Dust choked the air, thick enough that I could barely see a few metres in front of me. My vision swam, eyes stinging like I’d poured acid on my retinae. Even with a makeshift mask on my face, my nose was clogged with grime. Every inhale rubbed sandpaper over my lungs, soot turning my mouth and throat to cotton.

Sound was muffled, but not enough to dampen the ear-splitting scream of Taeyong’s destructive power when it was so close. It was a near-constant cacophony now, an endless wail of annihilation. The air stirred with its use, kicking up more and more dust by the second. Though it was dampened by the metal door, the sound was still enough to have my heart jackhammering between my knees.

Small silver linings, it covered up the noise of Julia bashing on the hatch in the ceiling, clinging to the ladder with one arm. The power sign around her eyes had dimmed, dust hindering her superhuman senses, but she still struck with deliberate precision, trying to affect something I couldn’t see from my position beneath her.

I glanced back, squinting through the haze. My foot was tapping, and it took a force of will to stop. But it was like playing whack-a-mole with my own boy; the moment I had that tic under control, one hand started shaking.

My breaths were coming too quick, but not getting enough air. A torn off strip of my shirt was hardly functioning as an adequate filter.

The metal door was still miraculously holding even under the assault of Taeyong’s screaming power, but that didn’t mean we were safe.

Whether the door's proximity was weakening his power somehow, or if he just didn’t want to knock it down—which seemed unlikely— it was only a matter of time before the surrounding walls crumbled, even if they were made of solid brick, tougher than other walls in the place. Cracks were already appearing. Once the gaps were wide enough for someone to look through, we’d be done.

As if in response to my thoughts, a chunk of masonry fell away. A puff of dust kicked up into the air as it thumped to the ground.

The sound was matched by a groan of metal and a clunk from above me. My eyes snapped upwards.

“Got it!” Julia cried, scrambling up the ladder and through the now-open hatch.

I shot up after her as fast as I reasonably could. Safety beckoned.

We hadn’t had time to come up with a plan, and my throat was sore from having to shout to be heard over Taeyong’s power, but we’d both had the same thought immediately: there was no way we were fighting our way out in these conditions. Escape was our only salvation, and the roof was the sole option on that front. There had to be some route down to the ground floor, we reasoned. A fire escape, maybe.

Julia was waiting for me, and she slammed the hatch shut as soon as I was clear. Another metal barrier between us and our pursuers. A potential life-saver, if my suspicions proved true.

Below our feet, a heavy crash boomed out. They’d gotten through the wall. Fortuitous, on our part.

A foolish part of me had hoped visibility might be better up here, but if anything it was even worse. Dark grey haze filled the air, thick and cloying. We’d emerged right beneath the radio tower, the caged ladder leading up to the satellite dishes far above just a few metres from the hatch. Through the dust, the metal frame of the tower was only just visible, spearing down through the roof and presumably into its foundations far below.

The building trembled beneath our feet, cracks forming in the ground all around us. Just a few metres away, Taeyong’s power was shredding into the roof itself.

But it was weaker, I wasn’t just imagining that. Quieter, less destructive. With the damage I’d seen it do earlier, it should’ve been able to get through this flimsy hatch and the surrounding roof effortlessly.

“Which way?” I shouted, turning back to Julia. Dust tickled my throat, and I choked out a cough that sounded more appropriate for an old man who’d smoked a pack a day since his teens.

The power sign framing her features was almost entirely grey, and she dismissed it with a shake of her head. The lower half of her face was covered, but by the furrow of her brow I could guess she wasn’t making a pleasant expression. More blood dribbled from beneath her cloth mask. “My power’s weakened here,” she called back, her own voice strained. “Can’t tell you shit.”

My fists clenched. The urge to scream ‘I told you so’ right in her face was unbearably strong, but that was a far from productive avenue of discussion, so I held it back.

Instead, I turned on the spot, squinting through the dust in every direction. Still couldn’t see shit.

Taeyong’s power was screeching, non-stop. Time was wasting.

“Fuck it!” I shouted, then picked a direction and started walking slowly forward. I made sure to test my footing before I put my weight down, and it was a good thing I did. Only a few steps past the boundary of the radio tower’s metal frame, a spider web of cracks radiated out beneath my foot. The roof didn’t collapse, but no doubt it would have swallowed us both if we’d ventured much further.

Still, it cost me. The shock of the ground fracturing beneath my foot made me cry out and lunge back, and I inhaled a lungful of dust. Agony gripped my lungs in acidic talons. I doubled over, coughs wracking my chest. Getting them under control would take time we couldn’t spare, so I kept moving in spite of Julia’s weak attempts to hold me back.

Trying to go around the weak spot failed. Namely because fucking everywhere was a weak spot. It was like the roof above the room we’d been in was the only secure area on the entire rooftop. Seeing as the walls had been reinforced, it made sense. It was probably something structural to do with the radio tower.

But it put us in a shitty situation. There was no escape over the rooftop. Not unless we wanted to take our chances on falling through, hoping that the next floors wouldn’t also collapse, dumping us at the bottom of the building and burying us in rubble. On the other hand, we couldn’t just stay here. Quite apart from the deadly power after us, I was starting to worry about the dust in the air. It couldn’t be healthy.

Julia and I matched eyes at the same moment. From her expression, I could tell she’d had the same idea. I gave her a nod, and she returned it.

We only had one option left, and we both knew it.

Up.

We bolted to the cage containing the ladder. By some divine mercy, it was unlocked, and Julia wrenched it open. She stopped to gesture me ahead of her, and I didn’t even entertain the idea. I shoved her inside, then followed after.

Julia shot me a glare as she caught herself on the ladder’s rungs, but made no further protest. Grabbing on, she started climbing. I was right behind her.

The ladder was made of solid metal, cold enough to be painful to the touch and slippery from layers of dust. With my eyes stinging and the world enshrouded in grey fog, it felt like I was climbing in the dark. I’d already been exhausted before I’d sprinted over here from the central tower, and weakness reared its ugly head once more. Soon, reaching out for the next rung felt like a monumental effort.

My fitness levels were something I’d taken pride in, a point of confidence. But I’d been pushed far beyond my limit today. It was humiliating to see my own arms shaking as I hauled myself up, and the pain in my muscles felt like a just punishment for slacking off, even though every instructor I’d ever spoken to told me someone my age couldn’t train any harder.

Worse, the strain made my breathing harsher, gulping in more dust. The dust only further hurt my chest, which brought on another bout of coughs. The coughs then made me inhale more, which burned my lungs. It was a vicious cycle. I started to feel weak, darkness creeping in the edges of my vision like a swarm of shadow insects.

Then the dust around me faded. Light brightened. Breathing got easier. It was still a herculean effort to drag myself upwards, but I kept going. One more rung. Then another. And three more after that.

A hand reached down towards me, but I ignored it. My body had been reduced to an automaton. All it could do was climb.

The hand snatched at my wrist, pulling, easing my load.

Within seconds, there was no ladder above me, no metal cage around me. Something grabbed the back of my tracksuit jacket and dragged me up, and I collapsed to one side onto a metal walkway. The surface was cold and hard, but at that moment it was as luxurious as a plush bed in a five-star hotel.

I tore my ‘mask’ off and sucked in a ravenous breath of clean air. Naturally, I started coughing my lungs up. Once the pain had passed, every inhale seemed to clear a layer of fog from my mind. I went from panicked autopilot to human once more, and memories flooded in.

Rolling over, I surveyed the way we’d come.

Hanging below us was a cloud of pale dust that reached halfway up the tower, covering the top of the radio building from view entirely, falling over the outer walls like a waterfall. It trembled and shuddered in time with the screeching that resonated from within. A low rumble echoed, and I had the feeling the building we’d just escaped wasn’t much longer for this world.

“You back with me?” a voice rasped, and it took me a moment to recognise it as Julia’s.

“I’m good,” I managed to wheeze back, though my attempt at a thumbs-up ended in failure.

“Don’t suppose you have a plan to get us out of this?” she asked. “Because I’ve got nothing.”

I took a moment to gather my thoughts.

Now that I paid it any attention, we were dizzyingly high. The only thing threatening our aerial dominance was the ponderous pillar of smoke still lingering to one side of the radio tower, drifting up out of what had to be a massive hole in the building’s roof, though it was much thinner than it had been. Everything else seemed so far away. The cars in the parking lot looked like toys, the buildings like models. Red-brown rooftops stretched out for miles, like oscillating waves frozen in time.

Directly below us was the cloud of dust, a thin metal walkway the only thing stopping me from plunging into it. A shiver went up and down my back like a ghost was playing violin on my spine.

Acrophobia had never been an issue of mine, but I was starting to understand it.

“As a matter of fact, I do have a plan,” I huffed out. “We’re sitting on it right now.”

Julia really did have a lot of expressions that conveyed disbelief ever-so effortlessly.

“Metal,” I said. “Metal stops his power, somehow.”

“That’s…” Julia started to object, but then her brows furrowed. She fixed me with a hard stare.

I nodded. “They couldn’t get through the door, and now they can’t get through the hatch.” I tapped the metal walkway I was still luxuriating on. “I’m betting he won’t be able to hit us up here, either.”

Julia’s reply was cut off by a sudden spike in noise, the screech’s effort redoubling in an instant. Or, I realised as the dust below us started billowing outwards from a point at the centre, there was no longer so much of an obstruction to dampen the sound of Taeyong’s power.

In seconds, there was a clearing in the dust cloud directly below us.

Taeyong stood on the roof, one hand stretched high above his head. Atop his palm floated a spherical storm of black power the size of a medicine ball. Thousands of strands of obsidian energy spun in place, writhing, overlapping, warring for dominance. Then the ball compressed, an unholy screech cutting the air, until it vanished with a clap of thunder and a whump of displaced air. A wave of omnidirectional wind blasted out from the spot where Taeyong’s power had just been, blowing the cloud of dust away as if it was nothing while leaving Taeyong completely unruffled. Even all the way up here, the shockwave buffetted me hard enough to sting the skin.

“It was bigger earlier,” Julia whispered in my ear.

I glanced at her. “What?”

“His power. It was bigger. Being under the tower is affecting it, maybe. Like he’s in a faraday cage? Does that give you any clues on how it works? Because if it doesn’t…”

“We can’t just end it like this,” I murmured. “If we do, they win.”

Julia was silent.

“Look, it doesn’t matter how it works. He can’t get us up here.”

“How sure of that are you?”

“100%.”

“Bullshit.”

“... 90%.”

Julia closed her eyes. “Okay. And then what? We just wait here for them to leave? I know Morphosis didn’t specifically give us a time limit, but there has to be one.”

Her words hit me like a mountain collapsing over my head. It was completely true. After everything I’d been through, it was entirely possible I’d come out of it with another zero attached to my name. The idea of my life’s dream going up in flames competed with the humiliation of failure for the dubious title of ‘most horrifying.’

And yet.

No regrets.

I couldn’t imagine anything I’d regret more than letting a pair of villains win.

Maybe they’d face punishment for all this without me doing anything. Maybe they wouldn’t. I hoped they did, but a lot of things already hadn’t added up today, so what would be one more?

No. I couldn’t rely on anyone else. I had to defeat them. People like them didn’t deserve to be here.

I’d kick Taeyong's ass, get him arrested, then finish the practical test with all my points intact.

That was the way a hero would do it. No backing down.

“We’ll find a way,” I said, frantically scanning our surroundings.

We were on a circular metal walkway surrounding the very tip of the tower. A cluster of satellite dishes faced every which way, humming with electricity. They didn’t look in great shape, little veins of rust running through the bits of metal fastening them to the tower. There was some other electrical equipment, assortments of wires, and a mast that held blinking lights. Nothing particularly useful.

Taeyong used his power twice more until the roof was clear enough that he could turn, surveying the area unhindered. Seeing nothing, he called out, and Sooyoung emerged from the empty space where the hatch had been. Below her, mounds of rubble littered the floor, but the hatch lay there completely intact. They must’ve used Sooyoung’s power to get past it faster.

Julia chewed on the inside of her cheek. Her power sign came to life, opalescent light fading into existence around her features. Her gaze stayed fixed on me.

Our enemies had started exploring the roof, no doubt moving to check if we were hiding somewhere nearby. They stepped cautiously out past the boundary of the tower, Taeyong taking the lead, his partner behind. For a brief moment my heart soared, thinking they were going to fall through, taking care of the problem for us.

But nothing happened.

I narrowed my eyes, my heart dropping back to my stomach as I tried to get a clearer view of what was happening below. Why hadn’t they fallen? Was it just that they were lighter than us? Taeyong was a skinny guy, sure, and neither of them were exactly colossi, but the roof had seemed so weak.

I popped my head out from between the railings, trying to get an unobstructed view from high above.

What I saw next… I couldn’t say if it was a desperate delusion, exhaustion playing tricks with my mind, or reality. From this high up, I couldn’t be sure.

But it had me leaping to my feet against my body’s protests, diving for the biggest satellite in reach. I wrapped my arms around it and heaved. It was about the size of a car’s wheel, but it was heavy. Rusted nails and fasteners fell away immediately, but cables kept it anchored, and I had to awkwardly shimmy it around to disconnect them. I grit my teeth in frustration. At my best, I would’ve been able to lift this with ease.

Below, Sooyoung turned, seeming to finally notice the radio tower they’d left behind. Her gaze panned upwards, her eyes flying wide. Taeyong’s stare followed a moment later, and even from here I could see him heave a sigh.

“Are you gonna surrender,” Taeyong shouted up to us with a swirling black vortex in one hand. “Or do I have to hurt you?”

Julia’s hand went to her armband.

I lifted with all my strength, throwing caution to the wind. My muscles strained to the point I thought they might snap, and I only worked them harder in response. Searing pain stabbed into one bicep like a knife. Something in my lower back twisted. My right knee felt like it was going to pop.

The last cables sprung from the satellite. The sudden lack of resistance threw me off balance, and I almost fell backwards over the railing, but I managed to twist my body and heave the dish out of my arms at the last moment.

It hurtled to the ground, right where our two enemies were standing.

Taeyong had the presence of mind to leap towards the tower’s protection.

But Sooyoung didn’t. She stood still, staring like a rabbit in the headlights.

Taeyong screamed and lashed out with his power.

But the satellite was made of metal.

The howling black energy washed over it like water, and it crashed to the ground barely an inch away from Sooyoung.

Cracks spread. I hadn’t been imagining them.

The roof crumpled and fell, a gaping hole yawning open to swallow the satellite into its dusty depths.

And Sooyoung fell.