"Oh man… tell me this isn't what I think it is. A Wick game!?"
Nasrul's voice cracked the night. He bolted upright so suddenly that heads turned and the thin ring of firelight trembled with movement. For a second the clearing fell into a curious, alarmed hush as everyone looked their way.
Zaki grabbed Nasrul's forearm and hauled him down before anyone could get too nosy. He kept his voice low and sharp. "Sit. Don't cause a scene."
Nasrul's cheeks went flush. "Ah—sorry, sorry. Force of habit." He forced a sheepish laugh and sank back to the dirt, fingers worrying his shoe lace until it was even more untidy than before.
When the neighboring gazes slid away, Zaki leaned closer. "What made you shout? You look like you saw a ghost." He nodded toward Nasrul's wrist where the watch's glow had dimmed to a steady, faint pulse.
"It's what the watch says," Nasrul whispered. He swallowed and tried to steady his voice. "Wick. It—it's the name of a horror game. Popular one. People stream it, people scream over it. It's not just jump scares. It's… ritual stuff."
Zaki frowned. "So somebody kidnapped us and forced us into a YouTube creepypasta? Great. That explains nothing."
Nasrul didn't smile. "It's not that simple. Wick is about people who play a deadly ritual game in the forest. The story goes that the protagonist is blindfolded, carried into the woods by friends, handed a candle and some matches, and then abandoned. He has to survive until dawn."
"Dawn?" Zaki glanced at his own watch again. "This says our objective is until four a.m. I thought Wick ended at six."
"In the original story—yeah, the worst versions run until six," Nasrul said. He rubbed his temple, as if the remembered images were rubbing at his skull. "But most retellings break out into two endings. One is rescue: someone calls the police and the main guy is pulled out alive—traumatized, but alive. The other… no one finds the body. He's just gone. Both endings leave you with a wreck."
Zaki let out a breath that might have been a laugh if he wasn't trying so hard to be calm. "So either we get saved or we're food for whatever lurks here. Lovely options."
"Yeah," Nasrul muttered. "If this truly is a Wick scenario, logic doesn't do much. Horror that deals with ghosts—if it's real here—doesn't operate on cause and effect like our world. The rules get… flexible. Shapes change. Things pass through matter. Wards and talismans sometimes work, but even those depend on the right words, pronunciation, rites—everything has to be exact. One mistake and you make it worse."
He swallowed. The paper on the tree—old, brittle, with letters that had been nailed to the bark—crept back into his head. Stay in the light. He'd read it aloud earlier, and its simplicity had felt like a threat rather than a guideline.
A wind picked up then, carrying a cold that tasted like iron. The fire guttered and snapped; a few people muttered. Someone pointed, voice trembling, "Was that paper there before?"
Between two trunks, two yellowed sheets were nailed like banners. A man moved forward and peeled one free. He read aloud without expression, "Stay in the light."
The phrase hung in the air, heavy and uselessly small.
Nasrul's nose burned. The paper looked old—handmade, fibrous, like something from another era. A detail like that should have been irrelevant, but it anchored him: this wasn't a casual prank with printed flyers. Whoever or whatever set this up had tried to reproduce the aesthetic of the old Wick stories down to the smallest detail.
If it's staged by people, we can think. If it's the real thing… hope is thin.
He dug in his jacket more out of habit than hope and found a small matchbox, exactly as the mission notes had promised. Three matches. The relief that came with that tiny find was ridiculous—like being given a piece of bread in a storm.
"Hey—does everyone have these watches?" Nasrul called, standing up a little to be heard. "Tap the screen. See what it says!"
At first hands fumbled at wrists in confusion. Then one by one people tapped. When the glow flared, a few screamed, some swore, most simply stared, pale under the candlelight.
"What is this? How—how is this possible?" a woman cried. A man whispered, "Is this tech? Military?"
Another voice, younger, tried to choke back humor that didn't fit. "If this were a novel, we'd tap and get some crazy HUD explaining our objectives. Guess what—we did, and now we're the protagonists."
Laughter cracked somewhere amid the fear—short and brittle. It didn't soothe anybody.
Zaki and Nasrul exchanged a look. Around them people began to cluster, trading snippets of half-remembered ghost stories and game lore. A student remembered a web forum thread about "Wick rituals gone wrong"; an older man muttered about local superstitions. Over and over the same facts returned: candle, matches, stay in the light, survive until dawn.
Small practicalities surfaced. Several people checked their pockets and found the allotted matchboxes as well. Others hunted for anything they could use as fuel or shelter. One woman immediately closed her eyes and began to chant something under her breath in a language Nasrul didn't recognize—perhaps a prayer or an old ward. It made two nearby men step away like they'd been splashed.
The group's energy shifted then from stunned to active. Fear had teeth, but it also made people move. Someone suggested building a ring of light, collecting candles together; another argued they should split up to search for exits. Voices rose and defended positions until Zaki held up a hand and called for rationality: "We don't know if there's time. We have matches—three each. We hold the fire, we keep close. We look for signs of the burned house the watch mentioned."
"Discovery quest," a young guy muttered, half in jest, half in horror. "First to find the burned house gets a thousand points…like points matter when you're dead."
Points. The mission's absurd, gamified wording clung to the edges of horror in a way that felt obscene and distant. But it also offered structure—rules, however perverse—and sometimes rules could be exploited.
Nasrul turned his palm so Zaki could see the matchbox. "Three matches. Use them wisely. We'll hold a candle through the next hour and—" he hesitated, thinking of the watch's note about the hour change "—if the rules mean anything, the candle has to be held when the hour flips."
Outside the ring of light, the trees crouched like silent watchers. The forest seemed to lean closer, as if listening to their whispered plans. Somewhere far off, an animal howled—whether panic or predator, Nasrul couldn't tell.
He looked at the faces around the fire—scared, angry, ridiculous in their ordinary clothes. For a moment he envied those who'd never clicked yes, who were still on a couch miles away reading manga and counting down to sleep. Then he focused on what he could control: matches, candles, company.
"Stay in the light," someone repeated. The phrase had become less slogan and more strategy.
In the glow of trembling flames, the group made their way to see which candles they could spare, who could be trusted, and which entrances to the clearing were watchable. Fear had arrived, but with it came stubbornness—human, small, and stubborn enough to want to try.
They were only at the start. The mission's clock waited for no one.