Chapter 71: Heading Home
The elevator doors slid open with a hiss like a sigh exhaled from some mechanical god, and for a brief, fleeting second, I thought perhaps the world had ended in our absence.
The waiting room—once buzzing with chatter and tension, stained in the invisible sweat of anticipation and despair—was now silent, sterile, hollow. The furniture still stood where we’d left it, the low velvet divans and marble benches arranged in an obscene parody of hospitality, but the people... they were gone.
No shrieking nobles, no trembling merchants, no drunken adventurers slurring about glories to come. Just absence. Just space. It was almost worse than if the room had been filled with corpses. I felt something tighten in my chest as we stepped out, the silence greeting us like an old friend, one who had grown weary of pretending they weren’t waiting to be asked a terrible question.
And then—I noticed him.
A single man sat behind the front desk, hunched and humming quietly to himself as he flicked through parchment with the same casual detachment one might use to sort recipes or funeral notices.
The same man who had greeted us on the day we entered this cursed tower, like a concierge at a luxury asylum, promising nothing and implying even less. Somehow, impossibly, he looked exactly the same. Not older, not wearier, not even remotely changed by the apocalyptic breakdown that had just shaken the tower’s spine.
His uniform was too neat for this mess, his sleeves rolled with surgical precision, the corners of his collar stiff as knife-edges, and above it all, his porcelain-white mask, smooth and gleaming, shielded the upper half of his face. No cracks. No grime. Not even a single fingerprint to mar its sanctity. It was the kind of mask you wore not to conceal an emotion, but to erase the idea that you were ever entitled to one in the first place.
The way his quill dipped into the inkwell, then danced across the forms without even looking—it was almost insulting. The building had nearly collapsed into metaphorical and quite literal rubble, and he was here... filing paperwork?
I approached slowly, my boots clicking against the polished floor like a countdown. My eyes burned holes into the back of his head, half-expecting him to unravel into some shadowy monster. But no. He looked up, blinked once as if I were the janitor late for shift, and smiled.
"Ah. You made it back. Lovely," he said, the words crisp and professional, as if I hadn’t just returned from fighting a demigod in a throne room of blood and betrayal. "You’ll be happy to know the Tower has re-stabilized. Bit of a scare earlier, of course. Everyone had to be evacuated."
Evacuated. The word echoed like a punchline with no audience. I stared at him, unblinking, as his pen scratched merrily across the page. "Everyone?" I asked, trying very hard to keep the sound of mockery out of my voice. I failed.
"Well," he said, not looking up, "all the visitors. Standard emergency protocol. We monitor structural integrity through several divine indicators, you see. All very theatrical. We cleared the lower levels just in case. But not to worry—it’s settled now. We’ll be reopening shortly."