There was a loud, obnoxiously soft crackling every time my feet landed on the floor. This was a painful enough experience, not helped in the slightest by the fact the roads were simple cobblestone; their nooks and crannies were just obvious enough where every step came with the risk of either tripping over the crevice, and falling on my face, or getting shin deep in the crevice and bending my ankles in unimaginably painful ways.
Neither of which I was particularly insistent on experiencing.
But reality, it seemed, didn't care about my lack of insistence.
Without a shred of mana flowing through my system to act as a buffer, the conservation of energy was a cruel, unforgiving master.
The kinetic energy from my heel striking the uneven granite didn't dissolve into a perfectly managed mana dissipation layer anymore. It travelled straight up my tibia, rattled my patella, and anchored itself as a dull, thudding ache right at the base of my lumbar spine in one agonising motion.
If anything in the universe was consistent, it was its hatred of me and its joy, it seemed, in putting me through pain.
I wheezed slightly, the moan of pain you would expect from an eight year old escaping my mouth.
I was a hero who had physically rewritten the landscape of a continent, yet I was currently being structurally outmatched by a street layout designed by medieval civil servants.
"Are we arriving today, or should I book the room for the next fiscal quarter?"
The handler's voice drifted back to me, smooth, entirely unbothered, and dripping with a subtle, dry mockery that made me want to execute a perfect kinematic strike straight into his sternum.
Except, as my throbbing knuckles from five minutes ago reminded me, the speed punch of any punch I would be able to muster currently against this specific target only resulted in self-inflicted damage.
"Just studying the terrain. It's hard to plan an escape route when the local bricklayers clearly hated straight lines." I grumbled, my voice sounding especially pathetic even to my own ears as I dragged my left foot over a particularly aggressive piece of mortar, the sensation in my back not unlike that of chalk scraped against a chalkboard.
There was a silence. It was one of the single loudest silences I had ever experienced, this life or past. He was judging me. And badly at that
Instead of striking back with any form of witty comment in my pathetic state, I clamped my jaw shut, focusing entirely on the biological mechanics of a standard human stride. Heel, roll, toe-off. Balance. Kinda. Adjust for the slant of the gutter. Fail to adjust. Silently scream in agony.
It was frustrating, to say the least. I had spent roughly eight years assuming my progress had been linear, if not exponential, and at the very least positive, only to lose access to my store of mana and have the entire foundation of existence exposed as fraudulent. An incredibly pathetic, small, and whiny type of fraudulence at that.
If I can't even cross a town square without my own skeleton trying to commit mutiny, how was I supposed to survive the sheer structural pressure of literally anything more difficult than walking down a street.
Not far ahead of us, the oppressive rows of leaning townhouses finally gave way to a small, enclosed square, flanked by heavy iron gas lamps that hissed with a low, thermal drone.
At the centre sat the hotel—a massive, grey-stone monolith that looked less like hospitality and more like a high-security containment unit for things that regular society didn't want to look at.
Which, in all fairness, was a group I likely came under.
The air felt increasingly suffocating as I got closer.
I was starting to truly doubt the 'hotel-ness' of this hotel. Was I going to come back out?
I hadn't done anything particularly deserving of punishment, had I...?
Oh.
The whole vacuum fiasco.
The likelihood of this being a prison skyrocketed, and I started considering alternative escape routes.
I turned to my side, and lo and behold, the smirk on the handler's face had not disappeared. And instead, it had bolstered itself to the point where it could less be defined as a smirk than as a complete grin.
The possibly of my escape was... probably below one percent. It could be argued that my chances of escape were in the actual negatives. Maybe if I had a mana core I maybe I could do something, but as I was now? Yeah not really.
"Are we going to enter, sir?" The 'sir' was said without the slightest hint of respect. It was almost impressive, really, to say a term that was by definition respectful disrespectfully.
"Yes."
What was rebelling going to do now?
Might as well get it over with.
I breached the entrance of the reception area, the worker there glanced 'up' to me for no more than half a second before looking back down.
I was almost 100% sure I heard a deep, tired, almost disappointed sigh from her before she turned her head back up.
"Hello, how may I help you today."
That cheeriness was not the same person I had just looked at.
On one hand, credit where credit is due to the professionalism.
On the other hand, I feel like getting her checked into therapy would be an incredible cost-return investment; you pay a minor fee to get her looked into, and you keep having a receptionist. Good trade-off in my opinion.
Of course, none of this was voiced. Imagine an eight-year-old talking about cost-return investments? The Principal would be even more confused by me than he already is; and that's a pretty high bar.
While my thoughts were off in Narnia, considering the benefits and negatives of giving a particularly tired-looking receptionist therapy, the oh-so professional voice of the handler came through, dragging me out of my daydreaming session.
The handler bypassed me entirely, his long strides carrying him straight to the mahogany counter. He didn't offer a name, or an explanation. Instead, he simply dropped a heavy, matte-black transit case onto the polished wood with a solid, echoing thud that made the receptionist's practiced smile falter for a fraction of a second.
"Transfer, last name Vale" the handler said, his tone clipped, professional, and entirely devoid of the mocking warmth he'd been treating me to outside. "Personal choice by the Principal. Not quite sure what he saw in this... hooligan"
And there it was. Could this guy ever miss an opportunity to slander me?
The receptionist's fingers flew across a sleek, modern interface built directly into the aged wood of the desk. The discrepancy between the medieval aesthetic of the city outside and the cutting-edge logistical tech inside was jarring. It was the first real confirmation that this wasn't always grim, miserable, and depressing hotel.
"Vale... Vale... The first name's Aren, right?" she murmured, her false cheeriness instantly evaporating into the dead-eyed compliance of a bureaucrat who had seen too much. She pulled a shiny black and gold key card from a slot beneath the desk, but she didn't hand it over immediately. Instead, her eyes drifted over the handler's shoulder, finally pinning themselves on me.
Well. At least as much of me as she could see from up there.
I stood there, trying my absolute best to look like a mildly traumatized, entirely mundane eight-year-old whose biggest concern was a scraped knee, rather than the origin story of why three-quarters of about six cities had disappeared.
To pass the time, I let my eyes drift across the lobby, casually cataloguing the defences of the monolith. It was a habit I couldn't seem to shake, even with an effectively useless body. The high ceilings were supported by thick, load-bearing pillars of dark granite, perfectly positioned to provide cover from ranged projectiles but entirely disastrous if someone decided to collapse the eastern face of the building.
As my gaze swept toward the shadowed edge of the room, a sudden, inexplicable phantom ache flared right along what had been the old scar tissue of my previous life; the one that had run directly down my chest. The hair on the back of my neck stood up—not from a flare of mana, but from a raw, evolutionary spike of pure survival intuition. My jaw clenched automatically, my weight shifting into a low, defensive stance before my brain could even register a threat.
I forced myself to relax, blinking away the sudden tension. The furniture in that corner was heavy—high-backed, suffocating velvet armchairs scattered near the wall. A few of those chairs were occupied by the exact kind of people you'd expect the state to hide away. In the far corner, a low-born boy with hands wrapped in thick, blood-stained brawler's tape was aggressively tearing the pages out of a local pamphlet. A few paces to his left, a young girl from some high-born noble house sat perfectly still, swallowed by the pristine, stifling layers of her formal dress, her gaze fixed entirely on the slow, rhythmic swing of the grand pendulum clock on the far wall. She looked as bored and drained by the bureaucratic waiting game as the receptionist.
And more reluctant to be here than I was. And that was an achievement I didn't think possible.
A sharp tap on my shoulder shattered my focus. I didn't flinch, but my hand instinctively twitched toward a non-existent hilt.
"If you're quite finished trying to intimidate the upholstery, sir," the handler muttered, his voice dropping into that low, practiced drone of utter exhaustion, "the desk has actually processed that you exist. Unwillingly, of course."
I didn't linger on them. Anomalies were a dime a dozen in places like this, and my body was probably just reacting to the suffocating atmospheric pressure of the containment wards hidden in the walls. None of them were currently threatening to push me down a flight of stairs. My focus snapped right back to the mahogany counter as the receptionist finally cleared her throat.
"Room 402," the receptionist's voice cut through the silence, handing sleek black card to the handler. "Top floor of the east wing. Elevators are down for maintenance. You'll have to use the stairs."
My internal monologue instantly disintegrated into a string of profanities that would have shocked the Principal. Four flights of stairs. With a spine that felt like a collection of broken glass and an ankle that was actively staging a mutiny.
"Excellent," the handler remarked, a tiny, malicious sliver of that familiar grin returning to the corner of his mouth as he turned back to me. "Hear that, sir? A wonderful opportunity to continue your architectural survey. Lead the way."
Deus occide me.
Quaeso.
I muttered under my breath, the archaic syllables slipping out with the heavy, melodic cadence of a dead era.
The handler paused, squinting down at me. "What was that? Did you just try to curse the woodwork, kid?"
"I said the architecture is very historic," I grumbled, lifting my dead weight onto the first step.
***
My left foot dragged over the threshold of Room 402, and the pure malice that had forced me to stay upright for four agonising flights of stairs completely evaporated. I didn't care about the handler, the paperwork, or the ominous containment-cell vibe of the room. I simply let my knees buckle, allowing gravity to take me the rest of the way.
Thud.
My face buried itself into the stiff, starchy hotel sheets.
They smelled overwhelmingly of cheap industrial detergent and old, trapped moisture, a far cry from the silk linens of my past. Every single fibre of the mattress seemed to actively resist the contour of my ribs, offering all the plush comfort of a flat slab of unyielding slate.
"Cur me Deus dereliquit." I muffled into the mattress, the ancient, rolling syllables sounding heavy and hollow against the fabric.
"I told you, kid, if you're going to curse the plumbing, do it in a language I can actually understand." The handler muttered.
Then he sighed deeply.
"Get some rest, kid," the handler's voice echoed from the doorway, completely numb to my profound theological despair. "We start early tomorrow."