1. The Demon's Game

Mountain ranges of empty energy drink cans, snack wrappers and instant ramen cups rose on every side of the room. Somewhere among them, on a battered desk, you could just make out a keyboard and mouse that used to be white and now wore a glossy film of grease. Thick blackout curtains shut off the window, so there was no telling whether it was morning or night out there, spring or winter. Darkness, silence and the monitor’s artificial glow were the only things that ruled this room.

“I’m here… I’m finally here! I’m really almost there!”

The Lord of the East. He was notorious as the boss every player on the planet had given up trying to clear, a catastrophe whose despair-inducing difficulty sat on a different plane from any boss before him. 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 elaborately drawn magic circle, but after hundreds of attempts every one of his attack patterns was burned into my memory. So 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, and I could say this with my chest puffed out: I’d poured all five of those years into it with more dedication than anyone alive. This game was my life.

“Stay calm.”

The Lord of the East’s HP bar was flickering around the 1% mark, while my character was still holding above 50%. If I kept up this pace, the glory of the World First clear was mine for the taking.

Thump! Thump!

My heart had gone and possessed a drum on the verge of detonation, and it was pounding 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.”

And the moment I clicked the mouse for the killing blow —

“Huh?”

“NOOOOOOOO!!!!”

My computer had the absolute best specs on the market. It had never blue-screened, never bugged out, never so much as hiccuped with lag. I’d half starved myself scraping together the money for this thing —

And it was going to betray me now?

“Don’t give me that crap!!”

I lost it and started shaking the monitor like a madman.

“Haa… haa.”

Maybe my desperation reached it, because astonishingly the monitor blacked out for a split second and then flared back on, and there was my character, still standing on the battlefield.

“N-no!”

But my desperation must have been a hair short, because the miracle vanished as fast as it had come. On top of that, the screen erupted in violent red-and-blue noise, and —

— BANG!

A small explosion went off and every power source in the room died. I’d dropped flat at the sound of the blast, and once the smoke cleared I cautiously got back up.

“…What the hell.”

The only light left in the darkness came from the monitor, somehow still on, its surface a swirling vortex of red-and-blue static. Before I could even process that, the vortex began sucking in everything in the room like a black hole.

“AAAAAAAAAHHHHH!”

And then the swirl swallowed my consciousness too.

My World First… is gone?

That was the very first thought to surface the instant my consciousness came back: the World First clear had been right there under my fingertips, and it had slipped away. An unfamiliar bed, a ceiling with a strange pattern, foreign air seeping into my skin, an oppressive atmosphere weighing 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 straight. There was absolutely no way a person could get sucked into a monitor, so I must have fallen asleep without realizing it. It was a pretty awful nightmare, sure, but at least that explained everything, and it made what I had to do simple.

Wake up from this nightmare.

And once I was awake, I’d brew a coffee with an extra shot.

“Ack!”

But a sudden, vicious pain stabbed through my lungs, as if shards of glass were shredding them.

“Khh—”

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

.

.

.

A delicate girl’s voice tickled my ear, and my eyes snapped open in surprise.

“Hahh.”

Standing before me was an angel.

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

Her pure-white dress flowed down to her ankles, draped over her like silk woven from melted moonlight, and its faint stitchwork shimmered like stars, as if someone had transplanted a nebula out of the night sky onto the fabric. Her shoulder-length hair had 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 almost translucent: together they made a harmony too unreal to belong to this world.

And then there were the eyes. They were deep blue sapphires that held the abyss of the cosmos, and somewhere inside that gaze, stars drifted. Each time her long, full lashes blinked, it felt like stardust might come spilling down at any moment.

More than this 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 grinds 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, and studied 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 began to come back, and I made up my mind to start asking questions.

“…Who are you, and where the hell am I?”

Had she had no 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 inside my chest again, glass shards scraping the inside 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 across my whole body, and like a lie, the agony tearing me apart began to subside, little by little.

“…Possession Stabilization?”

It was a familiar system message, floating in front of my eyes, and I looked back and forth between it and her.

“Did you just do that?”

Her face creased with worry as she nodded.

I propped myself up to sit. The pain hadn’t fully faded but it was bearable, so I decided to focus 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 had any confidence in, and since she claimed to have lost her memory, I bumped anything to do with her down the priority list. For now, I calmly looked around.

Antique decorations, top-grade silk bedding in place of the threadbare cheap bed I was used to, and emblazoned right in the center of the ceiling, a great lion with a flowing blue mane. Now that I’d noticed, there was no way I could fail to recognize this place.

“…This is House Arne.”

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

House Arne.

In the game’s worldview it was the shield of the Empire and 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, betrayed the Empire, and transformed into the Demon Knights…

Anyway, I knew this place. I knew it as the headquarters of the Demon Knights, of course. Knowing the human-era house was a totally separate matter.

I gave my own body a once-over. Thin, spindly arms. The head’s two sons shouldn’t have been built this skinny.

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

Which meant I had possessed one of those sons. So had I just gained weight or something?

That question was about to get answered fast.

The door slammed open and a voice called out.

“Are you still lying there like a corpse? Your room reeks of rot.”

Tightly packed muscle so defined you could see the contours through his clothes. An ugly face would have been one thing, but of course, infuriatingly, he had a handsome one on top of it. I had reloaded hundreds of times trying to mash in that pretty-boy face.

Just as she whispered into 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 warped into a large-scale slaughter pattern, with dozens, even hundreds of mooks swarming in. And no matter how heavily you stacked defensive gear, his signature insta-kill charge tore the entire party to shreds.

Yet right now this same Valerian had no black wings on his back, and 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 had never been able to see in the game, was standing right in front of me, alive.

Then another man followed in behind him and added 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 like that might be the least trouble he can cause the family.”

Narrow, sly eyes and a mouth twisted up in a cunning sneer.

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

“That expression of yours displeases me.”

Maybe her whisper tickling my ear had made my expression slip, because Valerian creased his brow. His reaction confirmed that she was visible only to me, but 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.”

Yet neither I nor any other player had ever felt the slightest sympathy for him, because his epithet was Lucius, the Joint Collector.

Lose to Lucius, and 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 single 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, too, there wasn’t the slightest trace of demonification.

Demonification.

In this game, every NPC had a Demon Seed planted inside them, which we players called the DV stat. It was a numerical representation of a character’s mental state, from 0 to 100.

At a DV of 0 the character was just a normal human: the seed lay dormant, and there were absolutely no outward changes. But once it crossed 20, the seed began to stir and the signs started to show. Unexplained insomnia set in, and minor nightmares plagued the person. Up to that point it didn’t touch their nature or values, since anyone can have insomnia or bad dreams now and then.

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

Yes. Exactly like these two brothers, right now.

“I hear you had another of your fits, coughing up blood as usual.”
“Even you must think you’d be better off dead, right?”

Valerian set the line and Lucius spiked it.

“I think I see why Father pretends you don’t exist. Better that you die quickly, if only for the family’s honor.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying!”

They traded barbs back and forth like a synchronized comedy routine, and I was just beginning to genuinely wonder if these two could even be classified as human, when —

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

There’s an eternal, unshakable truth among gamers.

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

A character, after all, just has to be pretty and cute, and that wins the day.