The black ceramic coffee cup was a mere two millimeters from Jason’s lips when his military instincts screamed.

It wasn't the screech of car brakes, nor was it a panic-stricken shout. It was the silence. Too much silence. The teak-floored, semi-outdoor restaurant in the corner of District 7 had gone dead quiet over the last five minutes, as if every patron had suddenly vanished off the face of the earth. The night breeze carried the scent of wet asphalt and heavy, dark roast coffee, blending with the low hum of an air-conditioning unit from the building across the street.

Jason slowly set his cup down. His sharp gaze flicked toward the reflection in the large glass window to his left. Across the table, Leo—a round-eyed young man in an oversized bomber jacket who looked far too fragile to be a fugitive—was biting his thumbnail, frantically staring down at the dimly lit screen of his ultrabook.

"Stop biting your nails, Leo. It's a bad habit if you want a long life," Jason’s voice was low, calm, yet weighed with steel.

Leo gasped, hastily dropping his hand. The young man's breath came in ragged gasps, cold sweat beading on his temples. The laptop screen in front of him glowed with rapidly scrolling lines of hexadecimal encryption code—a mini storage drive containing darknet transaction data belonging to the Ouroboros syndicate, enough to put high-ranking police officials and underground bosses away for life. Or bury them both at the bottom of the sea.

"I... I can't stay calm, Jason," Leo whispered, his voice trembling. "The proxy connections keep jumping. The third-layer encryption is a beast. If they realize we're hacking their firewall..."

"They've known since the moment we set foot in this city," Jason cut in sharply. His eyes swept the surroundings.

The bartender behind the counter stood rigidly, wiping the exact same glass for three solid seconds without once turning his head. Two well-suited men at a table in the eastern corner hadn't touched their food; their steak plates sat completely untouched, while their eyes remained glued to the screens of the phones in their hands. The air grew heavy, thick with the scent of gunpowder and a tension ready to detonate at any second.

Jason reached for his burner phone on the table. His thumb hovered, ready to punch in the emergency code to call for a fallback extraction point.

Yet, before his thumb could strike the key, the silence shattered.

Not by the crack of a gunshot. But by a terrifying digital symphony.

Bzzzt! Bzzzt! Bzzzt!

It wasn't just one or two phones. At that exact second, hundreds of thousands of electronic devices across the entire restaurant, the highway outside, the looming skyscrapers, and even the phones in the waiters' pockets vibrated in chilling unison. Standard factory ringtones blended with mechanical buzzing to create a low, rumbling drone, like thousands of giant hornets enraged inside a cage of iron.

Leo jolted, nearly dropping his laptop. "Jason... what is that?!"

Jason didn't answer. His eyes widened slightly as he caught the reflection of dozens of glowing phone screens lighting up the dimming room. That cold, bluish-white light mirrored in the pupils of restaurant patrons who had looked completely ordinary just moments before.

Everyone in the room stopped moving.

At the adjacent table, the neatly suited man slowly raised his phone. Behind the counter, the cashier froze mid-task. One by one, their heads snapped upward in eerie synchronization. Their movements were stiff, coordinated by a single digital command just broadcast citywide via a private satellite network.

Jason gripped the edge of the wooden table, the muscles in his forearms tightening instantly. "Leo. Close the laptop. Now."

On Leo’s phone lying on the table, an anonymous messaging app opened automatically without human touch. A push notification featuring a coiled serpent eye icon popped up on the screen, accompanied by blindingly bright red text:

GLOBAL BOUNTY ALERT

Target: Leo Vance (Data Controller)

Reward: $10,000,000 (Ten Million USD)

Status: DEAD OR ALIVE

Current Coordinates: Sector 7, District Commercial Area.

The ten-million-dollar figure blazed in neon crimson beneath a real-time photo of Leo's face, scraped straight from the restaurant's security cameras.

The atmosphere in the restaurant plunged into a deep freeze within a fraction of a second. The feverish heat of the hunt instantly suffocated the night's false peace.

Behind the bar, the male waiter—a messy-haired young man in a white apron stained with sauce—slowly stopped moving. He no longer looked at the glass in his hand. Slowly, his head tilted to the right, locking his gaze straight onto table number four where Jason and Leo sat.

The young man's lips parted, forming a thin, lifeless, blood-hungry smile.

Without a sound, his right hand slipped behind the folds of his white apron. His callored fingertips clamped hard around the hilt of a twenty-centimeter chef’s knife, its stainless-steel blade gleaming under the restaurant lights.

Jason slid out of his chair, dropping his center of gravity into a textbook combat stance, ready to meet the coming storm.