"Holy panda, make it work. God help your lamb in its time of need. Amon, make it fly into the sky. Thor, fry this damned thing!" Harid's finger kept pressing a green button with increasing force and frequency, but nothing happened. He had safely reached the next subway station and ascended to the base of the tower that had to serve as a cable cars station. The problem was that the bottom and muddle part of the cable cars station was only a framework made of steel beams that housed a lift which ran though its middle part and ended at the top.

  Naturally, the lift did not work and Harid was horrified by the prospect of climbing up using the emergency ladders that looked rusted and not reliable at all. However, the temptation of having a direct route to his far away destination via the thick cable was too great. He was sure that he would have not survived the journey on foot.

"You have teleport, you cannot fail." He whispered repeatedly to bolster his courage while gazing at the cable leading to the black tower high above the ground.

"This will be a disaster." His eyes kept moving from the green button to the first emergency ladder back and forth, but even all the gods did not seem to have the power to make the lift work.

  In movies, people solved similar situations usually by cranking up a generator and making the machinery work, but he doubted that approach could work in his situation and frankly he was quite stupid when it came to electricity.

"It is alright. If it does not work out, I can still disappear before I kiss the pavement." He reassured himself again and saw in his mind all the people in white coats that were surely waiting for him after he had teleported again. He shook his head to get the idea out of his mind and gripped the first rusted ladder in both hands.

  He ascended the first two ladders quickly, his eyes bulging with every squeaky sound of the aged ladders. When he stood at a small platform in the middle of the first third of the cable cars tower, he had to grip one of the steel beams tightly. His head was spinning and he could still hear the squeaking sounds of the rusted ladders.

"I will go crazy after climbing the whole thing." He realized that there was no wind and he had to be imagining the unnerving sound.

"Ugh, I even start hearing things. I need to calm down." He took a deep breath and the sound drew closer as if its source was moving.

"What?!" He looked down in alarm at the last long ladder under him and after a moment of hesitation, he reached into his pocket where a lot of dust and sand accumulated thanks to the filthy environment of the subway tunnels. He pulled his fist out and let the dust and sand fall down alongside the ladder.

In the middle of the ladder, the gains of sand stopped midair and Harid's blood pressure reached levels that would send an ordinary doctor into an advertising frenzy, offering their patients ten kinds of drugs at minimum.

  He glanced at the rest of the tower and had no confidence that he could make it in time before the invisible monster caught up with him, because that certainly was what was making the squeaky sounds. The predator probably realized that it had been found out and decided to undo its camouflage, it revealed its humanoid form while speeding up its chase.

  Harid panicked when he saw the monster with his eyes and grabbed a thin rusted iron beam next to him. He attempted to yank it away from the construction to use it as a weapon. Surprisingly, his panic gave him strength and the rusted metal wailed before a long steel construction of several welded steel beams began to fall. Harid stepped to the side and guided the falling beams in the direction of the ladder that his pursuer was using.

  In the next second, the predator screeched with surprise. What followed was its howl of agony when the beams crashed into its body and took it down along with the ladder. It was falling together with the steel beams until it smashed into the ground where it remained lying motionless.

"That went well." Harid stared in shock at the dead monster that lied sprawled at the bottom of the tower.

"Those invisible guys are really annoying, I was lucky." He sighed and grabbed the ladder that he had been about to use before the incident, but his hands grabbed only air. When he calmed down and looked closely, he realized that the steel construction that he tore out of its hinges was actually connected to the ladders leading to the next platform and there was now a gap above him that had no ladders.

  In a trance, he looked down again at the monster and saw that among the steel beams that fell down, there were even multiple ladders. Some of them used to lead further up.

"Eh." Harid gulped and was nauseous when he imagined climbing up or down without the ladders.

"I am done for, this is ape difficulty!" He stared at the roughly ten meters of space above him that was without a ladder. It was just ten meters, but the pattern of the steel beans was not something an untrained person could climb. The beams were few and far between and their smooth, cold surface could not be gripped easily. He was confident that he would have been able to climb up if the beams were thinner, but the smooth thick beans were hard to grip and he slid down only after one meter when he attempted to climb one of them.

  He changed his strategy and tried to climb along the ones that were angled by forty five degrees instead of going directly up, but he voluntarily slipped back after a while, having no confidence to continued climbing after he would have reached the steel beam's junction.

"I should do more exercise." He bit his lip while staring at the unforgiving steel construction. Despite his words, he was sure that he would not have been able to climb up even if he had been into sports and training. The difficulty was simply too high.

He looked down briefly, but the situation there was the same. No ladder.

  While he looked around, his eyes wandered towards the middle where the lift was supposed to go up and noticed that the shaft of the lift had its own emergency exits that had no ladders, but there were thick nails embedded in the vertical steel beams, enabling emergency evacuation.

"That is . ." His eyes focused on a mesh from welded wires that was enclosing the space of the lift and wondered if it was possible to get inside to reach the nails in the shaft.

"Whatever, it has to be rusty like everything else here." He stepped on a thick horizontal steel beam, but even before he did his first step, he decided to sit on the beam and move like a worm rather than walking upright in the direction of the lift shaft. After worming his way from the edge of the tower to its center, he arrived at the mesh and tried to pry open a hole for himself to pass through.

"Why everything holds in place now?" He pulled angrily, but did not dare to exert to much force given his unsteady position. In the end, he decided to use the steel mesh as a ladder and began climbing up on the lift shaft's outside.

  He had to pause several times, wrapping his hands in the extra clothes he had taken with him, because the wires of the mesh were thin enough to cut into his hands when he put all his weight on them. From time to time, some welds gave way and almost caused him to fall, but he had persevered and in the end, he reached the floor of the cable cars station where the lift ended.

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The problem was that he reached its floor and needed to at least enter the enclosed space of the lift to get inside.

  He attempted to break some welds apart, but there were always places that held firmly and stopped him from opening a larger hole in the mesh.

  Exhausted, he pulled the strap of his bag through the mesh and partially hanged on it to regain some strength. While rubbing his bruised palms, he thought about his next course of action.

  He seemed to be unable to enter via the lift shaft. He would probably be able to find an exceedingly rusty patch of mesh, but he had not enough strength to be skulking around like a squirrel. His dull eyes rested on a ladder that was on the cable cars tower's outside, the path he had abandoned at the beginning apparently led to the station's roof.

  After a while of rest, he unstrapped himself and used the thick horizontal beams again to get to the ladder the same way he had gotten to the mesh before. It was worse than at the bottom of the tower thanks to sharp wind, but he managed to get there and grasped the ladder.

  Some time later, he was able to finally stand at the top of the tower, at the roof of the cable cars station. He squinted to protect his eyes against the wind and looked around. The view was incomparable to the time when he was on top of the apartment building.

  The city was really big and he was unable to tell if its large portions swallowed by trees, sand or simply ruined by some other disasters were the end of the city, or just large portions destroyed by some accidents. Either way, he saw that there was a lot of skyscrapers in what he considered the city's center, another part of the city was half-buried in sand and the part next to it was overgrown by plants and trees. There was also a part that looked like a toxic ruin with patches of strangely glowing liquid on the streets. Still, the most common scenery was that of an ordinary ghost city he had already passed through with apartment buildings and shopping malls, a knight or two occasionally loitering on the empty streets.

  He wandered to the place directly facing the tower and looked down, he could see the thick steel cable that ran towards the black tower in the distance. Up close, it was thicker than he had expected.

Much thicker.

And much further.

"That is one hell of a jump." He subconsciously crouched when he imagined himself getting onto the cable, because he could not think of any way to get there. In theory, he would be able to walk atop of the thick cable all the way to the black tower, but only after he had somehow got there.

"No, this is impossible." Harid gulped and his left hand that pressed against the cold steel of the station's roof to support him began to shiver. "It is too far."

  He guessed that the cable was roughly ten meters away, which was a bone-breaking distance and considering that it was a slippery steel cable, his death was probably guaranteed if he dared to jump down.

Harid stumbled back to the ladder leading to the tower's top and gripped it with his hand.

"This will be a disaster." He attempted to unhinge the ladder, but it held and so he sat down on his butt and began to kick it with his feet.

  After a long struggle, the ladder finally gave way to his forceful approach and he was able to pull it up. He dragged it to the spot with antennae and hooked the top rung of the ladder from its support. He walked to his previous position and observed the situation again. This time there was a ladder going almost parallel above the cable roughly ten meters above it, several meters of its length overlapping the roof Harid was standing upon.

"Well, lets see. I will crawl on top of the ladder and it will bent when I reach its end, gracefully delivering me to the cable below." He said with conviction, but was quite sure that he was going to the sanatorium with the people in white cloaks for sure, because the stunt seemed to be too crazy.

Everything had been set up, but he was reluctant to start his attempt.

"Well, before the future patient teleports away, he can at least try out his new self-destructive powers." Harid talked to himself, thinking that it was probably time to try out his new tattoos, as he would hardly ever be in a more remote location than he was at that moment.

Aside from the lemonade tattoo and teleportation tattoo, he had collected another three tattoos he had not yet dared to test.

  When he focused on the part of his skin when one of the newly found tattoos was, it flashed with an eerie glow and a bright symbol appeared a second later at his feet only to disappear right away. Harid waited for something else to happen, but that was apparently all the tattoo did.

"Fine, a silly monster attracting symbol tattoo, welcome to my collection." His face distorted and he concentrated again on another set of alien symbols on his skin.

The part of his skin burned brightly and that was it.

"What?! Not even a symbol? No nothing?! Just. .. just. . .! " He failed to take the result with humor anymore and his face turned bright red with anger.

It took him a while to calm down.

"So teleport, lemonade, nothing symbol and complete nothing." He looked at the last untested tattoo and prayed to all his ancestors to work as all the gods had already failed him multiple times.

The mark lit up in the same way the previous ones did and lo! There was a slick, black hairbrush in his hand!

  He smoothly guided its black teeth through his hair, subjected to a pleasant felling of the back of his skull tingling after its touch, only to break it in two with an inhumane growl of anger a second later, throwing the two halves into the distance with all his strength.

Useless. Everything useless.

  He stood rooted at the top for a moment with his eyes closed, mobilizing all his strength to calm down. Surprisingly, when he opened them again, he had really managed to regain a sliver of sanity.

"Right, let's continue with the show." He reluctantly looked back at the ladder before him. Expecting it to bend at some point, he lowered himself and began to crawl backwards with his all four limbs, his plan was to remain in an upright position when the ladder bent, becoming an ordinary vertical ladder.

  Carefully, Harid placed his legs and hands on the rungs one at a time, slowly moving backwards. When his whole body left the safety of the station's roof, he finally saw the cable and the ground far below it, a nauseating sight that made his heart race faster. At the same time, his every move began causing the ladder to sway. The swaying started mildly, but as he crawled further, its frequency lowered and amplitude increased. At one point, he felt too dizzy and had to stop advancing.

"Come on, only a few more rungs and it will surely bend under my weight." He moved again with his grip tighter than ever, expecting the dangerous maneuver.

"One more and it will come, only one more step." His breathing quickened, the pressure of the situation was great even though he had his last ace in his sleeve, the teleportation tattoo.

"One mo .. ." Suddenly, he found out that his leg had reached no support and he was extending it into the air. He quickly pulled it back and stuck to the swinging ladder like a slug.

He had miscalculated, the ladder held not bending at all even though he had reached its end.

"W-What now, What now?!" He panicked and wanted to crawl back to the safety of the roof, but the ladder was swaying too much and he did not dare to make a move. Even if he managed to move, there was no other way to reach the cable. Previously, he had thought about lowering the ladder and placing it directly on the cable, but the part of the ladder he had manager to tear off was two meters short and could not reach the cable. That was why his plan was to bend the ladder and use it to considerably shorten the distance he would have to jump after hanging by his hands from its last rung.

"I will not back down, you will bend over you bitch!" He began to shift his weight with every swing of the ladder, increasing the amplitude of the swings. Shutting down the feelings of dizziness and nausea, he continued to swing madly at the end of the ladder until something gave way.

  He felt as if the time slowed down and his head looked up, looking horizontally at the whole length of the short ladder. The rusted steel of the ladder remained firm, unbend and unbroken. However, what broke was the support for the antennae that held the ladder attached to the roof.

"No way!" Harid felt weightless and immediately tried to rotate his body and grab the cable that was bound to pass by him shortly. He managed to make the move and glimpsed the steel cable with his eyes, his lifeline that was passing right next to him. He tried to grab it with both arms, but only felt a strong impact and dull pain spreading though his limbs and side.

  There was no way he could grab the cable at his speed and he continued to fall with his body throbbing with pain, feeling like he had just been hit by a truck.

"Have to teleport, come on!" Luckily, the cable had not hit his head and he still managed to activate his tattoo before he reached the ground.

The next moment he saw a white flash and fell on his butt.

"Ugh, why is my bed this hard?" He looked around in confusion and jumped to his feet.

"No! Impossible!" His feet began to tremble while he was looking down at the thick steel cable snaking its way into the distance.

"Why?" With a whimper, he looked at his feet and realized that he stood at the exact same place where one of his newly tested tattoos placed the nothing symbol.

It had done something after all.