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, sitting through introductory lectures.
It was pure filler.
The chat had already reached the 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 had no tag, no designation, no flag the system would notice. Nobody had any reason to walk up to him, and nothing would trigger naturally.
To skip Phase One, he had to break the geometry. He had to clip.
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 got two votes. One of them was IsoldeSimp47, probably trying to be funny. Option B ate the progress bar.
Eloy started moving again, keeping his pace loose. A peasant frozen in a hallway staring at nothing would draw the wrong kind of attention. He talked the mechanics through as he walked, voice low.
"There's a blind spot in the Academy's collision detection," he said. "You put a cylindrical object at a right angle against a wall seam, stand on it, jump with your arms extended at the exact millisecond the center of mass of the character crosses the surface plane... and the physics engine spits you out the other side."
In the game, that deposited you straight into the Director's chamber, skipping the whole forty-minute orientation.
In reality, he had no idea what clipping through solid matter would do to an apparently real human body or if it would work at all. He only had one way to find out.
First, he needed a bucket.
Without a minimap, navigating the Academy was genuinely humiliating. The game had rendered it as a streamlined hub. Reality was a massive, illogical fortress: corridors bending at wrong angles, staircases feeding into mezzanines that fed into more staircases. The type of architecture that suggested the builders had been making it up as they went.
The chat enjoyed every second of it, as always.
[jonasjohn145]: speedrunner lost on level 1
[Slayer_007]: bro is so poor he doesn't have a minimap
[TrollKing99]: THATS MY STREAMER RIGHT THERE
Twenty minutes later he found the maintenance hall near the ground-floor kitchens. A wooden bucket sat next to a mop, abandoned. The dimensions looked right.
He tucked it under his arm and walked with the posture of someone on an official errand. Nobody stopped him. Nobody looked at him twice. Being at the absolute bottom of the social hierarchy had one benefit: perfect invisibility.
Following the system's glowing waypoint, he carried the bucket to the North Wing and stopped in front of a set of massive oak doors. Twin iron locks. A heavy crest of arms carved into the center. Eloy had sprinted 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 had to be exact. Ninety degrees from the corner seam, right where the corridor turned before the main entrance. He adjusted the base. Nudged it two millimeters left. Stepped back and checked the alignment.
The chat went quiet.
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.
[LMAO_cat]: the wall is going to win
[PraiseTheSun]: CHAT IS HE ACTUALLY DOING IT
[TrollKing99]: I CANNOT WATCH
Muscle memory. He'd run this input a thousand times. The fact that it was now a load-bearing wall in a real building and not a polygon mesh was a problem he was actively choosing not to engage with.
He jumped. Arms forward. Shoulder hit the plane —
[TrollKing99]: I CANNOT LOOK AWAY
The world choked.
Every nerve fired at once. His lungs had opinions he couldn't hear. His vision cut black, then static, then a color that had no name. Something in his chest understood, briefly and horribly, what stone felt like from the inside.
Then it corrected.
The pressure vanished. The static cleared. Eloy hit a solid floor, skidding forward and slamming his chest against polished stone.
He rolled onto his back, coughing, and stared up at a vaulted ceiling painted with constellations.
The bucket was in the hallway. Eloy was not.
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 matched the game's render exactly. Maps across every wall. Cold fireplace. Heavy oak desk dead-center. And behind it, head bowed over a stack of parchment, silver hair catching the light from the stained-glass window—
Director Caldwell.
Eloy knew this trigger. He stepped forward. One pace, two, three. Stopped at the coordinates. Waited for the cutscene.
Director Caldwell raised his head.
That was not the right face.
Caldwell stared at him. His eyes dropped to the floor, searching for any type of clue, then jumped to the solid stone wall behind Eloy, then came back to the teenager in a dirt-stained peasant tunic standing in the center of an office secured by two iron deadbolts.
Wrong face. Completely wrong face.
"How did you get in here?" Caldwell asked. Very slowly.
Eloy recognized the exact nature of his mistake.
In the game, Caldwell ran on four AI states: neutral lore delivery, directional guidance, solemn warning, dramatic cutscene. He did not have 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.
Caldwell stood up. He wrapped his fingers around a velvet cord hanging beside the desk and pulled it once.
"Guard," Caldwell said. "I'm going to need you to answer some questions."
Eloy looked over his shoulder. Solid stone. No bucket, no door, no seam. He looked back at Caldwell's hand still resting on the cord.
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 poll window snapped open on its own. Eloy read the two options.
They were the worst he'd seen yet.