Page 113 of Scarbound

Noeul stopped and flexed his fingers carefully beneath the desk, waiting for the discomfort to fade. Almost four months had passed since the second surgery, but prolonged typing was still difficult. His wrists tired quickly, and certain movements sent small flashes of pain through his hands.

He stared at them for a moment. They had caused him so much trouble lately. Other people had washed them, bandaged them, fed him because he couldn’t properly hold chopsticks. He had spent weeks treating them like fragile objects that belonged to somebody else.

Enough.

He placed them back on the keyboard, slowly this time.

There was no need to prove anything.

By late morning, he had already found something in the testing environment that caught his attention. At first, he assumed he had misunderstood the documentation. He checked it again, then returned to the system.

No.

There it was.

He leaned closer to the screen. “Interesting…”

The colleague beside him glanced over. “Found something?”

“Maybe.”

Noeul tested it again before answering. Then once more.

A smile slowly appeared on his face.

Definitely.

He called his team leader over and explained what he had found, careful not to sound overly confident on his first day. The older man studied the screen.

“You found this already?”

Noeul immediately wondered whether he had done something wrong. “Yes. Is there a problem?”

“No.” The man looked at him, mildly impressed. “You’ve been here for three hours.”

“Oh.”

Noeul wasn’t sure how to respond.

His team leader laughed. “That’s a compliment, Noeul.”

A small warmth spread through his chest. “Thank you.”

It shouldn’t have meant so much. It was one small finding in a controlled environment, hardly anything worth celebrating. Yet when his team leader walked away, Noeul found himself staring at the screen with a smile he couldn’t suppress.

He had missed this. Being good at something.

For the next hour, he became completely absorbed in his work. The office faded around him as his attention narrowed to the screen. He barely noticed the conversations, ringing phones, footsteps, or the occasional burst of laughter somewhere behind him.

His hands began aching again before lunch, forcing him to stop. This time, he listened. He leaned back and stretched his fingers carefully, annoyed but unwilling to risk damaging them again.

“First day and you’re already trying to destroy yourself?”

The comment came from somewhere behind him.

Noeul smiled without turning around. “I’ve been told I have a talent for that.”

The words left his mouth before he thought about them.