I Tried to Summon a Succubus, but She Took Me to the Demon World Instead...

Chapter 1 - A Ritual for the Desperate

I am going to say this upfront so history records it properly: this was an unbelievably stupid idea.

My name is Ren Haruki. Third-year high school student. 18 years old. Male. Healthy, according to school records. Terminally unlucky with women, according to observable evidence. Summer vacation had started that morning. That should have been good news. For normal people, the first day of summer break meant beaches, festivals, part-time jobs, dates, club trips, tanning, accidental hand-holding, maybe even kissing if God was feeling reckless. For me, it meant lying on my bed at one in the morning, scrolling through a group chat full of guys bragging like idiots.

Bro my cousin already invited three girls to pool lol

Ren u alive

dont spend whole summer with your right hand

I threw my phone onto my pillow and stared at the ceiling. "Cruel," I muttered. "Really cruel." I was not mad because they were wrong. That was the problem. I had never had a girlfriend. Never even gotten close enough to a real romance for the universe to reject me properly. At school I got through the day by acting like it was funny. Laugh first, make the dirty joke, keep moving. If you laughed with everyone else, nobody looked too closely at how pathetic your weekends actually were. It was not a noble strategy, but it usually worked. Tonight the joke had worn thin.

Because a week ago, right before classes ended, I had heard a rumor. Not a normal rumor, either. Not "teacher so-and-so is getting transferred" or "that third-year couple broke up behind the gym." No. This one had the exact shape of a terrible decision. There was a ritual going around. A real one. Summon the right demon, and she'd give you a night you'd never forget. The guy who said it looked way too serious to be making it up. Another guy laughed and called him full of crap. Another swore his older cousin's friend had done it. Nobody had proof. That should have killed the story. It did not kill the story. It moved into my skull and started paying rent.

I told myself I was only curious. That was technically true. It was also not the whole truth. Because after three hours of searching through the kind of forum threads that make your soul feel sticky, I had found a scanned page, three contradictory translations, eleven arguments about candle wax, and one printout titled:

"Beginner Ritual: Lesser Succubus, Safe Version"

Safe Version. I still wanted to meet the idiot who wrote that. "This is research," I told myself for what had to be the twelfth time. "Academic research."

The circle on my bedroom floor glowed dully under my desk lamp. The chalk lines were crooked, one of the symbols looked like it had given up halfway through being a symbol, and I had redrawn the whole thing three times before reaching the point all desperate men eventually reach. Close enough. My room smelled like cheap candles, graphite, laundry detergent, and panic. I had locked my door, shoved a towel under the gap, and opened my window a crack in case summoning a succubus created fumes. That felt responsible. At the center of the circle sat the printed sheet, weighted down with the heaviest object on my desk: a pointless trophy from middle-school relay.

I picked the paper up again. The instructions were awful.

Step one: prepare offering.

Step two: remain sincere.

Step three: speak the incantation with desire.

That last one was frankly insulting. "With desire," I muttered. "What, did they think I was going to do it with civic duty?" My face was already hot. I was alone. In my room. At one in the morning. On the first day of summer break. About to chant foreign nonsense into candlelight because I had gotten so thoroughly sick of being untouched that I had reached across the internet and grabbed the first forbidden thing that winked back. If that was not desire, it was at least unemployment.

I looked at the line labeled intended result and almost died on the spot.

"Mild affection, dream pleasure, or direct manifestation depending on compatibility."

"Direct manifestation," I read aloud, then covered my face with both hands. "No. No, let's not act like I wasn't hoping for that one." There were levels to my shame that night, and all of them were advanced. I should have stopped there. I knew that. Any decent version of me would have crumpled up the page, erased the chalk, and gone to sleep with the bitter dignity of a teenager who had almost committed ritual stupidity for horny reasons.

Instead, I stepped into the circle. "All right," I whispered. "Worst case, nothing happens and I spend the rest of summer hating myself in private." I looked down at the page again. "Best case..." My brain immediately produced images so embarrassing I nearly bit through my own tongue. Kissing. A beautiful girl on my bed. Hands in places hands normally had to negotiate their way into. Maybe some soft demon whispering that I was handsome instead of terminally average. Maybe... "Okay," I said quickly to nobody. "Let's not think too hard or we're going to pass out before magic even starts."

I picked up the paper with both hands and began reading.

The words felt wrong in my mouth immediately.

They did not feel merely foreign; foreign would have been manageable. This was something meaner than that. The syllables seemed to resist being spoken by me, as if my tongue had to negotiate its way through each one. By the third line, my throat had gone dry. By the fourth, the room had become too quiet in the way places sometimes do right before something breaks. The candles flickered with open reluctance. I had the absurd impression that they knew more than I did and disapproved.

Still, I kept going.

The instructions had demanded sincerity, and on that front I was overqualified. I was sincere in the painful, humiliating way only a teenage boy standing in a candle circle at one in the morning could be.

By the time I reached the final line there was a bitter taste in the back of my mouth, like the air itself had begun to bleed.

I said the last word.

Every candle went out, all at once and without the courtesy of drama, as if the room had simply been shut like a lid.

I stayed very still.

"That," I said into the black, "was concerning."

For one full second, nothing happened.

Hope returned with embarrassing speed. Maybe it had failed. Maybe I had wasted hours of my life, seven candles, printer ink, and the remaining dignity of my bloodline on an occult scam with formatting. Honestly, failure had a kind of mercy to it. Failure I could live with. Failure I could bury.

Then the circle under my feet began to glow, and the color was not warm candle red or anything remotely romantic. It was a deeper crimson, the kind that looked alive in bad ways. It filled the crooked chalk lines from within like blood entering veins. I saw, with a very specific kind of horror, that the symbols I had drawn were moving, sliding, and correcting themselves with offensive confidence. The whole thing rearranged under me like a real teacher taking one look at my work and rewriting the answer key while I was still holding the pencil.

"No," I said.

The air in front of me warped.

At first it looked like heat above pavement in summer. Then the distortion deepened, folded inward, and became the sort of impossible that immediately made your body understand language it had never studied. Pressure climbed through the room so fast my ears popped. My teeth hurt. Breathing stopped being automatic and became something I had to do on purpose.

Somewhere far away, a bell rang.

One heavy strike.

It did not sound like any bell from the human world. Not school, not temple, not neighborhood clocktower, not any machinery I knew how to name. It sounded older than those categories. Like a notice. Like something vast had just been informed I existed and had opinions about that.

Something stepped through the distortion.

Beauty is a useless word for certain emergencies. It implies softness, safety, admiration from a distance. None of that applied here. The girl who entered my room looked beautiful in the way drawn blades looked beautiful: precise, expensive, and dangerous enough to make awe feel like a form of self-endangerment. Long crimson hair spilled over one shoulder in a line too vivid for my cheap room to deserve. Black fabric wrapped her body in something that sat halfway between a dress and armor, elegant enough to belong at a noble banquet and severe enough to belong on a battlefield. When her heels touched my floor, the room stopped feeling like my room. It became too small, too plain, too human, and the air adjusted itself around her the way lesser things moved around greater ones.

She looked around once with the cool attention of someone assessing a room, not reacting to it. Then her eyes found me. They were gold in the hard, exact sense, not "gold in the light" but gold like polished metal sharpened to an edge.

"You," she said.

Her voice was low and immaculate and carried much too much authority for someone who had just stepped out of impossible geometry into a teenage boy's bedroom.

I pointed at myself because my brain had stopped handling language with professional competence.

"Yes," I said. "Me. Correct. Hi."

She looked down at the circle, then back at me. The expression she gave me was the exact one teachers wore when they caught a student doing something so inventive, reckless, and obviously doomed that simple punishment no longer covered it.

"Explain."

"I..." This turned out to be a difficult sentence to begin. I tried twice before the wrong one escaped first. "Are you the beginner package?"

Silence hit the room so hard it felt architectural. She stared at me, and I felt, with complete conviction, that I had just found the worst possible opening line for a demonic encounter and might yet be remembered for it in whatever afterlife handled secondhand shame.

"...The what?" she asked.

"That came out wrong," I said quickly. "Not wrong in the sense that it was secretly good. Just wrong in every direction."

My eyes dropped to the printout still in my hand, which was shaking enough to make the page whisper.

"I was trying to summon a succubus."

Her expression changed in a way I did not know faces could change. It somehow held disgust, amusement, contempt, and curiosity all at once without letting any of them win.

"Of course you were."

My face burned.

"To be fair," I said, because even my self-preservation had by then accepted that my mouth was committed to the bit, "the internet described it less humiliatingly than that."

"The internet," she repeated, with the tone of someone forced to discuss mold in a formal dining room.

She stepped closer, and the room became heavier with her. There are presences that do not simply occupy space; they revise it. Each step she took seemed to push pressure into my chest until standing still started feeling like labor. She studied the circle again, this time not with annoyance but with concentration sharp enough to make the edges of the room feel unstable.

"Who taught you this pattern?" she asked.

"A forum thread."

"What language did you think that incantation was?"

"Honestly? Somewhere around line three I committed to not knowing."

The corner of her mouth moved, but not with kindness. It looked more dangerous than that.

"Your self-preservation is deplorable," she said.

"That feels fair."

Her gaze tracked over the circle once more, and I watched the exact moment her amusement vanished. Her eyes sharpened. The whole line of her body seemed to still around a new conclusion.

"No," she murmured.

It was a quiet word.

It frightened me more than shouting would have.

"No human should be able to reach this depth."

"Depth?" I repeated.

She ignored me.

"No beginner lust-circle should have touched my seal."

My stomach dropped hard enough to register as a physical event. "Seal" and "touched" were not words that sounded safe in that context.

"So," I said carefully, "we've moved past beginner package."

She looked at me.

I became intensely aware of my own mortality.

"What is your name?"

"Ren. Ren Haruki."

"Ren Haruki," she repeated, and hearing my full name in her voice felt wrong in a different way than the incantation had felt wrong. It was not painful. It felt binding, like my name had just been entered into a ledger I had never agreed to see. "Tell me exactly what you wanted when you began."

"Do I really have to?"

"Yes."

I tried to meet her eyes and discovered quickly that this was an activity better suited to braver men.

"I wanted..." I swallowed. "A succubus."

"That much is obvious."

"A pretty succubus."

She folded her arms.

"Continue."

"A very pretty succubus."

Her expression remained immaculate, which was honestly insulting considering how hard mine was collapsing.

"And maybe," I said, while what remained of my soul attempted to leave through my ears, "someone who would make the first day of summer break less depressing."

That did it. She did not smile, but a soft breath of laughter escaped her, there and gone so quickly I might have doubted it if I had not been watching her like my life depended on facial evidence. Which, at that point, it might have.

"Pathetic," she said.

"You laughed."

"Do not mistake observation for encouragement."

"You absolutely laughed."

"Do not become bold simply because you are attractive in your stupidity."

Everything inside me stopped. My heart did not merely skip a beat. It vacated the premises, held an emergency meeting, and returned under protest.

"I am what in my what?"

She blinked once, a tiny sign that perhaps she had not intended to say that aloud.

"Irrelevant."

"That did not sound irrelevant."

"It will if you wish to keep breathing."

I decided, with great maturity, that breathing was probably the better priority for now.

She lifted one hand. Thin red light unwound from her fingers and drifted over the circle like ribbon turning into script. The whole pattern answered. Every line on the floor flared brighter. The printout in my hands ignited in crimson fire that did not burn my fingers, only consumed the paper into drifting ash.

"Hey-"

"Silence."

The word struck harder than volume should have allowed. It was not loud, just authoritative in a way that made my body comply before my pride could object.

Then she frowned in earnest. It was not mild annoyance or noble disdain, but a real, thinking frown, the expression of someone listening to machinery deep inside a wall and realizing it had been built wrong.

"Impossible," she said.

"You keep saying versions of that, and I feel like I am not benefiting from the information."

"This was not merely a summons." Her voice hardened. "You triggered a binding clause."

"A what?"

"Someone altered this bait-ritual long ago. Any lesser demon it caught would have been shackled and bled for strength." Her gaze narrowed at the shifting geometry on the floor. "Crude. Vulgar. Effective, in theory."

I stared at the circle with renewed horror.

"So I almost enslaved a succubus by accident?"

"By incompetence, not by accident. Different crime."

"That feels needlessly precise when I am already losing emotionally."

"And yet accurate."

Then she stepped into the circle with me, and the red light surged upward. Heat hit my legs so suddenly I yelped and nearly folded in on myself. It was not on my skin. That would have been easier. The symbols moving across the floor seemed to pass through me and reappear inside my body, like something incandescent had been threaded under my skin and was now being pulled upward with patient cruelty. My veins lit in sharp red lines. No blood. No wound. Just the sensation of being written into from the inside out.

"Wait," I said, voice breaking around the word. "What happens now?"

"Now I determine why the binding latched onto me instead."

"That sounds worse than the succubus plan."

"Everything is worse than your succubus plan."

She was right, which was rude. The burning kept climbing through my ankles, calves, knees, thighs, and stomach with vicious certainty, as if some invisible script had entered my body and was searching for the place where it wanted to finish the sentence.

Then, without warning, a name appeared in my mind. It did not feel remembered so much as placed there, clear as if someone had leaned close and whispered directly into the back of my skull.

"Seraphina?"

For the first time since arriving, she stopped looking composed.

Her eyes snapped to mine. Real tension entered her face so sharply that I understood, all at once, that whatever was happening had moved beyond mere embarrassment and into territory that frightened even her.

"How do you know that name?"

"It-" I swallowed hard. "It was just there."

"Do not move."

That was all she said, but the room had changed around the sentence. There was strain in it now, and urgency.

The circle responded like it had heard us.

The patterns on the floor twisted again. New symbols spread outward in branching crimson, faster than my eyes could track. They crawled over the wood, up the bedframe, across my desk, over the walls. My room was not being lit. It was being overwritten. Every familiar object had become a surface for a language I did not know and clearly had no business standing near.

Then the writing reached me properly.

I screamed.

There is no useful dignity in pain that sudden. The symbols under my skin surged higher in one merciless wave. Light ripped through my veins in jagged threads and drove itself toward my chest with the determination of something that had already decided where it belonged. The bell rang again, not outside, not anywhere human ears were supposed to map. One clean, resonant strike from some larger architecture beyond the room.

The walls split with red light.

Cold wind rushed through my bedroom carrying the smell of stone, smoke, and something old enough to make instinct curl up and beg not to be noticed.

"This is bad, isn't it?" I managed.

"Disastrous," Seraphina said.

"Why are you saying that so calmly?"

"Because panic would waste time."

The floor vanished. Or perhaps my understanding of the floor did. Either way, gravity stopped behaving like something I knew. My desk stretched sideways. The ceiling unfolded into darkness shaped like arches and towers. The room did not break so much as open, exposing structures behind reality that had apparently been there all along waiting for the right mistake.

Seraphina moved. One moment she stood in front of me. The next she had me by the chin, forcing my eyes onto hers while the world came apart around us.

"Listen carefully, Ren Haruki."

Her voice cut through the noise with humiliating ease.

"From this point onward, do exactly as I say."

"I would love to believe I have other options," I said through gritted teeth, "but I definitely do not."

That earned me the faintest flash of something sharp and almost amused.

"Good."

Then the burning inside me surged upward all at once. The symbols that had climbed through my legs and torso slammed into my chest like a brand driven through bone. For one impossible second I could feel every line of it, every curve, every hook, converging behind my heartbeat. It was not on my skin or across my hand, but deeper, somewhere under the ribs where a body was not supposed to experience geometry.

Then something locked. The pain changed shape. It did not lessen; it became definite, the way panic becomes certainty when a door closes.

I gasped, and in that broken breath I saw Seraphina's expression change again. It was not fear, not exactly. Recognition was closer, and somehow that was worse.

"Interesting," she murmured.

"I hate when you say that."

"You summoned me, bound yourself to me, and burned my color into your flesh with a counterfeit ritual meant for gutter demons." Her fingers tightened fractionally against my chin. "At this point, your preferences no longer concern me."

The red around us rose into a storm. My bedroom was gone. My house was gone. The open window, the desk, the stupid relay trophy, the ordinary world that had existed an hour ago with its group chats and cheap humiliation and summer-vacation expectations - all of it had dropped away beneath a greater disaster.

"What happens now?" I shouted.

She leaned closer, crimson hair lifting in the violent wind like a banner over a battlefield I had accidentally created.

"Now," she said, "you come with me."

The last things I registered arrived all at once: her gold eyes, exact and merciless; the crimson light flickering under my skin like I had caught fire from the inside; and her voice close to my ear, low and certain enough to feel less like speech and more like law:

"From this moment on, Ren Haruki, you are under my claim."

Then the world opened.