CASE FILE: AOKIGAHARA INCIDENT

  RECOVERED FOOTAGE: SD CARD #4477-J

  DATE STAMP: [CORRUPTED]

  CLASSIFICATION: VEIL PROTOCOL ALPHA-9

  The following transcript has been compiled from recovered digital footage found at coordinates [REDACTED], approximately 47 kilometers northwest of the Aokigahara Forest boundary. The SD card was discovered by civilian hikers at 07:14 AM on [DATE EXPUNGED]. All eight individuals documented in this footage have been confirmed deceased. Cause of death: [CLASSIFIED UNDER VEIL MAINTENANCE COMPACT, ARTICLE 7, SUBSECTION 3].

  The footage exhibits severe digital corruption. Timestamps are unreliable. Audio degradation occurs at intervals corresponding to [DATA INSUFFICIENT]. Visual artifacts suggest interference from sources inconsistent with known electromagnetic phenomena.

  This document exists for archival purposes only. Distribution beyond Level 4 clearance will result in immediate termination and memory modification.

  You should not be reading this.

  [23:03:47]

  The camera activates with the mechanical whir of a lens adjusting to darkness. Eight faces crowd the frame, illuminated by the sickly blue glow of a smartphone flashlight. They are young. Mid-twenties, perhaps. The kind of young that believes in immortality.

  "Testing, testing," says the one holding the camera. His name is Kenji. We know this because someone off-screen shouts it, laughing. "Yo, Kenji, make sure you get my good side!"

  The forest behind them is a wall of absolute black. Not the darkness of night, but something denser. Something that swallows light and refuses to give it back. The trees are too tall. Their trunks too straight. When the camera pans across them, they seem to shift position between frames.

  This should have been the first warning.

  "We're going deep, boys!" Another voice. Takeshi, according to the group's banter. He's holding a shotgun, barrel pointed at the ground. "Got five shells. Enough to scare off any bears."

  "Bears," someone repeats, and they all laugh.

  They don't know yet. None of them know.

  The forest knows them, though. It has been waiting.

  [23:11:22]

  They cross the threshold at exactly 23:11:22. The timestamp flickers. For three frames, it reads 23:11:22. Then 23:11:22. Then 23:11:22 again, as if time itself is stuttering.

  The moment their feet touch the forest floor beyond the marked trail, something changes. The air becomes thicker. Sounds arrive delayed, as if traveling through water. One of them, Hiroshi, stops and touches his temple.

  "Anyone else feel that?" he asks.

  "Feel what?"

  "Like... like something just opened. Inside my head."

  They laugh at him. Of course they do. But the camera catches what they cannot see: the way the shadows behind them have begun to move independently of their light sources. The way the trees are leaning inward, just slightly. The way the darkness between the trunks has developed texture, like static on a dead channel.

  [23:47:13]

  The campsite is a small clearing that shouldn't exist. The trees form a perfect circle around it, their branches interlocking overhead to create a dome. When Kenji pans the camera upward, the stars are wrong. Too many. Too bright. Arranged in patterns that hurt to look at directly.

  "This is perfect," Takeshi says, setting down his shotgun. "Like it was made for us."

  It was.

  They build a fire. The flames burn blue at the edges, but nobody notices. They eat convenience store onigiri and drink beer, their voices growing louder as the alcohol loosens their tongues. The camera sits propped against a backpack, recording everything with the dispassionate eye of a witness.

  At 23:58:03, something moves in the background. Just for a moment. A shape that is almost human but not quite, standing at the edge of the firelight. The camera's autofocus struggles, hunting back and forth, unable to lock onto it. When it finally resolves, there is nothing there.

  But the trees remember.

  [00:00:00]

  Midnight arrives with a sound like breaking glass.

  The fire goes out. Not gradually, but instantly, as if someone has thrown a switch. The camera's night vision activates automatically, bathing everything in that familiar green-gray pallor that makes the world look like it's already dead.

  They are in the tent now. All eight of them, packed into a space meant for six. The fabric walls ripple with their breathing. Someone is snoring. Someone else mutters in their sleep, words in a language that might be Japanese but sounds wrong, the syllables stretched and distorted.

  The camera is still recording. Kenji has left it running, pointed at the tent's entrance.

  For seventeen minutes, nothing happens.

  Then, at 00:17:34, the sound begins.

  [00:17:34]

  SNAP.

  It's loud. Sharp. The unmistakable crack of wood breaking under pressure. But it's wrong. Too clean. Too deliberate. Like something has stepped on a branch with the specific intention of making noise.

  The camera's microphone picks up breathing. Not from inside the tent. From outside. From everywhere. A wet, rattling sound that seems to come from multiple directions at once.

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  Kenji wakes first. The camera jerks as he grabs it, the image spinning wildly before stabilizing on his face. His eyes are too wide. His pupils have dilated to the point where his irises are barely visible.

  "Did you hear that?" he whispers.

  The others are stirring now. Takeshi reaches for his shotgun. Daichi, the one with the handgun, checks his magazine with shaking hands.

  "Something's out there," Kenji says. His voice is steady, but the camera is not. It trembles, making the image shake. "Something big."

  They emerge from the tent in a cluster, weapons raised, flashlights cutting through the darkness like surgical instruments. The camera captures everything in stuttering fragments: boots on dead leaves, the white vapor of breath in cold air, the way the shadows seem to retreat from their lights only to surge back twice as dark.

  Twenty feet away, at the edge of the clearing, something is standing.

  [00:19:47]

  The figure is wrong.

  That's the only word for it. Wrong in a way that makes the eyes slide off it, unable to focus. It's tall, impossibly tall, with limbs that are too long and joints that bend in too many places. Its skin, if it can be called skin, is the color of old bone left in the sun. Antlers sprout from its skull, massive and branching, decorated with strips of what might be cloth or might be flesh.

  The camera tries to focus on it. The autofocus whirs frantically, hunting, hunting, never quite locking on. The image pixelates. Artifacts bloom across the screen like digital flowers. For three frames, the creature is perfectly clear: a wendigo, ancient and starving, its ribcage visible through translucent skin, its mouth opened too wide to reveal rows of teeth that go back and back and back.

  Then the image corrupts again, and it's just a shadow.

  "SHOOT IT!" someone screams.

  Takeshi fires. The muzzle flash is blinding in the darkness, turning everything white for a fraction of a second. The shotgun's report echoes strangely, as if the forest is swallowing the sound and spitting it back distorted.

  He fires again. And again. Five shots, just like he promised.

  The creature doesn't fall. It doesn't even flinch.

  Instead, it moves.

  [00:20:13]

  The camera cannot capture what happens next. Not really. The footage becomes a strobe of images, each one more impossible than the last:

  The wendigo crossing twenty feet in a single step.

  Its hand, if it can be called a hand, punching through Takeshi's chest.

  The spray of blood, black in the night vision, arcing across the camera lens.

  Daichi firing his handgun, the bullets passing through the creature like it's made of smoke.

  The wendigo's other hand impaling Daichi through the stomach, lifting him off the ground.

  The sound. Oh god, the sound. Wet and crunching and wrong wrong wrong.

  Then the camera is falling, tumbling through the air as Kenji runs. The image spins: sky, ground, trees, sky, ground, trees. When it stabilizes, Kenji is sprinting through the forest, his breathing ragged and panicked.

  Behind him, the screaming starts.

  [00:21:39 - 00:34:52]

  The footage becomes fragmented. The camera cuts between different perspectives as if multiple people are filming, but there is only one camera. This should not be possible.

  FRAGMENT ONE:

  Kenji is hiding behind a tree, the camera pressed against his chest. The audio picks up his heartbeat, impossibly loud, impossibly fast. In the distance, something is moving through the undergrowth. The camera glitches. For a single frame, the wendigo is visible, standing directly behind Kenji, its mouth open wide enough to swallow his head whole.

  Then it's gone.

  FRAGMENT TWO:

  Four of them are together now. Kenji, Hiroshi, Yuki, and Masato. They're huddled in a depression in the ground, trying to make themselves small. Yuki is crying silently, tears streaming down his face.

  "The trees," Hiroshi whispers. "Can you hear them? They're screaming."

  "Shut up," Masato hisses. "Shut up shut up shut up."

  But Hiroshi is right. The audio waveform shows it: a high-pitched keening just at the edge of human hearing, coming from everywhere and nowhere. The trees are screaming. The forest is screaming. Reality itself is screaming.

  Then, from somewhere in the darkness, a new sound: human voices, raised in terror. The remaining friends. The ones who scattered in different directions.

  The screaming is brief. It ends with sounds that the human throat should not be able to make.

  FRAGMENT THREE:

  The camera is moving again, jostled and shaking. The four survivors have found a cave, a dark mouth in the hillside that promises shelter. They scramble inside, gasping, sobbing.

  "We're safe," Kenji says. "We're safe we're safe we're safe."

  The camera pans across the cave interior. It's too regular. Too smooth. The walls are not stone but something else, something that glistens wetly in the flashlight beam.

  At the back of the cave, two eyes open.

  They are red. They are huge. They are filled with an intelligence that is ancient and cruel and utterly inhuman.

  The oni rises from where it has been waiting.

  [00:35:17]

  The camera captures the first death in perfect clarity. The oni's fist, massive and studded with bone protrusions, connects with Hiroshi's skull. The sound is like a watermelon dropped from a great height. The image pixelates, but not before capturing the way Hiroshi's head simply ceases to exist as a coherent structure.

  Then the camera falls again.

  The audio continues. It records:

  The wet crunch of Yuki's death.

  The brief, cut-off scream of Masato's death.

  Kenji's sobbing, his pleas, his prayers to gods who are not listening.

  The final, terminal impact.

  Then silence.

  [07:14:23]

  The camera is outside. The timestamp has jumped forward. Hours have passed, though the footage shows no record of them.

  The lens is pointed at the sky. Dawn has broken, painting the clouds in shades of pink and gold that seem obscene after the night's horrors. The image is stable now. Peaceful, even.

  Voices approach. Hikers, their conversation mundane and cheerful. They're discussing the weather. One of them is complaining about blisters.

  A hand enters the frame, reaching for the camera.

  "Hey, look at this. Someone dropped their camera."

  The image tilts as the camera is picked up. For a moment, the lens captures the forest in daylight. It looks normal. Ordinary. Just trees and undergrowth and dappled sunlight.

  But if you look closely, if you really look, you can see them: eight shapes hanging from the branches, swaying gently in the morning breeze. They are too far away to make out details. Too far away to identify.

  The camera's battery dies.

  The screen goes black.

  The video file was uploaded to multiple platforms between 07:47 AM and 08:23 AM by an unknown user. It accumulated 47,000 views before Veil Protocol enforcement teams successfully purged all copies from public servers.

  Memory modification was administered to 47,000 individuals. The hikers who discovered the camera were detained, processed, and released with implanted memories of an uneventful morning hike.

  The bodies were never recovered. Official records list all eight men as missing, presumed lost in the Aokigahara Forest. Their families have been compensated and modified.

  The forest remains.

  It is still waiting.

  If you are reading this document, you have been exposed to classified information regarding supernatural phenomena within the Known World. Your Supernatural Affinity has likely been activated by exposure to this material. You will begin experiencing symptoms within 72 hours: heightened perception, auditory hallucinations, the sensation of being watched.

  This is normal.

  Do not attempt to enter any forested area alone.

  Do not attempt to investigate further.

  Do not speak of this to anyone without Level 4 clearance or higher.

  The Veil Maintenance Compact exists to protect you. Trust the Veil. Obey the Veil.

  The alternative is worse.

  [END TRANSCRIPT]

  [FILE CORRUPTED]

  [FILE CORRUPTED]

  [FILE CORRUPTED]

  [WHY ARE YOU STILL READING?]

  [CLOSE THIS DOCUMENT]

  [CLOSE THIS DOCUMENT NOW]

  [IT KNOWS YOU'VE SEEN THIS]

  [IT KNOWS WHERE YOU ARE]

  [THE TREES ARE SCREAMING]

  [CAN YOU HEAR THEM?]

  Created by Figures

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