His voice was trembling so badly it fractured into a dozen different pitches as he swung his bare legs out of bed.

The silence swallowed his voice entirely... offering absolutely no echo.

He slowly pushed himself up.

Klaus was still wearing his slightly oversized high school uniform, the collar unbuttoned as the fabric was wrinkled somehow.

He walked out of his bedroom and stepped into the dark hallway.

The floorboards were freezing cold under his bare feet, the wood groaning loudly under his weight.

It wasn’t the familiar settling creak of an old family home... It sounded like the straining of a coffin lid under the weight of wet earth...

The Second King wasn’t playing the "happy family" script anymore.

The parasite had realized that the host’s resolve was changing.

It had sensed the fragile, desperate bargain struck in the void between the two halves of Klaus’s soul, and it had fundamentally altered the parameters of the simulation to inflict maximum psychological devastation.

The honey trap had failed. The illusions of warm hugs and hot breakfasts were gone, so the god was bringing out the torture rack.

Klaus crept down the hallway, pressing his shoulder against the cold wallpaper.

The floral pattern under his fingers felt slightly damp, slick with blood that shouldn’t be there.

His heart hammered a terrified beat against his ribs and the pulse thumped in his ears, completely drowning out his own shallow breathing.

Every creak of the floorboards sounded like a snapping bone in the silence.

He rounded the corner leading to the living room with his fingers gripping the doorframe so tightly his knuckles ached.

The room wasn’t completely dark.

It was bathed in the harsh sickly blue glow of the television set resting on the entertainment center.

The volume was entirely muted, but the screen was fully active, illuminating the empty, silent living room in a ghostly light that cast long, unnatural, elongated shadows against the walls.

The shadows seemed to twist and reach for him, mocking his hesitation.

"Wh-what the hell is this..."

Klaus walked slowly toward the television.

The noxious chemical smell of industrial bleach and rotting blood grew exponentially stronger with every single step.

It was an aggressive assault on his olfactory senses, burning his eyes until thick hot tears leaked down his cheeks and searing the back of his throat with every inhalation.

He felt his head throb... like he was running insane.

Klaus stood directly in front of the screen with the blue light painting his pale, terrified face.

It was playing a local breaking news broadcast.

The bright, harsh red ticker tape scrolled endlessly along the bottom of the screen, flashing the words in bold, unapologetic block letters that burned themselves into his retinas:

[BREAKING NEWS - TRAGIC DISCOVERY IN DOWNTOWN.]

Klaus stared at the screen as his pupils shrank to tiny pinpricks.

The breath completely, utterly vanished from his lungs, as if a massive, invisible fist had just reached through his ribs and violently crushed his chest cavity.

The camera angle on the television was pointed upward, illuminating the massive, imposing concrete base of the Star Tower Building... the tallest, most iconic, monolithic skyscraper in the absolute center of their city.

The heavy floodlights from the news crews, fire trucks, and police cruisers painted the dark, brutalist concrete in harsh washed-out light.

The flashing red and blue sirens painted the scene in a strobe of panic.

Hanging from the thick, exposed steel girders of the second-story observation deck, swaying gently, rhythmically back and forth in the cold howling wind, were three heavy, braided industrial ropes.

And hanging by their necks at the end of those ropes were three figures.

It was his mother...

It was his father...

It was Melanie...

The high-definition camera did not cut away to the newscaster.

It did not blur the imagery out of respect for the deceased. The simulation zoomed in relentlessly, sadistically, refusing to spare him a single gruesome, agonizing detail. It forced him to look.

Their faces were horrific.

The lack of oxygen and the violent, sudden snapping of their cervical vertebrae had caused massive amounts of blood to pool entirely in their heads.

Their skin was a sickly, swollen, bruised, terrifying shade of mottled purple and black, the flesh distended and completely devoid of humanity.

Their eyes were bulging massively from their sockets, completely bloodshot as the delicate capillaries burst and leaked dark red tears, staring blindly and accusingly out into the sky.

Their tongues, swollen and dark, hung limply from their open, slack, ruined mouths.

The news anchor’s face appeared in a small picture-in-picture box in the corner of the screen.

His expression was a mask of practiced, grim solemnity as the subtitle flashed beneath him in stark white letters:

[FAMILY AND GIRLFRIEND OF LOCAL TEEN FOUND HANGED - POLICE SUSPECT MASS SUICIDE DUE TO OVERWHELMING GRIEF.]

"No..." Regret Klaus whispered with the word barely managing to scrape past his vocal cords.

His legs completely, totally gave out.

He collapsed onto the living room carpet, his knees hitting the floor with an unceremonious thud as the soft fibers of the rug offered no comfort.

The descent into madness did not happen in a single clean snap.

It wasn’t an instant flip of a switch... It was a slow unraveling of his entire psychological foundation.

It was the sensation of a thousand individual threads of sanity snapping one by one under impossible tension.

First came the denial...

"It’s a glitch," Klaus mumbled frantically, shaking his head side to side in short, erratic jerks.

His breathing escalated into a rapid shallow hyperventilation with his chest heaving as if he had just run a marathon. "It’s just a glitch... The code is breaking... It’s not real... They’re upstairs... They’re just sleeping... Mom is in her room... Dad is reading."

He tried to stand up, to run up the stairs and throw their bedroom doors open to prove himself right, but his motor functions completely failed.

His body was violently rejecting his commands, paralyzed by the sheer magnitude of the visual trauma then came the physical sickness.

The overwhelming visual trauma, combined with the putrid suffocating smell of the chemicals in the air, caused his stomach to violently contract.

Klaus hunched forward on all fours, his fingers digging into the carpet, and vomited violently onto the living room floor.

He gagged and heaved, his body trying to expel the horror, until there was nothing left in his stomach but burning, acidic, yellow bile.

He spat the bitter residue onto the floor, strings of saliva hanging from his lips then, the true horror of the simulation’s narrative locked into place, sliding like a cold dagger directly into his heart.

The Second King hadn’t just killed them... The simulation had specifically, meticulously framed it as a suicide.

The god was telling him, in the most brutal calculated way possible, that even in a fake world where they survived the original accidents... the crushing burden of Klaus’s existence had driven them to hang themselves.

The parasite was whispering the ultimate, darkest fear that Klaus had harbored his entire life, broadcasting it on high-definition television: You are a cancer.

Even when you save them, your existence is so miserable, so suffocating, so utterly devoid of light, that they would rather climb a tower and snap their own necks than live in a world with you.

Klaus stared at the swollen purple face of his mother swaying gently on the screen.

The rope creaked audibly in his mind as he stared at the broken, twisted neck of his father with the grease stains still visible on his hands.

He stared at the lifeless dangling body of Melanie, her perfectly pressed school uniform blowing in the simulated wind.

He didn’t cry...

The tears completely stopped as the well simply ran dry.

The psychological damage inflicted upon him was so catastrophic that it completely bypassed the human capacity for sorrow or grief.

The mental fuses in his brain that processed sadness, logic, empathy, and fear simply overloaded and violently blew out in a shower of neurological sparks...

’I...’

The naive heartbroken teenager who had sat in the white void and begged for a chance to say goodbye was instantly, permanently eradicated.

That boy died on the living room carpet, drowned in his own bile and unprocessable trauma.

CRASH!

The television screen violently exploded.

A shower of jagged glass, bright orange sparks, and acrid electrical smoke rained down onto the living room carpet, scattering over Klaus’s bare hands.

The harsh blue light vanished entirely, plunging the room into near-total, suffocating darkness, illuminated only by the faint, pale moonlight filtering through the window.

From the smoking, shattered ruins of the television set, a voice echoed.

"You can find me at the top of the Star Tower," the God mocked.

The voice dripped with sadistic amusement, relishing the absolute, flawless destruction of the mortal’s mind. "If you want revenge."

The silence returned. The only sound was the harsh wet rasp of Klaus’s breathing in the dark.

Klaus remained kneeling on the carpet, his hands resting directly on the sharp edges of the shattered glass, for exactly five seconds.

He didn’t feel the glass cutting into his palms... then, his mind violently surrendered to the madness.

The trauma, the betrayal, the gruesome, indelible sight of his hanging family, and the sheer cruelty of the parasitic god fused together inside his teenage brain...

They collapsed inward, forming a singularity of pure psychotic rage.

He ceased to be a high school student. He ceased to be a rational human being capable of complex thought or self-preservation.

He became a cornered, rabid, feral animal completely, totally consumed by the singular, burning need to butcher a god.

Klaus slowly stood up...

He didn’t say a word.

He didn’t scream or cry out in agony.

His face was completely slack with his jaw hanging slightly open... They were the eyes of a corpse that was still walking.

He didn’t put on his shoes as he turned around and walked mechanically into the dark kitchen.

Klaus opened the heavy wooden drawer near the stove. The metal rollers shrieked loudly in the silence, a harsh, grating sound. He bypassed the butter knives, the spatulas, and the standard utensils.

His bare hand wrapped around the thick, black, textured rubber handle of an eight-inch, heavy-duty steel butcher knife.

He pulled it out.

The heavy metal blade gleamed faintly, catching the pale moonlight filtering through the kitchen window as the weight of it felt perfect in his numb hand.

Klaus turned on his heel and he walked down the hallway, ignoring the front door completely.

He walked straight toward the large, plate-glass window in the living room.

CRASH!

Klaus didn’t open the window... He walked directly through it.

The heavy pane of glass shattered around him with huge jagged shards tearing long, bloody gashes into his forearms, his shoulders, and his cheeks.

He didn’t feel the pain.

Klaus stepped out onto the front lawn, the cold, biting night air hitting his bleeding face.

He raised the butcher knife, gripping the handle so tightly his knuckles turned a bloodless white with his tendons straining against the skin and then, he ran.

Klaus didn’t pace himself.

He didn’t jog to conserve energy as he didn’t care about his stamina, his lung capacity, or the fact that he was entirely unathletic and hadn’t exercised in years.

He sprinted down the dark deserted suburban streets in his bare feet.

His high school uniform clung tightly to his sweating chest with the fabric quickly staining with the blood leaking from his glass cuts.

His bare soles slapped violently against the cold asphalt.

Stray pebbles, jagged rocks, and broken glass littering the gutters tore deeply into the tender flesh of his feet, slicing the soft pads of his toes and heels to ribbons.

He left a continuous, trailing path of wet, bloody footprints in his wake with every single step, marking his path of vengeance.

The Star Tower Building was three miles away, located in the absolute center of the downtown district...

He ran the entire distance at a dead lung-bursting sprint.

His chest burned as if he were inhaling shattered glass and his vision tunneled but his legs kept churning, fueled by an endless reservoir of pure psychotic adrenaline.

He breached the downtown district.

The neon lights of the city flickered, illuminating the empty streets. There were no cars and there were no pedestrians as the trial had cleared the stage.

Klaus skidded to a halt at the base of the massive concrete plaza surrounding the Star Tower.

The area was cordoned off with bright yellow police tape, though there were no police officers in sight.

The massive, harsh white floodlights pointed upward, illuminating the concrete pillars of the building.

Klaus stumbled forward, his bloody feet slipping slightly on the smooth concrete of the plaza.

He looked up.

There, suspended from the thick steel girders extending from the second-story observation deck, barely thirty feet above his head, were the three bodies.

The ropes groaned softly in the wind as the smell of decay was overpowering here.

Klaus walked directly underneath them. He looked up at the bottoms of his father’s greasy work boots. He looked up at his mother’s dangling slippers. He looked at Melanie’s scuffed school shoes.

His mouth opened in a silent wail.

He dropped into a crouch and leaped upward, stretching his left arm out as high as it could possibly go.

His bloody fingers swiped through the empty air, grasping at nothing... He missed the soles of his mother’s shoes by at least fifteen feet...

He landed hard on his bare feet with his knees buckling as he scrambled back up.

He jumped again... and again... and again.

It was a pathetic agonizing display of complete futility.

A broken, bleeding teenager leaping into the air over and over again, desperately trying to touch the feet of his hanging family, knowing it was impossible, but unable to stop himself.

He jumped until his leg muscles screamed, until the blood from his torn soles smeared across the pristine concrete plaza.

He couldn’t reach them... He couldn’t cut them down... They were out of his reach...

They had always been out of his reach.

A thick drop of dark, coagulated blood fell from his father’s swollen foot, landing perfectly in the center of Klaus’s cheek.

Klaus slowly lowered his arm. He stood perfectly still, looking up at the bodies for one long agonizing minute.

The final thread of humanity snapped, severing him from anything resembling reason.

He turned away from the hanging bodies. He looked at the massive, reinforced glass double doors leading into the lobby of the Star Tower.

He walked forward, raised the butcher knife, and smashed the pommel through the glass, kicking the remaining shards out of his way.

He stepped into the sprawling empty marble lobby as he bypassed the sleek silver elevators entirely.

A god wouldn’t wait in an elevator...

He found the heavy steel door marked STAIRWELL.

Klaus pushed it open and the air inside the concrete shaft was stale.

One hundred and twenty floors.

He took the first step as the blood from his feet left a perfect crimson print on the gray concrete.

He didn’t mutter about killing the god since that was too sane.

Instead, Klaus began to laugh.

It started as a low, wet, ragged wheeze in the back of his throat, bubbling up through the phlegm and blood.

As he climbed, taking the steps two at a time, the laugh grew louder.

It became a harsh unhinged cackle that echoed up and down the massive concrete shaft, bouncing off the walls like the shrieks of a damned soul.

With every single step, his shattered mind painted a vivid horrifically detailed masterpiece of exactly what he was going to do when he reached the top.

He visualized the Second King.

He visualized driving the heavy steel blade of the butcher knife directly through the god’s pristine right eye...

He imagined the sickening pop of the eyeball bursting...

He imagined grabbing that elegant, flowing hair, wrapping it around his bloody fist, and slowly, meticulously peeling the skin from the god’s skull...

He visualized sawing through the god’s collarbone, listening to the divine being scream and beg for mercy as Klaus hacked him to pieces, taking his time, making the pain last for an eternity...

The psychotic visions fueled his ruined body.

"Hah... hahaha... HAHAHAHA!"

The manic laughter filled the stairwell.

By the fortieth floor, his kneecaps were bleeding from where he had stumbled and slammed them against the sharp concrete edges. His lungs felt as though they were filled with boiling acid.

By the eightieth floor, his bare feet were entirely raw with the skin flayed down to the muscle, leaving thick smears of gore on every single step.

He was using his free hand to grip the metal railing, hauling his dead weight upward with his fingernails cracking and bleeding against the cold steel.

By the hundred and tenth floor, he wasn’t running anymore. He was a crawling, broken, bleeding monstrosity, dragging himself up the final flights by concentration.

His vision was a swimming blur of gray and red as he reached the one hundred and twentieth floor.

The heavy, reinforced steel door labeled ROOF ACCESS loomed above him.

Klaus forced himself onto his ruined trembling feet. His uniform was soaked in sweat and blood as his face was a mask of feral grinning madness.

He raised his bloody right foot and kicked the push-bar with everything he had left.

CLANG!

The heavy steel door flew open, slamming against the outer wall. The cold high-altitude wind rushed into the stairwell, whipping his dark hair across his face.

Klaus stepped out onto the sprawling, flat concrete expanse of the skyscraper’s roof.

Standing at the very edge of the roof, his back turned to Klaus as he casually looked out over the sprawling, glowing city below, was a single figure.

He was a man of unparalleled beauty. He wore an elegant, perfectly tailored white suit that seemed to repel the dirt and grime of the world.

His hair was a brilliant, flowing silver that caught the moonlight, and his posture radiated an aura of untouchable divine authority.

It was the Second King...

Hearing the door open, the god slowly turned around.

The Second King looked at the pathetic, bleeding, feral teenager standing in the doorway.

He looked at the butcher knife gripped in the boy’s shaking hand as a slow, wide, incredibly arrogant, sadistic grin spread across the god’s flawless face.

The god didn’t draw a weapon as he simply opened his arms slightly, welcoming the slaughter.

"HEHEHEHE!" Klaus screamed as he charged.

He threw his broken body across the concrete roof, raising the heavy butcher knife high above his head.

He aimed directly for the god’s beautiful, smiling face, putting the entire, combined weight of his momentum, his madness, and his grief behind the downward swing.

The blade came down in a lethal, flashing arc however the Second King simply raised his right hand.

CLINK!