Reno summoned every last drop of strength he had left. Breathing heavily and with trembling muscles, he dragged Vanya’s unconscious body across the threshold of the Faculty Office located midway down the corridor. Gani, Dinda, Arin, and Sela burst inside right behind him like a pack of terrified prey.

BANG!

Reno slammed the heavy wooden office door shut. Gani acted swiftly, dragging a heavy iron filing cabinet to barricade the door, while Reno twisted the deadbolt until it clicked firmly into place.

The room was bathed in pitch-black darkness, save for a faint, blood-red sliver of light creeping through the ventilation slats above the doorframe. The pungent reek of old paper, dust, and eucalyptus oil—typical of a faculty staff room—immediately hit their senses. In the far corner, Vanya slowly opened her eyes, coughing softly as she clutched her throbbing head.

"Where... where are we?" Vanya whispered, her voice terribly raspy.

"The faculty office. We’re safe here... for now," Reno answered, though he sounded far from convincing even to himself. He sank onto the cold floor, resting his sweat-drenched back against a nearby desk leg.

"Safe, you say?!" Gani hissed wildly in the dark. The young man tugged at his own hair, pacing back and forth like a lunatic. "Didn't you see what he looked like out there?! His neck was snapped, his eyes were bleeding! We're trapped in a haunted building, Reno! We're never getting out of here!"

"Gani, shut up! Stop screaming!" Arin snapped, clutching Sela, who kept her face buried in Arin's side. Sela had stopped crying, but her body trembled so violently it looked as though she were suffering from severe hypothermia.

Dinda sat slumped on the floor in the corner, staring blankly into the dark void. All the wealth, status, and arrogance she routinely displayed on campus felt like worthless trash in a place like this.

Suddenly, the suffocating stillness inside the room began to warp.

The bone-chilling cold slowly dissolved, replaced by a strange, stifling humidity. The familiar scent of the faculty room vanished into thin air, replaced by the faint smell of baby oil and the stale air of a cramped bedroom. The blood-red glow filtering through the window faded, giving way to the soft, warm illumination of a dim yellow lightbulb.

"Guys... why is the room changing?" Reno murmured, scrambling to his feet in high alert.

All six of them froze in shock. The concrete walls of the faculty room—replete with lockers and office desks—began to blur and melt away like wet paint. In the blink of an eye, the room underwent a total metamorphosis. They were no longer inside the university building.

They found themselves standing in the corner of a humble, borderline depressing bedroom. At the center of the room sat a thin mattress resting directly on the floor without a frame, a plastic wardrobe with one missing door, and an old wooden study desk piled high with stacks of ungraded exam papers.

"Where... where are we?" Vanya whimpered, crawling closer to Reno, scared out of her mind.

"Shh! Look over there..." Arin pointed toward the study desk.

Seated there was a middle-aged man they knew all too well. Professor Danu. Yet the figure before them was not the neck-snapped monster that had hunted them through the corridors. Before their very eyes, Professor Danu appeared fully alive. He wore a faded white undershirt with a yellowed collar and a pair of worn trousers. His frame looked considerably thinner and more fragile than the man they usually saw in lectures.

This was a vision—a collective flash of the past forcefully projected into their minds. They were witnessing what had transpired mere hours ago, before the wall clock froze at the ninth hour.

Professor Danu was weeping.

The old man's shoulders shook violently. The tears falling from his eyes were not blood, but the pure, agonizing tears of a broken human being. On his desk, an old laptop with a cracked screen glowed softly, displaying the private WhatsApp group chat of the Classroom 3B students.

Professor Danu’s trembling fingers scrolled through the screen. Displayed clearly on the monitor was a video recording of Gani pulling a prank—placing a dusty chalkboard eraser atop the classroom door so that it fell directly onto the professor's head, followed by hundreds of laughing emojis, mocking comments, and cruel insults from other students. On another corner of the desk lay an official letter from the dean’s office: a final warning and a reduction in teaching hours due to his "incompetent performance," stemming from complaints filed by wealthy students unsatisfied with their grades.

"Why... why do you treat me like this?" Professor Danu’s voice sounded faint, trembling with a profound, bottomless despair. The voice sounded agonizingly real to the six students watching from the corner of the bedroom. "I only wanted to teach... I’ve dedicated over a decade of my life to this institution... so why am I always trampled on...?"

Dinda clapped both hands over her mouth, tears welling up and spilling over. She recognized that formal complaint letter—she and her mother had drafted it last week to pressure the administration into raising her Business Law grade without having to attend remedial classes.

"Professor..." Arin whispered, her heart suddenly pierced by a wave of sharp, crushing guilt.

Professor Danu wiped his tears away roughly. His gaze went entirely blank, stripped of every remaining spark of life. With slow, desperate movements, he pulled open his desk drawer.

From inside, he retrieved a small, white plastic bottle. A high-dose container of sedatives that legally required a strict prescription. The old man opened the cap with hands that shook so violently that several white pills spilled onto the floor.

"Don't, Professor... please don't..." Sela suddenly screamed hysterically, attempting to rush forward to stop him. However, her body passed right through Professor Danu’s spectral form like empty wind. They were merely powerless spectators to a tragedy that had already transpired.

With one long, painful breath laden with agony, Professor Danu poured the remaining contents of the bottle into his palm—dozens of pills at once—and shoved them into his mouth. He swallowed them forcefully without water, choking heavily as they went down.

The old man broke into a violent coughing fit, his fingernails digging into the wooden edge of the desk until his knuckles turned ghostly white. Slowly, the lethal dosage began to attack his central nervous system. Professor Danu’s body went into light convulsions. His eyes bulged as he stared up at the stained bedroom ceiling, radiating a tragic cocktail of regret, resentment, and unbearable pain all at once.

His breathing grew shallow, ragged, and sparse. Until finally, precisely as the round wall clock in the bedroom chimed once to mark 9:00 PM on the dot, Professor Danu’s body collapsed heavily onto his desk, knocking stacks of exam papers onto the floor.

He was dead. Alone in a silent, cramped room, perishing from a despair manufactured by the very people who treated him as if he didn't exist.

WHOOSH!

The bedroom vanished in an instant. The warm yellow glow dissolved back into the pitch-black void of the third-floor Faculty Office. The ice-cold air bit into their skin once more, and the metallic stench of blood returned to the atmosphere.

All six students gasped for air, slumped on the concrete floor of the staff office, their bodies trembling uncontrollably. The room returned to silence, but this silence felt infinitely heavier. It was no longer just the sheer terror of a monster hunting them down, but the overwhelming weight of guilt slamming into their psyches, shattering their mental fortitude to pieces.

"He... He committed suicide at nine o'clock tonight..." Reno spoke, the words catching in his throat as his eyes stared hollowly at the floor. "Before our makeup class even started... he was already dead."

"We... we did this to him?" Vanya sobbed uncontrollably, curling into a ball on the floor as her frame shook violently. "I made fun of him in the group chat all the time... I always mocked his dirty batik shirts..."

Dinda buried her face in her hands, weeping bitterly, entirely robbed of speech. The official complaints and bribe money she used to brag about now felt like a cold blade that had severed a man's life.

Gani stood motionless in front of the filing cabinet, his breathing short and shallow. His aggressive demeanor had completely melted away, leaving behind the pale, haunted face of a criminal who had just realized the full gravity of his crime. The mental reel of him pranking Professor Danu looped continuously in his mind like a broken tape.

All six of them came to realize the most horrifying truth of that night: the entity hunting them outside was no random, malicious spirit. It was the physical manifestation of the heartbreak, vengeance, and suffering of a teacher whose dignity they had systematically destroyed day after day.

And now, the Professor had returned to administer their true final exam.