Chapter 109: A Story in Blood And Ash

Kael focused his eyes on the upper part of the map.

He zoomed in mentally, tracing the path lines the mini-map suggested. The itinerary was clean, almost eager, like the system had decided this was important enough to guide him properly.

Following the itinerary the map had drawn for him, when he reached its end, he was surprised by what he saw.

The color of the item was also blue.

“Perhaps normal to rare loot is blue, and the rarer it is… the more colorful it gets?” he thought, since the blue dot next to him, not the rune one, was still in the same spot, not moving.

He didn’t like having to guess, but guessing was what you did when you didn’t have a manual. Gold had meant loot so far. Blue could mean… something between? Or something completely different that just happened to share the same color as “rare” in some twisted system palette.

The rune [Excise] was a rare rune after all. Could there be another rune in that room?

The thought tightened into a hook. Another rune this close? In the same building? That felt like the tower either rewarding him… or baiting him.

He slowly made his way up, going between offices, cubicles and broken down walls and barely standing beams that supported a building that wanted to fall more than anything else.

He kept his steps light, careful about where his boots landed. Some sections of the floor were cracked enough to flex. Every time it groaned under his weight, Kael’s stomach did the same. Dust drifted from overhead with each vibration, catching in his throat.

He didn’t just walk, he listened. The building had a constant low creak, as if it were always deciding whether to collapse. Every now and then, there was a distant scrape, a soft clatter, something shifting a few floors above where the red dots lived.

Once he reached the upper floor, he checked his map again; there was no trace of any enemies here.

The emptiness was almost worse. Empty meant something had cleared it, or something had happened here that made even monsters avoid it.

It was all empty.

But there was one thing that was quite different here.

This whole floor was pitch black.

Not shadow-dark. Not “no windows” dark. It was a burnt dark that ate light instead of reflecting it.

Not painted, not bad lighting. But because it had burnt down to a crisp.

Char crumbled under his boot as he stepped. The remains of an office chair collapsed into powder when he brushed it with his shin. The smell was old smoke, deeply set into everything, as if the fire had happened ages ago but refused to leave.

Office tables, chairs, walls, and the cubicles here had all turned to crumbled charcoal.

It looked like a memory of a place more than a place.

A graveyard of furniture.

And the blue dot was behind the only door in this office that was locked.

The door stood out immediately because it wasn’t ash. It was metal, darkened by heat, but intact. Like the one stubborn thing the fire couldn’t eat.

In fact, the map was pointing at the door itself, a small portion of it.

Kael narrowed his eyes. The dot wasn’t hovering inside the room. It wasn’t even showing deep within. It was… right at the door. Like the item was attached to it. Or embedded.

Kael focused his eyes and saw that the door had a small dent and a crack in it.

A subtle imperfection in a surface that otherwise looked like a blank slab. The dent caught the dim light in an odd way, and the crack looked like something had been driven into it at an angle.

The handle was a simple lever style, but warped slightly from heat. The edges of the doorframe had scorch marks. The surrounding wall, what remained of it, was charcoal.

He tried to twist the handle to open the door, and it simply snapped off with a brittle metallic crack, the broken piece suddenly cold and useless in his palm. Kael stared at it for half a second, as if it had insulted him.

“The hell happened here?” Kael thought.

His eyes swept the blackened hall again. A fire that hot didn’t just casually happen in an office. Something either blew, or burned, or was made to burn.

He then pushed the door, it didn’t budge.

Not even a shift. Not even a complaint. It was locked tight, and whatever was behind it was just as stubborn.

“Wish I had my crowbar now,” Kael sighed.

It wasn’t even about nostalgia anymore. It was practicality. A crowbar didn’t care if a handle broke. A crowbar didn’t negotiate. It just forced.

One of the few or only times he ever needed the crowbar was now, but he sadly already turned it into his current gauntlet.

His gaze flicked to his arm, to the rune sockets he’d carved into the metal with Brokk’s hammer. Worth it, absolutely. But the tradeoff was biting him now.

Looking around for anything to use as leverage would be a waste of time.

The floor was ash and brittle remnants. Anything he could jam into the crack would crumble or snap. And the door looked thick, industrial. Too sturdy and heavy to budge with anything makeshift.

Though the frame itself was damaged, the door remained intact spare the burns.

“I guess I don’t have a choice,” Kael muttered as he pulled Brokk’s hammer.

The hammer felt solid in his grip, reassuring, almost. Like a cheat code, he could hold.

He didn’t intend on ’repairing’ the door.

That would be stupid. Repairing meant strengthening. It meant making the tower’s obstacle even worse.

Instead, he began hammering around the keyhole area.

Not the center of the door. The weak point. The place where mechanisms lived. The place where a lock could be forced to fail if you destroyed the housing.

Each tap of Brokk’s hammer dented and warped the metal like it was softer than it had any right to be. Kael worked around the keyhole in a rough circle, puncturing and deforming the area, trying to break the lock’s alignment.

No matter how quiet he wanted it to be, the hammer striking into metal felt like a bell being tolled.

The sound rang sharp and clean through the burnt corridor, clang, clang, clang, each hit a beacon. Each hit an invitation.

Kael’s jaw tightened. He kept hammering anyway.

Several monstrous howls echoed in the building above Kael.

The first ones were unmistakable, high, nasty, goblin voices that sounded like someone scraping metal on teeth. They came in bursts, like the creatures were waking up annoyed.

However, there were a few sounds that, although they were pretty far away, belonged to something that was definitely not a goblin.

A low hissing sound, a nerve-racking sound.

It threaded through the building like a whisper made of fangs and hunger. Kael felt the hairs on his neck rise despite himself.

Kael couldn’t waste time trying to understand or theorize what sort of monstrosity owned that creepy grating voice.

If he started imagining, he’d freeze. If he froze, he’d die.

So he poured all his focus into his hammering and managed to puncture several holes around the keyhole.

Satisfied with the openings he made, he sent a powerful, quick punch.

He didn’t punch the door; he punched the damaged, softened section around the lock. The metal gave with a sudden, seeing-it-fail kind of satisfaction. Something inside clattered and dropped.

The door, however, still didn’t open.

Kael stared at it, breathing a little harder now, ears tuned for movement. The building above sounded more awake than it had a minute ago.

“Are you kidding me?” Kael cursed.

He planted his boots, set both palms flat against the cold metal, and leaned in. Not with a sudden shove, slow pressure, or feeling for any give.

His muscles tightened under the tracksuit, the leather armor hidden beneath flexing with him. His breath hissed through his teeth, and the door finally… moved.

It scraped across the floor with a heavy groan, the sound harsh in the small space. Slowly, bit by bit, the door opened up.Kael slipped through the gap, shoulder turning sideways to fit, then shoved again to widen it just enough.

Looking at the room, it was a locked room.

Small. Sealed. Like a place meant to protect something important… or keep something in.

Locker of sorts? Maybe a storage area, no windows, no other exits.

The air inside was stale. Trapped. It smelled like dust and old plastic and the faint hint of something that had died here and never properly decomposed.

And the thing blocking the door was some old shelves and what looked like a giant office printer.

Kael had to step around the clutter as he eased the door wider. The shelves were toppled at an angle, wedged as if they’d been shoved there in panic. The printer, if that’s what it was, had strange writing on its buttons. And seemed to have had better days. Too many cuts and too many broken bits. The interesting part was once again this strange world’s language.

The language wasn’t his. The symbols weren’t his. It was the same kind of wrongness he’d felt since day one: familiar shapes, unfamiliar meaning.

However, what piqued Kael’s attention was a person.

Not moving. Not breathing. Not anything.

Well, a former person.

A corpse of what looked like a firefighter.

The uniform was unmistakable even in ruin, heavy fabric, reflective strips faded and torn. The helmet lay cracked nearby. The body was slumped in a corner like it had sat down to rest and simply never stood up again.

The man, who was stuck here somehow, had clothes that were all torn and rotten.

Time had done a number on them.

The cloth hung in tatters. The boots were split at the seams. The man’s hands were skeletal, fingers curled slightly as if they’d been clutching at something before giving up.

Kael’s throat tightened for a second, an involuntary reaction he hated. The tower was full of death, but this wasn’t a monster. This was… a person who’d tried to save people in another world and ended up trapped behind a metal door.

He looked at the map again and noticed that he was right next to the blue item.

Looking around, he couldn’t find any runes or anything that could be considered a tower item, until he turned his head.

The door.

The dent. The crack.

The door had a firefighter axe stuck to it.

Buried into the metal at an angle, the head lodged deep, as if someone had swung with everything they had, either trying to get out or trying to keep something from getting in.

And it was contoured in a light, faint blue hue.

A soft glow that didn’t belong in this dead, dusty room. It made the axe look unreal, like a piece of a different system had been placed here and preserved.

Unlike the Sledgehammer he found on his first day in the Reverse Tower, which had a rotten handle. And a rusted head.

This was different. This looked like it didn’t age.

This axe was clean, pristine even.

No rust. No rot. No decay. The metal surface caught what little light slipped in and reflected it like it had been polished yesterday.

The whole storage was eaten and consumed with rot and time, but the axe felt like it never experienced a day of service.

Kael grabbed the axe, and a notification appeared in front of him.

[You have found: Flame Imbued Axe]

The moment his fingers wrapped around the handle, it felt… right.

It belonged in his hand. Like the tower had finally admitted: yes, weapons exist, and yes, you’re allowed to have one.

“Oh, an item. A tower item!” Kael’s eyes opened wide as he realized what was in his hand.

The words came out low, almost reverent, despite himself. Not because he respected the tower, but because he respected the advantage. Because a tower item meant survivability.

This was the first time he had ever found a weapon in the tower.

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