The group moved in a line, struggling through the fog-shrouded forest.
Before entering the mist, Everly had used a Miniature Crystal Ball to investigate it. Just like the previous fog, this one carried no curse. However, traversing it was genuinely difficult.
The forest was damp and cold.
The ground beneath their feet was muddy and slippery. Every step produced a squelching, gurgling sound. If soone accidentally stepped on moss, they could easily lose their balance and fall.
After walking for so ti, one of the students suddenly spoke up.
“Strange… does anyone else feel like the forest is way too quiet?”
The mont he ntioned it, the others also began to notice sothing was off.
He was right—it was too quiet.
A forest was normally a lively place. On ordinary days, birds would begin chirping noisily before dawn. Squirrels and other small animals gathering food for the winter would scamper through the branches, producing an endless rustling of leaves. Even as the weather grew colder, the forest remained bustling and full of life.
Yet all of those familiar sounds had suddenly vanished.
The forest before them felt like a fake set made of props. Aside from the noises they themselves made while walking, not even the rustle of swaying leaves could be heard. The silence was terrifying.
“M-Maybe the fog is just too thick, and the animals don’t want to co out and move around…” soone swallowed nervously and offered a random guess.
No one responded.
It had been easy to ignore before, but once they realized sothing was wrong, everyone found themselves unconsciously pricking up their ears as they continued forward, listening carefully for any sounds in the woods.
Plop, plop—those were their footsteps.
Rustle, rustle—that was the sound of clothing brushing together.
Huff, huff—those were the heavy breaths of the exhausted hikers.
If that was the case, then what was the faint scrape… scrape… sound coming from sowhere ahead and to the left?
Among the group, one male student could no longer suppress his curiosity. He briefly stopped walking and turned toward the direction from which the scraping noise was coming, peering into the forest.
The fog was extrely thick. Just a few ters away, the outlines of the trees already appeared blurred, as though veiled behind a thin layer of gauze.
On the trunk of one fir tree, a pitch-black shape suddenly protruded. It was moving up and down slightly.
What is that…?
The boy wiped his fogged-up glasses and looked again. He saw the black thing press itself against the trunk. Five long, slender appendages bent like a chicken’s claws, scraping hard against the bark before abruptly withdrawing behind the tree and disappearing from sight.
That shape…
Could it be… a human hand?!
“AAAHHH!”
The realization made him scream.
“What happened?”
“Don’t suddenly start yelling like that! You scared to death!”
Everyone was already on edge because of the forest’s unnatural silence. The boy’s sudden scream nearly frightened the already-jumpy students out of their wits.
“Th-th-there… over there… th-there’s… soone!”
Ignoring the annoyed glares directed at him, the boy raised a trembling hand and pointed toward the fir tree.
“Soone? Are there other people out here besides us?”
“Maybe they’re hikers, just like us?”
The others hadn’t seen the hand disappear behind the trunk. Instead of being alard, they were excited at the prospect of encountering another person.
Only the boy stared ahead with terror in his eyes, unable to stop his hands and legs from shaking.
The fir tree was slender—its thickest part was no wider than a person’s thigh. Yet the owner of that hand had managed to hide completely behind it without exposing even the slightest part of its body.
Could sothing like that really be human?
Or was it so kind of unnaturally thin monster?
“It isn’t far away. Let’s go take a look.”
Harriet glanced at the students behind her, who were eager to investigate. She raised an arm and signaled to Ted, who was bringing up the rear.
The group briefly changed direction and followed Harriet toward the fir tree.
Concerned that sothing unexpected might happen, Harriet remained tense the entire ti. One hand gripped the climbing axe at her waist, as though she were on guard against so unseen threat.
Her caution quickly affected the students behind her. The previously restless group quieted down, looking around nervously as they walked, as if afraid that sothing horrifying might suddenly burst out of the woods.
After advancing another dozen steps or so, they soon arrived at the fir tree the boy had pointed out.
“That’s strange. There’s nobody here. Did you see it wrong?”
Everyone looked around.
The forest was completely empty, and there were no obvious footprints in the soft mud.
“But there are strange scratch marks on the tree.”
One sharp-eyed student pointed at the trunk of the fir.
Following her finger, the others saw five long scratches gouged into the pale-gray bark. Whatever had left them must have used trendous force—the tough bark had been torn open, exposing the pale wood underneath.
The scratches alone weren’t enough to determine whether they had been made by a human or by so five-clawed animal.
Soon, however, soone discovered a strange symbol carved into another tree nearby.
It consisted of a large circle on the outside. Inside the circle was a tangled, crooked pattern of lines that was difficult to describe, and attached to the edge of the design were two smaller circles.
A symbol that complex could only have been made by human hands.
No one recognized it, and nobody knew why the person who carved it had left it there.
After lingering for a while without seeing the “person” the boy had ntioned, the group was already preparing to leave when another scream suddenly rang out.
“Oh, co on, not again!”
The repeated screams were starting to wear everyone’s nerves thin. Clutching their chests, they hurried toward the source of the sound.
The one who had scread was another male student.
While everyone else had been busy searching for the mysterious figure, he’d felt an urgent need to use the bathroom. So he had quietly slipped a little deeper into the woods, hoping to take care of his bodily needs before anyone noticed.
Unexpectedly, just as he had unzipped his pants, a strong stench of decay drifted into his nose.
Being young and driven by curiosity, the boy temporarily abandoned what he had been about to do and walked around the large tree from which the sll seed to be coming.
That single glance left him frozen in place.
Clutching his head with both hands, he let out a completely undignified scream.
Behind the thick trunk grew a branch that forked outward. It was about as thick as an adult’s calf, extending diagonally away from the tree. Its broken tip had ford a sharp wooden spike that had pierced through the back of a stag’s neck and erged from its upper chest.
The large stag had been impaled by the branch and suspended in a grotesque position, hanging in the air like a giant slab of cured at dangling beneath an eave.
The spike had penetrated the area where the neck t the chest. As a result, the stag’s front legs hung stiffly in the air while its hind legs rested on the ground. Its head drooped forward, and its massive antlers spread outward like tree branches. At first glance, it looked almost like a devout worshipper bowing in prayer.
A dead deer alone would not have been enough to make the boy scream in terror.
What truly frightened him was the wound in the stag’s abdon.
No one knew how long the animal had been dead. Its once sleek brown fur had begun to decay, oozing a dark, soy-colored fluid. A massive wound ran down its belly, opening the abdon from top to bottom.
Or perhaps “torn open” would be a more accurate description, since the edges of the wound were ragged and uneven.
The flesh on either side had peeled back, exposing the pale ribs beneath. The internal organs that should have filled the cavity were gone. Instead, several headless raven carcasses had been crudely stuffed inside the deer’s abdon.
Bloodstains and decomposing bodily fluids had soaked into the deer’s fur, drying into patches of dark brown crust.
Beneath the dead stag lay a puddle of blackish-brown liquid, thick as tar and giving off a nauseating stench.
“Ugh—blegh! It slls awful!”
“Who could do sothing this cruel…?”
Most of the students who had rushed over focused their attention on the stag’s corpse, covering their noses as they discussed it in disgust.
After briefly examining the carcass, however, Everly shifted her gaze to the tree that had impaled it.
There, hidden behind the stag’s body on the concealed side of the trunk, she spotted the sa strange symbol they had found earlier.
Clearly, the people who had killed the stag were the sa ones who had carved the symbols throughout the forest.
If her guess was correct, these people were probably mbers of so kind of cult. After all, in horror movies, mysterious symbols appearing on walls, floors, and deep in forests were practically synonymous with secret religions.
Perhaps they had accidentally wandered into the territory where a cult conducted its activities.
Following that line of thought, the figure that had been peering through the cabin window the previous night was probably a cult mber as well.
Suddenly, Everly felt a twitch in her brow.
Just monts ago, she had experienced a strange sensation—
The feeling that soone was watching them.
It was incredibly subtle.
Like a breeze brushing against fine hairs, or a feather gliding across skin. Light. Fleeting. Soone less sensitive to being observed might never have noticed it.
But Everly was certain.
At this very mont, a cold gaze was slowly sweeping across the group in the forest.
Her back stiffened, and the hairs along her spine rose uncontrollably.
Who is it…?
Forcing herself to remain calm, Everly pretended to take out her phone to photograph the stag. In reality, she switched to the front-facing cara and secretly used the screen to observe what was behind her.
What she saw was this:
In the milky-white fog beyond the group, among the gray-white tree trunks that stretched straight into the sky, a pale shape was hidden.
The figure pressed itself tightly against one of the pale trunks, utterly motionless.
If not for the hint of black visible where what appeared to be a hand protruded from the trunk, one could almost mistake it for an extension of the tree itself.
Just as Everly held her breath and tried to get a clearer look, a sudden gust of wind swept through the forest.
The cold wind stirred the dense fog. Wisps of white mist churned silently, swallowing the figure in the distance.
When the wind died down and the fog settled back into place, the silhouette was gone.
Only that lingering sensation remained—the feeling of being watched, of being spied on—clinging like a shadow that would not fade.
……
The number of cultists in the forest was unknown. Worried that her companions might panic and give themselves away, Everly did not dare to speak about what she had seen. Instead, she quietly relayed the information to Misa by tapping Morse code into her palm.
Even so, the sudden appearance of the dead stag cast a shadow over what had once been the students’ innocent, carefree world.
After leaving the carcass behind and resuming their hike, the group beca unusually quiet.
Without needing to coordinate, everyone instinctively softened their footsteps, as though making too much noise might wake so unknown monster sleeping within the forest.
As they moved forward, Everly could still feel that gaze upon them.
Sotis it ca from behind. Sotis from the side. Sotis, in a way that defied logic, it felt like it was coming from above the trees—like the nightmare from last night had beco reality, and eyes had grown into the forest canopy itself, watching them.
She had to fight hard against the urge to look up, just to avoid revealing her awareness.
What their teacher, Harriet, had said before setting out had been right.
From morning until dusk, the fog in the forest showed no sign of dispersing. Along the way, Harriet had to periodically stop, pulling out a GPS device to correct their direction.
When the sun tilted westward and the light in the forest began to dim, the fog ahead suddenly thinned.
In the center of the mist, a faint rectangular outline appeared.
As they drew closer, the group gradually made it out:
It was a pointed-roof wooden cabin standing alone in the forest.
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