The roaring night wind howling across the jagged ridge gradually subsided, replaced by a gentle, tranquil pre-dawn breeze. Along the eastern horizon, a thin strip of bruised orange light cracked open the pitch-black sky, parting the heavy curtain of mist that had clung to the slopes of Mount Aruna all night long.

With their last reserves of strength, the five friends dragged themselves over the final crest of the steep, rocky climb.

And the instant their final steps breached the ridge, the view before them instantly melted away every ounce of exhaustion, freezing cold, and creeping dread that had haunted them through the dark.

"Oh, God..." Maya whispered brokenly, both hands flying up to cover her mouth in sheer disbelief.

Spread out beneath their feet was a breathtaking, boundless ocean of soft, rolling white clouds stretching as far as the eye could see, sparkling with golden hues brushed by the rising rays of dawn. The sky above exploded into a magnificent gradient of colors—deep violet, soft pink, and a refreshing, vibrant blue.

They had made it to the highest peak of Mount Aruna.

"We... we actually did it..." Dika choked out, his voice thick with emotional tears. Completely ignoring his aching legs, he dropped his small pack and fell to his knees on the summit dirt, laughing through tears of absolute victory. "I swear, we actually made it to the summit, guys!"

Gani, who had spearheaded this high-pressure trek from the start, let out a massive, shuddering exhale. The rigid tension in his jaw finally unspooled. A wide grin broke across his face as he opened his arms wide to welcome Rian, who stepped forward.

"We did it, Gan... we actually pulled it off," Rian murmured, pulling Gani into a tight hug and hammering his friend's back with waves of pure relief.

Maya, standing beside Sita, threw her arms around Sita and Rian in a chaotic group embrace. Tears of joy spilled freely down their cheeks. Every single auditory terror at the cliff's edge, every monstrous shadow in the fog, and every vicious argument down on the trail evaporated into thin air, swallowed whole by the grandeur of dawn at the top of the world.

"I honestly thought we were going to die last night," Maya confessed between happy sobs, letting out a small, watery laugh as she wiped her eyes. "I am not kidding, I was terrified out of my mind."

"Proof that we're tougher than we look, May! The Atma Jaya squad is truly undefeated!" Dika cheered enthusiastically, springing to his feet and tossing an arm around Sita and Maya simultaneously. "Come on, Sita, flash a smile! Look at the view behind us—wasn't last night's hell worth it?"

Sita, her face still slightly pale, finally offered a genuine, soft smile for the first time since the journey began. She gave a slow nod. "Yeah, Dik... it's incredible. Thank you guys so much for watching my back."

"Alright, enough getting emotional. Let's capture the moment before the weather up here decides to flip on us," Gani urged, straightening his jacket and gesturing toward the sturdy wooden summit marker standing tall beside a massive boulder.

"Now that's an idea!" Dika beamed. He reached into his jacket pocket, pulling out his cherished action camera, its screen still glowing to life. He mounted the device to the end of his selfie stick and stepped backward, lining up his framing with the group standing neatly in front of the summit sign.

"Get in close! Come on, Sita, right in the middle next to Maya," Dika directed cheerfully, adjusting his friends. "One, two, three... big smiles! No more academic trauma faces!"

Click!

The indicator light on Dika’s action camera blinked green, signaling that the group photo had snapped successfully against the breathtaking backdrop of the cloud sea and the majestic sunrise.

"Awesome! Let me check how it turned out," Rian said, stepping closer to Dika to peek at the tiny two-inch screen.

Maya, Gani, and Sita crowded around Dika, eager to witness the historical artifact of their triumph on Mount Aruna. Dika thumbed the navigation button to open the device's latest gallery file.

"Here, look... the lighting is dead-on, and the cloud cover—" Dika cut himself off mid-sentence.

Suddenly, his voice locked tight in his throat. The fingers gripping the selfie stick went entirely rigid.

Rian, standing directly beside Dika, frowned at the sudden, radical shift in his friend's expression. "What is it, Dik? Is it blurry?"

No answer came from Dika's lips, only a sudden, frantic hitch of his breath driven by raw terror. Maya, Gani, and Sita froze, their eyes widening in mounting horror as they stared down at the tiny screen in Dika's hands.

On the display of the action camera, the group photo in front of the summit marker still showed the stunning morning view. But the faces of the five people inside the image had undergone a soul-shattering transformation.

Dika, Gani, and Sita in the photo wore terrifyingly wide smiles—yet their eyes on the screen no longer stared forward; their eye sockets had hollowed out into empty, jet-black voids, weeping thick, viscous trickles of fresh, dark blood that streamed down their cheeks.

And what made Rian and Maya’s blood instantly turn to ice...

Right inside the photo, tucked tightly against Maya’s right side as she embraced Sita, stood an alien, ashen-gray hand with long, spindly claws wrapped in a vice-like grip around Maya’s shoulder from behind. The hand looked semi-translucent yet horrifyingly solid, as though its owner was standing flush against Maya’s back—even though, the exact second that photo was snapped seconds ago, absolutely no one else had been standing there on the silent peak.

"D-dik..." Maya whispered brokenly, her entire frame wracked by violent tremors. "Whose... whose hand is that on my shoulder...?"

Before Dika could answer or frantically kill the power on the camera, the tiny screen flickered twice in rapid succession. A harsh, static hiss bled out from the device’s tiny speaker, followed immediately by a raspy, venomous whisper hissed straight into their ears:

"You never made it to the summit... you just walked straight into the trap."