The piercing, shrill laughter left a ringing echo in the ears of Rian, Maya, Dika, Gani, and Sita as they stood frozen in the center of the suffocating, closing wall of white fog. The surrounding air felt frigid, biting straight down to their marrow, as though the mountain itself were mocking their arrogant folly in breaching forbidden territory.

Rian pushed himself up slowly from the dirt, then hauled Sita to her feet with rough urgency. His chest heaved in jagged, chaotic gasps, and cold sweat slicked down his temples and neck.

"Sita! Do you have any idea what you just did?!" Rian snarled in a raspy, panicsricken voice choked with raw fury. He gripped Sita tightly by both shoulders. "If I hadn’t grabbed you back, you’d be gone, swallowed alive by that mist! Whose voice did you think was calling you?!"

Sita blinked rapidly, as though snapping awake from a deep, prolonged nightmare. Her vacant stare slowly refocused, though her face remained as pale as paper and her lips trembled violently.

"I-I... I just heard Mom, Yan..." Sita whimpered, tears finally spilling over her lashes to streak down her cheeks. "She said she was freezing... she told me to follow her..."

"That wasn't your mother, Sita!" Maya shrieked hysterically, her voice fracturing at the edge of tears. She lunged forward, throwing her arms around Sita's trembling body and weeping openly to vent the crushing terror mounting in her chest. "It was a ghost! A demon trying to drag you down to your death! Never listen to anything out here again, please!"

Gani stood a few paces ahead of them, clenching his fists until his knuckles turned completely white. His jaw locked hard, fighting off an explosive mix of boiling anger and suffocating frustration. He whipped his head toward the thinning fog, revealing a line of blackened, moss-choked dead trees framing the trail.

"Stop it! Enough!" Gani's voice sliced through the silence, sharp and heavy with pressure. "If we keep tearing ourselves apart like this, it won't just be Sita who vanishes—we're all going to die stupidly out here before we ever make it down the mountain!"

Gani's blunt, raised tone instantly struck a match against the frayed nerves of the rest of the group—most volatile of all, Dika.

Standing back near the edge of the path while gripping his rubbery, exhausted knees, Dika suddenly snapped upright. The guy’s face flushed a furious red, the veins in his neck bulging as he buckled under the combined weight of physical exhaustion, raw hunger, and bottomless terror.

"Easy for you to say 'die stupidly,' Gan!" Dika snapped, his voice pitching high with venomous hatred. He shoved a trembling finger straight into Gani's face. "From the very beginning, who was the one forcing us down this Mount Aruna route, huh?! Weren't you the self-proclaimed hiking expert who knew everything?!"

Gani narrowed his eyes, stepping up to Dika. "I picked this trail because it's an official route, Dika! It’s not my fault the situation turned completely insane halfway through!"

"Not your fault, you say?!" Dika let out a harsh, bitter laugh, choked with manic frustration. He stepped up close, unlatching the heavy, black hiking pack from his back and heaving it down onto the ground with a vicious, resounding thud. Thud! "Look at this bag! My spine feels like it's snapping, my legs are completely shot, and now you want to wash your hands clean after we almost lost Sita?!"

"Hey, watch your mouth, Dik!" Gani roared back, matching his aggression as he advanced on Dika. "You've been dead weight since step one! Packing nothing but junk food, whining constantly, and now trying to point the finger at me for busting my ass leading this group!"

"Dead weight? You call me dead weight?!" Dika scoffed, his chest heaving rapidly. "If it weren't for your pathetic hero complex wanting to play team captain, I would never have agreed to this cursed trip! Everyone else from our campus is chilling safely at coffee shops right now, but we're stuck in living hell because of your selfish ego, Gani!"

"Cut it out, Dika! Gani! Stop fighting!" Rian screamed, tearing himself away from Maya and Sita to shove his way physically between his two friends who were moments away from throwing punches. "The situation is falling apart and you two are at each other's throats?! Do you want to get us all killed?!"

"Back off, Yan! Let Gani see how it feels!" Dika glared daggers past Rian. "He thinks he's a god walking among men! He thinks our lives are some kind of game?!"

Maya, still holding onto Sita, pressed her hands against her pounding temples. The vicious shouting match, dripping with raw ego and sharp barbs, made her chest feel heavier by the second. "Stop it, please... don't fight anymore... your voices are going to draw other things here..." Maya choked out through a fresh wave of tears, agonizingly aware that the beautiful friendship they had toasted to at the coffee shop a week ago was shattering into dust in this cursed forest.

Gani turned his face away, huffing an angry breath as he crossed his arms over his chest. His breathing remained ragged, his glare pinned to the dirt at his feet. "Say whatever you want, Dik. If you want to turn back and crawl down alone, be my guest. But don't drag everyone else down with your stupidity."

"Damn you, Gani..." Dika hissed under his breath, clenching his fists so tightly his fingernails dug deep into his palms.

A heavy, hostile silence clamped over the group. The laughter and youthful banter were gone entirely, replaced only by the sound of their ragged breathing and Maya's muffled sobs as she continued to hold Sita in the corner of the trail.

Amidst the screaming match and the chilling silence that followed, not a single one of them noticed what was happening just inches below.

Dika’s heavy black backpack, which had been carelessly dumped onto the dusty dirt near the massive tree roots, began to shift on its own.

The main zipper of the pack's middle pouch slowly began to slide open from the inside with a steady, eerie mechanical glide—zip... zip...—as though an unseen pair of hands hidden beneath the clothes was deliberately carving out an exit route.

Rian, Gani, Maya, Dika, and Sita remained entirely consumed by their respective panic and anger, trading sharp glares, completely deaf to the soft whisper of sliding fabric.

Right at the peak of the tension, the pile of spare clothes inside Dika’s backpack shoved violently aside.

From the wide-open gap of the gaping zipper, a pair of pale, ashen-gray hands suddenly thrust outward. The skin on those hands looked withered, slick with a thick black slime, tipped with long, jagged, razor-sharp claws like the talons of a wild beast.

Those monstrous hands blindly clawed at the dirt outside the bag, locking their vicious grip tightly onto the rim of Dika's pack, and slowly hoisted a torso upward into the open air—positioning itself directly behind Dika's back as he stood glaring at Gani, entirely unnoticed by anyone in the clearing.