Runebound Reverse Tower of The Dead

Chapter 265: Management

Within a darkened space, and right in front of a large screen, a white furred creature sat down, wearing a twin tux, and red eyes with a monocle that further enlarged one of his eyes. He looked annoyed, to the point of anger. Watching events unfold in a way he didn’t like, expect nor could he ever admit to be brilliant.

The glow of the screen painted his fur in cold flickers, turning the polished buttons of his tux into tiny flashing stars. The air smelled faintly of ink and old parchment, the kind of place that was never meant to be comfortable, only functional. Even the chair beneath him looked more ceremonial than practical, as if it had been designed for sitting through eternities, not enjoying them.

A group of climbers, humans, weaklings, far too foolish to understand the real danger of the trial, were having the time of their lives as they were enjoying the water of an oasis. This was a replay of a few days ago. The screen showed them splashing, drinking, laughing, bodies half submerged, the desert stretching beyond their little circle of relief like a cruel joke.

Torrac watched with the kind of stare that didn’t blink often, the monocle magnifying one eye until it looked even more offended than the other. The oasis scene looped small details on repeat, the shine of water, the movement of shoulders, the momentary lowering of their fracture as if comfort was a prize they had earned rather than bait they had stumbled into.

"What are you doing here, Rabbit?" a creature spoke behind him.

Turning, "Snake. Shouldn’t that be my question? Why are you here at this time?"

The temperature in the room seemed to shift with her presence. It was not warmth or cold, but that subtle, instinctive sense that something predatory had entered the space. Torrac didn’t rise. He didn’t need to. He simply angled his head, letting the monocle catch the screen’s light and turn it into a sharp, judgmental gleam.

"My floors are empty, nothing to watch there, I came to check on that lad. But I guess you’re doing that already." She cooed as she walked closer to the rabbit, the mask over her face only revealed slit eyes. Never her expression.

"Mind your own business." He snapped.

She hissed, "Don’t you dare speak to me with that Tone, rabbit, you know you’re one more offense before you get sent to the tower as a climber." Her voice carried the lazy cruelty of someone who could afford to make threats and never pay for them. Her shadow stretched across the floor in a way that did not match her shape, like the room itself could not agree on what she was.

The rabbit clicked his tongue, "You know what I mean, these are my floors, I’m managing them. You have nothing to do here." His ears twitched once, betraying the irritation he tried to keep buried under bureaucracy and pride. The replay continued behind them, the climbers laughing at nothing, ignorant of the fact that they were being watched like insects under glass.

"Unfortunately for you, Dragon decided that you were a risk. Too emotional, Torrac, you should not have intervened." She pushed back.

"It was a one-time thing." He said it quickly, like repeating it enough times could make the tower believe it too. His gaze did not leave the screen, but his fingers tightened around the armrest, white fur compressing.

"Is that so? Then why did Ulsal decide to pay a hefty sum again?"

"Ulsal did? When, why? He never told me anything," the rabbit frowned. The frown sat wrong on him, not because he couldn’t frown, but because it made him look almost human for a second. Offended. Slightly worried. Like a man realizing he’d been used as a pawn again.

Snake looked into his eyes, hers turning from yellow to deep green. "Interesting, you are telling the truth..." The words were casual, but the act was not. The green in her eyes was not a color. It was a function. A mechanism.

"You used that on me? That’s not right." He snapped, offended.

"Don’t worry about it," she hissed, the sound sharp enough to scrape, "I’ll go and see what Dragon has to say about one of the constellations intervening in a sub-ten-floor." She lingered long enough for the warning to settle, then turned as if the conversation had already ended in her head.

"Do whatever you want, I’m done with that brat..." Torrac the rabbit sighed as he sat down watching the group venturing through the desert. He leaned forward slightly, elbows on his knees, expression turning sourer with every second of the replay. He watched the line of bodies moving across sand, watched how relief made them sloppy, watched the way comfort always sharpened into danger when people began believing they were safe.

So far, they’ve lost only two people, one who was foolish enough to run into a sandstorm. And the other who died by a murderer among them.

The fools thought that he died to a snake. There are no snakes that small in the tower. He could almost taste their ignorance through the screen. The way humans always needed a clean story.

A neat reason. Something easy to blame. They would rather invent a tiny snake than admit the truth, that the real venom was sitting beside them, wearing a face and waiting for night.

"Bunch of idiots..."

***

Somewhere else in the tower’s administrative floors, Snake appeared next to the main manager of the administrators, Dragon. The space here felt different, less like a room and more like a mind made physical. Dim layers of screens floated at odd angles, pages of contracts and rules folding and unfolding in the air like living paper. Dragon sat as if he had been carved into his seat, calm in a way that made most emotions feel childish by comparison.

"It wasn’t Torrac," she said. No flourish. No apology for the accusation that had brought her here. She delivered facts the way others delivered knives.

"I had a feeling that it wasn’t him," Dragon said. His voice didn’t rise or fall. It simply existed, steady as a law that didn’t care who it crushed.

"You trust him?" Snake said, and there was interest hidden beneath the question. The kind of interest that looked like curiosity but was really about leverage.

"No, I trust that he doesn’t trust us; he won’t act out after that year he had to spend repenting for interfering with the first-floor challenge. And he’d never associate himself with the same constellation that caused all of this in the first place." Dragon’s gaze drifted across a screen showing Kael’s movements, then to another displaying a thread of contracts, then to another where the tower’s living rules pulsed like veins.

"What does Ulsal want again?"

"He wanted to change the rule of the floor where that lad is in."

"And what is he offering? To change the rules of the tower, that’s not something that can be easily done." Snake’s tail end of the sentence carried the implication plainly. That kind of change always came with blood, even when paid in something else.

"Well, he wants to change it from three needs to arrive to clear the floor. To Only the first three to arrive will clear the floor. He spent enough Insight that the tower is actually agreeing with his decision." Dragon gestured slightly, and a screen rotated to show the rule-set, lines of text moving as if being rewritten by invisible hands.

"How much?"

"Three million..."

"That... that’s not right? For that rule, even a million Insight is too much." Snake’s eyes narrowed again. Not in anger. In calculation.

"Exactly, that’s why I think that he did something else..." Dragon said, and the pause after it carried weight. A constellation spending that much did not do it for charity. It did it for advantage.

"What do you mean?"

"Monkey, you’re here, right?" Dragon didn’t look around when he asked. He didn’t need to.

Immediately from within the darkened walls, something emerged out.

"How do you always tell when I’m here?" Monkey said. The man wearing a monkey’s mask spoke. His presence felt like a grin in a room full of knives.

"Just call it an intuition, anyway, what do you think?"

"Snake is right..." Monkey said, "The cost is too much, but I can take a bold guess..." He rolled one shoulder, as if the guess itself amused him.

"Tell us..."

"Well, Ulsal is a smart Constellation; he must have changed a rule and must have altered something in the trial." Monkey’s masked face tilted toward the floating rule text, then toward Kael’s moving silhouette, then toward the faint pulse of the tower’s will behind it all.

"Even that is still too much Insight."

"Exactly, and the thing he altered... I believe he spent the insight, so the tower keeps quiet about it..." Monkey’s tone stayed light, but the implication landed like a stone. Paying not to change, but to hide.

"Ah..." Both snake and Dragon replied at once. It was rare for them to echo each other, and the fact it happened at all made the moment feel colder.

"I guess he must have prepared something for Kael..." Snake said, eyes narrowing as she imagined the ways a constellation could "prepare" something without the tower openly announcing it.

"It seems to be the case, but unfortunately, we can’t figure it out, nor understand why. We’ll have to just watch..." Dragon said, and with that, the screens shifted again, settling into a new arrangement.

Waiting. Observing. Letting the tower’s cruelty unfold at its own pace.