Panic wasn't exactly my go-to emotion. I was more of a "freeze and hope it goes away" kind of guy, or maybe "assess the situation and then maybe freak out ter." But right now, standing in this... forest? Wearing army clothes? With a literal gun on my back? Yeah, the panic was kicking in. My hands were shaking so hard I had to grab my own wrists.

  'Okay. Deep breaths. Just... just breathe, Alex.'

  I closed my eyes for a second, sucking in a shaky breath of air that smelled like dirt and pine needles. Not car exhaust and hot concrete. Definitely not Park Street.

  When I opened my eyes, the world was still the same trees. And that old shack was still there, looking like it was about to fall over. I swallowed hard.

  'This has gotta be some kind of messed-up prank. Like, a really eborate one.'

  But... a gun? And the dog tags? And these clothes? No way was this just a prank. No one I knew would do something like this. Or could do something like this.

  My mind, in a desperate attempt to make sense of this situation, fshed back to that creepy guy on the subway. His st words. "Enjoy your story."

  What the actual hell did that mean? Was he... responsible for this? It sounded like something out of the Alice novel I was reading. People getting pulled into weird worlds. Monsters. Crazy Rulers.

  'Okay, okay, don't go crazy yet. This isn't a novel. This is... this is reality. My reality. Which is currently terrifying and makes zero sense.'

  I cautiously reached back, my fingers brushing against the cold metal of the rifle again. It felt heavy. Real. Too real. I quickly pulled my hand away.

  'Don't touch the gun. Probably shouldn't touch the gun.'

  My gaze flickered back to the old shack. Maybe... maybe there was someone in there? Someone who could expin what was going on? Or at least tell me where the hell I was?

  My mind, usually lethargic and on auto pilot, screamed at me to run. Run far. Run fast. But where? I had no idea where I was, no phone, no map, no nothing. Running blind felt even more dangerous than staying put.

  Plus, the shack was the only sign of anything besides trees. Maybe it was worth checking out. Or maybe it was a trap.

  'Probably a trap. This feels like a trap.'

  Still, staying here felt like waiting for something bad to happen. And honestly, the suspense was killing me.

  Taking a deep breath, I slowly, cautiously, started walking towards the shack. Each step on the dirt path felt loud in the silence. The birds had even stopped chirping now. The atmosphere felt heavy. Like right before a storm.

  As I got closer, the shack looked even more in ruins. The wood was warped and splintered, and the roof looked like it was barely held together by moss. The windows were dark, either boarded up or just really dirty. There was a small, crooked door, hanging slightly open. It looked like it was about to fall off its hinges.

  I stopped a few feet away from the door, listening. Nothing. Just the wind rustling through the leaves and my own ragged breathing.

  "H-hello?"

  My voice cracked. Great. Good job, Alex.

  Silence. Still nothing.

  Okay. Now what? Do I just... walk in? That felt incredibly stupid. Like, "lead character in a horror movie walks into the obviously haunted house" stupid.

  But what other option did I have? Wait outside until something found me?

  Mentally preparing myself, I reached out a trembling hand and pushed the door open a little wider. The old hinges groaned in protest, looking like they're about to break.

  The inside was dark, dusty, not much to see at first gnce. Just a floor covered in dirt and leaves. I took a small step inside, taking a better look at the interior.

  Then, a sound.

  Click.

  It was small. Quiet. But in the absolute silence of the shack, it was loud. And it came from right behind the open door. A blind spot.

  My body froze. Every muscle locked up. My eyes, wide, snapped to the space just behind the door.

  A dark, circur shape. Metal.

  Bang!

  My st thought was a choked-off gasp before the world exploded in a fsh of blinding white light and deafening sound.

  Everything went bck.

  Pain. Not just pain, but a blinding, searing agony that ripped through my head. It felt like my skull had been shattered, then put back together. A screaming, raw pain that made my teeth grind together.

  And cold. So incredibly cold.

  I tried to move, to thrash, to curl into a ball, but I couldn't. My body felt like it was being held down by something immense, something heavy and formless.

  'What... what happened?'

  My thoughts were sluggish, swimming through the thick, painful fog in my head. I remembered the shack. The door. The click. The muzzle.

  'Shot.'

  The realization smmed into me, adding another yer to the agony. I got shot. In the head.

  'I'm dead. Right?'

  That's what happens when you get shot in the head. You die.

  But... this? This didn't feel like what I imagined death would feel like. This was... pain. And a feeling of being squeezed. And cold.

  Then, just as suddenly as it had started, the intense, blinding pain in my head began to recede. It faded, leaving behind a dull, throbbing ache. The feeling of being held down lessened, and the coldness started to lift.

  I gasped, sucking in a sharp breath of air. It still smelled like dirt and pine needles.

  My eyes snapped open.

  The trees. The dirt path. The old shack.

  The chirping.

  Everything was the same.

  My heart hammered against my ribs. My body felt... heavy. Stiff. I looked down at my hands. Rough fabric. Dull green.

  My boots. My pants. The rifle slung over my shoulder. The dog tags on my chest.

  It was all there. Everything.

  Panic pierced through the lingering ache in my head.

  'This can't be real.'

  My breath came in ragged gasps. This wasn't possible. This wasn't real.

  I remembered getting shot. I remembered the pain. I remembered thinking I was dead.

  But I wasn't dead. And I was back here. Exactly where I had started.

  When I try remembering the feeling of getting shot, a dull, phantom pain, pulsed inside my skull. My hand, trembling, went up to touch the spot where the bullet should have entered. Nothing. Just smooth skin, damp with sweat.

  It didn't make any sense. None of it.

  It was crazy. Absolutely, completely crazy. My mind, in a desperate attempt to protect itself from the overwhelming absurdity and horror, tched onto the only thing that even vaguely resembled an expnation.

  The novel I was just reading. My military clothes. Dying. Coming back. Loop. Eternal War. Peter Pan.

  'This... This is that. This is like that game in the novel.'

  A horrifying, impossible connection clicked into pce. I had died. But instead of the end, I was back. Like hitting restart. But real.

  The guy on the subway. He wasn't just some weirdo. He knew. He knew this would happen. "Get pulled in," he'd said.

  My mind, which had been wild and unfocused, suddenly sharpened. Him. The guy with the bck eyes. The one who knew my name. That gaze and smile.

  He sounded and looked like one of the characters in the novel, the devil Mephistopheles. And Mephistopheles... he was the one who made Peter Pan's world. The one who started it all.

  'He put me here.'

  The thought was so huge, so insane, it was almost unbelievable. But it was the only thing that made any sense of my situation.

  'Okay. Okay, so that happened. And then I got shot. And... came back. Just like Peter Pan.'

  It was the craziest thing ever. But it also meant... I wasn't necessarily stuck here forever. Like in the novel, if you pyed the "game" and survived until the ending, maybe... maybe you could get back to your own world. Right? the tale devils and Alice with the kids did it, sort of.

  My breathing was still shaky, but a different kind of energy was starting to course through me. Fear was still there. But under it... a sliver of that weird, adrenaline-fueled thrill that I always chased in horror games was starting to surface.

  'Okay. So, this is bad. Like, really bad. But also...'

  Weirdly... familiar. Like pying a difficult video game. You die, you learn, you try again. Except... this was real. And dying hurt like hell. I rubbed my forehead again, a phantom throb resonating through my skull.

  Okay, enough thinking for a minute. Too much thinking just made my head hurt more and the world feel more unreal. I had to figure out what to do now.

  I was still in the same spot. The trees. The dirt path. And the shack.

  The damn shack.

  My mind screamed at me to get away from it. But the other part, the part that was starting to look at this insane reality through the warped lens of video game logic, said...

  'Okay, so the shack is a trap. But... why? What's in there? Why was I put here?'

  In games, if you die in a trap, you analyze the trap. You find the weak point. You find the exploit. And you beat it.

  Maybe... maybe that was the same here. Getting shot hurt like hell, but I came back. So maybe... maybe I could handle finding out more.

  'Yeah. Let's do it. Let's check out the shack again.'

  It felt stupid. Incredibly, absurdly stupid. Like walking straight into a known trap. But the alternative was just... standing here. Waiting for something else to happen. And I couldn't do that. The suspense was worse than the fear of the trap itself.

  So, with another deep breath, I straightened up my unfamiliar military uniform, adjusted the heavy rifle on my shoulder (carefully, still didn't want to touch it much), and started walking back towards the shack. My legs felt stiff and heavy, my muscles sore and aching in a way they hadn't this morning. Maybe from dying? Or maybe these clothes were just uncomfortable.

  As I got closer to the shack, the eerie silence, heavy and suffocating, started for a second time. My footsteps on the dirt path felt loud, intrusive. Every fiber of my being screamed to turn and run, but a perverse fascination, a chilling curiosity that felt plucked right out of a horror movie script, made me keep walking towards the shack.

  'Okay. So, the shack. There's a reason someone doesn't want people going in there. Probably something bad. Real bad. Last time was just... bam! Straight to death. Not even a second to think.'

  My head throbbed again. This time, I wasn't walking straight to the front door like some idiot character in a tutorial level. I wasn't that stupid. Not anymore. Not after that.

  I stopped a good fifty feet away from the shack, likely outside the range of whoever is hiding inside. I needed to look. I needed to see why someone was hiding inside there. My current situation, being pced so close to the shack, there has to be a reason.

  My gaze swept across the crumbling shack, trying to spot anything, anything at all that wasn't just warped wood and mold. The front door, crooked on its hinges, offered a small peek of the interior. The windows on either side were too dark to see through, too much dirt and stains. One of them, the one on the right side, boarded up, had a bit of torn cloth near the edge. It looked like something had been scraped against it. Maybe?

  'Okay. So, I got shot. From inside. Right behind the opened door. They had to be waiting for me.'

  I cautiously circled around the shack, staying as far back as the edge of the overgrown grass would allow. My boots crunched faintly on dried leaves and twigs. The eerie silence made me sweat even more.

  Circling around the back, the shack looked even worse. Part of the roof was caved in, letting streaks of light filter into what I assumed was the back room. More broken, dirty windows. The wood here was completely rotten.

  My eyes darted around, trying to see through the gaps of rotten wood. Is there movement? A glint of metal? Someone's figure? Nothing. It was just... empty-looking.

  'But there is something hiding. Got shot by it. Hard to miss that.'

  Maybe I could get a better angle. I carefully moved closer, ducking down, using a thick clump of overgrown weeds as cover. My breathing hitched, listening, watching.

  From here, peering through the weeds, I could get a slightly better view of the dirty back windows. If something was inside, and it was trying to hide, the windows felt like the most obvious spots to watch out for.

  Minutes crawled by. It felt like hours. The silence pressed in. My muscles ached from tension. Still nothing. No sound, no movement, no sign of anything living inside.

  Or... maybe something that wasn't alive in the first pce.

  The thought made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Ghosts? Monsters? Like in the novel? Definitely not... from Peter Pan's memories, there was no mention of supernatural entities.

  It's definitely a human, then.

  Not a ghost or monster. Just some messed-up human waiting in that shack with a gun. The idea wasn't exactly comforting, but it was less... existentially terrifying than dealing with some supernatural abomination. Humans, even crazy ones with guns, felt like a problem I could maybe understand. Maybe.

  Still, they shot first.

  'Okay, human. What's your deal?'

  I lowered myself even more, using the weeds as cover, inching closer towards the side of the shack. The ground felt cold and hard against my knees, the unfamiliar uniform rough and scratchy.

  Focus. I had to focus. What could I see from the rotten gaps? What could I hear?

  Dust. And more dust. Strewn across the floor, visible in the sliver of light filtering through the crooked door and broken roof. Piles of dry leaves blown inside. Old, rotting wood. It smelled musty. Unpleasant.

  Maybe the person inside wasn't trying to hide at all. Maybe they were just... living there. Or staying there. And they really didn't want any visitors.

  But shooting? Just shooting? That seemed a bit extreme, even for a disgruntled tenant. Unless...

  'Unless they don't want anyone seeing them.'

  Maybe they looked... messed up? Some kind of disease? Or their identity was the problem in the first pce?

  My eyes scanned the dark interior through the crack in the wood, trying to find something, anything. A boot? A hand? Maybe the gun itself?

  There. In the far corner, opposite the door, huddled against the wall. A figure. Small. Wearing dark, yered clothing that looked old and dirty. Hard to make out details in the gloom. But... not an adult. Shorter. Thinner.

  'A kid?'

  The possibility felt both relief and a fresh wave of unease. A kid with a gun, hiding in a shack, shooting visitors? What kind of messed up situation was this?

  I slowly, painstakingly, shifted my position, trying to get a better view through the door. If it was a kid... why were they doing this? Were they alone? Were they being held hostage?

  My eyes adjusted further to the low light. The figure wasn't just small, it was... hunched over. Cradling something in its arms.

  The gun. It was cradling the rifle like a teddy bear.

  And then, as the light shifted slightly, I caught a better look at the face. Or what I could see of it. Filthy. Smears of dirt and what looked like... grease? Matted hair, pstered to the forehead with sweat. And big, wide, dark eyes staring out from the darkness. Staring right towards the door.

  But... something else was in their gaze too. Fear? No. More like... animalistic caution. Wary. And empty. Like nobody was home behind those wide pupils.

  It wasn't the face of a conscious killer. More like... someone operating purely on instinct. Or trauma.

  'This kid... something really bad happened to them.'

  My heart, which had been racing with fear, now felt a different kind of ache. This wasn't a monster. Not really. Just... a kid who was terrified, hiding with a gun.

  Maybe this kid was just lost and scared. And dangerous because of it.

  I held my breath, not daring to move. They hadn't reacted to me being so close to the shack, meaning they either hadn't seen me yet, or they were so focused on something else inside the shack, or on the door, they weren't registering anything else.

  If it was a kid... a small kid... maybe they weren't strong enough to keep me out if I really wanted to go in. But the gun... yeah, the gun changed things. And if they were scared and jumpy enough to just shoot anything that came near...

  I had to be careful. I didn't want to die again. Not yet. Dying hurt like hell.

  Okay. Pn. I needed a pn. I couldn't just walk in and announce myself. They shot st time. They'd probably shoot again. And maybe I wouldn't get so lucky coming back this time.

  But I couldn't leave them either. What was a kid doing out here alone? With a gun?

  My mind started spinning through possibilities. None of them good. But all of them pointing to one thing: this kid was in trouble. And whoever shot me st time... well, it was this kid. Huddled in the corner. With their finger ready for the trigger.

  I stayed still for a long time, watching, listening. The kid in the corner didn't move, didn't make a sound. Just kept cradling that rifle and staring at the door with those wide, empty eyes.

  Silence stretched on and on. The air felt thin. And I, hiding in the weeds, watching a scared kid with a gun in a ruined shack in the middle of nowhere, felt... utterly, completely alone. And more terrified than I had in my entire life.

  Chirriro