The Silverpine Forest had gone still: unnaturally still. No birds. No wind. Not even the hum of insects. Just the breath of silence and the lingering echoes of the elk’s fall. The brothers stood at the edge of the pit, peering down.

  “This isn’t right,” Rigal muttered. “It’s too quiet.”

  “What’re you talking about?” his brother, Milo laughed, triumphant. “We got it. You see that drop? Classic pit trap. This place is odd, a school? Maybe military? Who cares? We’re bringing that thing home.”

  Rigal didn’t answer. He turned his head.

  The elk lay broken at the bottom, sides unmoving, its body twisted unnaturally across shattered pavement and splintered white bone. To Rigal’s eyes, it had been a trap, built by someone, sometime long ago? But he remembered the stories adventures told of dungeons, they could make the impossible possible. A sign lay cracked near the rim, half-buried in moss. Faded letters read:Pick up and drop off only, no parking.

  Rigal crouched near the edge of the pit, eyes narrowing. “What the fuck is no parking?”

  Milo just shrugged it off. “Help me down, I will pass up the elk with some rope.”

  Bone jutted from the pit walls, bent into spidery angles. The base was reinforced with layered with the same black stone and a central hub of sinew-wrapped gears. Rigal squinted, spotting faint, glowing lines carved into the inner rim. Symbols he couldn’t recognize, but which pulsed faintly beneath the blood.

  And then, without warning, something shimmered in front of his vision.

  System Notification: [Trap Blueprint: Bone Claw Trap] Explosive entrapment mechanism. Lure-based. Launches barbed bone claws upward once weight is detected. Powered by preserved muscle tension and arcane fiber.

  Rigal leaned forward, scanning the jagged pit. He had seen a few traps before and hunting tricks, he was a Level 3 Hunter, after all; however, nothing like this. Bone claws, sinew tension, glyphwork. It was... refined in a grotesque kind of way. And then, with a faint chime, the system flickered into view again.

  System Notification: It's un-bear-able how effective this trap is!

  Rigal blinked. He actually looked around, expecting someone to be playing a joke. But the message just hung there in the air, cheeky as hell.

  “That’s... new,” he muttered. “The system doesn’t joke. It’s never—”

  His breath hitched. A shape moved behind the rusted-out car. Rigal staggered back, eyes wide. “What the hell...?” He turned toward his brother. “This is a dungeon trap. That pit’s rigged—we have to—”

  But he never finished. The air behind him shifted. There was a sound behind him: soft. Barely a breath. Not footsteps. Not exactly.

  Shhkt.

  The whisper of something brushing across glass and metal. From behind a rusted, long-abandoned vehicle, a figure rose. Tall and broken-backed, wearing what looked like a tattered sweater vest and a blood-streaked pencil skirt. Its arms were too long, fingers ending in gleaming red talons like painted nails.

  The dungeon monster’s face hovered inches from the Rigal’s own, a nightmare pulled taut over bone. It was elongated, skeletal, the stretched, papery skin the colour of old, deep frostbite, a sickly blue-grey pulled so thin over bone that jutted like broken, splintered fence posts. The translucent skin was cracked in places, revealing a webwork of dark, sluggish veins beneath that pulsed faintly, not with life, but with a cold, internal rhythm, like dying embers seen through ice.

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  Her mouth didn’t smile, it didn't sneer. It simply split. A jagged, wet line that tore wider as its claws sank into protesting flesh, a silent, horrifying rending. And the teeth revealed… “Gods,” Rigal screamed. Too many, too long, like rows of discoloured, impossibly sharp icicles crammed into the splitting maw. Her breath didn’t just roll out; it gusted, freezing and thick, carrying a stench that was a suffocating blend of raw, putrid rot and the empty, aching void of starvation.

  But the worst part wasn’t the tearing claws or the too-many teeth or the breath that stole the warmth from your very bones. It was her eyes. Hollow sockets that somehow held a terrible, focused light. Eyes that held no malice, no hate, no flicker of recognition of the person screaming in front of it.

  Just hunger.

  Unblinking, unfeeling, utterly detached. Like it didn’t even register the hunter as a person, a life, a consciousness. Just meat. Meat that inconveniently screamed.

  And as the Windigo-Mom raked down, claws trailing glistening steam from freshly torn muscle, her face tilted. Not in curiosity, not in sadism. But amusement. A chilling, utterly alien amusement. Not at the pain it was causing, not at the blood or the tearing flesh… but at the noise. At the gurgling, panicked sounds of suffering Rigal was making. Like a child shaking a rattle, fascinated only by the sound it produced, completely oblivious to the source of the noise being a living being’s agony.

  Another one crawled from beneath a crushed vehicle on all fours—limbs contorted like an insect. Its face was frozen in a parodic expression of suburban cheer, white pearls around its neck gleaming with gore.

  PTA Moms from hell.

  “RUN.” Rigal tried to scream, but his voice cracked.

  Rigal screamed, and wouldn’t stop until he was dead. Not the kind of scream people do in movies. This wasn’t clean or noble. It was ragged, animal, unending. A sound scraped out from the deepest part of him, broken open by pain no person was meant to feel.

  Windigo's claws had torn into his back first, splitting through coat and sinew like wet paper. Then it dragged him down. He kicked, thrashed, tried to crawl, but the ground swallowed his hands. His finger nails break on the strange black stone. Another claw sank into his thigh and twisted; not to kill, but to hold him still.

  He screamed higher this time, until his voice cracked. His mouth moved but no sound came out. Just breathe. Just panic. Just sobbing, choking terror. The other Windigo circled, slow and patient, like it enjoyed the music.

  It wasn't quick. The creatures didn't rush. They peeled him apart with ritual precision, as if they'd done this hundreds of times and never tired of the taste. Flesh split. Bones popped. And Rigal's body convulsed with every cut. Even when he couldn't scream anymore, his eyes stayed wide; alive, watching, until they finally dimmed into glass.

  Milo turned just in time to see the first creature leap. He didn’t stop moving, his mouth open, breathing hard. He was shaking, not fully processing what he’d seen. Then something shifted in the shadows.

  He looked left. Another figure. Then another. Windigo-Moms everywhere.

  System Notification: [Adventurer Milo has entered Zone: Bus Loop Perimeter]

  Warning: You are now being hunted.

  Mom Aggro Detected.

  Run, Milo.

  The PTA has teeth.

  The 3 remaining moms emerged silently. Coming Milo’s way from the forest. Each one was dressed in the tattered remains of human civility: aprons, cardigans, bits of jewelry clinging to their monstrous forms. Eyes hollow. Movements hungry.

  Milo stumbled back, his breath coming in sharp bursts. His hand gripped the bow but didn’t raise it.

  “No, no, no—” he muttered, backing away.

  He turned and bolted, boots slipping on the front lawn grass as he ran towards the front door of the school, deeper into the unnatural light. Behind him, the creatures didn’t howl. They smiled.

  Rigal's screams had become sobs, his body broken, but his mind clung to a single hope: Please let Milo make it out. The pain was unbearable, the cold of the Windigo's presence sinking into his bones like frostbite made flesh. But still, beneath the terror, a flicker of peace warmed him. If he died here,truly died, he’d respawn back at the Goddess Violet’s temple. Naked, stripped of everything but breath, but alive. I’ll be home again. The thought gave him just enough calm to loosen his grip on the moment… until he looked up and saw the jaws descending. There was no more time to hope. Only the crunch of bone.

  Milo passed strange objects he couldn’t name. “This isn’t a forest,” he whispered, breath ragged, eyes wide with terror. “This is a grave.”

  And the dead weren’t sleeping anymore.