The False Moonlight's Scalpel

Ninazu Kigal spent five grueling years on Eridu Station mastering combat-surgery, all to escape the suffocating expectations of her noble house. She returns to the neon-lit ziggurats of Neo-Akkad just in time for a high-profile funeral, only to find her ex-fiancé, Lugal, clinging to her exact genetic lookalike. When Lugal whispers that he is marrying the stand-in for duty but will always love his 'white moonlight', the world-weary surgeon doesn't shed a tear. Instead, she loudly proposes a heavily publicized, purely strategic fake-courtship to his terrifying, heavily armed uncle, Marduk, to secure funding for her new weapons-grade clinic. While Lugal is predictably bankrupted and abandoned by his 'innocent' stand-in, Ninazu focuses on carving up feral bio-mutants in the lower wards alongside her platonic warlord sponsor. But High Exarch Ziusudra has been closely watching her violently efficient surgeries. Ninazu always believed she was exiled because she was too fragile for the syndicate wars, a protected prize under the city's ancient rules. What happens when she realizes she completely misunderstood the rules of her society, and the 'White Moonlight' isn't a cherished first love, but a genetically engineered apex predator meant to slaughter them all?