Of all the people there, he should've been the last to volunteer. He wasn't the social one. The "I'll sit over here and exist quietly" guy didn't sign up to be the center of any game.
He could already picture how this was supposed to go in a normal night: he'd mumble something, stay on the edge of the group, pretend to look for people and then "accidentally" not find anyone until they got bored and turned the lights back on.
But the idea felt light. Harmless. Easy.
They were in a perfect forest, in a perfectly warm cabin, with perfectly cooperative friends and dream alcohol.
The whole thing had that smooth, rounded edge to it. No roughness. No awkwardness. No stray thoughts about exams or rent or anything that usually crawled under his skin.
It was just a dream anyway.
That conclusion slid into place so neatly it almost felt given to him.
Of course it's a dream.
No planning memories.
No stress.
No consequences.
He let the thought settle.
If it was a dream, it didn't really matter what he did. He could play along, be "it," walk through the dark like some horror game protagonist, and then wake up in his room with his eyebrows still attached and his exam still waiting.
"Sure," he'd said.
And the scene had accepted it.
The lights cut off.
Not dimmed. Not flickered.
Snapped.
One second, color and warmth and music. The next, black.
Music strangled mid-beat. Whispered laughter scattered into the dark as people shuffled, chairs scraped, doors creaked. Someone fake-screamed for the bit. Someone else shushed them.
The dark felt thick for a second, like it had weight.
Hao turned to face the wall and lifted his arm out of habit, as if checking a watch he didn't need. The gesture itself was oddly comforting, like he'd done this a thousand times before.
"One…" he muttered.
He let the silence stretch, listening.
A nervous giggle from another room. A door bumping closed. The distant scuffle of socks or bare feet on wood. The old cabin bones complaining under sudden movement.
"Three… four…"
He could almost see them in his head, scrambling for hiding spots like some cutscene he wasn't allowed to watch, only imagine.
"Five."
"Twenty."
He hesitated for a moment, a tiny smirk ghosting across his face.
"This is so dumb," he whispered, more amused than annoyed. "If this is my dream, I could at least have spawned superpowers or something."
"Fi—"
The pain hit like someone had thrown a knife straight into his skull.
It wasn't the dull, foggy throb of exhaustion he'd grown used to. It was sharp. Precise. A clean cut through the softest part of his brain.
His breath caught. His stomach dipped.
The darkness in front of him seemed to tighten, pressed closer.
Something inside him shifted.
The usual fuzz of inner monologue, that endless hum of What am I doing with my life and Did I set an alarm, went silent.
For a heartbeat, his head was truly empty.
Then a voice spoke inside his skull.
It sounded like him, but cleaned up. Sharper around the edges, stripped of doubt and hesitation.
Keep the lights off.
Stay inside the cabin.
Survive until sunrise.
The tone was almost casual. Like tips on a loading screen. Suggestions, not commands.
They didn't feel optional.
The lines sank into him with a heavy, quiet weight, arranging themselves into something solid.
Rules, he decided. Fine. Rules.
Unwritten, unsigned, but still there.
He leaned forward, one hand flat on the wall, breathing through his teeth as the pain ebbed.
"Math exam's tomorrow… I still need to cook… and…" he whispered, then froze.
"Wait. Why am I here? And who are those guys supposed to be?"
The two questions felt wrong in his mouth. Not because of the words, but because of the emptiness that greeted them.
The cabin's warmth suddenly had edges. The air that had felt comfortably heavy now pressed in a little too much.
The silence after the laughter felt too complete, like the whole building was holding its breath, waiting to see what he'd do with those new "suggestions."
"If this is some half-awake dream," he muttered to himself, "where's the flying? Why is my brain's idea of fun a dark cabin in the middle of nowhere?"
No answer, obviously.
He waited a second anyway, just in case the universe felt like being helpful for once.
Nothing. Just the slow ticking of unseen wood, cooling in the dark.
He let out a long sigh, then pushed himself off the wall and started moving.
No light. No phone glow. Only the thin grey blur of moonlight sneaking in around curtains and through windows, just enough to turn furniture into vague shapes and corners into darker patches of dark.
He stretched his arms out in front of him, fingers spread, taking careful, small steps.
Toe. Heel. Test. Shift weight.
"No lights."
"Stay inside."
"Survive."
He repeated them in his head, half mocking, half clinging to them because they were the only solid things in his mind right now.
"Anyone here…?" he asked quietly.
Silence pushed back.
He swept the first floor. Under couches. Behind them. Inside wardrobes. Under the big dining table. Behind the curtains. In the bathroom.
No muffled giggles. No poorly hidden shoes sticking out from behind furniture.
More importantly: no breathing he could hear. No heartbeats he could feel. Just the occasional phantom noise that turned out to be the house shifting, or his own clothes brushing his skin.
The dark pressed against his arms and neck, heavy and close.
No lights.
Stay inside.
Survive.
They circled in his head, deceptively polite.
That was when he saw the basement door.
It wasn't open. Didn't glow. It just existed at the edge of his vision, a rectangle of black cut into the hallway.
If he hadn't been staring so hard into the dark, he might've missed it entirely.
A thin strip of moonlight from a distant window fell exactly along its outline, picking it out like someone had traced it on purpose.
"Don't tell me someone actually hid down there…" he muttered.
He still went.
Because of course he did.
His survival instincts were apparently taking a break.
The wooden steps complained under his weight, each creak swallowed quickly by the thick air below.
The smell hit halfway down. Damp. Old. The sour-sweet scent of things that had been forgotten for too long.
"Too dark," he said under his breath, hand sliding along the rough railing.
He repeated the "suggestions" in his head to keep himself anchored, the way other people might hum a song.
No lights.
Stay inside.
Survive.
"Survive what exactly…"
His foot hit concrete.
He paused, letting his eyes try and fail to adjust.
His hands did the work his vision couldn't. Fingertips brushed boxes. Fabric. The corner of something wooden. A chair. Rusting metal.
Storage. Junk. Nothing moving.
"This is just boring," he muttered.
Then he heard it.
Tac… tac… tac…
Soft. Rhythmic. Not far above him.
The sound of something hitting wood. Not heavy enough for footsteps. Not irregular enough for random creaks.
It didn't stay above him.
The noise seemed to run through the beams, down the walls, into the floor under his feet. Each tap landed in his chest as much as in his ears.
Tac… tac… tac…
Somewhere overhead, someone whispered, "Do you hear that?"
A door hinge complained. Floorboards sighed under shifting weight. The quiet scatter of footsteps started moving in the same direction, all at once.
They'd heard it too.
He found himself smiling despite the creeping tension in his shoulders.
"Found you," he said quietly.
The basement somehow felt closer behind him as soon as he turned his back on it, like the room had shrunk out of spite. The stairs seemed longer on the way up.
He climbed anyway, following the sound. First floor. Second. Higher.
The attic.
The noise grew clearer with every step, like it was pleased he was coming.
Tac… tac… tac…
It came from the far corner.
"Hehe… found you," he said again, half mocking, half trying to keep himself calm.
He stepped forward.
His foot slid on something slick.
The world tilted. He crashed down, dust exploding into his face.
Somewhere below, a door closed. Farther away, a floorboard creaked in answer. The whole cabin seemed to be slowly re-arranging itself around that single sound.
The sound didn't stop.
Tac… tac… tac…
Cold spread up his spine before he even stood back up.
He pushed himself onto his feet and moved toward the noise.
When he got close enough, the culprit revealed itself in a thin blade of moonlight from a crooked attic window.
A rope.
Thick. Old. Hanging from a beam. Swaying back and forth in a slow, lazy arc.
Its end tapped against the floor with each swing.
Tac… tac… tac…
The sound poured down through the boards, into the walls, into every room of the cabin. No matter where anyone was hiding, they would know where to go.
Hao's lip curled. "Seriously…"
He knelt, reached for the trapdoor, and pushed it open.
Dry wood groaned softly.
Somewhere below, on another floor, he thought he heard the scrape of someone else moving into position. The faint sense that he wasn't the only one who'd followed the rope's call.
That was when the scream cut the air in half.
It came from directly below. Not faint. Not playful. A raw, ripping sound.
Not a party shriek. Not someone jumped as a joke.
Something was being dragged into a place it would never leave.