Of all the accounts he could have been using when this happened, the system had synchronized him with the Level 1 alt account he had logged into just to fuck with the developers.
But there was something else.
[Death mechanics have been modified.]
That silenced everyone.
Rafael looked back up as a few seconds passed before the next line appeared.
[Respawn has been disabled.]
For a moment, the entire spawn area went silent.
Then someone screamed.
"No! No, no, no! What does that mean?!"
Another player shouted toward the sky.
"Bring us back!"
"LOG US OUT!"
The panic that had already been spreading through the crowd immediately became something worse.
Thousands of people began shouting at once, but Rafael remained where he was, staring at the notification.
"Shit... this is like Sword Art Onli—"
Before Rafael could finish, another notification appeared.
But this one wasn’t floating in front of him.
It appeared across the sky.
An enormous blue window stretched above the entire spawn area, large enough for every player to see.
[Main Quest]
[Return Home: Defeat All Bosses of Eldoria.]
Rafael stared upward.
"All bosses...?"
Thousands of people seemed to have the same reaction.
Rafael’s expression slowly changed.
"That’s impossible."
And he wasn’t exaggerating.
It had once taken a full clan of max-level players sixteen hours to defeat a single Ancient Boss, and even when Eldoria had been nothing more than a game, nobody had ever managed to defeat every boss scattered throughout the world.
"No!"
A man suddenly screamed from somewhere in the crowd.
"WHO ARE YOU?!"
Everyone nearby turned toward him.
The man was staring into the sky.
"Who brought us here?! You motherfucker! Are you one of the developers?!"
Another player shouted from farther away.
"This isn’t even a VR game!"
That was the part Rafael couldn’t understand either.
Eldoria wasn’t virtual reality. There was no headset capable of reading their minds, no neural interface, nothing that could explain how any of this was possible.
Rafael had been playing it with a mouse and a half-broken keyboard.
Yet here they were.
Then another message appeared across the sky.
[Death is permanent.]
[The adventure awaits in Eldoria!]
The notification disappeared.
Then the barriers surrounding the spawn area began to vanish, exactly as they did after finishing the tutorial in the game.
The roads leading out of the city were open.
The forests, dungeons, villages and everything beyond them were now accessible.
The game had officially begun.
That was when the crowd truly lost control.
Thousands of people began moving at once. Some rushed toward the gates leading into the city, while others ran toward the teleportation fountains, desperately trying to reach somewhere else without even knowing where they were going.
The crowd quickly turned into a stampede.
"MOVE!"
"GET OFF ME!"
"I CAN’T GET UP!"
"STOP PUSHING!"
Nobody listened.
Within seconds, several people were left lying across the stone, trampled beneath the crowd.
All the while, Rafael stayed exactly where he was, watching thousands of players desperately fight their way out of the spawn area.
"Well... this is fucked."
Everyone around him seemed terrified of dying, of being trapped here, of never seeing Earth again.
For Rafael, it simply hadn’t sunk in yet, even though everything felt real.
He could feel the wind against his face and the warmth of the sun against his skin, and there wasn’t even the slightest sensation of controlling a character anymore.
This was his body now.
"Huh, what the fuck did Kirito do at the beginning...? Or Ainz... but he had all his powers. Fuck me."
He looked up at the sky.
"Powers... power... ah, should I?"
His eyes fell on the other side of the square, where part of the wall was damaged.
It looked exactly the same as it did in the game.
His body slowly turned toward it, and almost unconsciously, he started walking in that direction, away from the crowd.
"A game that ran on code became reality... then that means all the shit they fucked up should still be in it."
By the time he finished speaking, he had reached the damaged wall and stopped directly in front of it.
"But death is permanent... so if I die here, I die for real."
He looked down at his hands.
"Well... I was dying anyway back on Earth, so why would I care?"
Without any further hesitation, he tried it.
Rafael stretched out his hand, leaned forward and rolled straight into the wall.
Nothing happened.
Well, except that he busted his ass.
His head slammed into the stone, followed by his shoulder and then the rest of his body.
"Agh... fuck..."
But he didn’t stop.
Rafael got his ass back up and tried again.
Then again.
And again.
More than ten attempts later, every single one had ended with him smashing himself against the same wall. His forehead and nose were bleeding, he had bitten his tongue, his shoulder hurt like hell, and both of his hands were scraped raw.
Meanwhile, almost everyone else had already made their way into the city.
"Work, you fucking bitch!" Rafael shouted as he kicked the wall. "Work!"
He stepped back about five meters and stared at the damaged section.
"You need to fucking work!"
Rafael sprinted forward, jumped at the last second and threw his entire body into another dive roll.
"Agh..."
He bounced straight off the wall and crashed onto his back.
For several seconds, he just stared at the sky.
"Why would it even work...?" Rafael sighed. "I’m fucking dumb."
He slowly sat up.
"I need food and water..." His eyes moved toward the city. "And I probably look like a retard."
He laughed to himself and started getting up.
Or tried to.
"Huh?"
Something was holding him back and as he looked down his right foot had disappeared into the wall.
"Oh..."
A huge smile appeared on his face.
"It fucking worked! I clipped through this bitch!"
There was only one problem.
It was just his foot.
"Let me squeeze in...""
Rafael pushed his left leg toward the same spot, and it went through.
He immediately started forcing the rest of his body into the gap, slowly squeezing himself through the wall until, finally, his entire body passed through.
Then gravity took over.
"Oh, fuck."
This wasn’t the game anymore.
There was no character standing safely beneath the map while Rafael watched from behind a monitor. This was his actual body, and now he was free-falling beneath the world.
He could still see the underside of the land above him, including the tiny section where the developers had apparently missed a spot in the collision.
Which meant that if the rest of the exploit still worked, there should be something beneath him.
"Be there! Be there, you piece of shit!"
Rafael continued falling through the darkness until suddenly his feet hit something solid.
His legs immediately buckled beneath him.
For several seconds, he simply stared at the forest surrounding him, at the trees, plants and grass, while breathing air that felt purer than anything he remembered from Earth.
"I-I... I made it..."
A notification appeared.
[You have entered ???]
Rafael’s eyes moved toward it.
Then a smile formed on his face.
"And this shit still doesn’t understand what happened... Ha... ha, fuck yeah!"
He started laughing like a maniac, completely ignoring the pain throughout his body.
He had done it.
He had clipped through the wall of the spawn city and arrived in a place that should only have been accessible after reaching Level 700, defeating multiple bosses and completing a series of difficult requirements.
Out of the millions of players who had played Eldoria, only a tiny fraction had ever set foot here, even with tutorials showing them exactly how to reach it.
"Y’all motherfuckers put the Elven Lands underneath the spawn area, you dumb fucks!"
Rafael was living his best moment, not only because he had actually reached this place, but because of what it meant.
The glitch worked.
"If I can do this..." Rafael stood. "I can exploit even more. Though why the fuck would I..."
He stopped.
His eyes moved across his surroundings again.
"I’m in the Elven Lands."
That realization hit differently.
In the game, the Elven Lands were considered the safest and most prosperous region in the entire world, a land of wealth, ancient magic, enormous cities, forests untouched for thousands of years, and creatures that existed nowhere else.
Back when this had been nothing more than a game, reaching it had been an absolute nightmare.
But now the game had become reality.
Rafael’s smile slowly widened.
"This is the best."
Then another realization struck him.
His smile grew even wider.
"I can fuck elves..."
Glitches, exploits and bugs suddenly disappeared from Rafael’s mind as he remembered something far more important.
The elves had been designed like walking thirst traps, with perfect bodies, ridiculous proportions, and faces that looked like somebody had spent six months adjusting every slider until human beauty standards simply stopped applying.
And now they were real.
But something was wrong.
"They should already be here," Rafael said as he looked around. "They should know I entered."
Almost as soon as the words left his mouth, the trees began shaking in the distance.
Rafael turned toward the sound.
Figures were moving through the branches, jumping from tree to tree and rapidly closing the distance.
"They’re coming."
Seconds later, three figures dropped from the trees a few meters away from him, but Rafael immediately felt that something was off.
There were three of them, and they looked exactly as Rafael remembered.
Except all three were wearing full armor.
They should understand me.
"Hello?"
Nothing.
The three elves simply stood there, watching him.
"I’m Rafael, and I came to the Elven Lands to... uh, be friends."
"Friends?"
One of them finally spoke. Her voice was almost as beautiful as her appearance.
"Yeah... uh, friends."
As he answered the elf began walking toward him..
She kept her eyes locked on his until she was standing directly in front of him, close enough that her armored chest nearly touched his.
Then she smiled.
"Huh?"
Something felt wrong.
His heart hammered against his chest, his breathing came fast and shallow, and his hands began to tremble. Every detail around him seemed impossibly sharp yet somehow far away at the same time.
Then he felt the warm blood running beneath his clothes.
His eyes moved down and there it was... a blade inside of his fucking stomach.
Though there was no panic at all as adrenaline was pumping through him so fucking hard that his mind simply refused to turn any of it into pain.
He only had one thought.
I’m going to die.
Not eventually, not in a few minutes, but right fucking now... so he acted.
Inventory.... open.
A translucent window appeared before his eyes.
[Loaf of Bread ×1]
[Water Flask ×1]
"Emélia! We were ordered to take him alive!" one of the elves shouted.
"I know, but he had a weird smile on his face,"
Give... me the bread.
Tiny pixels immediately gathered in Rafael’s right hand.
The elves who had stabbed him immediately jumped back, all of them raising their weapons as something began forming between Rafael’s fingers.
"Is that a... loaf of bread?" One of the elves asked as they all kept watching the same thing.
"Is he trying to heal himself?" Emélia’s voice came as they watched this human do something... they never saw before.
Stabbed, blood gushing out of him, and meanwhile, he was biting off pieces of the bread.
"He’s not healing. And I don’t feel mana or magic."
While they just stood there observing this anomaly, Rafael was doing his thing.
His left hand remained pressed against the wound in his stomach as blood poured between his fingers, while in his other hand, he held the loaf of bread, biting away at the sides while leaving the center untouched.
Bit by bit, its shape changed and soon, almost nothing remained except a long, thin piece of bread extending from the thicker end clenched in Rafael’s fist.
"Y-ou bitches..." His voice came, looking up at them. "... should be friendly."
He swung the bread left to right and in the next instant, the upper bodies of all three elves fell almost simultaneously.
They were cut in halves cleanly.
"Uh..." He stumbled forward. "...Im– not Kirito...."
He collapsed.