If this security officer wasn’t going to let him enter Gamdu Communications Tower through conventional means, maybe it was time to start considering some illegal methods. Breaking and entering, for example, or sneaking in as an employee.

Zack exited the Gamdu Communications Headquarters building while musing about his approach. For now, it was probably better to head home and get some much needed rest. It was almost midnight, and his body and mind were exhausted from everything that had transpired. The hotspot was not going to disappear any time soon. He had time.

He absentmindedly pulled his yellow raincoat’s hood over his head and pushed open the door with his shoulder, stepping onto the rainy city street. He felt a bit delirious as fatigue set in.

This wasn't normal fatigue. He had pushed his body past what it could handle with the misuse of the awakening technique before it was ready for it. The recoil was beginning to set in, and Zack felt dizziness and his vision blur. He needed to rest, urgently.

As he walked out, he felt himself collide with someone.

Oof!

The impact was far greater than he expected, and upon further introspection the collision was definitely intentional.

Zack stumbled onto the ground, landing on his ass. He instinctively cushioned the fall with his elbow, instantly regretting it as his elbow rang with pain. He felt the wet surface of the concrete floor outside the communications building pressed against his cheap yellow raincoat’s sleeves, the rain seeping into the fabric of his pants and his underwear.

The bag from the convenience store fell onto the concrete beside him, his sandwich having fallen out of its plastic container, as the bread became increasingly soaked from rainwater.

From the ground level, he saw two people, one of whom must have shoved him on purpose. One was a man who wore a sleek pair of black polished dress shoes, the expensive kind. And the other was a woman, her delicate feet slipped into a pair of red high heels, a designer brand. From the force of the impact, it had to have been the man.

“This must be the new delivery boy,” said a male voice. His voice was cool and confident, the kind that could easily be heard from the male lead of a drama.

“Ah~ this delivery boy should be more careful!” replied a flirty young female voice. A hint of inebriation could be heard in her buttery tone.

Zack looked up slowly, his eyes trailing the pair’s outfit.

The man stood with a tall, confident posture, wearing expensive and elegant Gabani slacks tailored to perfection. On his wrist was a dazzling Veraxillion watch that Zack had only seen on a billboard once. It was probably worth more than anything that he could imagine. His suit was a brilliant dark navy Gabani that gave him a sophisticated air, a matching set with his pants.

The woman’s thin and glamorous legs were bare all the way up to her upper thigh, after which they were covered by an elegant red minidress that could be frequently seen at a nightclub. Her figure was incredible, and her arms clung around the man’s arm as her knee pointed towards him affectionately.

Zack’s gaze reached their faces. The man on the left was undeniably handsome, with deep eyebrows. Zack recognized him immediately. He had recently acted in a popular TV drama, and was now the face of many brands from advertisements in the subway station that he just crawled out of to the Cosmo milk ads in the convenience store he visited.

The suited man looked down at him with indifference, the blank and condescending expression sitting on his face far removed from the charming smile he gave in his advertisements.

“What are you still doing sitting there? Get out of my way, delivery boy,” the suited man said, motioning for Zack to move aside.

Zack looked at the suited man, then at the ruined sandwich strewn across the floor to his right, and felt his blood boiling in anger.

“My food.” Zack said slowly while sitting up, indicating at the sandwich which was now sitting miserably, the bun soaking up dirty rainwater on the concrete floor. “Pay me back for it.”

An inexplicable flash of annoyance appeared on the man’s face, as he walked forward until he was standing directly above Zack. Looking down at him, he raised his foot. The black designer shoe came right down on the sandwich, crushing it underneath as tomatoes, lettuce, and breaded chicken spilled out from the sides in a slurry onto the wet concrete.

“Why should I pay you back? You walked right into me, delivery boy.”

Zack felt his blood boil as he stared at the sorry mess that was once a sandwich on the concrete beside him. He got up on his knee. “You bumped into me. Pay me back,” he said with an adamant tone.

The man continued. “You have a lot of nerve, talking back to me here. Know where you’re standing in front of? This is my office building, Gamdu Communications Headquarters. Surely even you have heard of it, hm? This place isn’t for the likes of bums like you.”

“Honey, don’t worry about him,” said the young woman in a thoroughly drunk voice. “He’s probably just a migrant worker from out of town.”

“Tch.” The suited man’s hand went into his pocket, taking out an extravagant leather wallet. Rummaging through it for a moment, he produced a paper bill with a hundred on it. Crumpling it up, he tossed it onto the ground in front of Zack, before kicking it towards him with his designer shoe.

“There’s your money. Now get out of my sight, before I have security remove you,” he said.

Zack’s hand formed a fist, before he noticed that the security guard inside the building was reaching for his baton with a radio raised.

The suited man put a hand on Zack’s shoulder and shoved him aside with a push, and then entered through the glass revolving door into the Gamdu Communications Building.

As the glass door closed, the security guard inside began to speak. It was still audible to Zack as he bent down to pick up the crumpled hundred zed bill that was now wet and dirty.

“Welcome to Gamdu Communications, Vincent. What brings you here so late tonight?”

“I’m here to show my lovely girl here a good time, and it just so happens that my office has one of the best views in all of downtown. Why don’t you open up floor forty seven for us?”

“But sir, the upper floors are not open after ten o’clo–”

“I don’t care. Open them for me. Or do I need to remind you that I brought in more than half of your company’s revenue during the last month?” Vincent replied.

“...”

“As you wish, sir.”

The woman giggled excitedly. “I can’t believe you work here! I’ve always wanted to visit the Gamdu media building. This is where they produced your second drama Moonlight Sonata, right?”

Ding!

The elevator within the building sounded, and the couple walked in. From the corner of his eye, Zack could see the suited man Vincent’s hand around the woman’s butt.

The elevator door closed, leaving the security guard alone in the lobby.

“Hey, what are you still doing here?” the security guard shouted at him, baton pointed. “This is company property, leave!”

Zack quickly scooped the soggy hundred bill and pocketed it. He then collected the remains of his sandwich, putting them back into the plastic bag alongside his water bottles, and pulled his yellow raincoat hood over his head.

He walked down the street to the nearest trash can deep in thought.

It had been so many years since he was last in society that he’d forgotten. Society was not that bastion of hope that he longed for. It could be cold at times, and sometimes terribly cruel.

Even at the end of days, the rich enjoyed the privilege of bunkering in luxury celebrating the end of the world with bottles of the finest champagne and working electricity, while the poor were forced onto the streets to fend for themselves.

Zack had slowly forgotten about that, as the days trailed on where the only company that he had were his training, his demon summoning app, and some hard to chew dried biscuits.

He began the long walk back to his apartment to the east, the rain languishing on his bright yellow raincoat.

He wasn’t planning to go to work tomorrow, when he had just regressed and hadn’t recalled everything yet, but now he was starting to remember why that simply wasn’t an option. He graduated with crippling medical debt to pay for his mother’s hospital fees before she eventually passed away. His father had died when he was young, and left him and his mother nothing but more debts from failed business ventures.

The apartment that he lived in was the cheapest one he could find to put a roof over his head while he worked.

The company he worked at paid well, and was very selective. Most of his coworkers came from wealthy families, and lived comfortably their entire lives. Only he lived in such a dump. Zack never told his coworkers where he lived out of embarrassment.

Even as the end of the world loomed on, he still needed to work to keep a roof over his head. A dump with a roof was better than no roof at all.

…

Zack buzzed into his apartment, before opening the old iron lattice door himself. A cat sat above the trash cans sitting underneath the staircase, purring at him before swatting at an insect that ran across the monotone off-white stucco walls.

He walked up the old building’s slanted staircase, his shoes clacking on the white and black checkered floor as he ascended to the fourth floor. Having finally arrived, he took out a pair of keys and opened the door, stepping inside for the first time in years.

He kept the inside as clean and organized as he could, but it was so small and cramped inside the apartment that he could barely move around without knocking into the furniture or the walls. The paint on the walls were peeling off in some places next to the heating unit, and the faucet in the kitchen didn’t work.

This was the kind of place that the red dress girl would never even think of stepping inside. Compared to the glitzy corporate Gamdu Communications Headquarters, this old apartment was an eyesore, a complete dump.

Zack took off his raincoat and hung it on the coat rack, and then undressed until he was butt naked. Folding his bloodied and damaged clothing to the side, he stepped in the shower for a quick rinse, the first real shower he’d had in years.

The shower was not long, and he quickly dried himself off and threw himself onto his bed. The cheap bed was too short for him, and his legs hung over the bottom of the mattress.

Exhausted, he sank his head into the pillow.

“Good night Zack,” he told himself while patting himself in the head, a routine that he maintained every night to keep himself sane. He thought that things might be different now that he had come back, but not much had changed. He was lonelier than ever.

Zack fell asleep quickly, getting some much needed rest before being awakened by his morning alarm.

His morning routine movements were practiced and efficient. Throwing on his suit and pants, which looked out of place when compared to his crummy apartment, he headed down and took the bus to midtown.

Zack walked into his corporate building, being greeted politely by the front desk secretary.

Heading up to the thirty first floor, he walked through the glass door and into his office, making a right past all the cubicles.

He heard two voices conversing from the meeting room up ahead, its door ajar.

“Why don’t we get some dinner tonight? I can give a call to the best steakhouse in town,” said a smooth male voice. “Normally they don’t take reservations, but I’m sure they’ll make an exception for me. How about it?”

“Um... maybe, I’ll have to think about it,” replied a female voice that he recognized. It was Yuri’s.

Walking past the meeting room, he saw that his coworker Yuri, the office beauty standing in her usual attractive brilliance, was standing and talking to a suited man in the meeting room. She turned her head and smiled as Zack approached, and reached a hand out to stop him.

Zack looked at her, then looked at the man in a suit.

Tall, deep eyebrows, and strikingly handsome. He was wearing a clean pressed gray Gabani suit, with a Veraxillion watch on his left wrist. A faint hint of heavy cologne came from him.

“Zack, please meet our client for our presentation today, Vincent!”