Chapter 179 --179
**Location:** Elara’s Office, Two Hours After Waking
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The first stack had gone down by roughly a quarter.
Ken stood by the wall, arms folded, watching Elara work with the same focused attention he gave potential threats. Not because he expected danger—just because watching her was genuinely difficult to stop doing once you started.
She’d been at it for two hours straight.
No breaks. No pauses. No staring out the window while processing—she processed *while* working, reading one document, signing it, reaching for the next, annotating in the margins with that precise economical handwriting, cross-referencing against earlier files she’d already memorized and hadn’t needed to look at again.
The speed was surgical. That was the only word for it. Not fast in the way someone rushed through work—fast in the way a machine operated. Methodical. Zero wasted motion. Each document received exactly the attention it needed and no more. Critical issues got immediate detailed responses. Minor approvals got a signature and a thirty-second review. Routine maintenance paperwork got a stamp and a note to Demerti to implement standard protocols.
Marcus stood on the other side of the door, and Ken could tell from the slight angle of her ears that she was watching too, even while maintaining guard position.
Neither of them had said anything.
Because what was there to say?
She’d been unconscious for three days. She’d survived enough poison to kill three people, a magical overflow that had nearly taken down the entire chamber wing, and whatever had happened in whatever space she’d been in while her body fought to stay alive.
And she’d been awake for two hours and had already cleared roughly twenty percent of the accumulated backlog.