The system offered this one without ceremony. Tier C. Complexity: Medium. Influence: Local. Reward: 180 Blood Points.
Vincent sat across from him, watching. The man's funeral suit was wrinkleless, almost too clean. A suitcase rested beside his foot. His left eye blinked with a nervous tremor that never found rhythm.
Vincent might have overlooked him. But the system had not.
Thomas A. Neely. Age forty-seven. Corporate litigation.Exonerated three money-launderers linked to organized crime.Two deaths unofficially attributed to his legal shields.Next appointment: courthouse hearing at 8:15.Transport arriving in six minutes.
Vincent scanned the street. Fire hydrant. Slanted drain. Bolted newsbox. A tipped trash can rested against a signpost for Bus 7.
He bent and picked up a crushed paper cup from beneath the bench. Waterlogged. The lid clung weakly to the rim. Inside rested the handle of a plastic spoon, snapped mid-neck.
Vincent stood and crossed the street. Neely looked up as he approached.
"You dropped this," Vincent said.
"I don't drink coffee," the man replied, though he took it anyway. The reflex to accept what is handed runs deeper than thought.
Neely peered into the cup, puzzled.
Vincent reached into the trash bin without urgency. His fingers closed around a mirror shard, thin and angled like a cut already promised.
The cup slipped from Neely's grip. The spoon clinked against the pavement.
The mirror entered soft tissue from beneath the jaw. A push, not a stab. The kind of insertion reserved for silence.
Neely's breath hitched once. Then stopped.
Vincent lowered the body gently against the bench. The posture looked like exhaustion. The coffee cup was returned to his lap.
A city bus passed. No one inside. No one looked.
The glyph beneath Vincent's wrist pulsed with new weight. Blood Points surged. Influence climbed.
But something else appeared. A flicker. A shape in the edge of thought. A glyph not part of his known interface. It spun for less than a second, then disappeared before his mind could form a query.
Vincent did not stop walking.
No sirens called the body's name. No eyes cried foul. The system remained quiet.
Lesson V: Some deaths belong to no one, and that's how the world prefers it.