~ The chalk bleeds again ~
3:27 AM. Sarjapur Flyover.A fog hung low over the underpass like a held breath. And inside a parked silver Alto, the corpse of an electricity board engineer sat buckled upright. His phone was shattered. His pulse, long gone.
No struggle. No visible trauma.
Just a red chalk checkmark — drawn from the inside of the windshield.
By 6:00 AM, the body had been cleared and replaced with silence.
At 6:08 AM, Kabir Sharma stood on the edge of the overpass, sipping cold coffee, watching the cleanup van drive off without headlights. He held a photo of the corpse in one hand, and a digital tablet with a live database in the other.
He was not supposed to be here.
His clearance had been revoked. But that didn't matter. Because whoever was behind this had left patterns — and if there was one thing Kabir understood, it was patterns.
"Why him?" Kabir whispered.
The victim's name was Nirmal Dev, a mid-level engineer with no enemies, no criminal record, and no media history. But Kabir knew how to look deeper. He pulled up recent whistleblower filings across the energy sector.
There it was.Filed two weeks ago. Anonymous.A detailed report of a ₹70 crore smart grid scam involving three engineers.Two had died in unrelated accidents. This was the third.
"Three marks. Three dead," Kabir muttered.Then he remembered the hacked whiteboard.
"Three more tomorrow,"written in red.
He suddenly turned. Footsteps.Swift. Light.
Nothing there.
But lying on the concrete — where no one had been a second ago — was a stick of red chalk… and a cheap, disposable phone.
Kabir picked it up, checked the call history. Only one number saved:
+44 7... A UK line. International.
This wasn't revenge. This was orchestration. Global. Surgical.
The kind of operation governments pretended didn't exist.
Elsewhere, across the city...
A classroom in a night college stood empty.Inside, on a dusty blackboard, someone had drawn four stick figures.
Three with red Xs.One with a red checkmark.Then... the whole board was erased.
The eraser moved in perfect silence. The boy's hand didn't tremble.
He stepped back into the CCTV blind spot, eyes reflecting moonlight.He didn't smile this time.But his voice was calm:
"They'll think it's him soon."
Then he picked up his schoolbag, zipped it, and vanished through the fire exit.
His name was Zayen.
And with every mark, he was rewriting the rules.