The Royal Academy bell tolled across the courtyard.
Eloy stopped in the middle of the corridor. He knew that specific sequence of strikes. It marked the official start of Phase One. The protagonist was supposed to spend the next forty minutes walking around the grounds, meeting key allies, and attending introductory lectures.
It was pure filler.
The chat reached the exact same conclusion.
[PraiseTheSun]: skip skip skip
[LMAO_cat]: we are NOT sitting through orientation
[TrollKing99]: GLITCH TIME
The game relied on Arthur's presence to trigger the cutscenes. The world reacted to his designated hero tag. Eloy was a nameless peasant. He had no hero tag. No NPC had any reason to approach him, and no cutscene would fire naturally.
If he wanted to skip Phase One, he had to force it. He had to break the geometry.
A blue window snapped into existence.
[POLL: NEXT TRICK?]
[A) Wait for Phase 1 to end normally.]
[B) Clipping. Bucket. Now.]
[TIMER: 3 SECONDS]
Option A received two votes. One of them belonged to IsoldeSimp47, likely trying to be funny. Option B swallowed the progress bar.
Eloy started walking again, keeping his pace casual. A peasant standing frozen in the hallway and staring at nothing would attract the wrong kind of attention. He kept his voice low, explaining the mechanics to the chat as he moved.
"The collision detection in the Academy has a specific blind spot," Eloy murmured. "If you place a cylindrical object at a right angle against a wall seam, stand on it, and jump with your arms extended the exact millisecond your center of mass crosses the surface plane... the physics engine spits you out on the other side."
In the game, this glitch deposited the player directly into the Director's chamber, skipping the entire forty-minute orientation and triggering the next major narrative beat.
In reality, he had no idea what clipping through solid matter would do to a human body. He only had one way to find out.
First, he needed a bucket.
Navigating the Academy without a minimap proved genuinely humiliating. The game had presented the castle as a streamlined hub. Reality presented it as a massive, illogical fortress. Corridors turned at impossible angles. Staircases led to mezzanines that fed directly into other staircases.
The chat enjoyed his suffering.
[jonasjohn145]: speedrunner lost on level 1
[Slayer_007]: bro is so poor he doesn't have a minimap
[TrollKing99]: ACTUAL GENIUS
He reached the maintenance hall near the ground-floor kitchens twenty minutes later. A wooden bucket sat abandoned near a mop. The dimensions looked correct.
Eloy picked it up and tucked it under his arm. He walked with the relaxed posture of someone running an official errand. No one stopped him. No one even looked at him. Being at the absolute bottom of the social hierarchy granted perfect invisibility.
He carried the bucket to the North Wing, following the system's glowing waypoint.
He stopped in front of a set of massive oak doors. Twin iron locks secured the handles. A heavy crest of arms marked the center of the wood. Eloy had run past these doors hundreds of times without ever reading the crest.
The doors were locked. The game only opened them after Phase One completed and Arthur received his formal invitation. Eloy had no invitation.
He set the bucket down on the stone floor.
The angle required absolute precision. Ninety degrees from the corner seam, right where the corridor turned before the main entrance. Eloy adjusted the wooden base. He nudged it two millimeters to the left. He stepped back and checked the alignment.
The scrolling text in his peripheral vision stopped completely. The chat held its collective breath.
Eloy stepped onto the bucket. The wood creaked loud enough to make him wince.
[IsoldeSimp47]: i dont believe this is going to work
[GDAopen]: i dont believe this is going to work
[umuIou290]: i dont believe this is going to work
He pressed both palms flat against the stone. Cold. Completely solid. The kind of solid that had been solid for three hundred years and had opinions about it.
[LMAO_cat]: the wall is going to win
[PraiseTheSun]: CHAT IS HE ACTUALLY DOING IT
[TrollKing99]: I CANNOT WATCH
Muscle memory. He'd executed this input a thousand times. The fact that this was now a load-bearing wall in a real building and not a polygon mesh was a problem he was choosing not to engage with right now.
He jumped. Arms forward. Shoulder crossed the plane—
[TrollKing99]: I CANNOT LOOK AWAY
The world choked.
Every nerve in his body fired at once.
His lungs had opinions he couldn't hear. His vision cut to black, then to static, then to a color that didn't have a name. Something in his chest understood, briefly and horribly, what stone felt like from the inside.
Then the error corrected itself.
The pressure vanished. The static cleared. Eloy hit a solid floor, skidding forward and slamming his chest against polished stone.
He coughed, rolling onto his back. He stared up at a vaulted ceiling painted with constellations.
The bucket remained in the hallway. Eloy was inside the locked room.
The chat feed exploded.
[TruthTheNuke]: HE DID IT
[GDAopen]: CLIPPING!!!!!!!!!!
[PraiseTheSun]: THE MADMAN
[IsoldeSimp47]: THAT SHOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE
Eloy hit the floor chest-first, skidded two feet, and stopped.
He lay there for a second. Did a quick check. Arms: present. Legs: present. Internal organs: seemingly in their original configuration, which was genuinely more than he'd been sure of thirty seconds ago.
He pushed himself up.
The room was exactly as the game had rendered it. Maps across every wall. Cold fireplace. Heavy oak desk dead-center. And behind the desk, head bowed over a stack of parchment—
Director Caldwell.
The man's head was bowed over a stack of parchment. His silver hair caught the light from the stained-glass window behind him.
Eloy knew this trigger. He stepped forward. One pace. Two paces. Three paces. He stopped at the exact coordinates required to initiate the dialogue.
He waited for the cutscene to fire.
Director Caldwell raised his head.
The expression on the older man's face did not match the welcoming, exposition-heavy speech Eloy had memorized.
Wrong face. Completely wrong face.
Caldwell stared at Eloy. His eyes dropped to the floor, searching for the bucket that did not exist. His gaze jumped to the solid stone wall behind Eloy. Finally, he looked back at the teenager wearing a dirt-stained peasant tunic, standing in the center of an office secured by two locked iron deadbolts.
"How did you get in here?" Caldwell asked. He spoke very slowly.
Eloy froze. He recognized the exact nature of his mistake.
In the game, Caldwell operated on four distinct AI states. He delivered neutral lore, informative directions, solemn warnings, or dramatic cutscene dialogue.
He did not possess a state for genuine, logic-breaking horror.
Eloy had clipped through a wall. He stood in front of the chief administrator of the most powerful institution in the nation. He had no credentials, no noble backing, and no physical explanation for bypassing the locks.
The chat processed the reality of the situation.
Caldwell stood up. He did not yell. He did not draw a weapon. He simply reached out and wrapped his fingers around the velvet cord hanging beside his desk.
"Guard," Caldwell said. "I am going to need you to answer some questions."
Eloy looked over his shoulder.
Solid stone. No bucket. No door. No exit.
A system notification flared in the top left corner of his vision. The text pulsed in bright warning yellow.
[ WARNING: UNEXPECTED VARIABLE DETECTED ]
[ DIRECTOR CALDWELL HAS INITIATED SECURITY PROTOCOL ]
[ THIS ACTION POSSESSES NO HISTORICAL DATA ]
Eloy looked at the floating text. He looked at the Director's hand gripping the security cord. He looked at the wall he could no longer jump through.
[IsoldeSimp47]: chat what does he do now
[LMAO_cat]: chat what does he do now
[PraiseTheSun]: chat what does he do now
A blue poll window snapped open on its own. The two options listed were the worst he had seen yet.