Eloy forced a practiced, easy grin. He stared straight at the floating chat window, ignoring the towering stone spires of the Royal Academy and the pristine blue sky above him.
"Alright, guys," Eloy said, keeping his voice pitched to his usual casual stream volume. "I see the spam. Yes, it's a new immersive setup. Exclusive beta. Very high-tech. But we are absolutely not rushing Isolde right now. There is an optimal route for this run, and getting vaporized by the endgame antagonist in the tutorial is a massive time loss."
The text in the translucent box accelerated.
[IsoldeSimp47]: optimal route my head go talk to her right now
[LMAO_cat]: skip skip skip ISOLDE
[TrollKing99]: DO IT COWARD
[Slayer_007]: bro is scared of a 3d model
"I'm not scared," Eloy muttered. "It's about efficiency."
Gravel crunched behind him. Heavy, deliberate steps.
Eloy turned. A boy in a pristine, silver-trimmed uniform marched across the courtyard directly toward him. The student carried a training sword, but the steel edge caught the sunlight in a way that suggested it was entirely lethal. His chin was tilted up, his expression twisted into a sneer of pure aristocratic disdain.
"You still haven't given me what I asked for, wretch," the boy snapped.
Eloy stared at him. The boy was maybe seventeen, with perfectly coiffed blonde hair and a badge shaped like a roaring lion pinned to his lapel. Eloy had just woken up on the grass three minutes ago. He didn't have anything to give.
The silence stretched. The noble's face flushed a dark, angry red. He raised the sword, pointing the tip directly at Eloy's chest.
Eloy knew this exact frame.
It was the tutorial trigger. The game's protagonist, Arthur, was supposed to be walking through this exact courtyard on his first day. This blonde noble was a scripted encounter designed to bully a random, nameless peasant. Arthur would step in, deflect the blade, and unlock the basic combat tutorial while simultaneously establishing his heroic moral compass.
Eloy looked down at his own clothes. Coarse brown tunic. Scuffed leather boots. Dirt under his fingernails.
He was the nameless peasant.
He glanced left. He glanced right. The sprawling courtyard was dotted with other students in fine uniforms, all of them stopping to watch the spectacle. None of them had Arthur's signature red hair. The protagonist was nowhere to be found.
The noble pulled the sword back, settling into a high stance.
"Chat," Eloy whispered, keeping his eyes locked on the blade. "Normal strategy or tutorial skip?"
A blue window materialized beside the chat feed, accompanied by a sharp digital chime.
[POLL: HOW SHOULD ELOY HANDLE THE NOBLE?]
[A) Normal Strategy — stall and let Arthur save you.]
[B) I-frame dodge, chest punch, and immediately find the Villainess.]
[TIMER: 3 SECONDS]
Eloy read the second option. A cold sweat broke out on the back of his neck.
"You've got to be kidding me," he breathed.
The timer hit zero. The progress bar for Option B had swallowed the entire screen in a massive landslide of votes. A new prompt flashed in jagged gold letters.
[ CHAT SUPPORT ACTIVATED ]
The noble lunged.
The technique existed in the game. It required three perfect dodges, exploiting the invincibility frames of the animation, followed by a light counter-attack to the chest to stagger the opponent and break their poise.
Speedrunners rarely used it in tournaments. The window for the input was a fraction of a second, and the time saved over just letting the tutorial play as normal was barely four seconds.
But Eloy had drilled it a thousand times during his offline routing sessions. The muscle memory was baked into his nervous system.
The steel blade thrust toward his throat.
Weight to the back foot. The blade came in flat, aimed for the throat. Eloy let it close until the steel was close enough to shave him, then torqued his torso sideways.
Air. The sword hit nothing.
The noble stumbled through his own swing, overextended, and that half-second of recovery was all the gap there was. The second strike came wide and fast; horizontal, aimed at the ribs, and Eloy dropped under it without thinking, the steel parting his hair on the way past, close enough to ruffle his hair.
Two.
The noble snarled. Instead of pulling the sword back for a proper third strike, the boy's free hand ignited with a crackling blue light. Mana. He was channeling raw magic into a close-range burst.
That was not in the script. The tutorial noble did not use magic.
The blue light flared, illuminating the furious twist of the noble's mouth. The blast of energy erupted forward in a wide cone.
Eloy threw himself backward, angling his body toward the ground. The magic scorched the air where his chest had been a fraction of a second earlier. The heat singed the fabric of his tunic. He hit the stone paving hard, rolling backward over his shoulder to absorb the momentum.
He came up on his feet right inside the noble's guard. The boy was still overextended from the magic burst, his arm outstretched, his balance completely broken.
Eloy planted his left foot and drove his right fist straight into the center of the boy's silver-trimmed chest piece.
A light strike, precisely placed: heel of the palm to the solar plexus, same input as the game, different body. One beat. No negation.
The impact cracked like a whip. The noble's eyes rolled back. All the air left his lungs in a sharp, pathetic wheeze. He dropped the sword. His knees buckled, and he collapsed onto the courtyard stones like a sack of wet sand.
Dead silence fell over the courtyard.
Dozens of students in elite uniforms stood frozen, staring at the scene. A dirt-streaked peasant had just dismantled a trained aristocrat without drawing a weapon.
Eloy's heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird. His knuckles throbbed. The smell of ozone from the magic blast hung heavy in the air. He forced his breathing to slow, fighting the urge to look down at his trembling hands.
[ ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: Complete the tutorial! ]
He turned his back on the unconscious noble and started walking.
He kept his pace even. He didn't run. He didn't look back at the crowd of stunned students. He just walked toward the massive arched entrance of the Academy's main building.
The chat box in the corner of his vision was exploding.
[Slayer_007]: BRO WHAT WAS THAT
[LMAO_cat]: HE ACTUALLY DID THE SKIP
[PraiseTheSun]: THE MADMAN
[IsoldeSimp47]: NO DAMAGE RUN INITIATED
[TrollKing99]: OKAY NOW GO TO THE LIBRARY
Eloy swallowed hard. The adrenaline was beginning to recede, leaving behind a cold, sharp clarity.
[WARNING: DEVIATION FROM ORIGINAL TIMELINE DETECTED. ]
[ UNKNOWN VARIABLES INTRODUCED. ]
[ PROCEED WITH CAUTION. ]
Eloy stared at the notification for exactly one second, then kept walking.
A golden arrow appeared on the stone floor ahead of him, glowing faintly. A system waypoint.
[ QUEST UPDATED: Follow Chat's Directive. ]
[ DESTINATION: The Grand Library. ]
He followed the arrow through corridors that kept narrowing, the marble floors trading out for dark wood, the student noise fading until there was nothing but his own footsteps.
The arrow led him down a narrow, dust-moted hallway. It stopped dead at the entrance of a massive room filled with towering oak bookshelves.
Eloy stopped at the threshold.
The library was supposed to be empty at this hour. That was in the game's schedule data: the Grand Library, 8 to 10 AM, zero NPC occupancy.
The game's schedule data was wrong.
She was sitting at the far table, spine straight, both hands flat on an open book. Standard Academy uniform. Black hair pulled back with no decoration. The developers had given her three official character portraits across the trilogy.
None of them had prepared him for the fact that she was a real, solid person who took up actual space in an actual room.
The air around her table was different. Not atmospheric. Just... nobody had sat near her. Every chair within four meters was pushed in, untouched.
Eloy's hand tightened on the doorframe.
The chat feed sped up to an unreadable blur.
[IsoldeSimp47]: SHE IS RIGHT THERE
[X_BLAD_X]: GO GO GO
[JOHN892]: ELOY DO NOT FLINCH
[PraiseTheSun]: TALK TO HER
Eloy did not move. He stood on the threshold, his hand resting on the heavy wooden doorframe. His fingers dug into the grain of the wood. If he walked into that room, he was stepping entirely off the map. He was initiating an interaction that the game's original code had explicitly forbidden.
He looked at his own hand. He looked at the girl in the shadows.
"Chat," he murmured. "I am absolutely not doing this."
The poll window didn't even finish loading before the bar hit 100%.
[ VOTE COMPLETE. UNANIMOUS. ]
[ CHAT SUPPORT ACTIVATED. ]
[ PROCEED TO DESTINATION. ]
The golden waypoint arrow reappeared on the floor. It pointed directly through the library door.
Eloy looked at the arrow. He looked at the girl with her back to him, ten meters away, completely unaware.
He took one step forward.
The floorboard under his boot creaked loud enough to fill the entire room.
Isolde's hand stopped moving across the page.