1. The Demon's Game

Mountain ranges of empty energy-drink cans, snack wrappers, and instant ramen cups rose in every direction across the room. Barely visible between them, on the battered desk, sat a keyboard and mouse, once white, now glazed in a glossy film of grease. The window was sealed shut behind thick blackout curtains, so there was no telling whether it was morning or night outside, spring or winter. Only darkness, silence, and the artificial glow of the monitor ruled this room.

“He’s here… he’s finally here! He’s really here!”

The Lord of the East was infamous as the one boss every player on the planet had given up trying to clear. This catastrophic entity boasted a despair-inducing difficulty on a completely different plane from any boss before it. Even I, the great and mighty, had needed months to grind him down.

“You’re seriously pulling out this pattern AGAIN?”

Black orbs poured out of an intricately drawn magic circle. But after hundreds of attempts, every single attack pattern was already burned into my memory. Which meant no matter what he threw at me, I could break it down.

“World First glory is going right into this excellent gentleman’s hands!”

Five years had passed since the release of Demonic Frontier, known the world over as the hardest game ever made.

I could say it with my chest puffed out.

I had poured the entirety of those five years into this game with more dedication than anyone else alive.

This game was my life.

“Stay calm.”

The Lord of the East’s HP bar flickered around the 1% mark. My character, by contrast, was still holding above 50%. Keep this pace, and the glory of the World First clear was mine for the taking.

Thump! Thump!

My heart was a drum on the verge of detonation. It pounded so hard it actually hurt.

“This is it!”

How many months had I burned trying to kill this thing? How many gruesome death scenes had I sat through?

“I’m finally taking you down.”

Just as I clicked the mouse for the killing blow…

“Huh?”

“NOOOOOOOO!!!!”

My computer was the absolute top-of-the-line, the best money could buy. It had never blue-screened, never bugged out, never so much as hiccuped with lag. I’d starved myself half to death scraping together the money for it. And it was going to betray me now?

“Don’t give me that crap!!”

I lost it and shook the monitor like a madman.

“Haa… haa.”

Maybe my desperation got through to it. Astonishingly, the monitor blacked out for a split second, then flared back to life, and there stood my character, still on the battlefield.

“N-no!”

But apparently my desperation had fallen a hair short, because the miracle vanished as fast as it had come. On top of that, the screen erupted in a violent burst of red-and-blue static…

— BANG!

A small explosion went off, and every power source in the room died. I’d hit the floor at the blast; once the smoke cleared, I cautiously got back to my feet.

“…What the hell.”

The only thing giving off light in the darkness was the monitor, somehow still on, its surface a swirling vortex of red-and-blue static. Before I could even process what was happening, the vortex started swallowing everything in the room like a black hole.

“AAAAAAAAAHHHHH!”

And then my consciousness was sucked into the swirl too.

My World First… is gone?

The instant my consciousness returned, the first thought to surface was that the World First clear, the one that had been right there under my fingertips, had slipped away.

An unfamiliar bed, a ceiling carved with strange patterns, foreign air seeping into my skin, an oppressive weight pressing down on the room. None of it meant a single thing to me.

No, no. There’s no way.

I scraped together what was left of my sanity and forced myself to think clearly. There was no way on earth a person could get sucked into a monitor. I must have dozed off without realizing it. An awful nightmare, sure, but at least it explained everything.

If that was the case, what I had to do now was simple.

Wake up from this nightmare.

Once I was awake, I’d brew myself a coffee with an extra shot.

“Ack!”

But a sudden, vicious pain stabbed through my lungs, as though they were being shredded by shards of glass.

“Khh—”

My throat heaved, and I coughed up a clump of blood. A wave of dizziness crashed over me, and my consciousness slipped away again.

.

.

.

A delicate girl’s voice tickled my ear. Startled, my eyes snapped open.

“Hahh.”

Standing before me was an angel.

No, “angel” was too clichéd a word for what she was.

A pure-white dress flowed down to her ankles, draping over her like silk woven from melted moonlight, embroidered with faint stitchwork that shimmered like stars, as though someone had transplanted a nebula straight from the night sky onto the fabric. Her shoulder-length hair carried the mysterious color of moonlight veiled in dawn mist.

And that wasn’t all. A doll-like little face, a slender neck, skin so pale it was nearly translucent. Every feature combined into a harmony too unreal to belong to this world.

And then there were the eyes.

Her eyes were like deep-blue sapphires, the abyss of the cosmos held within them. Stars drifted somewhere in that gaze. Each time her long, full lashes blinked, it felt like stardust might come spilling down at any moment.

More than the insane situation, more than the splitting pain, what threw me into the deepest confusion was who she was.

I knew her.

No, I knew her better than anyone alive.

The face preset I’d stayed up nights tweaking. The brutal grind I’d put myself through to unlock the Constellation Dress. She was the custom character I’d agonized and obsessed over for days on end to create. The custom char I’d spent five whole years with!

I drank her in, transfixed, studying every inch of her for a long while.

“I made her myself, but damn, I did a good job.”

The flower of any game really was the character creator.

Once I’d had my fill of admiring her, my scattered wits came back, and I decided it was time to start asking questions.

“…Who are you, and where the hell is this?”

Had she been without memories from the start? Or had she lost them for some reason?

“…What?”

The moment I scraped a voice out of my throat, that horrific pain surged up from inside my chest again, like glass shards scraping the lining of my lungs.

“Khaagh!”

I collapsed onto the bed and curled in on myself. The taste of blood spread through my mouth, and I couldn’t breathe.

Just then, a cool, soft touch settled on my forehead, slick with cold sweat.

Along with her whisper, a warm, pure energy spread through my forehead and out through my whole body. As if by magic, the agony tearing me apart began to subside, little by little.

“…Possession Stabilization?”

A familiar system message floated in front of my eyes. I looked back and forth between it and her.

“Did you just do that?”

Her face was creased with worry as she nodded.

I propped myself up to sit. The pain hadn’t fully faded, but it was bearable, so I focused on getting my bearings.

Is she some goddess of another world who lost her memories? Just like I possessed this body — has she possessed my custom-made character?

It wasn’t a thought I felt confident in. And since she claimed to have lost her memory, I bumped any information about her down the priority list.

For now, I took a calm look around. Antique furnishings, top-grade silk bedding in place of the threadbare cheap bed I was used to, and emblazoned dead center on the ceiling, a great lion with a flowing blue mane. Now that I’d noticed it, there was no way I could fail to recognize this place.

“…This is House Arne.”

I’d visited this place until I was sick of it, all for the Subjugate the Demon Knights quest.

House Arne.

In the world of the game, this was the shield of the Empire, its most honorable knightly house. Generation after generation it had produced prodigies of the sword, and its current head, Kairon Arne, was hailed as one of the Empire’s three Sword Saints. But for some reason the entire house had been corrupted, had betrayed the Empire, and had transformed into the Demon Knights…

In any case, I was familiar with this place. Familiar with it as the Demon Knights’ headquarters, of course; being familiar with the house in its human era was another matter entirely.

I gave my own body a once-over.

Thin, spindly arms. Neither of the head’s two sons should have been built this skinny.

“You said the buff you cast on me was ‘Possession Stabilization,’ right?”

Which meant I’d possessed one of those sons. So had I just gained weight or something? That question was about to be answered fast.

The door slammed open and a voice rang out.

“Are you still lying there like a corpse? Your room smells like something rotting.”

Muscle so tightly packed you could see its contours through his clothes. If he’d at least had an ugly face, that would have been one thing, but of course, infuriatingly, he had a handsome face to go with it. I’d reloaded that pretty-boy face hundreds of times trying to mash it in.

Just as she whispered in my ear, this was Valerian Arne, the eldest son of House Arne. The name I knew him by was Valerian, the Invincible Legion Commander.

The moment he showed up, the fight stopped being a simple boss battle and twisted into a large-scale slaughter pattern, dozens, even hundreds of mooks swarming in. And no matter how heavily you stacked defensive gear, taking a hit from Valerian’s signature insta-kill charge tore the whole party to shreds.

Right now this same Valerian had no black wings on his back, none of the two long horns that should have jutted from his head. By every measure, he looked like an ordinary human.

I was fascinated.

The human-era Valerian, something I’d never once gotten to see in the game, was standing right there in front of me, alive.

Then another man followed in behind him and tossed in his own snide remark.

“Brother, what do you expect from the runt? He looks like he’s struggling to even breathe — you really think he has the strength to open a window? Honestly, lying there might be the way he causes the least damage to the family.”

Narrow, sly eyes; a mouth twisted into a cunning sneer.

For some reason, she scampered around to my other ear and whispered there instead.

“That expression of yours is putting me in a foul mood.”

Maybe her whisper tickling my ear had made my expression slip, because Valerian creased his brow. His reaction confirmed she was visible only to me. In any case, I shelved the mystery of her for later.

Looks exactly the same as in-game.

Lucius wasn’t handsome like his brother Valerian. To put it bluntly, he was very ugly, a textbook victim of what gamers call “all the genetics went to one sibling.” That said, neither I nor any other player ever felt the slightest sympathy for Lucius. Because his epithet was Lucius, the Joint Collector.

If you lost to Lucius, the cutscene was a torture sequence in which your fingers were snapped one at a time. The infuriating part was that you couldn’t skip it; you had to sit there and watch until every last finger was broken.

How many players had rage-quit the game because of this bastard?

The death scene where I have to personally pick which finger gets broken — how is that even allowed?

And yet on this devil of a Lucius, there wasn’t the slightest trace of demonification either.

Demonification.

In this game, every NPC had a Demon Seed planted inside them. We players called it the DV stat: a numerical representation of a character’s mental state, ranging from 0 to 100.

At 0, the character was just a normal human; the seed lay dormant, with no outward changes whatsoever. But once it crossed 20, the seed began to stir and the first signs showed. Unexplained insomnia set in, and the person was plagued by minor nightmares. Up to that point it didn’t touch their nature or values. After all, anyone can have insomnia or a bad dream now and then.

The real problem came after that. Once the stat reached around 50, the seed began to writhe in earnest. The eyes grew cloudy and unfocused, and the slightest provocation would set off explosive outbursts of rage and anxiety.

Yes, exactly like these two brothers, right now.

“I hear you started another fit, coughing up blood like usual.”

“Don’t you think it’d be better for everyone if you just died?”

Valerian set the line and Lucius spiked it.

“I’m starting to understand why Father pretends you don’t exist. For the family’s honor, the kinder thing might really be for you to hurry up and die.”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying!”

Valerian and Lucius traded barbs back and forth like a synchronized comedy duo. I was honestly starting to wonder whether the two of them could even be classified as human…

She huffed and stamped her feet midair as she floated, fuming.

An eternal, unshakable truth among gamers.

Yeah. The character creator really is the most important thing in a game.

After all, a character just has to be pretty and cute, and that wins the day.