My Internet Friend Was a God
“...”
My whole body was a mess of wounds. My face was swollen black and blue with bruises, and cuts crisscrossed my arms and legs everywhere I looked.
And clutched in my hand was a single sheet of paper.
You have achieved 32nd place in Class F of the Academy and have accumulated one (1) warning.
You currently have two (2) accumulated warnings. Upon receiving a third, you will be expelled automatically.
The Academy — an institution devoted to training the heroes who battle monsters and villains. It existed to efficiently cultivate the awakener, that vanishingly small fraction of humanity gifted with power.
And phrased another way...
It means anything with a bad return on investment gets tossed out without a second thought.
Class F. The lowest of the low at the Academy. Its roster held thirty-two students, and I was ranked thirty-second. There was no arguing it: I was the Academy's official dead last.
Fuck.
The reason I currently looked like a dog that had been beaten half to death on top of a day marked 'inauspicious' on the calendar was tied to this exact problem. I'd been swept aside without even managing to resist during the ranking match held to stave off expulsion.
It wasn't that I hadn't tried. If anything, I'd worked harder than most of the top-ranked students. But the reason I was stuck wallowing at the bottom could be read straight off a corner of my status window.
On the very first day of the entrance ceremony, my pathetic excuse for talent — worse than even a dullard's — failed to earn the favor of a single Constellation.
This was like showing up to Daechi-dong with a torn textbook and trying to out-study the elites who spent every waking hour with private tutors. The winner had been decided before the fight ever started.
One semester left. Four months, not counting vacation, and I'd be expelled.
Fuck. I worked so goddamn hard.
I dragged myself home in despair, too wrecked to even think about washing up, and switched on my computer. The stinging would've made a shower unbearable anyway. The moment the boot chime sounded, I fired off a message to my friend on That's Code.
If you live long enough, you meet a friend or two who really gets you. The internet is no different — no, with all spatial limits removed, it's arguably easier to meet them online than in person. Anyone who plays online games has at least a dozen names sitting in their friends list.
Everyone's different, but in my case, every single one of them was an internet friend I'd never met face to face. You might pity me for that, but it can't be helped. My social life in the real world was such a disaster that I barely had anyone close to me. On the internet, though — where I could go feral without a single watchful eye — I was positively bursting with charm, and I'd amassed quite the circle of friends.
So stop looking at me with those miserable, pitying eyes. I'm plenty happy in my own way.
Anyway, among all these internet friends of mine, there was one particularly strange individual.
She went by some bizarre English handle, but I liked having her around because she was useful in so many ways when we gamed together.
Useful how, you ask?
Whenever someone picked a fight with her in chat, she'd spew profanities no human being had ever heard before, curses so spectacular that onlookers could only marvel in awe. After a notoriously infamous community troll got verbally annihilated by her and rage-quit the game entirely, I started keeping her on retainer as my mercenary for flame wars.
Ding.
A video call came through from her almost immediately, and I answered.
“So you have arrived. I have been waiting.”
If she had one defining trait, it was her bizarre, impossible-to-place way of speaking. But plenty of people roleplay online, so I never paid it much mind.
“Already in the lobby. Get in here.”
“Do not rush me.”
I loaded up the game and goofed off in the training grounds, mashing skills on my characters like a maniac. This was why I loved games. When I played, I could empty my head completely and focus on nothing but that single moment.
Though I wasn't fond of the hollow emptiness that crept in whenever I logged off.
“Hm. Your voice seems rather gloomy today. Has something happened?”
“...Is it that obvious?”
Well, of course. This was the woman so terrifyingly perceptive she could drive a man to quit gaming with a single sentence. Reading the emotions buried in my voice through a garbage mic? Child's play for her.
“It's nothing. I think I'm getting expelled from the Academy.”
“Why?”
“Because I'm disgustingly weak. What other reason could there be?”
I had told the friends I was actually close to that I attended the Academy. But I'd never mentioned I was dead last even among the F-rankers, so this was the first she was hearing that I was on the chopping block.
“I could assist you, you know.”
Yet she said it with perfect composure, not a hint of agitation. Help me? Help me how, exactly?
However superhuman her silver tongue might be, the problem of my Academy expulsion wasn't something words could fix. So I assumed she was joking and asked with a laugh.
“Oh yeah? And how exactly would you help?”
“A simple contract.”
Ding.
Along with her answer, some strange image arrived in my messages.
“What the hell is this?”
“Answer it.”
I frowned at the image and examined it closely.
— Contract Verification —
What is the date on which Randolph Carter and Nyarlathotep first met?
Randolph Carter. My handle. It used to be Kim Hyunseong, until she'd mocked it as unbearably lame and given me that name instead.
“Why are you quizzing me with something this easy? Three years ago today, obviously.”
Exactly three years ago to the day, I'd met her while gaming. It had been, for all intents and purposes, a completely one-sided ambush of an introduction — but I remembered it as a pretty good first meeting, all things considered.
“...Correct. I find you tolerable indeed. Duo with me.”
A faint sound of laughter drifted through my headset.
“Wait, you know how to laugh? That's a first.”
Chiiiik—
Then, all at once, a voice rang out through the static — impossibly clear, impossibly close.
“A first, yes.”
A voice as though she were speaking right beside me. No — beyond that. As though she were declaiming directly inside my skull.
“The mortal who has pleased me—”
BOOM!
“What the fuck—!”
A detonation like the sky collapsing in on itself. In the same instant, darkness flooded everything around me. Everything vanished — except the headset on my head — and I stood isolated in that pitch-black void.
But I knew what this phenomenon was. This was the thing from the entrance ceremony, the one they'd demoed for us...
“A Constellation contract?”
When you contracted with a Constellation, the contractor entered a specific space to converse with them directly. That space differed from Constellation to Constellation, but as a rule, the evil-aligned ones favored dark chambers.
Only — wasn't this place far too black?
Even the Demon King in the Darkness, currently recognized as the most malevolent Constellation on Earth, used a black-based demonic castle as his backdrop. He didn't go in for this absolute, light-devouring void.
“What is this...”
And then a small doubt flickered to life.
I've never done a Constellation contract. So how do I know all this?
“Huh?”
I had zero talent. I'd never contracted with any Constellation, which meant I knew these things only from secondhand stories. I couldn't possibly know what this phenomenon actually was.
So why — with no basis whatsoever — had I instantly recognized this as a Constellation contract?
Slither. Slither.
Something began crawling across the floor.
My body froze solid, and I barely managed to crane my neck downward to look at it.
“Damn it — I took a wrong turn somewhere.”
Sssss.
The thing that had been crawling along the floor suddenly rose up and reshaped itself into the figure of a human woman.
“You glimpsed my true form unbidden. You nearly went mad because of it — my apologies.”
“Hah... hah... what... what was that...”
My mind was still reeling. I tried to recall the thing's shape, but something seemed to have slammed a shutter over my mind — the memory simply wouldn't come.
“Do not trouble yourself trying to remember. I have sealed it.”
The woman standing before me poked my forehead, punctuating each word, and smiled.
“Who... are you?”
A familiar voice. A familiar way of speaking. I already knew who she was — but I couldn't bring myself to believe it, so I asked anyway.
“Do you truly wish to know?”
The Outer God 'Nyarlathotep' requests an Incarnation Contract with you.
“Nyarla...thotep?”
Outer God? Not a Constellation? And an Incarnation Contract, on top of that?
An Incarnation Contract was nothing like an ordinary contract — it was something a Constellation offered only to the most select handful of chosen contractors. Put simply, it meant being treated as special-SS-rank. And a contract like that... was being offered to me.
“Your feeble mortal civilization.”
She began to stroke my chin.
“I have watched all of it, from beginning to end — and I declare that you are the finest of the lot.”
Her face was smiling, delighted, radiating pure happiness.
“I can place everything you desire in your hands. I am telling you I will do for you things I have never done even for my own worshippers.”
The Outer God 'Nyarlathotep' is forcibly proceeding with the contract.
“And there is no right of refusal.”
With the sensation of something being carved into my very flesh, I lost consciousness.