Lone Target -

"You're late, Elias," a voice crackled through Elias’s encrypted comms—a channel that shouldn't have been accessible. Elias froze. "How did you get this frequency?"

The target sat alone at a corner table of a neon-drenched noodle stall, seemingly oblivious to the humming drones and the desperate pulse of the city around him. In a world where everyone was connected by neural links and social feeds, being truly "lone" was a death sentence or a statement of power. For this man, it was clearly the latter.

The rain in Sector 4 didn't wash away the grime; it just turned it into a slick, iridescent sludge. Elias adjusted the focus on his long-range optics, the digital readout humming a low, steady frequency in his ear. Through the crosshairs, he saw his mark—a man known only as the "Lone Target."