The city outside still slept.
Lattice City was never truly quiet, but in the hours before dawn, even its neon arteries dimmed to a drowsy glow. Skyscrapers bent into the sky like jagged fangs, their crowns shrouded in drifting vapor. Holographic ads flickered weakly, their bright promises muted by the haze. For most of the twenty billion souls crammed into the steel colossus, this was the only time silence existed — the brief pause before the next cycle of consumption, labor, and bloodsport.
Kael Draven sat alone in his high-rise apartment, staring into a skillet. The pan hissed as meat seared, tendrils of smoke curling toward the dim light that fell across his kitchen. He moved with the same deliberate grace that he used to load a sniper's chamber — precise, efficient, unhesitating.
Cooking was one of the few rituals he allowed himself. The cleaver he wielded was as sharp as any blade on the battlefield, and the knife-work he executed on vegetables could have disassembled a man just as easily. But there was no battle here, only sizzling flesh, oil crackling in fire, the faint scent of herbs cultivated on his balcony garden.
To anyone else, it would look absurd. A man with the build of a sculpted predator — black hair falling in sharp strands over a face that could have sold millions of holo-posters, lean frame cloaked in a black trenchcoat left open to expose the shirt stretched tight across steel-forged muscle — calmly plating food as though he weren't preparing for the single most dangerous decision of his life.
The world called him many names. The Dragon-Eyed Marksman. The Black Death. The Lone Fang. But here, in this kitchen, he was simply Kael, a man who needed fuel before the killing began.
He slid the meat and herbs onto a plate. A simple dish, stripped of excess, perfectly balanced. He ate with the silence of a wolf devouring prey — calm, methodical, eyes never leaving the faint reflection of himself in the glass of the window across from him.
The mask lay beside him on the counter.
Pitch black, dragon-sculpted, its contours cruel yet regal, as though it had been chiseled from the bones of some abyssal beast. Gold inlay ran along its ridges, catching the dim kitchen light. The mask was more than armor for his identity — it was the symbol of what he had become, forged by his own hand after years of blood-soaked exile. The dragon motif echoed through everything he touched: his rifles, his pistols, even the trenchcoat that draped his frame like the shadow of wings.
The weapons sat disassembled across the table in front of him, each part cleaned and arranged like sacred relics. The long barrel of his magnum opus, Fang of Nox, gleamed black and gold. Even in pieces, the sniper radiated lethality — a weapon that could peel open an armored juggernaut from three kilometers away, crafted by hands that understood every whisper of metal and recoil.
Beside it lay his twins — a pair of desert eagles, each etched with intricate dragon-scale patterns along the slides. They were heavier than most would dare wield, but Kael's hands fit them as if they had grown from his flesh. He had forged them from metals scavenged in forbidden zones, tempered them with knowledge pulled from arcane schematics buried in digital ruins. Each bullet he chambered into them carried his mark, each shot a signature of annihilation.
Kael finished the last bite of his meal. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and leaned back in his chair. His reflection in the glass seemed almost unreal — black hair, cold dragon-gold eyes that shimmered faintly even without activating their true form. They were not natural eyes.
And they were not his to begin with.
A faint tremor passed through him, gone as soon as it came. The memories had clawed their way up again, the same as they always did when silence pressed too heavily. White halls. Metal restraints biting into child-flesh. Men in coats murmuring about sequences, compatibility, dragon-code genetics. His screams muted by machines.
He exhaled, sharp and controlled, and the visions receded. Today was not the day for weakness.
He stood, the movement liquid, predatory. Every muscle in his body flexed beneath the shirt clinging to him, each motion reminding him of the perfection that had been forced upon him — and the scars hidden deep in the bones beneath. Women who glimpsed him on the rare occasions he entered public spaces often lost composure, their eyes dilating, bodies reacting instinctively to the sculpted divinity before them. Kael ignored them. He did not live for admiration, nor desire. Only survival. Only the kill.
Outside, the first waves of daylight began to creep through the city smog, turning the skyscrapers into looming obsidian blades rimmed with crimson. The day of registration had come. Billions would be watching. Millions had applied. Only thousands would survive the opening cycle.
Kael Draven intended to be the one left standing when all others had fallen.
He holstered the twin eagles into the pitchblack rig beneath his coat. Assembled his sniper with the elegance of a craftsman piecing together scripture. The Fang of Nox clicked into completion with a sound like a lock sealing shut. He set the dragon mask over his face, feeling it fuse seamlessly with the man he was and the weapon he had become.
When he opened the door and stepped into the neon dawn of Lattice City, it was not Kael Draven who walked the streets.
It was the Black Death.