The surgical lights of operating room bathed the room in an unforgiving white light.
A seventeen-year-old boy named Vane stood at the edge of the surgical table, eyes focused and trembling slightly.
Despite his young age, his mind was sharp, honed through years of rigorous training under his father's guidance.
His father is a renowned top surgeon who had personally mentored him, pushing him beyond the limits of conventional age and experience.
Today marked a pivotal moment in his life — his first living patient.
Vane was a genius in medical field but due to age restriction he was only allowed to operate on small animals and dead bodies but today he was allowed to perform a surgery on a living person due to his father's recommendations to the medical board.
The patient on the table was a lost cause—a man deep in a coma, riddled with an aggressive brain tumor that every senior surgeon in the city had already deemed untreatable. Even the patient's own family had given up hope.
Up in the observation gallery, behind a thick pane of glass, a row of veteran doctors stared down with folded arms and skeptical scowls.
To them, this wasn't just a highly experimental procedure; it was an insult to their decades of experience.
A seventeen-year-old boy, no matter how much of a prodigy, had no business holding a scalpel in a live human skull.
They were only here because Vane's father— a well known One-Star Medical Hunter—had requested they judge the boy by his talent, not his birth year.
"Seventeen?" one of senior doctor scoffed.
"This is ridiculous."
"If he hadn't recommended him, I'd have walked out already."
Vane looked up for a fraction of a second, catching his father's stern, unyielding gaze through the glass. There was no comfort in those eyes, only a silent command "Do not fail".
Taking a slow, deep breath, Vane forced the trembling out of his fingers. He reached out his gloved hand. "Scalpel," he said, his voice dropping into a flat, steady tone.
The nurse handed him the instrument. The cold steel felt completely natural in his grip.
As he positioned the blade just above the patient's hairline, the murmurs from the gallery faded into static.
The bright, sterile room shrank until his entire world consisted of nothing but the steady beep of the heart monitor and the exact millimeter of flesh beneath his hand.
He made the first incision.