The first thing that hit me wasn't pain. Not the cold stone digging into my spine. Not even the sulfur sting in the back of my throat.
It was the fact that I could smell.
VR hadn't cracked that yet. Even the best rigs barely managed "cheap vanilla candle" before you wanted to hurl. But this? This was sulfur. Real, acrid, metallic, layered with a rotten tang that curled my stomach.
Which meant one thing: I wasn't in Erevos Online.
I sat up slowly, blinking in the flickering candlelight. Stone walls stretched around me, carved with symbols that hurt to look at directly.
Pentagrams and sigils covered every surface, drawn in what looked suspiciously like dried blood.
At the center of it all, I sat in a circle of salt and crushed bone, wearing robes that definitely hadn't been in my closet an hour ago.
"Great," I muttered, my voice coming out deeper than expected. "Either I've been kidnapped by the world's most dedicated nerds, or I'm having the weirdest lucid dream of my life."
Around the ritual circle, five figures in black robes lay motionless.
Very motionless.
The kind of motionless that suggested they wouldn't be getting back up anytime soon. Scorch marks radiated out from where they'd been standing, as if something had flash-fried them from the inside out.
I looked down at my hands. They were pale, longer than they should be, with fingernails that came to subtle points. Definitely not my hands. These belonged to someone – or something – else entirely.
"Okay, this is fine," I said aloud, mostly to hear my own voice. "Perfectly normal Tuesday. Wake up in a ritual circle surrounded by crispy cultists. Happens to everyone."
I stood, and immediately regretted it. The world tilted sideways, and I had to grab the stone wall to keep from falling over.
My body felt wrong – too tall, too lean, with a center of gravity that didn't match twenty-six years of muscle memory.
When I steadied myself and looked at my reflection in a puddle of... something I didn't want to identify, the face staring back wasn't mine.
Sharp cheekbones, skin pale with an unnatural glow. Eyes that shift from fire to void. A cloak of smoke and velvet, alive with countless faces - men and women, young and old - whispering as they fade in and out.
"Oh, you've got to be kidding me."
I knew this face. I'd spent three months perfecting it in Erevos Online's character creator, tweaking every detail until it matched my vision of Dantalion, the 71st Demon Duke of the Ars Goetia.
The pale skin that never saw sunlight.
The predatory elegance that suggested nobility and danger in equal measure.
Even the way the shadows seemed to cling to the edges of my vision, as if darkness itself bent toward me.
"This isn't possible," I whispered, but my reflection – Dantalion's reflection – stared back with those impossible golden eyes. "NPCs don't just... people don't just become their characters. That's not how reality works."
A piece of parchment crackled under my foot.
I bent to pick it up, recognizing the elaborate script immediately. It was written in the same flowing hand that had filled my character's backstory documents, tho I'd never seen this particular text before:
"By blood and bone, by salt and flame, we call forth the Duke of Knowledge, the Teacher of Arts and Sciences, He Who Knows All Secrets. Dantalion of the Thirty-Six Legions, we offer our lives that you might walk among mortals once more. Rise, oh Duke, and reclaim your dominion over..."
The text ended in a brown stain that looked uncomfortably biological.
"Well, that explains the dead cultists," I said, crumpling the parchment. "And here I thought people had better things to do than actually try summoning fictional demons."
The irony wasn't lost on me. In Erevos Online, I'd played Dantalion as the reasonable one among the demonic nobility.
The demon duke who preferred negotiation to conquest, knowledge to destruction.
The one who built libraries instead of torture chambers.
I'd given him depth, complexity, even a code of ethics that put most human nobles to shame.
And now these idiots had tried to summon that character, died in the process, and somehow dragged me into their mess.
"At least they got the aesthetic right," I admitted, looking around the ritual chamber. It looked exactly like something from the game's darker dungeons, complete with the unnecessarily dramatic architecture and the lingering sense of malevolent presence.
That presence, I realized, was coming from me.
It was subtle at first – just a feeling that the shadows were paying attention, that the very air around me held more weight than it should.
But as I focused on it, I could feel... more.
Knowledge that wasn't mine, pressing at the edges of my consciousness. Languages I'd never learned but somehow understood. The sensation of vast power, coiled and waiting.
"Okay, Dantalion," I said to my reflection, testing the name. It felt right in a way my real name suddenly didn't. "Let's say this is real. Let's say some cosmic joke has actually turned you into your own character. What exactly does a freshly summoned demon duke do in this situation?"
My reflection didn't answer, but I felt the knowledge unfurling in my mind anyway. The Thirty-Six Legions. Each one a small army of demons bound to my will, scattered across dimensions and waiting for my call. In the game, they'd been raid mechanics and quest objectives. But if this was real...
"They're real too," I breathed. "Saras, Meidina, all of them. Every NPC I ever created, every personality I programmed, every backstory I wrote."
The implications hit me like a truck.
"They're all real, and they're all waiting for me."
I stood there in the silence of the ritual chamber, surrounded by the corpses of my would-be summoners, trying to process the impossibility of my situation.
The candlelight flickered against the stone walls, casting dancing shadows that seemed to move with a life of their own.
"Okay," I said aloud, my voice echoing off the ancient stones. "Step one: figure out where I am. Step two: figure out how to get home. Step three: try not to die in the process."
That's when I felt it – a pull, like invisible strings tugging at the edges of my consciousness. The sensation was familiar from the game, the feeling I'd get when one of my summon spells was ready to activate.
But this was deeper, more real. The knowledge unfurled in my mind like a flower blooming: I could call them.
My Legions. My creations.
The smart thing would be to explore cautiously, gather information, maybe find some normal humans who could explain what had happened to me.
Instead, I found myself extending my hand and speaking words that felt both foreign and natural: "I call upon the Knight-Captain of my personal guard. Come forth, Saras Netherbane."
The air in front of me began to shimmer like heat waves rising from summer pavement.
Reality bent, twisted, and then tore open like fabric.
Through the rift stepped a woman in dark armor, her hand already on her sword hilt, scanning for threats with the practiced ease of a professional soldier.
She was exactly as I'd designed her, down to the last detail. Tall, athletic, with the kind of ethereal beauty that belonged to high nobility – both human and something more. Her dark hair was pulled back in a practical ponytail, revealing the subtle points of her ears and the faint luminescence of her pale skin. Small horns curved elegantly from her temples, polished to an obsidian shine, and her eyes held flecks of silver that seemed to catch light that wasn't there.
A Bride of Dantalion, I'd called her race in the character creator. Noble demonkind designed specifically to serve the demonic royalty. Her armor bore the stylized sigil of a raven in flight – Dantalion's personal heraldry.
The rift closed behind her with a sound like a sigh, and she immediately dropped to one knee.
"My Lord Dantalion," she said, her voice carrying that accent I'd spent hours perfecting in the character creation screen. "I have answered your summons. What are your commands?"
Looking down at her – at this person I'd created, who was now real and kneeling before me with genuine devotion – I felt something shift inside my chest.
This wasn't a game anymore.
These weren't NPCs.
Whatever cosmic accident had made this possible, I was responsible for her now. For all of them.
"Rise, Saras," I said, trying to keep my voice steady. "First things first – are you... real? I mean, are you actually here, or am I having the world's most elaborate hallucination?"
She stood, tilting her head with that puzzled expression I'd programmed as one of her default reactions. "My Lord? I do not understand the question. You summoned me, and I am here. Is this not as it should be?"
"Right," I muttered. "Of course you wouldn't question it. You're programmed to—" I caught myself. "Sorry. You're designed to be loyal, not philosophical."
"I serve because I choose to serve," she said simply, and something in her tone made me look at her more carefully. There was a depth in her eyes that hadn't been there in the game, a spark of something that seemed entirely her own. The silver flecks in her irises seemed to pulse with their own inner light. "You created me, gave me purpose, gave me a life worth living. You designed my very race to stand beside the demonic nobility, and I am honored to be the first of the Brides of Dantalion to answer your call."
The weight of that statement hit me like a physical blow.
In the game, her loyalty had been a programmed trait, a bunch of code that made her follow my commands and deliver scripted responses.
But this woman standing before me wasn't following a script. She was choosing to be here, choosing to follow someone who, twenty minutes ago, had been nothing more than her creator in a virtual world.
"Saras," I said quietly, "tell me truthfully – do you remember being in a game? Do you remember being... not real?"
She considered this carefully, her brow furrowing in thought. "I remember dreaming, my Lord. Long dreams where everything felt distant and hollow, like shadows on a wall. But then you called, and I woke up. This feels..." She gestured around the ritual chamber. "This feels like the first real moment of my life."
"Yeah," I said softly. "I know the feeling."
She looked around the chamber, taking in the scorch marks and corpses with professional detachment. "Cultists, my Lord?"
"Apparently. They tried to summon Dantalion – me – and died for their trouble. Which raises an interesting question: if I'm really him now, what happened to my original body? Am I dead back on Earth, or just... elsewhere?"
"I cannot answer that, my Lord," Saras said. "But perhaps it does not matter. You are here now, in this world, in this flesh. The past is merely prologue to the present."
I had to smile at that. Even real, even thinking for herself, she still had that noble bearing I'd programmed into the Bride of Dantalion race.
The elegant poise, the way she held herself with quiet dignity even in a corpse-filled ritual chamber, the subtle otherworldly beauty that marked her as something more than mortal. Some things, apparently, were fundamental to what she was.
"You're probably right," I said. "So, Saras, what's your assessment of our current situation?"
She straightened, slipping into her professional mode. "We are in ancient ruins, my Lord, recently used for dark rituals. The construction suggests we are underground, possibly in natural caves that were later expanded and carved. The air carries the scent of forest and earth, so we are likely beneath wooded hills or mountains."
"Excellent," I said, genuinely impressed by her analysis. "And strategically?"
"The location could serve as a base of operations, My Lord. Defensible, hidden, with existing infrastructure. The ritual chamber could be repurposed, and there appear to be deeper chambers beyond this one." She paused, then added with characteristic bluntness: "Though we should dispose of the corpses before they begin to smell worse."
I laughed despite myself. "Always practical. That's why you're my Knight-Captain."
She smiled at that, a real smile that transformed her stern features.
"Thank you, my Lord."
Looking around the chamber with new eyes, I could see what she meant.
This place had potential. Ancient stone walls that would provide excellent defense, multiple chambers to expand into, and apparently secure enough that cultists could conduct their business without interruption.
If I was stuck in this world – and it was looking increasingly likely that I was – I'd need somewhere to regroup and figure out my next move.
"Very well," I said, stepping over the ritual circle's boundary. "Then let's claim this place as ours. But first, let's explore and make sure we're not about to be surprised by anyone else who might be lurking in the shadows."
"At once, my Lord," Saras said, drawing her sword with a whisper of steel. The blade gleamed in the candlelight, and I realized it wasn't just ceremonial – it was a real weapon, sharp enough to kill.
As we prepared to explore deeper into the ruins, one thought echoed in my mind: I'd just accidentally summoned the first of my Thirty-Six Legions. If Saras was real, if she could think and feel and choose, then the others would be too.
And somehow, I didn't think managing thirty-six independent-minded demonic commanders was going to be as easy as it had been in the game.
"Lead the way, Saras," I said. "Let's see what we're working with."
As we left the ritual chamber behind, one thought echoed in my mind: I'd spent three years creating these characters, giving them personalities and motivations and dreams. Now I had to figure out how to be worthy of their loyalty.
And somehow, I didn't think it would be as easy as it had been in the game.
To be continued...