Minho

Jisung kept walking, clinging to a single, desperate thought: just keep moving, don't look back, and don't let them know you've noticed.

The street stretched ahead, fractured by pools of dim orange light, and the pitch-black gaps between them felt agonizingly long.

Behind him, the footsteps matched his own perfectly. With the rusted iron gates of a park standing half-open into nothingness on his left, and a narrow alley cutting between two looming buildings on his right, he told himself to stay in the light, to hold on to that safety – but the footsteps behind him didn't fade.

His chest tightened as his mind began feeding him images he didn't want to see: old news clips, warnings, stories that never ended well. He tried to push them down to force a steady pace, but his legs were already moving faster as his breath grew shallow.

And then, his body made the choice for him.

Veering right, he plunged into the alley – a stupid, reckless move he regretted the second his shoes hit the cracked concrete. The darkness swallowed him whole, but he was already in, already committed to the mistake. Suddenly, the footsteps stopped, leaving a silence so heavy and suffocating it pressed against his eardrums right before a voice came from the dark behind him – low, steady, and terrifyingly calm.

— Don't fight it.

Before he could even turn around, an arm hooked tight around his chest and a heavy hand clamped over his mouth and nose, pressing a coarse cloth hard against his face as a sickly sweet, chemical smell hit him instantly.

He thrashed blindly, fingers clawing at a dark sleeve, gripping and pulling with fading strength, but his limbs were rapidly losing power. As his vision blurred at the edges, the darkness crept in like black ink dissolving in water.

The last thing he registered was the sensation of the ground rushing up to meet him – or perhaps it was just someone catching his falling body, he could no longer tell. Then, everything went black.