What You Cannot Hold, I Will Take

There is a contract between a man who steps into this ring and every person who paid to be in that building, and that contract reads simply: deliver something real, or account for the difference. I have never missed a payment.

The Ghost of Death By Me. I have let that name sit in my mouth for a day or two now, turning it over the way a man turns over a stone to see what lives underneath. What I find is theater. What I find is a name built to unsettle, to suggest forces beyond the ordinary, to excuse a man from the plain obligation of competition by draping himself in the costume of something larger.

I do not rattle. I do not negotiate with atmospheres. What I do is work.

When The Ghost of Death By Me meets me on this floor, he will discover that the territory he has claimed with his posturing and his borrowed mystique is not his to hold, because territory belongs to whoever is willing to take it and defend it with their body and their craft. I am both willing and able.

He can keep the name. I will take everything else.