Dead Rank

In Kota, India's coaching capital, your rank is who you are. Kabir Anand keeps his at 1,847 out of 1,903. On purpose.

Then, three hours into a Sunday mock test, with every phone locked in the lobby and the exam-hall doors chained shut, the invigilator's nose starts to bleed.

By nightfall Kota is sealed. The dead keep their old timetables: out of the hostels at 6:55, in class by seven. Nine hundred and fifty kilometres away in Bhilai, Kabir's thirteen-year-old sister is alone with their bedridden grandmother, a dying phone, and a father locked inside the steel plant.

Kabir can't fight. He can't run. He can't even ride a cycle. What he can do is read people like exam papers, and after a bite he shouldn't have survived, he can read the dead too, and rewrite their habits.

But every wrong answer is negatively marked. Not on a rank list. On him.

Fear goes first.

A survival story with a schemer for a hero. Every win comes from a plan, a timetable, or a person he didn't expect to trust. The power has hard rules and a real price, the romance is a slow burn, and the road runs through real places, from Kota's coaching lanes and the highways of Madhya Pradesh to a steel town called Bhilai.

Author's note: Dead Rank is published by me, Harshil_8, on NovelPhoenix and WebNovel only. If you're reading it anywhere else, it was posted without my permission.