Professor Danu’s final words hung heavy in the air of Classroom 3B, leaving behind a bitter taste of pure dread. Gani, whose fragile ego was deeply wounded after having his darkest secrets laid bare, could no longer contain the fury boiling inside his chest. His face flushed a deep red—a volatile mix of rage and desperate denial.

"Ah, screw this! I refuse to sit here and be humiliated like this!" Gani stood up abruptly, shoving his wooden chair back with a sharp, ear-splitting screech. "If the rest of you want to stick around and listen to this crazy old man's fairy tales, go right ahead! I’m out of here!"

"Gani, don't be stupid! Wait!" Reno reached out to grab Gani's arm, but the hot-tempered young man violently shoved him away.

"Get off me, Reno! I don't give a damn if I get expelled or whatever. My dad can handle this school!" Gani took long, aggressive strides toward the exit at the back of the classroom. He clamped his hand onto the antique iron doorknob and twisted it with force.

Click.

Click.

The doorknob turned, but the heavy wooden door didn't budge an inch—as if a multi-ton weight were pressing against it from the outside.

"Dammit, it's locked?!" Gani cursed. He began pounding his fist against the wooden door.

THUD! THUD! THUD!

"Hey! Pak Man! Security! Open the door! Who locked this from the outside?!"

"Stop screaming, Gani. Nobody is going to hear you," Dinda chimed in, her voice cracking as her wealthy, confident facade completely crumbled. She fumbled frantically through her bag. "Where's my phone... where is it..."

"Wait, I'll try calling my boyfriend or someone from our batch," Vanya stammered, pulling out her phone with violently trembling fingers. Her smartphone screen lit up, displaying her glamorous wallpaper, but in the top-left corner where the signal bars usually rested, a tiny string of text appeared that made her heart drop into a bottomless pit: No Service.

"No service?! How is that even possible?!" Vanya panicked, waving her phone around in the air as if trying to catch a ghostly signal out of thin air. "The campus Wi-Fi here is super fast, and my cellular coverage should be full 5G in the city area! Why does it say No Service?!"

"Mine's the same," Reno stared blankly at his screen. "No emergency calls, no Wi-Fi. Nothing."

"Professor Danu!" Dinda stood up, pointing a trembling finger at the middle-aged faculty member. "Did you use a signal jammer?! Are you locking us in here?! This is false imprisonment! I can report you to the police—my parents will make sure you rot in prison!"

At the front of the class, Professor Danu remained seated in the exact same posture. Rigid, erect, his hands resting flat atop the black leather-bound book. His pale face registered not a flicker of panic at Dinda's threats. He simply stared at the six of them with those horrifying, unblinking eyes.

"Inside this room, the human laws you so casually revere with money no longer apply, Dinda," Professor Danu's raspy double-toned voice echoed, a chilling draft creeping along the classroom floor. "The police will not hear your cries. The world outside... is now completely beyond your reach."

"What the hell are you talking about?!" Arin screamed from the back row, tears finally bursting past her eyelids. She wrapped her arms around Sela, who had buried her face in her arms, weeping in pure terror. "Please, Professor... just let us go home... we're sorry..."

While shouting and weeping filled the room, Sela slowly raised her head. Her swollen, bloodshot eyes darted toward the large glass window to her left. Outside lay only an impenetrable void of pitch darkness, as if every streetlamp across the entire city had been extinguished at once.

Yet, it was not the darkness outside that made Sela's chest tighten so severely she could barely draw breath. Her eyes drifted down to her left wrist—to the tiny analog watch she wore every day.

The second hand... had stopped.

Sela blinked several times, assuming her vision was blurred by tears. She stared intently at the watch face. The long hand pointed to twelve; the short hand pointed to nine. And the red second hand was merely vibrating in place, frozen dead at the twelve.

9:00 PM.

With a trembling body, Sela looked down at the screen of Arin's phone resting on the desk. The digital clock read: 09:00 PM.

Sela forced herself to look up, staring at the ancient wooden-framed wall clock mounted directly above the blackboard at the front of the room. The large hands on that clock displayed the exact same time. There was no familiar tick-tock. Only absolute silence.

"A-Arin..." Sela whispered, her voice so faint it was nearly swallowed by the sound of Gani still banging on the door at the back.

"What is it, Sel?" Arin turned, her face pale with anxiety.

"The clock..." Sela pointed a finger—stiff from the intensifying cold—toward the wall clock up front. "My watch stopped. The time on your phone... that wall clock..."

Arin followed the direction of Sela's finger. She frowned, then checked her own phone once more. In the next second, Arin's breath hitched in her throat. The time on her phone was completely frozen, even after she frantically refreshed the screen over and over again.

"Guys..." Arin interrupted the panic in the room, her voice shaking violently. "Look at your clocks... Right now."

Reno, Vanya, and Dinda instinctively glanced down at their respective phones. At the back, Gani—exhausted from trying to break down the door—slowly lowered his hands and checked his digital wristwatch.

"Mine... says nine o'clock on the dot," Reno muttered, his eyes widening in disbelief. "We've been talking for ages. It should be at least nine-thirty by now."

"Mine too!" Vanya shrieked, tossing her phone onto the desk as if the device had just scorched her skin. "Nine o'clock! Everything says nine o'clock!"

"This is impossible..." Dinda backed away a few steps until her hips hit a desk. "A mass clock malfunction? That makes no sense!"

"It is not the clocks that are broken, Dinda," Professor Danu's voice resonated once more, slicing through their panic like an icy blade. Slowly, Professor Danu raised his pale right hand, pointing toward the wall clock above his head. "Time has ceased for you. Nine o'clock tonight... is the absolute limit of your existence."

Gani spun around, his breathing ragged. "What the hell do you mean by that, huh?! Stop playing mysterious, you crazy old bastard!"

Professor Danu did not offer a verbal answer. Instead, he slowly flexed his pale, ash-gray fingers. As his hand moved, the fluorescent lights in the ceiling abruptly died, plunging them into pitch-black darkness for a few agonizing seconds—before flickering back on, casting a dim, blood-red glow over the entire room.

Under that eerie red haze, the six of them realized one absolute, terrifying truth: they were no longer attending a normal late-night class. They were trapped inside a frozen dimension, locked at a nine o'clock hour that would never turn into tomorrow—trapped alongside a entity that was now slowly rising from its desk.