Three months had slipped away since the wicked night that stripped Rian and Maya of half their souls on the slopes of Mount Aruna. The frantic pulse of the metropolis, humming with roaring traffic and the blinding neon of towering skyscrapers, had utterly failed to stitch shut the gaping wounds torn across their chests. The mountaineering hobby that was once their badge of honor had been wiped completely from the dictionary of their lives. Even their outdoor gear—backpacks, trekking boots, and portable camp stoves—had long since been thrown deep into the trash.

College graduation diplomas rested in their hands, yet those precious pieces of paper brought zero joy. Whenever night fell and their eyelids drifted shut, the phantom canyon, the suffocating white fog, and the mocking laughter of Gani, Dika, and Sita replayed on an endless loop of unyielding nightmares. The crushing guilt of surviving alone while their three friends were swallowed whole into a mystic dimension haunted every single breath they drew.

That night, the wall clock in Rian’s bedroom clicked to 11:45 PM. The overhead lights were doused on purpose, leaving only a sickly blue glow spilling from the laptop screen blazing on his desk. Rian was locked in a video call with Maya, reviewing their first job application files while trying to prop each other up amid the hollow vacuum of trauma.

On the laptop display, Maya’s face looked drawn and tightly wound. The girl sat inside her dimly lit apartment in the heart of the city, propped up against her headboard while hugging a long bolster pillow tight against her chest.

"Maya... are you actually holding it together? You've looked like a ghost all night, like you haven't slept in a week," Rian scolded through the microphone, his voice heavy with deep concern.

On the other end of the feed, Maya offered a faint, hollow smile that didn't reach her eyes. "How am I supposed to sleep soundly, Yan? Every time I click off the bedroom lights, I feel like I hear footsteps outside my apartment door. I'm scared... I'm terrified they're coming to collect on a promise."

Rian let out a heavy sigh, pressing his palms against his freezing face. "Me too, May... the nightmares never stop. It honestly feels like the two of us never truly made it off that mountain. Our souls are still trapped up there."

"Rian..." Maya whispered brokenly, her voice trembling on the verge of tears. "Do you think... do you think Gani, Dika, and Sita are actually at peace out there? Or... or do they still hate us for leaving them behind?"

"Ssst... don't talk like that, May," Rian interrupted fast, trying to steady Maya even as his own throat locked tight. "Gani did what he did so we could live. We have to stay strong... for them."

The conversation, steeped in guilt and raw anguish, dissolved into the long silence of the night. Both of them sat motionless for a beat, staring at each other's faces across the laptop screens in the quiet solitude of their respective rooms.

Yet right in the middle of that stillness, Rian’s gaze accidentally caught something deeply wrong playing out in the background reflection on his screen.

Rian narrowed his eyes, shoving his face closer to the display.

Inside Maya’s video feed, the laptop camera framed the corner of her apartment bedroom, which should have been completely empty behind her bed. The walls were painted a plain, sterile white with a wooden wardrobe tucked into the corner.

Yet, right against the white plaster directly behind Maya’s back... a faint shadow slowly shifted and moved.

Rian’s heart leaped straight into his throat. His blood flash-froze.

From out of the dark silhouette pressed against the wall of Maya’s apartment, a pair of pale, deathly hands with long, jagged claws crept upward, locking a vise-like grip onto the wooden headboard directly behind Maya’s shoulders.

Maya, completely oblivious, kept her chin tucked as she clutched her pillow, weeping softly, utterly blind to the lethal danger looming right over her.

"Maya...!" Rian screamed in hysteria, vaulting out of his chair so violently his desk stool crashed backward onto the floor. "Maya, right behind you! Run out of there right now!"

Maya jolted in shock at Rian’s frantic roar. "Huh? Yan? What?!"

Before Maya could whip her head around, the shadow against the wall took physical form.

Emerging from the dark shadows of Maya’s bedroom, the figures of Dika and Sita—their faces washed out to an ashen blue, their eye sockets hollowed into pitch-black, pupil-less voids, wearing wide, macabre grins—slowly rose to their feet, pressing flush against Maya’s back.

They locked their dead, piercing glares straight into Rian’s laptop camera, as though well aware that Rian was watching every second of it from miles away.

Dika’s pale hand reached out in slow motion, wrapping a freezing, dead coil around Maya’s shoulder from behind. Maya let out a shrill shriek, her body locking rigid instantly, completely incapable of twitching a single inch as the icy draft of death enveloped her frame.

And from Rian’s laptop speakers, cutting through Maya’s hysterical screams inside her apartment, Dika and Sita spoke in a chilling, unified whisper dipped in terrifying, cheerful glee:

"When are we going hiking again?"

Rian’s laptop screen flickered once, then winked out entirely into the permanent dark of night.

-The End-