Demon Summoning
The muzzle flashed. “Survivor! I have been waiting for y—” Thud. The brilliant smile of the man in the spotless white lab coat exploded alongside his bright yellow skull. I have no idea why he felt the need to reenact the cutscene even in real life. Hadn’t the sheer boredom of it all made me pull the trigger in the first place?
RATATATATATANG! The six-barreled minigun, already preheated, spun up with a ferocious whine and belched fire straight ahead. A light jab for greetings, then the real game began. A relentless chain of group beatings, each participant armed with a steel chair. The target was the final boss of this apocalyptic world, a mad scientist who had somehow job-changed into a dullahan. Nickname: the Doctor. Fan name: Hakase.
Watching him soak in a metal rain and turn the color of a blood-red sunset brought an unexpected calm to my heart. This was my version of staring into a bonfire. Or should I call it Doctor-gazing? Since both are hot, the name hardly matters.
RATATATATATANG! The recoil, violent enough to count as blunt trauma, was gently loosening the shoulder muscles I had knotted up from endless gear-farming grind when it happened.
Clack.
Trrrrrk.
Suddenly the pleasant cascade of falling shell casings stopped.
“....”
It wasn’t that I was out of ammo. The barrel had simply overheated and jammed. Of course reality had no romance. Only waste and disappointment lived here.
But this world sat at the hazy crossroads between reality and game—the boundary of the unreal. That was why half-baked romance impossible in “true” reality could still bloom.
“Replace.”
At the single word the minigun, ripped from a crashed combat helicopter, vanished into the virtual space of my inventory. Two rotary grenade launchers filled my newly emptied hands. I re-aimed. Through the crossed trapezoidal sights, the Doctor—already finished regenerating—glared at me with wild eyes while gasping for breath.
“Huk! W-wait! Stop, Survivor! If you kill me now, you will never receive salvation! Therefore……”
“Salvation?”
You are going to save me? The Doctor had begun spewing nonsense as if the bullets had been soaked in alcohol. In that instant, a dense pain like listening to my boss’s life story for two straight hours slammed into my skull. This would not do. For the sake of this still-drunk Doctor, I would have to personally cure his hangover.
Replace. Replace. Replace. Replace. Replace.
KWAANG!KWAGWAGWANG! An ensemble of hot, high-caliber weapons—RPG-7, Panzerfaust, M72 LAW, and others guaranteed to evaporate any hangover. Half-cooked chunks of flesh flew skyward with bone fragments; hard shrapnel scattered in every direction, blooming into momentary flames.
Yet the reception must have been too loud.
Grrrk!
Ughhh…
Kieeeeek!
The flames painting the sky, the blood, and the Doctor’s agonized screams must have reached outside the laboratory. Uninvited guests who mistook the funeral for a festival began pouring in from every direction, shrieking.
Oh dear. I had only prepared one serving of yukgaejang. No choice, then. I would simply have to reduce the number of guests.
“Replace.”
One hand gripped a compact flamethrower, the other a custom automatic pistol loaded with a fifty-round magazine. I tore through the space between the Doctor and the mutants like a wolf set loose among sheep. Red afterimages chased the black lines slicing through acrid smoke. They burned oxygen, burned flesh, then minced what remained with lead and burned it once more. Flame was exceptionally lethal to mutants with high regenerative ability. A pig shot by a bullet might survive, but a pig that had been cooked would vanish into the stomach—the same principle.
Gooooooo!
Grrrk!
Kieeeeeeek!
Survivor! Kuaaaaak!
Screams and shrieks ran wild. The stench of burning fat and scorched blood mingled, announcing the final notes of death’s waltz.
“These damn persistent bastards.”
Decades had passed since I became trapped inside this lovely ruined game, playing heart-pounding tag with the horde of bipedal meatballs that followed me because they “liked” me. The reason I ended up playing not just any ruined game but this apocalypse title was nothing special. I had simply been a little bored. That was the beginning of every problem.
“I’m bored to death.”
So I thought, Maybe I should pick up a hobby?
I hated sports. After coming home from the office I didn’t even want to lift a finger. Sports? Please. Sitting at a computer was just as bad. Clicking a mouse all day was literally my job. Doing the same thing after work felt wrong.
“There must be something.”
While searching for a miraculous hobby that would guarantee both physical comfort and entertainment—
I love you!
“Huh?”
A text had arrived from my pillow-loving friend.
“Minseoks? It’s been a while.”
I should never have listened to Pillow Park. I should have just watched documentaries and played idle mobile games. But back then I craved contradictory pleasure—body at rest, mind racing to the extreme.
“It looks pretty unique?”
I lay on the bed in a tank top and underwear, the VR device that resembled a high-tech neck pillow wrapped around my neck. I pressed the small button on the right. A transparent membrane covered my vision and a cyberpunk-style interface UI unfolded.
“What is this.”
It was already fun? I hadn’t even started the main game yet. My heart hadn’t raced like this in ages.
“Hey. Link? It says it’s finished. What do I do now? The interface is so complicated it’s making me dizzy.”
Oh, you’re in? Then it’s time to pick a game.
“Recommend. Please.”
Got it.
The games my friend recommended were fantasy titles—managing a monster farm, becoming an adventurer and exploring dungeons. They all looked interesting, but what I wanted right now was not virtual labor. I needed something to end the boredom of daily life. A Chernobyl-grade stimulus that would flood a lazy office worker’s brain with fresh dopamine. For example—
“Anything like a zombie apocalypse?”
There is one that’s trending these days. Might be a bit rough for newbies though?
“Don’t you know who I am?”
You only play mobile gomoku, right?
“Regional rank seven.”
So Cheongju’s pride was right here?
Server Connecting.......
I had expected adapting to virtual reality to be difficult since it was my first time, but fortunately I possessed a talent. The talent called over-immersion.
Evade the Runners and Head to the Fire Station
“Die, you undercooked meat-pie bastards!!!”
“Hey, we gotta run!”
“Minseoks! I need covering fire!”
“Where the hell are you going, you lunatic?! We don’t even have weapons—what covering fire?!”
While the other users screamed and fled, I charged straight into the monsters, swinging a Chinese cleaver and frying pan I had looted from the kitchen.
“Kyaaaaak!!!”
“Kieeeeek!!!”
Every swing shattered bone and tore flesh. The disgusting yet electrifying sensation traveling up the handles. The primal pleasure of ripping, smashing, and mincing—dopamine I had never tasted in my ordinary, flat life flooded my brain. My brain feels like it’s melting.
Realizing I had lived until now without knowing something this fun made me cry with pure frustration.
“Sorry. Hyung’s too scared to keep going.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll survive hard enough for both of us.”
“Kuhuk! Emergency escape!”
Even after my friend fled in terror from the bizarre difficulty and repulsive visuals to a moe farming world full of pretty girls, I did not stop. On the contrary, I burned even hotter. I returned the borrowed equipment, used my saved salary to buy better gear, and began playing in earnest.
After work I didn’t even want to waste time eating, so I gulped down bulk-purchased frozen chicken breast with plain water and dove back into virtual reality. I roamed the ruined world, sometimes having my limbs torn off by monsters, sometimes stripped naked by lunatics and looters.
Kill the enemy. Survive. Kill stronger enemies. Die. Die again. Kill. Die…
It was fun! So this was life?
Every moment inside that false reality, every day, every minute, every second was so thrilling and addictive that I could not stop. I continued that routine for eight long years.
And then, on an utterly ordinary day like any other—
“Log out, log out! Operator! Please get me out! I have a business trip tomorrow…!”
I was possessed by the game character I had raised like my own child. There had been no warning. My ordinary daily life ended in a single instant.
“It hurts…? Why does it actually hurt? This is real life? It’s not a dream, a fucking bug, or a ninja patch?”
Childish denial of reality did not last even a single day in the ruined world. The city crawling with mutants and lunatics was no longer a virtual playground.
“Meat… meat…”
“Don’t come near me. Stop following me, you bastard! Go look for meat at a butcher shop!”
Every day was terror and pain.
“Grrrr…”
“Why is a raid boss wandering around the normal zone?!”
Every day was a continuous ordeal.
Bam! Bam bam!
“Please… please just let me sleep, you crazy bastards…”
Every minute and second was torture. As time flowed, emotion wore away, willpower lost its flame, and my will cooled like a corpse abandoned on the roadside.
“I want to die.”
It would have been better to starve. Yet the character I had meticulously built over years—specialized for survival to the point of near-immortality—ultimately refused to allow the player’s death.
Even if I tried to hide like a dead mouse, when biological energy ran low I would lose my mind and rush outside to hunt for prey. It was not simple chewing and swallowing. Skin, muscle, and organs were forcibly pried open as I crammed in monsters that had once been human. Half-rotted chunks of meat slowly decomposed inside me and eventually became part of my body.
“Ugh, urgh. Huuuu… haa. The smell, fuck.”
I wanted to vomit all of it out, but the indestructible Plague Doctor Mask I had paid to embed in my head prevented me from throwing up properly.
“Goodbye! You shitty world! Ack!!! Huh? Uck!? Fuck! My arm! My arm!!! Uwaaaaaak!!!”
When I tried to pull a grenade pin because I no longer wanted to live, my arm would detach on its own like a lizard shedding its tail. Then, whispering a tiny sorry inside my mind, it would grow a new one.
The character I had raised with such care loved its player far too much.
“Just let me die already… you affectionate magpie-like bastard.”
Perhaps to repay the eight years of care, it desperately struggled to keep me alive. And so I continued rotting away day after day inside the ruined world.
Then one day a thought occurred to me.
If I was fated to be trapped in this game and unable to die nicely, then I would simply see the ending. The decision was ridiculously late, but my actions held no hesitation. I might be a pathetic coward, but I was a veteran of this damned game.
“This… world is… false—”
“I know.”
“…What?”
Thud. Flesh and bone fragments splattered across the wall like gory graffiti. The bright yellow head no longer regenerated; it seemed I had finally exhausted every last drop of biological energy. It really took forever. Damn bastard.
“Is it over?”
The Doctor, who had transformed from Emmental cheese to protein monster to a colossal meat mass that looked like a cross between a centipede and a dragon, had been reduced to a colony of earthworms writhing at my feet. Ridiculously weak for a final boss. Other than slightly higher durability and size compared to the meat masses I met on casual walks, its patterns had been laughably simple. Well, a salaryman who only knew how to push papers in a lab couldn’t be expected to fight well. It would have been impressive if he at least knew how to spin like a windmill.
My old friends who used to cling to my trouser pockets also returned to dust once the muzzle fire died.
“Kkyu!”
As I stared blankly at the charred remains of what had once been a promising grilled-patty candidate called the Doctor, I heard a small animal’s cry from a corner of my mind. It was not stress-induced hallucination. It was Kkachi, the entity cohabiting inside the same body. More precisely, an aggregate of traits I had named Kkachi. Even I didn’t fully understand it.
“You may eat.”
“Kkyu!”
With permission granted, the black flesh that had been mimicking a trench coat wriggled unpleasantly. It slid beneath the meat mass that had once been human and began to swallow the Doctor like a python swallowing an egg. Eat plenty. That will be your last meal.
The ending of the hardcore apocalyptic survival game Terraforming was nothing special. Kill the insane Doctor who claimed he would save humanity from the false world, obtain the vaccine called 【Return】 from the safe on the top floor of the laboratory. That was it.
Yes. It was finally over. Once I received the vaccine, all traits would disappear and my body would revert to the state it had been when I first started the game. The character would be “reset.”
It was a stupid reward that blatantly encouraged a second playthrough, but for a possessed person desperately craving suicide after being obsessively clung to by traits, it was rather tempting.
Kkyururuk.
After Kkachi’s last supper ended, I lifted my gaze from the long bloodstain stretching like a shadow and walked toward the elevator.
Squish.
“Tsk.”
The sound of flesh stuck to my shoes splashing with every step was irritating. I boarded the elevator and pressed the button for the top floor. The doors closed smoothly.
Beep-beep-beep-beep.
Perhaps the aftereffects of battle had reached even here. The flickering lights went out and darkness fell. The red floor indicator vanished, but the faint sense of ascent told me the elevator was still operating normally.
“Finally. The ending.”
A pure laugh escaped me for the first time in ages. The anticipation of parting from this painful life and the slender hope that I might return to my original world after seeing the ending collided, heating my blood.
Unlike my feverish body, the darkness inside the elevator felt strangely comfortable, as if I had become a fetus inside a womb.
“Mom. Dad. I miss you.”
I could no longer even remember their faces. The Michael Tyson of unfilial sons. Spinal-reflex longing, at whose end lay only powerless self-mockery and regret.
Beep.
The cheerful chime cut off my incoherent monologue like a knife.
“It’s over.”
We had arrived. The ending had finally come to this tiresome life. Or it should have.
Zzzzzzt.
“Hm?”
Sudden noise, irritating enough to spark anger, leaked from the ceiling. The incomprehensible static gradually clarified and began to spit out a woman’s voice like an old videotape.
Welcome, last survivor of the ruined world.
“Something the Doctor prepared?”
There was no answer to the meaningless monologue. After a short pause, the voice continued as if replaying a recording.
I hope you can regain the happiness you have lost.
Click.
“…Happiness.”
I really hope so.
The unknown line that had lukewarmly moistened my parched emotions ended. A moment later a pure white line was drawn in the air. And then—
The door opens.
“I offer my blood and true name upon the lion’s scales and swear upon my heart to speak only truth. O primordial sin born from the abyss, slave of pleasure that seeks amusement! I, Yuri Alcast, desire a fair and just contract with you!”
“…?”
Before me stood a child wearing a black robe—presumably suffering from chuunibyou. Excuse me, but who are you?
The door closes. (Laugh)