@Tarrant_Korrin
exactly what it sounds like. I wrote thing, and now i feel like sharing it. here you go:
In the Arkadian empire, there are four types of killers.
First, there are the soldiers and warriors, sellswords and knights, men and women who kill on battlefields, or guarding city walls. Some of them are good people, honourable, who fight out of a sense of duty, some who are indifferent, merely taking the coin, and some who are downright cruel, killing because they enjoy it. They are the second most deadly.
Next there are the murderers. Average men and women, for the most part, commoners who find themselves with just the wrong mix of hatred or desperation, and proximity to a weapon of some sort. In the slums of the capital they are common, lurking around every corner, and just a few inches under the skin of every man. They are the third most deadly.
The third kind are the assassins. There aren’t many of them, in truth. It takes quite a bit of guts to pay for someone’s death, and the sort of men who can afford to do so rarely have the necessary balls for it, so hired killers aren’t as in demand as everyone seems to think. There are perhaps a few dozen in total, scattered across the kingdom. They tend to be a particularly gloomy and overly serious lot, always going on about the sanctity of death and the art of the kill and so on. Given that they are so few, and so rarely employed, assassination is not something most people have to worry about. This makes assassins, ironically, the least deadly.
Now it can be argued that there are technically a few more kinds of killers: executioners, who dish out the punishment of the courts, nobles, who kill peasants by taking their money through taxes and leaving them to starve to death, and the handful of bandits who manage to hide from the king’s hunters. But all of them are insignificant, almost laughable in the face of the fourth kind of killer.
Very few people know of this kind, as their work is never obvious, unless you look very, very closely, and are very, very clever. The fourth is subtle, and patient, and invisible. The only way to stop them from killing is to know what they are, and how they kill, but since no one escapes once the fourth has set their sights on them, there’s no one who even knows that they exist. The fourth has never stabbed a man, never poisoned or strangled someone, never pushed them from a cliff or struck them down with magic. The fourth kind of killer in the kingdom of Arkadia, the deadliest of all, with the most blood on their hands… is me.