The chill of Post 1 still hung heavy in the air, doing little to ease the lingering dread etched into Maya's mind after catching a glimpse of those pale, dirt-caked feet. Though she chose to keep her terror bottled up, refusing to break the group's collective morale with a ghost story, her blood-drained face gave her away completely—especially to Rian, who walked right behind her.

"Are you actually okay, May? You look like you just saw a ghost in broad daylight," Rian muttered, stepping closer as they resumed their trek deeper into the dense, moss-draped forest.

Maya shook her head slightly, pulling her windbreaker tight around herself and picking up her pace to match Rian's stride. "I'm fine, Yan. Just feeling a bit under the weather, probably from sitting around sweating during our break."

"Seriously? If you're beat, just say the word. Don't push it, we can always ask Gani to call another break," Rian offered with a soft, genuine warmth that made Maya's chest ache with a quiet fondness amidst the oppressive, suffocating atmosphere of the woods.

Ahead of them, Gani set a steady pace at the front of the line, while Sita moved in total silence between Gani and Maya, her eyes glued to the dirt path with a vacant, hollow stare. Bringing up the rear, Dika—usually a nonstop chatterbox—had completely run out of steam, swallowed by heavy, exhausted silence.

The further they left Post 1 behind, the more the forest landscape underwent a slow, unsettling transformation. The canopy of giant overhead trees grew increasingly thick, interlocking to form a natural roof that nearly choked out the sky entirely. The bright morning light had long since been filtered down into a dim, sickly greenish twilight, casting long, eerie shadows between trunks smothered in thick green moss.

The forest fell deathly quiet. The cheerful chirping of birds and the rustle of the wind were entirely gone; the only sounds left were the ragged wheezing of their own breath and the crunch of trekking boots grinding against rotting fallen branches.

Dika, lagging at the very back, let out a soft groan and glanced down at the digital watch strapped to his left wrist. He brought his arm close to his eyes, blinking rapidly in disbelief.

"Okay, is my watch broken or something?" Dika grumbled in a raspy voice, halting his steps for a second.

Up front, Gani turned his head back. "What is it now, Dik? Is your watch dead?"

"Not dead, Gan. But it's totally messed up," Dika muttered, blowing out an irritated breath as he wiped sweat from his forehead. "Back when we took a break at Post 1, I distinctly remember it being 10:15 AM. Now, after huffing and puffing up these killer inclines like we're marching to our graves, my watch says it's only 10:25!"

Maya stopped in her tracks, spinning around with a sharp frown. "Only a ten-minute jump? We've been climbing forever, my legs feel like they're about to fall off."

"Exactly my point!" Dika exclaimed, shuffling closer with an expression twisted between confusion and anger. "Time is crawling like molasses out here, Gan! It feels deliberately dragged out. My leg muscles are screaming bloody murder, but the clock refuses to move."

Gani checked his own wristwatch, offering a faint, reassuring smile to cut through the mounting weirdness. "You're just psyching yourself out, Dik. When you're miserable and grinding up a steep slope, time always drags a thousand times slower. Classic exhaustion hallucination."

"No way, man! My physical misery is 100% real, but time is practically standing still!" Dika argued back, though he eventually gave up and dragged his feet forward to catch up with the pack.

Still, a nagging part of Dika’s frustration rang uncomfortably true. Rian was beginning to feel that exact same deep wrongness gnawing at the edges of the journey. It felt like they had been wandering through this labyrinth of mossy woods for hours—trudging up identical steep inclines, stepping over the exact same sprawling root systems, accumulating a crushing, leaden exhaustion in every joint.

By all logic, they should have reached the Post 2 clearing long ago.

"Gan, hold up a second," Rian called out, halting his steps and sweeping his gaze across the trail. "Haven't we missed the Post 2 sign? Normally, the stretch from Post 1 to Post 2 shouldn't take more than an hour and a half, right?"

Gani stopped as well. He furrowed his brow, peering forward and backward down the trail walled in by thick, mossy timber. "You're right... We definitely should've passed the Post 2 marker by now. But it feels like we've just been looping around the exact same spot over and over."

Hearing Gani say that, a fresh wave of goosebumps broke out across Maya's skin, instantly recalling the phantom footprint back at Post 1. "What do you mean we're looping, Gan? Don't joke around like that."

"I'm not joking, May. Look closely at that tree on the left," Gani pointed toward a massive pine tree whose trunk bent sharply at an unnatural angle, covered in heavy moss that uncannily resembled a human face twisted in agony. "That tree... we've passed that exact same shape three separate times in the last half hour."

Silence locked over the five friends like a vice. Dika, who had just been complaining about physical exhaustion, clamped his mouth shut, his eyes darting frantically into the dense, shadowed thicket flanking the trail.

"No way, Gan! How could we be circling around on a straight trail?" Dika protested, though his voice shook with a distinct tremor. "This is an official climbing route, there's a packed dirt path!"

"The path is there, sure, but the environment is completely dead," Sita finally spoke up, breaking her long silence. She pointed down at the ground right before them. "Look at the dirt... the grass and fallen leaves here are completely untouched. There isn't a single footprint from any other climber except our own."

Maya looked down, and Sita was right. The surface of the trail was blanketed in an unbroken layer of fresh pine needles and untouched moss, utterly devoid of boot prints or plastic trash left behind by other expeditions, as though no human foot had ever touched this earth in decades.

"Damn it... are we lost?" Gani muttered under his breath, his jaw tightening. He shrugged his backpack off his shoulders for a moment and reached into his pants pocket to pull out his smartphone to check for a signal or offline trail maps.

"Check your phone, Gan. Maybe your GPS is still pulling a satellite ping," Rian suggested, stepping closer to Gani, anxiety coiling tight in his chest.

Gani clicked the power button. The screen flashed to life, displaying his home screen. But the moment he opened the map application, the location icon spun endlessly in circles, flashing a stark red warning: No Signal – Waiting for Network Connection.

"Nothing. Service is completely dead. The offline maps won't load either because the cache data isn't pulling through a heavy canopy like this," Gani exhaled a heavy sigh of frustration, shoving his phone back into his pocket.

Rian, refusing to give up just yet, dug into his own jacket pocket and pulled out his phone. "Let me try mine... maybe my carrier operates on a different tower and can snag even a single bar."

Rian lit up his display. Unlike Gani, who was trying to load maps, Rian’s phone opened straight to his main interface, ready to pull up a compass or shoot out an emergency text.

The exact second the screen unlocked, a bizarre glitch struck.

Rian’s phone buzzed violently twice in rapid succession. The photo gallery app launched entirely on its own without a single touch from his fingers, bypassing the lock screen to display a brand-new image file stored in the internal memory.

Rian froze, his brows crashing together. He was entirely certain he hadn't opened the gallery app, let alone downloaded or snapped any new photos on this trip.

"Yan? Why are you pulling a face like that?" Maya asked, standing right beside him and noticing the sudden, radical shift in his expression.

Rian didn't answer. His fingers trembled slightly as he raised the phone screen closer to his eyes to make sense of the madness unfolding before him.

Blazing against the stark white light of the phone screen in the dim, green twilight of the mossy forest was a full-screen selfie.

It was a picture of all five of them—Rian, Maya, Dika, Gani, and Sita—grinning widely and laughing as they clinked their coffee cups together inside Kopitiam Senja on the very first day they planned the expedition a week ago.

Except, the background of the photo wasn't the cozy, warmly lit café.

The entire backdrop had transformed into a pitch-black campsite deep inside the woods. Standing directly behind their smiling faces in the photo was a bright red dome tent—now utterly shredded, its fabric walls torn wide open, swallowed by licking tongues of fire burning the inside of the tent to ash in terrifying, mocking silence.

Even worse, the reflections of the five friends in the photo were no longer smiling like they were at the coffee shop; their eyes had melted into pools of jet-black void, staring straight out of the screen at Rian with agonizing, ear-to-ear grins.

Clatter.

The phone slipped right out of Rian’s numb grip, smashing hard against the jagged rocks below the trail, cracking the glass screen into a spiderweb of fractures while the horrifying photo still glowed brightly against the damp dirt.

Maya and Dika jumped back, startled by the dropped phone.

"Yan! What the hell?! Why'd you drop your phone?!" Maya panicked, instinctively moving to bend down and pick it up, but Rian violently clamped his hand around her wrist, yanking her backward.

"Don't touch it..." Rian choked out, his voice trapped in his throat, his eyes blown wide with unadulterated horror as he stared down at the cracked screen on the ground. "...We never took that photo."