The ferry was a skeletal ruin, a dragon's corpse laid out on the black water of the river. Its steel bones, twisted and scorched, clawed at the bruised dawn. Drifting embers sailed on the cool air like malevolent spirits, the last vestiges of a fire that had consumed metal, men, and my own mythology. The world, so recently a symphony of screams, automatic fire, and roaring explosions, had fallen into a vacuum. All that remained was the distant, mournful wail of sirens growing closer and the soft, intimate crackle of the ferry's remains.
Beside me on the muddy bank, the Tinkerer sat hunched, a collection of sharp angles and trembling limbs. His face, usually a canvas of wry amusement and intellectual curiosity, was a pale mask of shock, smeared with soot and grime. He was alive, which was more than I'd had a right to expect. We were both broken, but the air still filled our lungs. For now, that was enough.
I studied my hands. They didn't look like mine. They were slick with a dark cocktail of my own blood and that of others, caked with grit from the collapsing deck, and scorched in a dozen places. The smell was a thick, cloying miasma—the iron tang of blood, the acrid bite of cordite, the heavy blanket of ash and smoke. These hands had once been instruments of impossible precision, tools that had dismantled syndicates and toppled regimes with an artist's touch. Now, they were just mangled flesh, a testament to how close I'd come to utter failure.
My mind, an unwilling cinema, began to play the feature presentation. The fight. Him. Deadshot.
It unspooled not as a memory, but as a fresh assault. The glint of moonlight off his wrist-mounted cannons. The almost casual way he moved, flowing through the chaos we'd created like he was part of it, a natural predator in his element. The relentless thwack-thwack-thwack of his rounds finding my armor, each impact a physical punctuation mark in a sentence that spelled my death.
He'd been a ghost of a different sort—a phantom of pure, unadulterated skill. I had come out of retirement expecting the same lumbering beasts and arrogant thugs I'd cut my teeth on. I expected to be the apex predator, the whisper in the shadows that ended wars before they began. But Deadshot… he wasn't a thug. He wasn't a beast. He was a surgeon, and I was the tumor he'd been contracted to excise.
The chilling truth settled in my gut like a block of ice. I hadn't almost lost because he was simply better. I almost lost because I had let myself become a relic. Retirement hadn't just softened my body; it had corroded my instincts. It had wrapped me in a thick, warm blanket of complacency. For five years, I had lived in a world where my legend was my shield. No equal existed because I had eliminated them all, and in their absence, I had anointed myself a king in a kingdom of one. The arrogance had been a poison, slow-acting but lethal. It had dulled the edge that had kept me alive for so long.
I had seen the intel on Deadshot. I'd read the files, seen the body count. And I had dismissed him. Just another gun for hire, I'd thought. Loud. Flashy. All reputation, no substance. A monumental miscalculation. He was every bit the legend, and he'd come closer than anyone ever had to putting me in the ground. He hadn't just fought me; he had dissected my strategy, predicted my movements, and turned my own aggressive tactics against me. He'd held a mirror up, and the reflection I saw was not a ghost, but a fool.
A sharp, lancing pain brought me back to the riverbank. I pressed a hand to my left side, my fingers finding the torn fabric of my suit and, beneath it, the ragged, sticky mess of torn flesh. A deep breath sent a constellation of shattered glass through my rib cage. Deadshot's parting gifts.
These wounds were more than physical. They were a brand. Each throb, each searing jolt of agony, was a syllable in a sentence I could no longer ignore: You are not untouchable. It was a truth I hadn't had to confront in over a decade. I had cultivated an aura of invincibility so complete that I had started to believe it myself. I had forgotten the taste of my own blood, the brittle reality of my own bones. Tonight, Deadshot had forced me to remember. He'd reminded me that for all my training, for all my technology, for all the fear my name inspired, I was still just meat and bone. And meat can be carved. Bone can be broken.
"Ghost?"
The Tinkerer's voice was a thin, reedy thing, barely audible over the crackling pyre in the water. It trembled, not just from the cold, but from the sheer, naked terror of having survived.
"What… what comes next?"
I didn't answer him right away. My gaze was fixed on the river, on the way the black, oily water swallowed the last of the flames, extinguishing them with a final, dismissive hiss. The question hung in the air between us, heavy and suffocating. What comes next? The world I had left behind had not forgotten me. It had festered. It had evolved.
Deadshot wasn't the end. He was only a stepping stone. A preamble. He was the first tremor before the earthquake. For five years, the criminal underworld had operated in a vacuum I created. Now, that vacuum was being filled by a new generation of monsters, sharper and more ruthless than the last. If a man like Deadshot could be sent after me—a professional of his caliber, a true artist of death—then he was not an anomaly. He was a harbinger. The people who hired him, the forces that could afford and command such a weapon, were the real threat. And they knew I was back on the board.
My arrogance had almost made this my final night on earth. If I had been the man I was six years ago, the fight would have been different. I wouldn't have underestimated him. I wouldn't have relied on reputation. I would have been the hunter, not the hunted.
I finally turned my head, the motion pulling at the strained muscles in my neck. I looked at the Tinkerer, at the raw hope and fear warring in his eyes. He wanted reassurance. He wanted me to tell him it was over, that we had won. I could offer him no such lie.
"Things don't get easier from here," I said. The voice that came out wasn't the confident baritone of the man I used to be. It was something else. It was hollowed out, stripped of all its self-assured gloss, and what remained was cold, tempered steel. "Only harder."
I shifted, the pain in my side flaring with white-hot intensity. "He wasn't the mission. Deadshot was a warning. And I almost ignored it."
There was no pride left, only the chilling clarity of a near-death experience. The hollow feeling wasn't defeat; it was the empty space where my arrogance used to be. And in its place, a cold, grim determination was beginning to take root.
Ignoring the protests of every nerve ending in my body, I pushed myself to my feet. The world swayed for a moment, a dizzying panorama of smoke and ruin. I braced myself, my legs shaking with the effort. Across the river, the horizon was bleeding with the first colors of morning—a sickly palette of purple, orange, and grey. The bruised sunrise didn't feel like hope. It felt like a reckoning. An indictment.
They would come for me now. All of them. The ones who had grown bold in my absence, the ones whose empires I had shattered and who had spent years plotting their revenge. The predators of the other worlds, made from a place harsher than mine. They would come stronger, faster, sharper. They would send their best.
To survive, I would need to be better. Better than them. Better than Deadshot. More importantly, I would have to be better than the complacent phantom who fought tonight.
The world thinks I'm a ghost. A story told to frighten the other side into compliance. But ghosts can fade. They can be exorcised, forgotten. And if I'm not careful, so will I.
I took a shuffling, agonizing step away from the riverbank, leaving the Tinkerer to his silence. I didn't look back at the ferry's corpse burning behind me. It was no longer just the scene of a battle. It was a grave. A pyre for the man I was, and for the deadly pride that had almost been my end.
PART 1: MERGED WORLDS END
Ghost will be back, but not for a while.
A small Hiatus will occur as I plan the next Part along with publishing other works.
I know the upload schedule hasn't been consistent but I'm a student at the end of the day and this is a fun hobby I do in my spare time.
Thank You all for your support and for reading. Good Day.