Absolute despair swallowed his mind, he pressed his head against the cold steel surface and watched it turn glossy when his tears made it wet. The only reason why he had been able to treat everything just like a game was gone. He could not teleport back home any longer.

  When Harid finally lifted his head up and squatted, he was unable to move or even think for a long time. However dubious his last resort was, it had been still there. His soft bed had been his trump card that he could play if everything turned out to be hopeless. It had been his undying hope, but not anymore.

He had no choice but to try to unravel the mystery of this dimension or die trying.

  Clearly, the two tattoos were connected and the first could teleport him to the destination set by the other, or to his home if no destination had been set. After overcoming his shock, he tested it on the windy roof and it was really the case.

"What now? The ladder fell and there is nothing else to use." Harid circled along the edges of the roof, but was unable to think of any way to get to the cable or even back down on the ground. He had torn away the ladder with the presumption that he was able to teleport away if his stunt with the ladder failed.

"Is there a way? There must be!" He stopped above the cable and stared at it as if it was able to answer his question.

"If I jump onto the cable and fall down I can simply teleport back and . . ." He began to mumble, rethinking his options again and again and his thought process stopped suddenly.

"Teleport back and be alright. That's it! That has to work!" He smiled when he realized an important detail about the teleportation.

  If the teleportation just moved him, he would not have been saved and had still splattered like a ripe tomato against the station's roof, but he was alive and perfectly fine. In other words, the act of teleporting seemed to reset his body's velocity to zero. Or if he thought about it differently, it synchronized his speed with the object the mark had been placed on.

"This could work!" Harrid jumped into the air and used one of his tattoos. To his satisfaction, the rune glowed at his feet and when he used his first tattoo again, it teleported him into the air resetting his velocity to zero. For a time, he was stuck in a weird motion of falling from the height one meter above the roof to almost touching the cold steel surface of the station, before he teleported again to the height of one meter. He played like this for a while, staying in the air while teleporting constantly, before he fell again and laughed like crazy.

"it works! It actually works! It is not all useless!" He hurried to the edge of the roof and jumped.

  He saw the cable quickly nearing him and he did what he had just done on the roof. He used the glowing rune to reset the location of his teleport about two meters above the cable and immediately after teleported back to that location right before he shattered his bones. He appeared two meters above the cable again with his velocity reset and fell at the cable from the height of two meters.

He repeated the trick once more, because he was unsure if the height of two meters was really safe and finally stood atop of the cable.

"Yes! YES!" He wanted to shout, but quickly remembered all the golden knights that had to be below him and kept his volume down.

It felt incredible to finally have some sort of a superpower or a cheat. He would have to think some more how to utilize the teleports.

  Vigorously, he began to walk on the top of the slippery steel cable, but his smile all but evaporated after a few steps. He stared at the black structure he was heading to and felt the cold wind blowing against his skin, biting into his skin like a hungry wolf nibbling on his prey, slowly enjoying its feast.

  He had lost the connection with the real world and also lost any chance to resupply safely. The basic necessities he had taken with him the last time seemed suddenly meager and he squeezed his bag tighter.

  Harid walked high above the city, the area half-buried in sand was at his one side along with the overgrown jungle that penetrated the skyscrapers in the area next to it. From his different angle, he judged that the place filled with sand had to be the edge of the city and for the first time, he tried to look further, beyond the world of concrete. There was no surprise, as the buried apartment buildings, shopping malls and large manufacturing halls simply disappeared and there was just sand as far as an eye could see.

"Clearly, there is nothing much to see in this direction, but the cursed sand cannot be bordering the city at all sides." He was sure that the desert was not on all sides, because he had been able to see patches of green in other directions when he observed the surroundings from the top of the cable cars station tower.

  Internally, he hoped that he would be able to leave the city and visit the countryside that might be a little bit more human-friendly. However, after he had seen all the sand, he guessed that he should probably abandon his false hopes. There would be nowhere to hide if he met something nasty out in the wild. The ruins were ugly and unwelcoming, but they were a great hiding place for those that were not particularly alpha predators of the region.

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"Nothing but distractions, I will finally be able to take a closer look at the tower." He felt a sense of accomplishment that soon, he would finally be able to see what the tower really looked like, because he could not say much after only having seen its top from afar.

  Moving forth, he was careful not to slip and fall down. He could not die that way, but he preferred not to have a heart attack from the shock. Only after he walked for nearly an hour and was still not in the middle of his way he realized how far the black tower was. His boring journey to the tower continued and after another hour he had finally crossed two thirds of the distance and was able to see the tower's base.

It was thanks to the fact that there was nothing much around it, as if someone had purposefully had decided to build it in the middle of a square.

"Huh, many nasty little yellow dots. Thankfully I won't be coming to the ground at all. The cable is quite thick, they will not see me as long as I am careful." Harid moved on while his heart beat faster.

  After some time, he finally reached the black tower and was able to see it from up close. The cable was anchored at its side inside a dedicated space where a cable car was supposed to dock. It was just as Harid had hoped, he would be able to walk in without being bothered by all the golden knights below him. He understood at this point that he would have been left without options if he had chosen to reach the tower not using an aerial route.

  There was only dozen of meters left and he decided to take a last sneak peak at all the knights below. They rarely looked up and he was high up in the air covered by the steel cable. He was confident they would not be able to see him.

  Peeking over the cable's edge, if there can be an edge with a cylindrical object like the cable, he observed the many golden knights below him and could not understand why there was so many of them. Then, he briefly remembered what he had read on his sister's phone and the amount of knights that contrasted with his previous memory started to make sense.

"Even squares are not safe indeed." He sighed and imagined that some batch had probably landed down below him, increasing the knights' activity in the area.

"Still, this is weird because they are more organized than I thought." At the edges of the square, the knights moved more randomly, but here at the center, Harid could not but notice that they were organized. Marching about organized in units, the sound of their steps easily reached him and send chills up his spine.

"Ah, my favorite leading figures are there. Actually too many for my taste." Harid whispered and tried to guess how many there were.

  From high up lying on the cable, the halberds they held were seen only as thin toothpicks, but Harid was still terrified by the sight of so many of them. As he counted, he noticed that there was ten of them in the same place, orderly lined up in front of a knight that looked a little different compared to all the others and was adorned by a deep blue coat.

"What the . . ?!" Harid was startled by what he was looking at, but suddenly the one knight who looked differently lifted his head and he swore that there was a flash of crimson light behind the bulky helmet.

"Impossible! Has he seen me?" Harid's head immediately jerked backwards and hid behind the bulk of the steel cable.

His head hidden behind the countless strands of steel, he was unable to see what happened next down there at the very base of the tower.

  The irregular golden knight stepped closer to one of the knight commanders and took a halberd from him forcefully as if taking a kid its toy. His body then spun a full circle and the weapon was launched at the steel cable high above his head.

"AAGGGHHH" Harid cried out and covered his ears, hurt by a sonic boom and the sound of the torn cable, the strands of which were at the moment whirling in the air like a nest of snakes with the momentum to cut through anything that might be in their way. At the same time the massive steel cable began to fall, as it had been cut by the supersonic projectile in half.

  Thankfully, the halberd had been launched without visual confirmation of the exact Harid's position as he had managed to hid in time and it missed him by a few meters.

  Thanks to his survival instinct, Harid immediately activated his teleportation tattoo and appeared several kilometers away, at the beginning of the cable that had just been cut. Naturally, the mechanical changes in its structural integrity propagated by the speed of sound in its steel strands, meaning he had only a second or two before the cable followed the fate of its cut end in the far distance.

  Still incapable of an articulated sound or grasping his environment, Haird began to slip along the cable as it began to tilt, it was inevitably going to slam against the ground, following its far end.

  All the other inhabitants of this area with intact hearing could clearly hear a steel squeal of the tortured anchoring screws and other mechanical parts that strained under the sudden shift of the massive weight. Still, the tower held even though it slightly moved back when liberated of the pull of the massive steel cable.

  Amidst all the noise he could not even properly think or hear, Harid's speed increased and he gradually began his free fall with his back bloody from the intense friction against the shifting steel under him.

  Thankfully, in the end he managed to push himself away from the dangerous failing cable and repeated the move he trained when he had been preparing to jump down onto the cable. After the commotion ceased, he successfully touched the ground and fell to his knees, not knowing what part of his body hurt more.

He still could not believe it.

"That thing! It actually saw me and cut the cable!" He muttered, his voice colored with pain, unwilling to believe what had just happened. The black tower which he had marked in his mind as the place that had the potential to answer his many questions about this world turned into a place to be feared. He did not know if he had just met the knights' leader, but he did not want to meet that thing ever again.

Was it his bad luck, or were the monstrosities stronger the further one distanced from the city's center?

He reached out to touch his back with his trembling hand and felt an unpleasant stickiness of blood. His injury could not be too serious, but it was still a large surface covered in blood, the smell of which was bound to attract the invisible scavengers.

"I have to hide immediately." Breathing quickly, he looked around while thinking about his next move.