Inky's Collection of Shorts

Ghost -- Part 1

Look, there's no point in me telling this to you.

I could be doing anything else right now. I could be relaxing with my friends, talking with others in the Order, or even gathering wildflowers or something.

But instead, I'm sitting behind a desk, writing my story in a journal that might potentially fall into the wrong hands and end in my doom. Because what I'm writing is basically treason.

My name is Clyde, and this is the story of how I became a Ghost.

***

Before I start, I should probably explain what a "Ghost" even is.

In my world, everything is based off of a kill system. Position, power, authority - everything. Whether or not you have a high kill count decides your whole life. Who cares about the innocent you just murdered? With the system that was in place, nobody was innocent anymore.

At the very bottom of the ranks, there is Pacifist. That's the people who don't have any kills at all, whether it's because they don't have the skill to do so or they don't have the guts. Everyone starts there, but if you actually want to live a life, no matter how messed up, you don't want to stay.

At the very top of the ranks is Stained. It's the highest possible rank out of ten, and with that rank, you basically have supreme power - or at least, until it gets taken away from you. Underneath that, the second-highest rank, is Ghost.

To get respect, you need to be at least at the third rank. A lot of jobs (if you want to live a normal life in our not-so-normal world and do something like make houses for people or weapons or something along those lines) require fifth rank or higher.

I don't know why it's like that. I don't know what happened before all this. When you first gain consciousness, you're in a world that you've never seen before, surrounded by people that you've never met. That's how it was for me, and that's pretty much how it was for everyone else in this world so far.

Actually, our whole lives are basically a game for a god. As far as I know, nobody has ever met him before, but clearly he liked violence even more than some of the people I knew. And we know there's a god hanging around. The telling markings on our arms that show our rank and Order, the semiannual hunts, the killings.

A blood-thirsty god watching over us, driving us to be equally blood-thirsty killers. Fun.

Now, it would probably be best for me to explain what I mean by "Order." An Order is sort of like a clan in that the people in an Order stick together and vow not to kill one another, which is a pretty big promise in my world. At the semiannual Hunts, all the Orders get together and try to kill each other to be the last one standing.

But that's shifting the topic a bit. I'll get back to the Hunts later.

I belong in the Silver Order. There are many, many Orders, but only five that matter: Platinum, Silver, Mithral, Palladium, and Copper, with their power rankings in that order. Those five also happen to have the most kills and highest-ranking people.

A lot of the smaller Orders are actually under the control of one of the bigger ones, for protection and survival and whatnot. You can join a different Order whenever you want, but then your former Order will probably hate you and try to kill you.

Unless the new Order you joined happened to be one of the top five, of course.

Oh, but Clyde, what about your rank?

I'll get there, just wait.

Back to the semiannual Hunts. It's the ultimate killing-off competition thing, and the best way to get your Order - and yourself - to the top of the pecking order.