"Leave me alone!" Wheezing like an old man, he woke abruptly due to nightmares and the pain in his neck, toes, fingers and who knew what else, Harid realized in despair that he was indeed not lying in his own bed and his neck was distorted like a broken water tap. For a while, he just stared into the wall in front of him.

"This again, this . .. It has not vanished." He was decimated after making sure that yesterday was not just an illusion he would be able to forget, but his new reality he did not understand one bit. He just knew that the subway was strikingly similar to the one he knew, it was an awfully low level of understanding.

  He was cold after the time he spent lying on the concrete floor, everything hurt him and overall his moral was extremely low. Despite all that, he knew that he was going to die if he stayed in the safety of the tunnel. He needed to eat and drink, to find warmer clothes because of the cold nights.

  He stood up with difficulty and looked at the entrance to the service tunnel that had been heavily ravaged by the sword of the golden knight from yesterday. He shivered when he remembered the terror of the huge knight and all his courage to explore the tunnel vanished.

"I can see something." He whispered hoarsely and slowly limped towards the tunnel. Looking through the opened steel doorway, he saw that there was morning outside and the light coming from the subway's entrance was enough to provide some level of visibility. He stretched and wanted to walk outside with his weary steps, but a sudden movement forced him to fall back on his butt. He did not even feel the pain because of the fear that arrived instantly, like he was a conditioned dog doing an experiment.

  The object of his fear was a large golden hand that reached out for him from behind the corner, if not for his immediate panic-induced fall, the hand would have grabbed him like a woodpecker taking a worm out of a tree. Right after, he could see the face of the golden knight that retrieved his hand, empty.

Why was he even using his hand? Perhaps he wanted to do something special with him? He did not want to imagine what it was.

His breath quickened, he could not believe the monster had waited for him all night!

"Persistent ugly, more ugly than other ugly." While staring at the beautiful face of the knight that could be seen in the dim light of dawn, Harid could not see his lips moving and figured out that the unsettling voice was only in his head. The knight had actually never spoken. He had a hunch before that the knights were actually not human, but this thought projecting and clearly alien way of thinking verified it. A question remained if the thought projecting was flawed, or the thought process of the knights themselves was distorted.

"W-Why you keep chasing us? Why must you kill us?" He found courage when he crawled out of reach of the knight's sword and tried to communicate.

"Because ugly. Tell commander persistent ugly persistent. Find persistent ugly here. He beautify. No more ugly." The giant knight turned around and jogged away as if his armor weighted nothing.

"A commander?" Harid froze on the spot. If the superhuman monster knights had someone intelligent that could command even more knights, he was dead the moment the commander arrived.

  Without delay, he began heading in the direction of the original station, but this time using the service tunnel that went along the main one. He assumed that the knights were unable to get him out of it even if they knew where he was, but an uneasy feeling was building up down in his stomach that it might not be true for their commander. If just the foot soldiers themselves were like supervillains, he did not want to even see their commander from a distance, not speaking about being located and chased by him.

"Whatever the cost, that commander must not locate me." Harid jogged forward, this time unaware where the service tunnel would exactly lead him. As the distance from the only natural light source grew, he again had been enveloped by total darkness.

He ran until his throat was perched and his legs hurt more than before.

"Seriously, can my pain receptors give me a break? I am a tender youth who is not used to pain!" He groaned while he kept moving forward.

  While complaining about the unfairness of the world, he spotted a very thin rectangle of light and knew that another door was in front of him. To his dismay, his discovery ended up not of any use to him.

"Welded! Welded! Fucking Welded!" He was suppressing tears while his fist slammed repeatedly into the steel door, only to stop in panic a second later. He did not want to be cut in half or attract the attention of the commander. He could only grit his teeth and continue in his journey with hope that they had forgotten to weld the next one.

  For a second, he thought that he should have exited the subway, but knew it was just false hope. The knights were as fast as top sprinters and there would probably be no hideouts up on the surface like the service tunnel where they were unable to forcefully enter.

  After more time of his arduous journey had passed, he saw yet another door and stepped closer to it with little hope. This one had been welded too, but time proved to be a great helper and however strange this reality was, welded parts still seemed to rust as well as on Earth. After a bit of struggle, Harid was able to undo the wire and opened the door carefully, trying to not produce any sound.

  Before he was able to see anything, thick smell of blood attacked his nose and he made an extra effort to exit the tunnel unnoticed. When he opened the door that surprisingly had not produced much sound despite their age, he was appalled by the sight in front of him. In addition, he was confused, because on top of the corpses he recognized from yesterday, as this was obviously the station he had arrived at, there were some people he did not recognize.

"There are too many. Don't tell me another group has been teleported." He carefully exited the doorway, making sure that there was no knight hiding anywhere. Actually, he did not think that the one that had assaulted him had been in hiding, he just had not expected him to still be there. It was more because of his negligence than the knight's stealth skills that he had nearly lost his life.

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  He slowly neared the place where the corpses were more concentrated and noticed that the ones he could not match with anyone he had arrived with shared some traits. They appeared to be all geared more towards fun than school or work.

"They have been moved here at night, meaning they arrived not long ago. We were teleported here when going to school and arrived at night." He guessed that the day and night cycles here were of a similar length, but days were switched with nights. Those who were kidnapped by this strange dimension at dawn arrived in the evening and vice versa.

He fought to keep his cool when walking through the corpses, at one time recognizing the lady that wanted to sue the knights.

"Yeah, they will probably not be afraid of that." Harid found his bag that was still where he had thrown it before and took out his sandwich that his mother had prepared for him to eat at school. He unwrapped it and began to eat. At first he ate it like always, but a moment later he began wolfing it down like a dog, pieces of salad falling down on the floor. He was not that hungry, he just needed to focus on something, to force all his attention and energy on the sandwich.

He did not want to think about anything else than the sandwich, because he would not have been able to take it.

"It was good, and this goes there." He walked to a garbage bin nearby and meticulously put the wrapping inside. If someone saw his action in the midst of the corpses, he would have thought him insane.

  Unexpectedly, when he touched the garbage bin, it flashed with light similarly to the circle from yesterday and a ray of teal light shot at his belly, disappearing before he had managed to dodge. He hurriedly looked under his shirt and spotted a word written in an unknown language there with which he had just been branded. He was unable to understand it, but when he focused on it, it shone with bright blue light and a bottle materialized in his hand out of nowhere, full of light green fluorescent liquid.

"This cannot be drinkable." Harid thought and stopped paying attention to the letters, disrupting whatever process was ongoing. At that moment the bottle vanished as if it had never been there. He stood there confused for a second, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. He repeated to process a few times with some variations, but that was really all the tattoo did.

"Great, an army of supervillain knights is after me and I can summon a bottle of a green, dubious liquid." He wanted to say more, but out of nowhere, he could hear many pairs of footsteps closing on his location and it was clear that they did not belong to humans.

"But why? I made no loud sounds!" He ran towards the entrance to his safe heaven that was luckily not too far due to him being paranoid after the morning incident.

"Fuck!" He had originally intended to take it easy after entering the service tunnel, but decided to keep running because there was clearly a pair of footsteps that was heavier and was closing in faster than the others. He did not need to be smart to figure out that it was probably the knight-commander.

  He had hoped that only his intelligence was superior, given that the knights' physique was already quite insane, but it seemed that it was not the case and the knight-commander was capable of wiping the floor with standard knights.

  Harid ran with all he got thought the narrow tunnel. He did not know what tricks the new enemy had up his sleeve, but he might be cornered in no time if the new enemy was a good strategist. Shortly after he had entered the tunnel, he heard that the heavy footsteps synchronized with his speed and the knight-commander was running parallel to him on the other side of the wall.

"He is in the main tunnel! What is the ass planning? Don't tell me!" An idea appeared in his brain like a lightning bolt when the knight's steps showed a slight disruption in their constant frequency and Harid sped up in a sudden burst of energy. A second later, the wall of the tunnel behind him exploded and an oversized golden halberd bit through the thick concrete.

  It was so fast that he was unable to register its shape, Harid could only swallow the dust created by the explosion of concrete and continue running onward.

"I am dead!" The only reason he was not freaking out completely was the tattoo on his body that gave him hope. "I have to use it, I will die here otherwise!"

  It took the halberd armed knight only a while to synchronize his position with Harid again, as he could apparently hear his footsteps too from the other side. Harid focused his attention on the tattoo on his belly and the bottle with light green liquid manifested in his hand again. Whatever it was, he hoped that the liquid was strong enough to take the knight-commander out of commission.

  His hands sweaty, he waited for the next attack and soon enough, he detected another irregularity in the movement of the heavy boots behind the wall and stopped, not wanting to do the same trick again. Shortly after, the golden halberd penetrated the space in front of him, crushing the concrete wall like it was made out of porcelain, enabling him to see the knight's upper half through the hole.

  Harid moved vigorously and splashed the contents of his bottle in the commander's face, but he was too eager and a part of the bottle's content ended up staining his right hand. He did not wait to see the commander's sizzling face and continued to ran forward while bracing for the pain in his right wrist.

But the pain never came.

He just felt that his right hand was suddenly very sticky.

"DIE UGLY!" He heard the knight-commander's furious roar in his head and noticed that under the weight of his fury, he changed his strategy. He began to whirl his halberd and followed directly behind Harid, forcefully destroying the service tunnel's wall as he went, ripping it apart like a hunter gutting a fish. When he got used to the pace, his speed increased and he was able to keep up with Harid who was running inside like a cornered rabbit.

"What kind of systemfuck is this? They sent after me knight Arthur turned terminator whose armor is forged from Holy Grail or what and I am given a sticky lemonade to defeat him?! Are you shitting me?!!! " He was about to panic and had to switch into a sprint to keep ahead of the furious knight who had his long, blond hair glued together with sugar. He had a feeling that the dust alone would be able to choke him to death if given enough time.

  Out of nowhere there came a very loud sound of steel clashing against steel and Harid glanced back. He though that another knight had come to solve some dispute with his pursuer, but it turned out that the cause was the diligence of the subway station builders. He remembered that they were running in the direction of the city's center and it turned out that the concrete here had been reinforced with steel beams.

"I love the people who built this! I have always wanted to be an engineer!" Harid breathed heavily and started to gain on his pursuer quickly. Despite all his superhuman attributes, thick steel beams were still thick steel beams and the knight-commander was unable to make a short work of them.

Harid continued to run for a time until he could not hear any sound at all.

"That leaves a question. Why have they swarmed me like a beehive?" He looked hatefully at his hand where the lemonade had dried and licked it. They had swarmed him roughly around the time he was trying out his new superpower. His power could be called Lemonade Self-Destruction, a truly valuable weapon of your everyday hero.

it tasted dusty and sweet, but what else was there to expect? Still, its luminescence was quite convenient.

He licked his hand, covering it with a mix of the lemonade and his spit, using his sticky glowing hand to light the way.

"Oh, my new green lantern, but shining is all I can do really." He giggled and felt like losing his mind after all the life-threatening situations.

"Because beauty. Persistent beauty shines, beautify all." He replicated the way the knights spoke in his mind and laughed hysterically.