As the voice said, the phrase “0,” the stopwatch sounded, and a horrid sound emerged from the cafeteria.

The sounds of dozens of students yelling bloody murder, and the traumatic scene of several students being beheaded or skewered in the heart or possibly stabbed dozens of times, surfaced through my mind.

Every single one of those poor souls was mercilessly and brutally killed by the voice that had counted down from 10 to 0. There was blood and guts all over the walls and floors of the cafeteria, intestines engraved on the square patterned floors that were once white like shining paint, and now nothing more than a disgusting combination of the colors on a painter’s canvas.

The walls were stained a horrifying red color with streaks of black. The corpses were left on the floor, lifeless. I couldn’t imagine the anguish and pain that the families of the students would feel when they learned of their deaths. Maybe they would even commit suicide to relieve themselves of this pain, or maybe they would have to live with this for the rest of their miserable lives.

Even with all of these monstrosities happening to these students, I felt nothing—no pain nor regret for pushing them on the way to death. I just felt happy that I was still alive.

I was selfish.

After this traumatic experience with life and death, I decided to run home to see my family; to make myself feel better. I ran in the hallways without a hint of exhaustion while I bolted out of the entrance of the school and as I ran to the street that I live on.

I was getting closer to home, maybe only half a mile away.

As I ran closer to home, I started to think about how a tragedy like this could happen at a heavily protected place like a school, but I soon would find out.

As I got onto the block my family lives on, I started to get extremely anxious and scared that somehow something had happened to them and that I would be too late. “What am I saying? It’ll all be fine.” “Once I get home, I’ll be in the comfort of my family, and I can freely express myself to them and receive help,” I told myself this to keep me sane.

As I started to run out of breath after running for nearly an hour, I was at my house.

I knocked on the front door, happy to escape this nightmare, and said, “ I’m home, Mom!”

After about 10 seconds, nobody answered. I was starting to get nervous that she could be in danger or worse.

I got my key out of my pocket and put it in the keyhole. Once the door indicated that it was unlocked, I grabbed the door handle and went inside.

Inside the house, it was quiet, too quiet. While I was walking through the hallway to the kitchen, I started to call out for someone. “Hey, anyone home!” I asked nervously.

Again it was silent.

I kept walking through the kitchen, to the dining, and eventually to the bedrooms.

I was on my way to my mother's bedroom when all of a sudden, I heard a loud shriek coming from the basement.

I had never thought to look there because mother never goes down there, and father is too busy with work to go down to that dusty area.

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Scared as to what I had just heard, I grabbed a flashlight and started to go down the stairs to the basement.

Each step that I took grew gradually but nonchalantly louder and more anxiety-inducing.

Once I finally got to the bottom step and stepped on the wooden floor, I felt somewhat at ease, but at the same time, I felt like my heart was going to pop out of my chest.

I started to look around my surroundings, and to my surprise, it was pretty clean down there, even though it was hardly used and probably had never been cleaned.

I started to think that I was hearing things from upstairs and was just starting to hear things because of my mental state.

This may have some merit because I had been pretty shaken up by that experience at school, but something about this basement felt odd.

I may have been right about this ick, or may not have been, but something was sketchy about this place.

It had wooden floorboards, plastered walls, and several dozen boxes of goods and lost items, but no sign of anything too unusual yet.

There were many boxes with the words “fragile” or to be carefully carved on the cardboard.

I kept looking for almost another hour until I finally decided to give up and go back up the basement stairs.

As I was going up the stairs, I felt somewhat relieved that there was nothing out of the ordinary in our basement and that I must have been just hearing weird things.

Maybe I'm just thinking too hard about these types of things. Maybe I just need to go to bed and wait for Mother or Father to get home from work.

They will help me get over this fear; I know that they will, and I'm waiting for it to happen. I thought about this statement over and over while walking back up the dusty stairs of the basement, hoping for a happy ending.

That all changed when I stepped on the top step.

When I had finally put my foot on the last step of the basement stairs, I heard it.

A horrific, demonic scream came from that very basement. Noise is loud enough to rupture your eardrums.

I then, with a horrified look on my face, ran up to the kitchen and grabbed the sharpest knife we owned.

I then ran back down the stairs to see what kind of monstrosity was waiting for me at the bottom of these seemingly never-ending stairs.

As soon as I reached the floor of the basement, I started searching for the source of that awful noise.

I looked far and wide, but in the end, I left more confused than when I started looking for the source.

I almost gave up again, thinking that maybe I was going insane and that I needed some well-deserved rest. But then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw it.

I saw a smoky but clear image of a monster.

It had two legs and two arms like a human, but the most astonishing part of the whole ordeal was that this entity had such a suffocating presence that it felt like I could die by even being near it.

It had black mist with a white-dotted pattern surrounding its body. And it had long jet-black hair, almost like the mane of a lion.

The black misty entity began to speak, “What is it you came here to achieve, boy?” The entity said as it scowled at how weak my body was in comparison to its own.

“I came to see what the source of this awful noise is. Are you in any way affiliated with the sounds that I have been constantly hearing?” I said with anger and restlessness in my voice.

The beast smirked and said, “How can you talk so nonchalantly to me? I am a god in this world and shall not be mistaken for one of you. He said with disgust. And what if I am? “Are you going to do something about it? You are a weak and useless nobody.”

He was right.

I had no way to defend myself against that monster and couldn’t even consider myself as nothing more than a useless human in this world.

“What is your name, great warrior,” I said while bowing down like a commoner does to his king.

“I go by Genso in the world of the gods, but in the human world, I am known as the God of Illusions.”

“God of Illusions!” I said, shocked that those stories about gods and goddesses may very well have been true all along.

“What is your intention in my house, great warrior?” I said nervously.

“Why should I tell a lowly human my reason for being in this world? My reason for causing mayhem around the city streets. My reason for being here in this very home right now.” He said in a suffocating way, like I shouldn't have the right to speak at this moment, like I was nothing, useless.

I was scared to even think about speaking to a horrible monster like the one before me. I was scared of it getting angry and killing me right now. I could feel how tense he was beginning to feel after I asked him my direct question, without care.

He then said, “I didn’t want to have to show you this, but you give me no choice, boy.”

He then showed me a hidden corridor to a room I had never seen before.

Once we got into the room, I knew why he had taken me there.

I could see how he was going to convince me. I saw on top of the queen-sized mattress a body, bloodied up and brutally beaten.

It was my mother’s corpse.