Doom's Hell Slayer

Games existed in the Wirod Dimension too.

This was a society where magic had been commercialized to the point that even five-year-olds could cast 1st-level utility spells, so of course there had been attempts to create entertainment with magic.

Chess powered by illusion magic. Circuses and stage plays enhanced by illusion magic. Movies made with illusion magic. Toys built on illusion magic, and so on, and so on...

Yes.

In this world, the Illusion Magic Tower—the tower dedicated primarily to the study ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠of illusion magic—bore the name of a magic tower, but in practice it was closer to a performance production company or a toy manufacturer.

And about fifty years ago, that tower had struck one hell of a jackpot.

"What is this? It's actually fun!"

"The spell's called Bouncing Ball. Huh. It really is funny."

A portable game spell.

There was nothing sophisticated about it. When you activated the spell, two vertical bars slid up and down, and a single ball bounced back and forth between them—first player to send the ball past their opponent's bar won. That was the whole game.

And once it became a massive hit, the Illusion Magic Tower began investing aggressively in game development.

"Tower Master! The game spells are selling like crazy!"

"Make more games! More! Mass-produce the same thing over and over!"

"B-but with this budget and this timeline, there's simply no way to produce that many quality games..."

"Shut up and do it! People love games, period! Whatever you churn out, they'll buy it! Keep producing! Keep going!"

Having gotten their first real taste of money from games, the Illusion Magic Tower began churning out cheap, low-effort mass-produced game spells exactly as promised. The result?

The overall quality of games plummeted, and people, sick to death of the mind-numbingly repetitive one-pattern gameplay of those cookie-cutter titles, simply stopped buying games altogether.

And at the very peak of that toxic atmosphere, everything exploded—over a game spell the Illusion Magic Tower had developed roughly twenty years prior, called Creature from Another Star.

The Tower Master of that era, anticipating record-breaking success, had poured mountains of gold coins into the project and rushed it from development to release in a mere five weeks...

"Refund requests for the spell are flooding in!"

"More scrolls are coming back than we can even store, Tower Master!"

Creature from Another Star went down in history as a legendary, record-shattering flop.

There was so much excess inventory that a bitter rumor still circulated—unfunny as it was—that they'd simply buried the surplus scrolls in the desert.

The Illusion Magic Tower's foundations shook so badly that rumors of bankruptcy made the rounds, the Tower Master who had led the race to the bottom of the game business was driven out, and the tower's mages found themselves unemployed and wandering the streets.

That was the position they were in.

That said, gaming as a culture hadn't died in the Wirod Dimension entirely.

Some of those unemployed Illusion Tower mages had settled in Trakamia, a kingdom on the Wirod Dimension's frontier, and the game they developed—Hero Plumber Bros!—led yet another craze, letting the industry breathe again.

Children loved games. Parents, however...

"This is what happens when children's minds get stolen by trash illusion magic like this! Does this make any sense to you?!"

"Game spells should be legally banned! The Valrod Imperial Senate needs to step in and do something!"

Well. They weren't exactly fans, anyway. And so.

Gaming limped along—a single catastrophic failure behind it, its breath barely recovered, scraping by on the margins. That was the situation.

"The game screen is three-dimensional?"

"Yes. Because of the implementation difficulty of illusion magic, every game before ours was stuck at the level of moving flat images inside a two-dimensional screen. But my friend Alfonso and I had already built a three-dimensional game before this one. It was called Super Soldier Catching Octopuses."

"Was it a success?"

"Well. Not a blockbuster, but a success, yes. Commercially decent, too. In any case, the commercial viability of this 3D game system is beyond question, Elsie."

Carmack—and Alfonso, the other co-developer—were explaining their game spell to me with tremendous passion.

"Originally we planned to package the game as a spell scroll and sell it, but seeing the Soul Page effects on Soul World changed our minds. What if we implemented this game directly on Soul Net as an effect? What if an enormous number of people could just run the game on the network and play it?"

"That's not a bad idea at all. Interesting."

"It supports multiplayer as well. It's structured so that all kinds of people can gather together and enjoy it. And for the currency required to run the game—we were thinking Mana Fruits."

"Since it can be applied instantly on the network. And people who've already bought Mana Fruits before would be purchasing a new service through a system they're already familiar with, so there'd be little resistance. Am I right?"

"Precisely. And if you pay us in cash proportional to the number of Mana Fruits spent on our game, we'll have commercial success as well."

I fell silent for a moment at their words.

Carmack and Alfonso went slightly pale at my silence.

They clenched and unclenched their fists, watching me with anxious faces—but my mind was on something else entirely.

This is going to print money.

Of course, by the standards of someone who'd lived on Earth...

It was a genuinely shabby game.

The characters rendered in 3D illusion magic looked less like humans and more like something vaguely human-shaped stuffed full of cubed radish kimchi, shambling around. The sound effects were pathetic, the movement absurdly simplistic, and compared to the games I'd played in my past life, both the systems and the playstyle felt painfully crude.

And yet.

It was a well-made game.

Even by my standards, I could feel that the game feel and gameplay were excellent enough to bury every one of those flaws. So there was no doubt in my mind—this was a product built to explode.

Its synergy with Soul Net was perfect too.

The problem, however...

"The idea itself is excellent, truly. The problem is Soul Net. I'm not sure Soul Net can withstand the flood of people who'll come rushing in to play this game."

Overload.

Soul Net was a virtual dimension built around its community features.

It had been designed purely for uploading and retrieving text and images, and I'd already heaped on feature after feature—Soul World, Soul Talk, and the rest—well past the point of excess.

And now a game? On top of that?

People were going to swarm in like actual lunatics, and there was a real chance the dimensional stability of Soul Net simply wouldn't hold and the whole thing would come apart.

"At most, we're estimating maybe ten thousand players."

"Super Soldier Catching Octopuses, which we sold last time, pulled in about that much in cumulative sales."

"Considering the easy access Soul Net provides... twenty thousand? I suspect that's about the ceiling."

Carmack and Alfonso said that, but I shook my head.

"A hundred thousand."

"...I'm sorry?"

"A hundred thousand at minimum. If things go well, over a million people will play this game. It's worth exactly that much. Which is precisely why I'm hesitating. There's nothing wrong with your idea—my only concern is whether Soul Net can hold up."

Carmack and Alfonso wore somewhat incredulous expressions at my words.

"Surely that's an exaggeration... isn't it?"

"A million is a number I can barely imagine."

"Trust me. It'll comfortably clear that mark."

I drew a long, deep breath.

A painful future unfolded before my eyes.

But it had to be done.

For success's sake.

And... for Soul Net's next explosive stage of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠growth.

"Let's make a contract, gentlemen. We'll build a dedicated site within Soul Net just for running your games. We'll implement the game directly as a Soul Net illusion effect so it can be played on the network itself."

"Payments in Mana Fruits?"

"We'll settle the Mana Fruits collected separately and pay you back in cash matching the amount spent. In exchange, we take thirty percent of your revenue as the Soul Net usage fee for your game."

At the word thirty percent, Alfonso and Carmack looked at each other and huddled over whether it was acceptable—but I won them over with a single simple line.

"In return, the Black Magic Tower will shoulder the full cost of a massive Soul Net expansion to keep your game running stable. And we'll run free advertising for your game. We'll cover the promotional expenses as well. That should more than justify a thirty percent cut, don't you think?"

Free advertising.

The two men in front of me understood exactly what kind of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠ripple effect that carried.

But my proposal didn't end there.

"By the way—do you happen to know many of the Illusion Magic Tower mages who got laid off and are out of work?"

"We do, actually, but..."

"Gather them all up. I'll need to hire them to refine the newly expanded illusion effects across Soul Net. The Soul Page effects need improving as well."

At my words, the faces of Carmack and Alfonso lit up.

"We'll spread the word immediately."

"As fast as possible, please."

That very day, I summoned every high-ranking mage and elder of the Black Magic Tower. And the Tower Master himself.

"The time has come for a massive expansion of Soul Net."

"An expansion?"

"The dimension is still tuned primarily for text and image uploads. But if we settle for that, we won't survive long. Soul Net has to be capable of far more diverse and complex effects."

Building a full dimension on the level of the current Wirod Dimension—one with seas and skies, a living ecosystem, mana, and working laws of nature?

That's a job for a god.

But a dimension that guts most of a dimension's functionality down to just uploading and downloading images and text—a Soul Net, in other words?

That was something you could develop at roughly the difficulty of a 5th-level spell.

But the time had come to make it into something far larger and more complex.

More capacity. More storage. A place where far more complex and varied things could be uploaded and downloaded.

"We're raising the dimension's scale to the level of a 7th-level spell. And for that, every single person in the Black Magic Tower will need to work through the night."

At the word overtime, everyone's faces curdled.

It wasn't impossible.

Interdimensional Dimension Point traversal magic was already an 8th-level art, after all. The Black Magic Tower was full of experts who had spent years handling precisely this category of magic, and if the elders and high-ranked mages all threw themselves at it, it was entirely achievable. But still...

"Do we really have to go that far?"

"Soul Net is already doing plenty well as it is, isn't it?"

"Why bother inflating the dimension to 7th-level spell capacity just to bolt on more features? Isn't that greed, Elsie?"

The Black Magic Tower mages were all asking the same thing: things are already good enough, so why go looking for suffering?

But I was immovable.

"Soul Net is a 5th-level spell. At best, a 5th-level spell. Any other tower or institution could easily build a comparable scaled-down dimension. Right now Soul Net happens to be the best game in town, so everyone uses it—but the moment another dimension is ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠created with better features, everyone will flood out of here and into that one."

"Even so, we're the front-runner. Surely people won't leave that easily?"

A very typical remark from people of a dimension that still didn't properly understand the concept of the internet.

And if there was one other law governing the internet, it was this: it was violently, mercilessly volatile.

"I'll stake my word on it. The instant another dimension offers more fun features—more fun content—Soul Net's user base won't just get cut in half. It will evaporate entirely. This kind of culture is extremely volatile. Without endless development and change, we'll be rendered obsolete in the blink of an eye."

The Tower Master looked like he wanted to argue—but then he seemed to accept it, and nodded.

I'd shown them the whip. Time for the carrot?

"And bear with the hardship a little longer. I'll increase your earnings to more than ten times what they are now."

"Ten times the current revenue? Is that even possible?"

"I'm certain of it. Ten times. Possibly more. Bear with it for now—do that, and I'll repay you with overwhelming profits."

Even after all that, the mages still looked dissatisfied.

The truth was, the Black Magic Tower had always been a quiet, sleepy tower.

By Earth's standards, think subway station attendants. Handing people like that an internet business—whose very essence was constant, sweeping change—naturally drew pushback.

But the results I'd produced were so enormous, and the money flowing into their hands had visibly exploded, that the discontent never surfaced openly.

"Fine. Let's give it a shot."

"If it's Elsie saying it, it's worth trusting."

"The moment revenue hits ten times, I'm cashing a fat, glorious bonus. Understood?"

"Absolutely! Between the accumulated ad revenue and Mana Fruit sales, our war chest is overwhelming! Let's dump it all in!"

And so, under my leadership, the Black Magic Tower threw itself into a massive expansion and overhaul of Soul Net.

The high-ranked mages, the elders, and the Tower Master bled for the work, and the newly hired Illusion Magic Tower mages joined the effort to boost Soul Net's performance.

Three months of grinding time, money, and manpower into the great Soul Net expansion later...

"Carmack. Alfonso."

"Yes."

"We're going live?"

Every haggard mage of the Black Magic Tower, every mage of the Illusion Magic Tower, and the game's developers, Alfonso and Carmack, all looked on as I stood before the upload with the game in hand.

Everyone swallowed dry saliva again and again, watching this moment with faces caught between tension and anticipation.

"Yes. Upload it."

Permission granted.

I uploaded the game.

And so, Soul Net's first online game—Doom's Hell Slayer—went live.

And then...

Soul Net exploded all over again.