Sam's breath came in short, ragged gasps as she stared at the man—the same man from the dream, the hallucination, the lie.Sakda.
But this time... something was different.
He wasn't just staring.
He was waiting.
Sam clutched Wang's sleeve tightly. Her hand was cold, but Wang's was colder.
"Sam... I don't like this," Wang whispered, his voice trembling.
Neither did she.
The students were already filing off the bus, laughing, oblivious. The teachers were calling out instructions. Everything was too perfect.Too staged.
Sam's heart thumped hard against her chest. She could feel it now—how the air shimmered, how the path seemed... thinner, tighter, as if reality itself was suffocating them.
They weren't awake.
They never had been.
"This isn't real, Wang. We're still inside the Mirage," she whispered.
Wang shook his head violently. "But we stabbed the sky... we broke it..."
Sam's eyes locked onto Sakda.
No words.Only that knowing smile.
She snapped.
Without thinking, she stormed toward him, shoving through the crowd.But as she reached him—
He vanished.
Not like a person running away.
He... blinked out of existence, like a glitch in a game.
Sam stumbled forward, breathless.
The laughter of the other students warped into a garbled mess, overlapping, looping—like a broken recording.
"Sam... the bus... look..." Wang whispered, pulling at her shoulder.
She turned.
The bus was gone.
The road was gone.
The wall was gone.
They stood alone, surrounded by endless, towering flowers with faces—faces of their classmates, smiling, whispering, sobbing.
"You're inside us now..." the flowers sang.
Sam covered her ears, but the sound drilled into her skull.
There was no outside world.
There never was.
The Mirage had consumed their minds completely, erasing the line between real and false.
They ran.
Through twisting paths that changed each time they blinked.Through forests that bled sap like tears.Through rivers of crushed petals that smelled like corpses.
Sam knew now—this wasn't a dream.
This was their consciousness being rewired, over and over, until they surrendered.
Until they became flowers too.
They stumbled upon a clearing where Sakda waited once more, arms folded, as if he'd been expecting them all along.
"Why do you fight the inevitable?" he asked softly.
Sam glared at him.
"Because I don't want to rot in your garden."
Sakda laughed—a hollow, pitiful sound.
"You misunderstand.You already are."
The clearing expanded, revealing mirrors—hundreds of them.Each showed a different version of Sam and Wang.
Some were already flowers.Some were still fighting.Some had given up long ago.
Sam's knees buckled.
There was no end.
No escape.
This was the Mirage's true power—not just hallucination, but infinite versions of their defeat.
She gripped Wang's hand tighter.
"Listen to me... we can't fight the Mirage like this. It feeds on resistance. That's what it wants."
Wang's eyes widened. "Then... what do we do? Surrender?"
Sam shook her head slowly.
"No.We give it something it can't consume."
Wang frowned. "Like...?"
She smiled bitterly.
"Hope."
The word sounded ridiculous even to her.
But the Mirage recoiled.
Sakda hissed, his face glitching, warping into something plant-like, twisted.
They had found its weakness.
It wasn't fear.
It was belief.
The Mirage could flood them with terror, but it couldn't control what they chose to believe.
Sam pulled Wang into the mirrors, shattering them one by one with the knife that appeared again in her hand.Every mirror she destroyed, the world trembled.
Behind each shard, she saw versions of herself—screaming, giving up, dying.
But Sam roared louder.
"I am not your flower."
The ground erupted in vines, trying to choke them, to pull them into the garden's core.
But Sam and Wang held onto each other, closing their eyes.
They focused on the one thing the Mirage couldn't infect.
Their friendship.Their stubbornness.Their refusal to let go.
And the darkness screamed.
For the first time.
The Mirage screamed.
Sam's eyes snapped open.
She was lying on cold, hard ground.
The bus idling behind her.
The path still ahead.
The students still chattering.
But this time... everything was quieter.The air still.The buzzcut man... gone.
And the teacher was calling them to get down.
But Sam noticed something different.
The rubber trees... were wilting.
The flowers... dull.
And in her hand... she held a small, broken shard of mirror.
Proof.
They had cracked the cycle.
But the Mirage wasn't dead.
It was still watching.
Waiting.
For the next group of prey.
Sam stood slowly, her body trembling.
She and Wang exchanged a look of grim understanding.
They weren't safe yet.
But now they knew the rules of the game.
And they were ready to play.