"Seems like you were not beautiful enough, as expected." A foot was placed onto the ground that was covered with blood and dust, a nasty mix that formed a stinky paste that was best to avoid.

  The knight had already left and Harid was free to collect all the supplies that the team had with them. He was not afraid of reinforcements as all the Moths had probably teleported away the moment they had found out that knights have discovered their hiding place.

"Cool." Harid picked up a green bag that was lying on the ground and opened it. It was much easier to gather food this way, most of the Moths came prepared and every single bag usually held a considerable amount of food.

  He remembered how all the newbies were usually confused about the insanity of the initiation process, most of them were not told the truth, because authorities and the army were always unwilling to show weakness. The garbage bins that were able to grant the abilities hidden in the tattoos could not be moved. Or more precisely, their powers worked only if they were at their original stations, they would become an ordinary utility item if they were placed anywhere outside. With the source of the teleportation power stationary, all the authorities could do was to choose the closest station connected to Earth with the one-way portals and act as if it was intentional in order not to lose face in front of the public.

  At first, they had tried to build a secure corridor between the two subway stations, but that naive approach worked only until the first knights showed up. Harid thought that the army could probably fend off a knight or two if they really tried, but the more they fought, the more noise they made and it was really game over for anything and anyone the moment a knight commander with a full unit showed up.

  Another piece of the puzzle was that the whole military operation was pushed by big technology companies and business and any sort of moral excuse or ideology was used only to lower the cost of propaganda needed to provide the honorable warriors that were supposed to seize the assets only to leave them in care of those who were more experience with handling wealth, taking only medals and good fuzzy feeling for themselves. No one at the top really cared about soldiers' deaths as long as they did not run out of heroes.That was why no one actively tried to change the current status quo, as the number of adventurers, heroes and naive dreamers was still sufficient.

"They have it tough, poor bastards." He said with his mouth full of military rations and stepped over the bodies of the unlucky newbie unit. The army might turn everything around if the portals were big enough to push through large pieces of machinery like tanks, but that was not the case. Harid had observed their operations long enough to know the portals' limits.

  He gnawed on his food without feeling anything, it became a matter of survival to snatch food from others and he would have done it without a second thought even if it was not. Earth had abandoned them. That was the simple truth.

  All the people who used a particular tattoo that was also dubbed The Curse had no way to ever see Earth again and had gradually became aliens as far as others were concerned. With time, people who feared, rejected them or tried to take advantage of them grew more numerous and as of late, Harid really felt like he was an alien to those people from Earth that came and behaved as if this place was a gold mine that had already been carved up by special interests. Of course, not a piece had been assigned to him or those in a similar situation like him.

  They were abandoned, forsaken, they were The Ashes that were left here after they have pulled the shortest straw. An immense hatred had been accumulated between The Ashes and Moths that were constantly fighting each other while covering in the shadow of the true predators of this world. The Ashes were attacking Moths for their resources, while Moths were driven by agenda and revenge. After all, who else was supposed to know more about the riches of this plane than those who were trapped in it?

  Many of the Moths left the ruins of the alien city immediately after being able to, never to return. When they tried to warn the others, they found out that news censorship worked much better than they had thought and after some initial trouble with the authorities, they ceased to try and warn other recruits about the war propaganda of special interests. The Ashes had no such choice, they had to survive in the hellish place or die trying.

  There had been a period of time when The Ashes lived with Moths, but they were always bad luck because the destination of their teleports was not bountiful Earth, the fact that motivated them to take extra supplies with them. It was only a matter of time before Moths chased them all away, calling them thieves and saboteurs.

  Almost a year had passed and Harid watched the conflict unfold and as one of the original Ashes also became one with a bounty on his head. With time, another need unfolded for the unlucky Ashes that became aliens to their original home. Their numbers dwindled and some of them began to forcefully kidnap Moths, branding new members with The Curse, turning them into their own. By doing so, the hate towards The Ashes grew even stronger and the unity of the unlucky folk shattered as not everyone agreed with the practice of forced initiation. The resulting chaos was the current situation.

  In all those months, Harid had not found out much more about the strange world and was still in the dark, held back by the haunting memory, his vivid nightmare he had lived though back then near the towering wall of the black tower.

  Apart from his bad memories, another reason was that the only realistic source of food were the Moths and the further he went away from the subway, the further he had to walk back and every step made in the open meant a risk of being detected.

"Do not move! What happened here? Your are one of those rats!" A uniformed man suddenly appeared, pointing a gun at Harid who was weighted down by numerous bags that contained the looted supplies.

"I'm not, don't shoot!" Harid said quickly while lifting his hands up in the air, simultaneously activating his teleportation tattoo. Before the inexperienced Moth's brain could process the situation, he was already standing atop of a high tower, a thick steel cable anchored at his feet, its remnants running in the direction of a much higher black tower standing in the distance. It was the cable cars tower that had proven to be an advantageous base, because it gave him a substantive resource he could use for escape, altitude.

"Windy as always." He entered the tower. He had used this move many times. Most Ashes made the mistake of not wearing Moths' uniforms, the teleportation was usually not as fast as a bullet and a second of confusion was essential to escape. Of course, the soldiers usually figured out quickly that he was an impostor, but quickly and instantly made a lot of a difference. No one was trigger happy enough to immediately shoot at someone in the same uniform.

"Huh, I hope there will not be more of this. That might change the situation." Harid frowned and took out a poster that he had found in one of the green bags. It was a wanted poster and the image on it was him.

"Damn, this is troublesome. With this, someone actually can shoot me without even asking." He frowned while looking at the poster.

"Only one way to solve this." He rummaged though the supplies until he found a military knife. "It is time for a new cut, my hair is too messy anyway."

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He thought for a second about a style that would be visually different enough to invalidate the poster's image.

  In the end, he decided to cut most of his hair on his right side making his hair strongly asymmetrical.

"That should do the trick." Harid looked at himself by touching his hair, because he had no mirror to look into. He felt like he had become a blind person, who probably used a similar approach to see themselves.

"You look more sexy this way, you will look even better without those green bags." He heard a female voice from behind and turned around in panic.

"Surprise, surprise! I have been waiting for your delivery." A woman was holding a gun pointed at his chest.

"You bitch! Stealing from your own?!" Harid was annoyed that his base had been found out.

"I would like to say that it is nothing personal, but on second thought." The young woman with Asian face made a step closer, her gun not leaving its mark even for a second. "It is."

"Come on! I saved your life! You would have killed me without all this crap if you really hated me!" Harid tried to counter the statement, still holding the military knife he had been using to shave his hair in his hand. "We are both The Ashes of the old world, right?"

"Nonsense, give it to me. Quick!" She insisted and Haird felt as if something was off. He scanned the ground through the floor of the platform and clicked his tongue.

"So this is why! Go forth and shoot if you want a friend to visit us here." He showed her a fake smile.

"Give me the bags, or I will shoot you and teleport away instantly. I am not that soft." She snorted and pressed her gun directly against his chest.

"And where is your destination? This tower is quite hard to climb, isn't it?" Harid's fake smile turned genuine when he realized why Charyia hesitated to shoot him. It was not easy at all to climb the cable cars tower after the ladders fell. It might look easy to use the torn cable to climb up, but he knew well that it was slippery and dangerous to climb. She had certainly used some location in the middle as a save point when she had been climbing up. After all, he had made sure that his base was close to impossible to reach without specialized gear and training.

  With no more words, Harid reached into the bag and took out a sidearm that he had noticed before along with the wanted poster. She reacted to the situation by making a few steps back and they ended up standing a few meters apart, pointing guns at each other.

"And what? If I cannot shoot you, it works the same for you. Smart boy." She ridiculed his action while following the movements of the knight-commander passing below them. The monstrosity was not directly under the tower, but it was certainly close enough to be attracted by gunfire.

"So what will it be? Will we play wild wild west the moment he is far away?"

"Do not dare to chicken out too soon or we are both corpses."

"I am putting it away, this violence is meaningless." Harid reached back into the bag with his gun and tilted it to the side in a suspicious motion. Immediately, Charyia sidestepped and hid behind a steel support.

"Do not fuck with me, I will not fall for your tricks." She said angrily from behind her cover.

"What tricks? I am putting the gun away!" Harid defended himself, looking confused.

"Bullshit, you are just trying to use salami, clothes and whatever is in that bag as a silencer. I am not stupid!" She peeked from behind the support with her gun ready to fire.

"You are really paranoid." He withdrew his hand from the bag again, but still held the gun and readily pointed it back at her.

"As I thought." She snorted. "Slippery as a snake."

"You are the one to talk, hateful black widow." Harid grumbled, not seeing a way out of the stalemate. "You know that spider right? Your ass is similar, fat and ugly."

They glared at each other for a while, but neither of them backed down.

"Hey, do not be a dick, you have enough for the both of us." She said, but received no response.

"What? Is mister big adventurer suddenly afraid of something? You like to make ruckus with cables, no?" She teased him to get somewhere, as she was unwilling to stand too long on one spot.

"And? I have tried something. Probably the only one around here, you are just spreading your legs in front of the Moths hoping that they will stick some little snack up your . . ."

"That is none of your business and it is still better than massacring them with a knight!" She retorted angrily before he had managed to finish his verbal counterattack. It seemed that Harid knew where to strike to make her uncomfortable as she began to subconsciously biting her lower lip.

"The same way is the black tower none of your business. You would have died with fright if you saw the monster there." Harid snorted in disdain. No one was tough enough to see what he had seen there and just shake it off.

"You have seen the queen, so what? Do you think that you are the only one?" She snapped at him back venomously. "Self-important man-child."

"I have enough of this farce! Wait, what queen?" Harid had nearly bit his tongue mid-sentence.

"The Golden Queen! She is a nasty hysterical bitch that one and before you ask as an idiot that you are, yes, I have heard her voice. She is a female."

There was a long silence in between them and the hormones of both had some time to get out of their system.

"Have you tried to explore further? Is there any food?" Haird asked, his tone much more calm compared to before.

"What do you think? That only you have tried?" She shook her head and lowered her gun for a second, but only for a moment before pointing it back at him.

"Oh, How hard we tried! Our expeditions. Do you understand that word? We? We tried! But this hell is not a forgiving place. The golden bitch did most of us without even trying. The injured people were picked off by the invisible pests. By the time of our second expedition, there was only me and two others. The third expedition was solo and I gave up on it even before it started."

"So I did one solo expedition and you did none." Haird interjected and immediately realized how inappropriate his remark was.

"Yeah, you are the real hero." She scowled without saying anything else, not in the mood to argue anymore.

"Fine, I have enough of this. Let's kill one another on three. This life is not worth living anyway." She suddenly stepped away from the pillar that acted as a cover for most of her body and started to count quickly.

"One. " Charyia said resolutely while looking into Harid's eyes, unblinking.

"Are you nuts? Stop this!" He urged her, trying to discern whether she was serious or not. Given the mental health of all those stuck in the strange dimension, one could never predict their actions with certainty.

"Two. " Her tone was unchanged, the gun pointing at her opponent's forehead.

Immediately after she said the number, a loud bang echoed through the abandoned station and Charyia fell to the floor with a stream of blood coloring her clothes red.

"You silly bitch! Why did you do this?!" Harid stepped closer to her body not knowing what he was supposed to do.

"Ch-Cheater! If you want to live so bad, then at least . . ." She began to cough blood, but managed to finish hear words with her last breath." . . then find out who did this. "

  Harid was left with the dead body in front of him, she had died before he had time to decide if he should hold her, ignore her or put another bullet through her just to be sure. His only luck was that the passing knight was long gone already before he pulled the trigger.

"Who did this? You are silly." He walked back and forth nervously. "Do you understand how stupid you are?!"

He looked into her dull eyes, but there was naturally no response from her.

"You don't, you just stare like a silly cow!" He pointed at Charyia 's dead body angrily with his finger.

  It was unreal. She was someone he had to guard against, because she had tried to kill him several times. Out of necessity, she had also saved him several times and their relationship was overall really strange. She was definitely not a friend, nor an enemy. She was simply someone who was, other Ashes kept dying like flies, but she was still there, a threat he had to be cautious of.

Not anymore.

"Who did this?" He repeated what she had said. What she had done was extreme, a proof that she had been barely holding it together for some time.

"Fine, fine I promise. I will find who did this." He dragged her body to the edge of the platform and threw it down to prevent his base from being too stained by her blood.

  He looked at her broken body under the tower that began to disappear as an inevitable guest came to have its meal. Harid watched the process in a daze and hid back in the tower before the last part of the body disappeared.

"I will find who did this. I will." He whispered with determination, but this time it was more a promise to himself. He had enough of the place and it was about time to find out the culprit behind his and many other people's misfortune. He was done covering in fear, traumatized by his last experience at The Black Tower.

  His head slowly turned in the opposite direction to where the black tower stood, there in the distance its azure twin towered above its surroundings. In the end the black tower was not the only place with a promise to hold answers.