The tower closed for holidays.
I’m not sure who made that decision. There was no HR department or corporate calendar, as far I was aware. And technically, I was the boss.
But today, the doors sealed. The floors became silent. No adventurers, no parties of heroes, no losers trying to liberate the realm from my unholy reign.
It did, however, mean mandatory socialization with my coworkers.
The common room, which was located between floors that should have been physically impossible, was packed. Every floor boss in the tower had shown up, meaning I was surrounded by approximately one hundred of the most terrifying creatures in whatever world this was, and they were all just... hanging out.
"Hold still, Your Dreadful Majesty."
Malice was painting my left hand. Spite was painting my right. They were small, gray-skinned creatures that came up to about my knee. They constantly hovered in a state of nervous devotion, serving as my personal henchmen. I didn't choose them. One day, they just showed up and started calling me things like "Your Malevolence" and "Oh Glorious Darkness" and organizing my throne room. They were terrified of me. They would also have died for me.
"Spite, you got it on my skin."
"A thousand apologies, Your Wickedness!" Spite's hands were shaking. He held the tiny brush like it was a live grenade. "I'll remove my own hands as punishment —"
"Don't remove your hands, Spite. Just fix the pinky."
"At once, Your Terribleness!"
On the other side of the room, Sable, a lamia from the 42nd floor, was sprawled across an entire couch. Her serpentine lower half coiled around the armrest and onto the floor. She was talking to anyone who would listen, which was currently a slime named Ooze from floor 12 who didn't technically have ears.
"— So he gets to my floor, right? Got this whole speech prepared, the 'I am the chosen one' thing, the eye contact, very intense. And I do my bit, I come out of the shadows, I do the voice" — She adopted a honeyed tone. "— You dare enter my domain, mortal, and this man looks at my face, and he goes, 'Are you single? I was kinda excited. Do you know how long it's been since I went on a date? But then, when he sees my tail, he freaks out! It's not like I'm subtle. You see what you see when you walk in."
"Rough," said Ooze.
"Maybe lead with the human half," said Yuki. Floor 67: Oni. Seven feet tall, with lavender skin and two thick horns curving from her temples. She was the closest thing I had to someone who understood my horn predicament, yet she always avoided discussing it. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, savoring a clay bowl of human fingers. "Men are simple. Show them the face first. Then the snake part."
"The snake part is seventy percent of me, Yuki."
"So show them thirty percent."
In the corner by the wall, Hana, floor 80, arachne, was knitting. Six of her eight legs were involved in the process of producing fabric at an upsettingly rapid pace, given where the thread came from. Her human torso emerged from the front of her spider body, but she was definitely pretty from the neck up.
"Has anyone been watching The Sundering?" she asked, keeping her eyes on her knitting.
"It fell off after season two," Ren, the kumiho from the 73rd floor, remarked. She was currently in human form, which made it easy to forget her nine tailed nature and heart eating tendencies. "The writing got lazy. They introduced that whole prophecy subplot and did nothing with it."
"The prophecy arc pays off in episode 9."
"Life's too short. Mine isn't, technically, but the principle stands."
Nyx, floor 88, dullahan, sat on the floor with her head in her lap, brushing its hair. The head moved independently, glancing from one speaker to another, while the body mechanically brushed. "I liked the prophecy arc," the head chimed in.
“You would,” Ren said.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Hey, Lily."
I looked up. Sable had shifted on the couch, angling her human half toward me.
"How's your little mage doing?"
"Don't," I groaned.
"What! I'm asking a friendly question. Coworker to coworker. How is she? Is she well? Did she have a nice resurrection?"
In my weeks in the tower, I had quickly learned some rules about this world. If you died in the tower, it wasn't permanent. Not for adventurers, not even for the floor bosses, as far as I could tell. If someone cared enough or paid enough, anyone could be reanimated. Resurrection was a service, albeit at a cost.
Unless you were me.
I was the Demon Queen. Level 100. The final boss. My death meant the end, with no chance of resuscitation, no divine intervention, and no do-over. The whole tower was structured around this. I was the prize. The reward for climbing 100 floors of increasingly horrible monsters was the opportunity to kill the one monster that stayed dead.
So when Ayla arrived, and I exploded her into pieces, that wasn't the end. It was a just a blip. Someone out there was paying to put her back together. Everything time, she would return the following day, unscathed, resolute, and deeply in love with someone other than me.
She would deliver another speech on fate, flames, and fire and the hand of Queen Victoria, and I'd kill her, and then we would start the cycle all over again.
She was like a cockroach. An unkillable, monologizing cockroach who had ruined my life and my afterlife without even knowing it.
"What's the count now?" Ren asked, with her chin propped on her hand and with her eyes bright. "Thirty?"
Hana said, "Thirty-six," without glancing up from her knitting.
"She cleared my floor in two minutes yesterday," said Yuki.
"She did the same thing on my floor," Sable said, sounding almost offended. "I had a whole ambush set up. Environmental storytelling. Atmospheric lighting. I dimmed the torches, and she just blew past it. I felt like a haunted house on November first."
"A minute 40 on my floor," Nyx's head said. The body initially raised two fingers, but then amended it to one and a half. "She's good, I'll give her that. She's very good."
"She's a pain in my ass is what she is," I said.
"So this woman," Ren said, "dies thirty-six times. Gets resurrected thirty-six times. Resurrection isn't cheap; those temples charge per limb so someone is shelling out significant gold to put this girl back together piece by piece, thirty-six times, so she can climb a hundred floors, get past every single one of us, reach the top, and get exploded again."
"What I want to know," Hana continued as she knitted at a contemplative pace, "is who's paying for the resurrections? That's a royal treasury-level investment."
"It's the queen," I sighed exasperatedly. "Victoria. Whatever. She's bankrolling it because she promised to marry Ayla if she kills me. So every time I blow her up, Victoria just pays to glue her back together and sends her up again. It's like a subscription service. For murdering me."
"That's kind of romantic," Sable said. "Not for you, obviously. For you it's horrible. But like, in general? Conceptually?"
"I will remember this when your performance review comes up."
Ren uncrossed then recrossed her legs. "I hear things through the floors," she said, not looking remotely sorry. "Sound carries. You're on 100, I'm on 42, and I can still hear you screaming 'I GAVE YOU YOUR FIRST ORGASM!'"
"Oh my god."
"Is that true?" Yuki asked. "The orgasm thing?"
"I'm not discussing —"
"She's obsessed with you."
"She's not obsessed with me. She's obsessed with killing me."
"Is there a difference?"
I didn't answer that. I looked down at my nails. Malice had done a good job. Dark, glossy, filed to points I hadn't asked for but didn't hate.
Everything about me was perfect in this body, which was the cruelest joke of all because I was perfect and miserable and stuck on the hundredth floor of a tower, getting murdered every day by my ex-girlfriend, who had forgotten that she was my ex.
"She'll stop eventually," I said. "She has to."
The mimic rattled in the corner.