The imp hesitated. Its hands moved vaguely, like it was trying to grab the right words out of the air and failing.
"SPEAK!" Torrac snapped. The monocle flashed as it tilted, and Kael wondered if the rabbit ever spoke at a normal volume or if its existence was just permanently stuck in outrage.
"Well, the price of items varies depending on the person purchasing them. A person with the potential to reach higher floors will see the price of the items as higher… talent tax basically…" The imp delivered it fast, like ripping off a bandage. Kael's expression shifted, slow and disbelieving, because the concept was both clever and disgusting in equal measure.
"So you're saying that I'm so untalented that an item worth a billion cores is only fifty for me?" Kael asked. He didn't even bother hiding the irony. The Tower insulting him through discounts was almost impressive in a twisted way.
"The system couldn't lower it any further, otherwise I think it might have been for free… I don't fully understand it either, actually there were a few items that were worth zero cores but since you setup your search for a minimum of 1 you didn't see them…" The imp's honesty made it worse. Kael's stomach twisted a little at the thought of free items he'd filtered out because he assumed "zero" wasn't an option. The Tower punishing assumptions again, even in shopping.
Kael's lips twitched in both admiration and disgust. The admiration was for the sheer cruelty of the system's design. The disgust was for how easily it turned a person's "potential" into a number and taxed them for it.
"I guess I'll have to revisit your shop soon…" Kael said. He meant it too.
"Too late now, you already grew too much with having that thing on you, the store is recalibrating… no wonder I had issues with prices going sky high…" The imp spoke like it was confessing a problem it had been trying to solve for hours, and Kael's eyes narrowed slightly at the phrase 'grew too much'.
"You see what you just did?" The Rabbit said. Torrac turned its heated stare back toward Kael like the map's existence was somehow a personal insult.
"How the hell is that even my problem or cause? How did I make the prices go up?" Kael asked. He spread one hand slightly, palm up, the gesture sharp with frustration. He wanted the rabbit to say the quiet part plainly, because right now it sounded like blaming a man for catching fish with a good hook.
"LEGENDARY! THE LEGENDARY DAMNED ITEMS! They'll make the floor so easy that getting currency would be a breeze, so the prices have to go up, NOT FOR JUST YOU! BUT EVERYONE!" Torrac howled. Its voice echoed inside Kael's skull even though the world was paused. Kael felt his irritation spike because the rabbit wasn't wrong mechanically, but it was still acting like this was Kael's crime instead of the Tower's design flaw... More like descision.
"Again! IS THAT AGAINST THE RULES?!" Kael shouted back, as he was getting more and more frustrated with the rabbit being unable to hold a conversation without going a dozen octaves above norm. His voice bounced off frozen stone and dead air, and he was suddenly aware of how absurd the scene was: a man arguing with a tuxedo rabbit in a paused apocalypse while a swarm waited politely for time to resume so it could eat him.
"I'm going to have an aneurysm!" the rabbit fanned his face and sighed, "The presence of legendary items will devastate the first floor. You have to give them up." The dramatic phrasing didn't hide the real plea underneath it. Torrac wasn't just angry. It was scared of consequences, and it didn't want to clean up.
Or perhaps it was being pressured by another entity, like Ulsal, for example.
"Not gonna happen," Kael said. His tone was flat. Final. He didn't dress it up because he didn't need to. He'd already learned what giving things up voluntarily did in this place: it turned you into someone else's resource.
"ARGHHH damn frustrating!" Torrac snapped, ears twitching as the emotion had nowhere to go inside such a small body.
"Sir Administrator…" The imp asked. It spoke cautiously, like it was testing whether language was safe around Torrac.
"WHAT!" Torrac shouted immediately, whip-fast.
"E-excuse me… but how did he survive the [Forbidden?]." The imp's curiosity was tinged with fear, as it suspected the answer would be dangerous knowledge.
The rabbit sighed, "Because he isn't dead…" The line fell casually, like it wasn't the kind of thing that should upend a worldview.
"Oi, are you supposed to be going around telling stuff like that to everyone?!" Kael snapped. His eyes sharpened. He didn't know what "dead" meant here fully, but he knew enough to understand that secrets like that weren't free.
"Wait, what do you mean he isn't dead?! This is the Reverse Tower. Everyone here is dead." The imp sounded genuinely shocked now, and Kael could see it re-evaluating him in real time, as he'd suddenly become a glitch wearing a human face.
"Ask the tower that." The rabbit said. It didn't elaborate. It didn't soften it. It just threw the responsibility upward, like the Tower was the only authority that mattered, and it wasn't interested in arguing with it.
The imp didn't inquire any further; it seems that the tower always has the final say in things here. The restraint wasn't courage; it was a survival instinct. Even the imp knew there were questions that got you deleted.
"Since I didn't break any rules, why am I being held hostage here? In case you didn't know I have a bunch of goblins about to hunt me down." Kael's words came out sharp with the frustration of someone whose life was being treated like a scheduling inconvenience. He gestured faintly toward the frozen goblins because the threat was literally standing there, paused mid-rise.
"I hope you get killed right here and then, to be honest, it would make my life way easier…" Torrac said with exhausted bitterness. It was petty in a way that almost made it human.
"That's a bit mean…" Kael replied, and the dryness in his voice carried the only humor he could afford. Mean didn't cover it. But he wasn't about to beg.
"I was never supposed to be nice in the first place, but… curses! Here!" Torrac snapped, then did something Kael didn't expect. The rabbit's irritation shifted into reluctant concession, like handing a dog a treat while resenting the fact you had to feed it.
{As the first person to ever obtain a legendary item below the tenth floor of the Reverse Tower, you gained the title [Legend]
+10 to all stats.}
The notification hung in front of Kael like a verdict. First person. Below the tenth floor. The Tower wasn't just acknowledging what he'd done; it was marking him for it. Kael felt a prickling sensation run along his arms as if his skin itself recognized the number. +10 to all stats wasn't a small perk. It wasn't a tiny nudge. It was a shove. The kind of shove that would change how his body moved, how it responded, how it survived.
"Don't die." The rabbit said and added. "Remove [Pause]." Torrac's tone shifted at the end, like the words were both instruction and a begrudging wish. Kael didn't miss the way it said it: not "good luck," not "be careful." 'Don't die. A command that hid in it the opposite of what it said.
"Wait, if you do that here…" the Imp said. The protest came out fast, alarmed, because the imp understood consequences like a person understood gravity.
But was immediately teleported away by the rabbit, who also vanished. The portal folded shut behind Torrac like a wound sealing, leaving Kael alone in the gray, suspended moment. For a brief fraction of time, there was nothing but his own breathing and the frozen swarm.
Kael didn't understand what happened as the world regained its color, but the moment the world did, his body felt like it was struck with a hammer. The pain didn't arrive as a clean wave. It arrived in jagged bursts, like his nerves were being plucked one by one with burning wire. His muscles clenched violently, not with effort but with forced change. The sensation was wrong, like something was reaching into him and reorganizing the framework without asking permission.
Muscles and nerves felt like they were actively being fried. Kael's body began changing while he watched, and along with all that pain, the goblins noticed him. Their eyes sharpened as sleep burned away in an instant, heads snapping toward him as movement returned. The pause had gifted them nothing, but the return had gifted them clarity: prey standing in the open.
"Motherfucker!" was the only word he could let out as his body was assaulted with bone-arranging agony.
The curse of growth, the Tower's "reward," hit him like a punishment dressed up as a blessing, and the world around him chose that exact moment to come fully alive and hungry.