August 10th. 8:17 PM.
Back in his apartment, the fluorescent kitchen light buzzed with a soft, dying flicker.
He dropped his bag, took off his shoes, and sat at his desk. The familiar hum of his PC welcomed him like an old friend once he turned it back on, one of the few who never expected anything from him.
As if to cancel our his thoughts, his phone rang.
'My father? What does he want now?'
He answered.
"Look, son... I've gotten ourselves into a bit of-"
"Trouble? Again? And it's not us. You only have yourself to blame."
"I just need a little bit of money to pay back what I owe. This will be the last time, I promise!"
"So were the last three times. I'm not giving you anything more to gamble with. Don't call me again."
Magnus hung up the phone and sighed.
He looked at the dusty glass protecting the inside of his computer. Vibrant LED lights breathed from one colour to another that revealed the expensive PC parts he'd worked so hard for.
It calmed him.
He checked his Gleam library.
The download was finished.
The executable file for his new game sat in the middle of his desktop, surrounded by screenshots, half-finished documents, and folders he hadn't touched in years.
'I should clean it up sometime.'
The icon had a stylised eye which stared up from the logo.
A black pupil with red sclera.
"Cult Management Simulator"
Taking off his work clothes, he checked the new game between each article of clothing removed. It was there, alright. He had a look at the reviews: "Mostly Positive".
The updates showed the last one being-
"Three days ago!? For a game over ten years old?"
Magnus blinked. Surely it meant three years, and he just needed to clean his glasses. So, he cleaned them, even so, it showed three days.
"Who in their right mind would update a game like this for ten years? The last review was four years ago. The last community contribution was from five years ago. There are only two players online..."
After giving it his usual browse, as he did with all games, he cleaned himself up in the bathroom. Washed and shaved, he put on a fresh set of clothes and refilled Lazlo's food bowl.
Sitting down at his desk, he put his headset on while Lazlo crunched on his kibble.
He double-clicked the game's icon.
And paused.
It wasn't fear. Not exactly. But something in his chest tightened.
His heart beat once much louder than usual. Just once.
The screen went black. Then, slowly, the sigil reappeared: a rotating, jagged circle with lines that rearranged when he wasn't looking directly at them.
Just two sentences that faded into view:
"THE EYES HAVE OPENED. YOU FINALLY LOOKED."
Magnus tilted his head.
A laugh escaped him, but it was hollow.
"Creepy marketing," he muttered.
And yet, he didn't click away.
Instead, something moved behind his eyes.
Not physically.
Conceptually.
A sensation like a puzzle piece shifting into place, even though he didn't know there had been a puzzle to begin with.
The computer fan kicked up to an unfamiliar whine.
In the corner of the room, Lazlo's tail twitched in his sleep.
A splash screen appeared with "Doomlight Games" appearing in a cult-like font. After the splash screen finished and the title screen appeared, Magnus leaned forward and clicked "Play".
Just before the screen changed, he could've sworn he heard something. A whisper.
A single word.
Not in the room.
Not through his headphones.
Inside him.
"Leader..."
Starting the game, he named his main character after himself, and destined his character to look like a thinner, more muscular version of himself.
Screams and shouts sounded from the street outside his apartment.
"Another protest?" Magnus's drew his eyes away from the only window in his apartment, and back to the screen.
A few minutes in, and the realisation hit him.
"No tutorials?" Magnus scanned the screen, the menu, and the start of the game.
Nothing.
There were no accounts for finishing this game, and that's why.
No hand-holding.
No tooltips that said: "Press E to Enlighten."
The moment the screen flickered to life, you were alone, staring into a void shaped like a user interface. No music. No sound. Just the occasional click when your cursor passed over something it wasn't supposed to.
It wasn't just hard.
It was hostile.
He tried looking for online guides, but most were dated, half-completed, and have him nothing more than he figured out by himself.
Magnus died four times before he managed to recruit more than his initial follower: a brainwashed sandwich vendor with loyalty issues and a glitched eye texture that spun like a loading icon whenever he talked about mustard, or cats.
The first time, Magnus had sent his lone cultist to convert people outside a metro station. The man handed out three flyers, preached a gospel of shadows, and then promptly got tackled by a federal agent disguised as a mime.
"A mime, of all things?!" Magnus yelled.
Under interrogation, the sandwich vendor sang like a canary. Gave up the cult's name, insignia, meeting place, and a pass-phrase that translated to "The Light Is Loud."
The screen blacked out.
Red text scrawled across the monitor, pulsing like veins. An eerie voice, wet and rattling, read it aloud:
"DON'T WORRY… WE REMEMBER YOU. WE WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER YOU."
Whispers followed. Chanting.
Magnus blinked.
"Okay," he muttered. "That's... normal. That's definitely queued to happen after someone's first loss, right?"
It wasn't. Nobody on the forums or guides mentioned it.
The second attempt lasted longer. He recruited two food truck operators and a part-time dog walker with a criminal record and a fondness for wearing ceremonial robes made from repurposed bath towels.
Just as the cult started gaining traction, minor blessings, faint auras, someone claimed their acne vanished, the dog walker livestreamed a seizure she insisted was a "divine vision."
The clip went viral. Millions of views on the first day.
Twenty-four hours later, Magnus's in-game house was raided by DEA officers.
Their reasoning was that his follower must've been on drugs he supplied her.
They found one sacrificed chicken, three legally imported herbs, and a mason jar labelled "LUNGS OF THE RIGHTEOUS."
Magnus tried to explain the lungs were just an acting prop. That the chicken was already dead. That the "herbs" were a variation of catnip.
Mid-explanation, Lazlo, his too-curious tabby, had gotten behind the monitor, tangled himself in the cords, and yanked the power cable free, turning off the monitor while he heard the NPCs in the game take him into custody.
Once he plugged the monitor back in, there was the red text again. Harsher. It pulsed this time.
"WE TORE THE OTHERS APART. BUT YOU WILL LAST LONGER."
"The hell is this game?" Magnus whispered, rubbing his eyes.
The third save has his cult fall apart over bureaucracy. He forgot to bribe a zoning official. Apparently, you needed proper paperwork and at least two forged permits to construct a blood-stained labyrinth beneath a bowling alley.
An anonymous city inspector NPC shut a full hour of Magnus's grinding down with bright blue eyes and a clipboard that brought about his doom.
"Who expects to have to do that?" Magnus growled. "Ridiculous!"
The fourth?
Nobody expects the Cult Ethics Council.
Magnus sure didn't.
One moment he was mid-initiation for a new member, chanting, candles, whispers from some unknown god. The next, the screen morphed into a courtroom.
Five waxen-faced judges sat on chairs at a circular podium. Each of them, and unmoving. Their mouths were open and they never blinked while debating in Latin the morality of his methods.
When he attempted to skip the cutscene, it only zoomed in closer on the lead judge's eyes.
He was sentenced to banishment by bureaucracy. The screen blurred, and all his cultists were reassigned to social rehabilitation centres.
"Banishment for human sacrifice?" Magnus snapped. "Isn't that what cults do? That's like punishing fish for swimming or a cat for hunting!"
By the fifth attempt, most people would've quit. Left a nasty review. Claimed the game was unfinished. Or cursed its difficulty curve, uninstalled it, and walked away.
Not Magnus.
But it didn't help that Lazlo still hadn't learned.
Attempt five was going smoothly, a charismatic recruiter, donations trickling in, even a half-functioning doomsday prophecy generator, when Lazlo rolled across the keyboard mid-summoning. A paw hit ESC, cancelling the summoning ritual and causing half of his cultists to implode.
Before Magnus could remedy the situation, Lazlo jumped behind the monitor again. Magnus turned too late. The screen flickered, the power plug popped out, and everything went dark.
"Lazlo, I swear to GOD!"
He jammed the cable back in. When the screen came on again, the HUD was different. Things were off. His cultists all had white eyes. The game's log had a new line that just read: "BLOOD TITHE PENDING."
Magnus took a short break, gave Lazlo some belly rubs and some wet food before clicking out of the fail screen.
He breathed deep, and the whispers returned.
The whispers, though?
Now they said his name. Well, his character's name.
At that point, Magnus stopped playing like a gamer.
He stopped thinking like one, too.
Common sense? Gone.
In its place: instinct. Fevered clicking. Late-night note-taking. Scribbles on post-its. He started listening for patterns in the static, whispers, and chants. Maximising ritual loops to get better relationships with the gods. Embracing inefficiency when it felt wrong to do so. He failed two more times, but those didn't count. They were... sacrifices. Lessons offered up to the machine.
To the game.
For the life of the cult.
He wasn't playing for victory anymore.
He was playing for ascension.
For the game, he'd become the perfect cult leader.