The night air felt lighter than usual, almost playful. Streetlights shimmered across the quiet streets like a fading constellation, and Eroan moved through it with a rare softness in his steps. As if he was trying to dance. The world around him felt strangely balanced neither loud nor silent, just resting. Cafés were closing; their warm yellow glows flickered out one by one as the city slowly exhaled. He passed small alleys, neon-lit corners, an elderly couple sitting by a tea stall, and for the first time in a long while, he felt something close to comfort.
He wasn’t rushing. He wasn’t thinking too much.
He was simply walking, letting the late-night breeze carry him forward.
His hands were in his pockets and each breath felt steady, collected. Everything about tonight felt calmer than his usual nights. His thoughts drifted to earlier moments, the conversations, the teasing, the way Shina’s laughter clung to the air. He didn’t expect to enjoy any of it, but somehow it stayed with him like a soft aftertaste. Walking his way through home, he passed a clothing shop. As he saw an awesome leather jacket it was dark brown. He thought about buying it. His thoughts exactly, "Should I buy or should I not? Well here comes the night's ideas of getting me broke. Always at night, these weird feeling of doing whatever comes into mind."
Then he bought it. "Now here goes my savings. Back to be broke again. But better than getting back to be friends" He was really glad after getting the jacket. He flipped the jacket and places his through the arm sleeves and wore it.
For once, the city didn’t feel like it was in chaos. Well till it wasn't.
It felt… normal. Peaceful.
But the night has a way of shifting moods without warning, as if the darkness itself decides when peace should end.
And soon—too soon,this fragile calm would break. Eroan looked at the moon and it was half covered by the darkness of the night. Feeling something like stitches in his arm. The ring he wore was glowing. With annoyance and pain "Now, What's that? It feels like are being stitched over and over again by needles. Said it with tired voice.
A sudden panic hits him, breaking through his patience after holding it off for so long.
It began quietly. A light twitch under his eye. A tightening inside his chest.
Eroan stopped mid-step.
Something inside him snapped clean through, like a string pulled too tight for too long.
His breath shortened. His fingers curled, digging into his palms. The air around him thickened, and the soft glow of the city suddenly felt distant, unreal, as if he were staring at it through fogged glass. His heartbeat struck faster and faster, slamming against his ribs like a warning. "Why does this happen to me ? I'm just fade up, I don't wanna do anything anymore. It's better if the pain eats me away." He began questioning reality and accepted the pain.
He had managed to suppress it all evening—every flicker, every shadow of the memory that clawed at him. He had buried it under conversation, under food, under the warm noise of a restaurant. But panic has a vicious nature. It waits. It observes. And when your guard drops even slightly… it attacks and takes away everything from you.
His breath stuttered. His surroundings warped.
A faint ringing began in his ears, then grew sharper, louder.
The air thinned.
Every light dimmed.
Eroan squeezed his eyes shut, knowing exactly what was coming.
And knowing he couldn’t stop it anymore.
The nightmares of the driver hit him, making him suffer the same experience through different visions.
The street dissolved.
The quiet city vanished.
Being replaced by insanity
He heard the driver’s panicked breaths, too close, too real—as if the man were right behind him whispering into his ear. Then the visions split and multiplied, overlapping on top of each other like broken mirrors.
The driver reaching for him.
The driver screaming.
The driver turning—eyes hollow, face twisted. Asking for help as the driver was being tortured to his death, getting torn from limb to limb and getting abandoned by each of his senses gradually. Eroan had to see it- he had to swallow all of it into his mind, like it's a fragment of his soul.
Eroan staggered as the illusion shifted again, this time throwing him into the moment of impact.The sickening jolt of his body being thrown against the world.
He gasped sharply as another vision stabbed through him:
The driver crawling.
Dragging himself.
His voice hoarse and unrecognizable as he called Eroan’s name.
Then another vision--
Someone standing.
Walking toward him.
Laughing. "You're being utterly pathetic. Aren't you?" That thing said that mocking him out of misery. He couldn't bear any of it, He was being destroyed both physically and mentally.
Eroan clawed at his head, trying to tear the images out. Each vision felt like a different version of the same nightmare—like the past was mocking him, bending itself into twisted forms just to break him again.
It wasn’t memory anymore.
It was torment.
The pain becomes too much, making him dizzy and unable to endure.
A sharp sting shot down his spine, then wrapped around his ribs like a tightening rope. His breath hitched, his knees weakening. The road beneath him seemed to tilt in every direction at once, collapsing into a spiral he couldn’t escape.
His pulse crashed in his ears, drowning out every sound except his own struggling breaths. His vision flickered—dark to bright, bright to complete blank until everything blended into a blur. He reached out for a wall, a railing, anything to anchor himself, but his fingers found nothing to hold on to.
The pressure inside his skull felt unbearable, like someone was pushing his head down from the inside.
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He tried to speak something, to steady himself.
But no words were simply buried in his mind alone, unable to sound.
His body simply couldn’t hold it anymore. I have to overcome this pain. I must endure it, cause if I can't - guess it'd be the end for me then."
Desperate, he looks for his way home but his vision is blurry and he loses balance.
He forced his eyes open.
The streetlights looked like long streaks of melting color, stretching and twisting as if the world were underwater. He blinked repeatedly, rubbing at his face, but the blurriness kept worsening. Every direction looked identical—dark, distorted, and endless.
A surge of desperation broke through him.
He needed to get home.
Now.
He staggered forward, gripping the air like a drowning man reaching for the surface. His steps were uneven, slipping, drifting sideways, almost falling with each movement. He tried focusing on familiar signs, buildings, anything—but the world refused to stay still.
He whispered to himself, voice trembling:
“Come on… focus… just walk…”
But the more he tried, the more the street stretched away from him, bending and twisting into unfamiliar shapes. Acting like it was an endless maze.
He reached for a lamp post to steady himself—missed.
His foot dragged across the pavement.
His balance left him completely.
He stumbles and falls on the ground.
His body hit the pavement with a dull thud.
His palms scraped against the cold concrete, sending a sting up his arms, but he couldn’t feel it properly—everything was muffled, distant. The world spun violently, turning the sky and ground into a single swirling mass.
He tried lifting his head, but a wave of nausea slammed him back down.
For a moment, he simply lay there, breathing hard, unable to tell whether he was awake or trapped inside the nightmare still twisting his mind.
And the night around him—
suddenly felt much darker.
He tries his best to get up again and looks ahead.
Eroan pushed his palms against the ground, trembling. His arms buckled twice before they finally managed to lift his body even slightly.
He swayed almost falling again but steadied himself with one hand on his knee.
When he finally looked ahead, nothing felt familiar.
The street he knew should’ve been there looked stretched and warped, as if reality itself had taken a deep breath and distorted. The lampposts flickered in slow, irregular pulses.
He swallowed hard.
He wasn’t sure if he was seeing the world…
or the nightmare bleeding into it.
The path feels like an endless maze he must walk through without his senses.
He took a step.
Then another.
And with each one, the world seemed to rearrange around him. Streets curved where they never curved before. Alleys split into two, three, four directions like branching nerves. The soft glow of street lamps flickered out one by one, leaving the path half-lit untrustworthy.
Every sound around him stretched out in strange echoes: footsteps that weren’t his, distant whispers, traffic that seemed too far away to be real.
His senses had abandoned him.
Even the air felt different—thicker, colder, almost like the atmosphere inside a nightmare.
He blinked, trying to correct his vision, but the road kept lengthening ahead of him, bending in directions he didn’t recognize.
But his legs kept moving.
He didn’t know where he was going—
only that he needed to keep going until something made sense again.
Anything.
Every shadow he passed seemed deeper. Every silence felt heavier. And yet the maze-like path kept pulling him forward as if guiding him into a place he wasn’t meant to reach.
He wasn’t walking home anymore.
He was wandering through a version of the city that wasn’t built for humans.
As he walks, the path eventually leads him somewhere else—somewhere different.
At some point he didn’t know when the city fell away entirely.
The tall buildings softened into silhouettes, then faded into the dark. The street beneath his feet shifted from concrete to something softer, colder.
He blinked.
He wasn’t on the main road anymore.
He stood in a narrow, unfamiliar lane surrounded by abandoned houses with boarded windows. Old signs hung crookedly from rusted nails. The wind carried dust across the ground, scratching against the silence.
He turned around
only to find the street he came from was gone.
Completely.
Just a long stretch of emptiness behind him.
He felt something crawl up his spine, not a sensation of danger, but a sensation of essence.
He didn’t choose to come here.
The path led him.
And whatever this place was…
it was waiting for him. The place was like an old park that was left on nothing for a long time.
After staying there for a moment and resting, he encounters something odd. "Man really there's no end to it".
He leaned against a cracked wall, letting his breathing slow. The dizziness eased, but the tension didn’t. The night felt too still.
Total silence.
Until—
A faint sound echoed at the end of the lane.
Something soft.
A tap… then another.
Like footsteps, but lighter.
He lifted his head, narrowing his eyes to focus. His vision still swam, but the shape at the far end wasn’t something he could ignore. A silhouette, half-hidden in darkness, stood motionless—too stiff to be human, too deliberate in its stillness.
It didn’t move.
But Eroan felt it watching it.
Silent. Patient.
He instinctively straightened his posture, trying to clear his head, his instincts flaring like sparks.
Whatever it was…
it didn’t belong here any more like he didn't. Getting a little closer look it appears that it was the same cat as the one from before- a black cat.
Being familiar with it, he can’t ignore it and instead glares at it.
His eyes sharpened.
The dizziness didn’t matter.
The fear didn’t matter.
There was something in the silhouette, something with it the cat's posture and its unnatural stillness-that struck him with a disturbing sense of recognition.
He had seen it before.
Not in waking life, but in the hallucination.
The driver’s final vision,
the shadow standing behind the broken glass.
Eroan’s jaw tightened. He wasn’t the type to run, even when every instinct screamed that this wasn’t real. His glare cut through the darkness, sharp and hostile, demanding the figure reveal itself.
The silhouette twitched—just a small movement, like a glitch.
His breath stilled.
It was the same way the hallucination trembled.
A flicker of pain carved through his temple, but he didn’t look away.
He refused to.
Because ignoring it…
would mean accepting fear.
And Eroan didn’t accept fear, not even when the nightmare stared back at him.
That encounter leads him to a fate that must remain an untold story.
The silhouette shifted—slowly, unnaturally, like the frame rate of the world dropped. Eroan took a step back, but the ground beneath him softened, sinking slightly.
The air around him warped.
Lights flickered above, casting broken shadows across the lane.
And before he could fully react—
the darkness surged forward.
A cold breeze swept past him, pulling the world apart like a curtain. His surroundings twisted houses bending, shadows stretching, the ground cracking open under the weight of something unseen. Like all disasters coming to get him.
Then—
everything snapped.
Silence.
Stillness.
And Eroan’s figure vanishes from the scene, swallowed by the very darkness he glared into.
What happened next…
would remain a secret the night refused to reveal and as it nature lies it would keep it hidden. Until the day comes.
Meanwhile, Crest & Kause with their members are in the forest.
Far from the city, under a sky with a moon that was just kept getting swallowed by the night sky. The group of four walked through the thick forest. Crest led lightly, humming aimlessly, while Kause followed behind him like a shadow. Two new members trailed along - one tired, one excited, both alert yet clueless about what the forest truly held.
The air here was colder than the city’s, sharper, infused with the scent of damp leaves and distant water. Fireflies floated in clusters, blinking softly like scattered sparks.
Crest pushed aside a hanging vine and exhaled.
“We’re deep enough,” he said, turning back.
Kause nodded, observing the surroundings with his usual calm. “Keep close. No splitting unless necessary. Keep your distance but be aware of the outcomes." Careful tone.
Their members followed, trusting—not knowing that the forest beyond this point was known for things that weren’t meant to be seen after day. One member said tired,"Man, how long are we even supposed to walk? It's been a few hours since we began our journey." Crest wanted to rest too but as stubborn he is he said," You guys decided to come in. I didn't invite you, why bother when you can't go through such journey". Both members were startled but annoyed too. Kause interrupting them said," Well, it's obvious that everyone's now tired. It's night already, we can't possibly go deeper in the forest without enough energy. So, it wouldn't hurt to be resting for a while. If everything's okay, then we'll head out after replenishing our energy". Keeping his calm and composure as he said that. Crest couldn't agree more.
They began setting up a camp.
They found a small clearing between thick roots and fallen branches. Crest dropped his pack and immediately started gathering dry wood while Kause arranged stones into a small pit.
Within minutes, flames flickered up,
warm, bright, almost too comforting for a place like this. They lit wood with fire and ate the foods they brought before coming here.
Crest dug out the wrapped snacks and fruits they packed earlier. The others sighed in relief, sinking into the earthy ground, finally letting the exhaustion settle into their bones.
Smoke drifted upward, spiraling into the leaves.
The forest, still vast and looming around them, seemed momentarily harmless in the glow of their fire.
For a while…
they forgot where they were.
The forest journey is dangerous and exhausting due to its long route and depth.
But the truth lingered around them like a quiet threat.
This forest wasn’t meant for night travel.
The deeper they went, the more the trees bent unnaturally, growing closer together as if whispering secrets. Roots coiled across the ground like veins. The air thickened with moisture, carrying faint echoes from unknown creatures.
The route was long—too long for a midnight venture. Every path looked identical, twisted by dense undergrowth. The moon provided little light, and clouds drifted lazily above, obscuring what little guidance they could rely on.
Crest rubbed his palms, the fatigue catching up to him.
Kause remained collected, but even he knew they were far from safe.
They needed the rest.
Because the forest was only silent when something different was listening there.
