Isekai Speedrun

I was tied to a hybrid travois-toboggan and dragged behind a snowmobile. The golden hour was long gone.

“Guys, let’s be reasonable! How about we just cancel this encounter? This was just a prank, right? Are you listening? Is my mic off? Moshi moshi? Sumimasen, nihongo o-hanasu? Parlez-vouz espanol? No? How about you don’t take me to your leader, maybe?”

My mystical ability to understand common Mu-Ur language unfortunately didn’t extend to the pre-Strangers-era languages used by Winter Forest tribes. Both in the game and anime, their tribal languages were represented by random guttural sounds. Even the subtitles were just circles, squares and triangles.

I didn’t have any practical dialogue options with these guys, but I kept chattering. I tried hand signals and secret choreys, but they just glanced at me annoyed.

“Hey, let’s call this punishment game off! I forgot the safe word! This ain’t fun anymore! Mods, stop the simulation! I’ll sue you for this!”

When we reached the high island, the moon was full and dark clouds were gathering above.

---

Source Island, the high island in the middle of the Frozen Lake, was like Acropolis without Parthenon. Instead of stone colonnades, massive pine trees circling the island were used as watchtowers.

A narrow path (known as Crystalice Valley in the game) lead to the center of the island, to the shattered ruins of an ancient temple. Only some low walls, steps and random melted statues of smooth white stone were still standing on top of a multilevel platform.

Far in the past, there was some palatial superstructure on this island built by the same distant ancestors who built the temple structures at the bottom of the Ice Dungeon, but only few foundations of buildings were now visible, and even those were partially dismantled and repurposed into defensive stone slab structures on the main island, or transferred to smaller satellite islands.

Long before Strangers and even before the Winter Kingdom, there was a thriving culture here, but just like jungle grew over the lost cities of South America, snow and ice covered the temples and pyramids of Winter Forest.

Most of the tribal families (including the leaders of the tribe, the elder shamans) lived in domed huts made of cloth and fur that circled the edges of the central high yard. This area was only for the strong and healthy; the old and crippled tribesmen were kicked out and had to live in the ice caves on the lower island terraces.

At the center of the yard was the sacrificial altar where Source shamans blessed the aerosanis, so the area in front of the altar was practically a parking lot for snowmobiles. These fast-moving Strangers vehicles were the backbone of Source Tribe’s power; they were worshiped, used and maintained with religious piety. Only the strongest warriors had the privilege to ride them.

---

I could see the bonfires and hear the feverish drums. Green northern lights danced over the distant snowcapped mountains.

All the signs were there. Worst RNG yet again.

Out of all times, the portal would open exactly tonight.

When the full moon rises above the frozen lake and the green curtains fill the sky, the dark clouds gather above the high island and Sparkling Source opens.

The reason they didn’t kill me immediately was because they were actively looking for fresh meat to sacrifice for the Source. They happened to find me instead of Staff Tribe warriors or their adventurous children playing tag in the forest.

If they hadn’t found anyone outside the tribe to sacrifice, they would’ve sacrificed one of their own, so finding me was like striking gold for them.

I was the main human sacrifice for tonight. Straight from freezer into a fryer.

The tribesmen dragged me straight at the altar area in the middle of the village. They were not giving me any time to lick my wounds or plan my escape from a jail hut.

The sacrificial altar was like a large open sarcophagus: a rectangle box made of white stone two meters long and one meter deep. A burn cage for humans. Simple and primitive compared to Strangers’ magitech sarcophagi with a transparent lid – an uncivilized crematory from more primitive times.

Behind the altar stood a grotesque statue of a thousand-eyed god – another mysterious relic from ancient times. It might have been a nice representational statue in the past, but now it was just an abstract lump of white rock worn down by elements. Nothing to write home about.

The area around the altar was kept snow-free. The elder shamans in charge of ceremonies cleaned the area every day, keeping it as pristine as millennia ago. How many humans had been sacrificed on this altar? Maybe one per month, and some extras on holidays, multiplied by thousand years.

The full moon was straight above the northern mountains. I could see the Sparkling Source appearing like a ghost out of pure air, then slowly widening above the altar – a levitating circular portal of greenish light, same shade as the aurora borealis, with some titular particle effects.

I felt cold and itchy all over, yet I was sweating.

When the riders rolled my body from the travois to the ground, I saw one of the ceremonial elder shamans holding my paper talismans and looking at them curiously.

“Hey! Hey, shaman, let’s make a deal! I’ll teach you how to use those if you let me go! Those are glyphs of the ancient language, you recognize them, right? Hey, are you listening? I have a scenario idea: how about you act like the king of elves and allow me to live, wouldn’t that be nice?”

Nope. The elder shaman crumpled the talismans and threw them away. Okay, I won’t teach you how to use talismans then.

Should I try to kill myself quickly instead of waiting to be burned alive?

No, suicide is not an option. Suicide isn’t speedrunning life, it’s ragequitting life.

The warriors grabbed my hands and legs, starting the ceremony without further ado.

“Stop this nonsense! This won’t do anything, idiots! Sparkling Source doesn’t care about your sacrifices, this is all completely unnecessary! Killing me won’t bring back your damn apples!”

Ignoring my violent objections, a shaman removed the leather collar on my neck and untied my hands while four warriors held me down. Then the warriors lifted me in the air and threw me in the stone sarcophagus like a trash bag into a bin.

After that, they threw in all the stuff they had collected – my shoulder bag and flagstaff included. They wanted to burn and get rid of all outsider items.

T-Sub’s body was eaten and dragged away by wolves, so I didn’t have to share the sarcophagus with his corpse. That was a positive point, I guess.

Even the burning was so damn unnecessary. All living and dead sacrifices, burned or not, would be eventually sucked inside the Sparkling Source. Smoke and flames were just the first things sucked in the Source, and the tribesmen seemed to enjoy the spectacle.

The bottom of the altar under me was filled with small, round, white pebbles. These pebbles were fragments of thousands of human skeletons worn down into rough ball shapes. For some mystical reason, some small parts of human bones didn’t get sucked in the portal but were left at the bottom of the sarcophagus.

Sparkling Source was sparkling above me. It would open to its full size at any moment.

The shamans around the altar were getting ready to ignite oil balls and throw them in to burn me alive.

I bit my sleeve again and a mild bitter taste spread in my mouth. Is there anything left? What can I do at this point except alleviate the pain?

I have nothing.

...Hold up. Stop right there with that defeatist attitude, Qwerty. You’ve survived worse clutches.

I still have something. I have my shoulder bag, my card belt, and my... flagstaff?

That was Kurdt original proposal back when we first met, wasn’t it? Get some magic out of Sparkling Source with Sparkling Staff, then kill Caliph Tze with it. That could’ve been the trick to deal with Tze’s immortal final form. Maybe get that elusive Good Ending that gaming community never found.

I could try the third option… with this two-thirds flagstaff.

Fulfill part of Kurdt’s failed prophecy with a different stick. With a representation of a stick.

One last glitch experiment.

---

Allow me to re-explain.

There were three famous glitches you could do with the Sultanate flagstaff, which is why it was an essential item to collect and keep away from wrong hands.

Glitch #1: Spawn Point Infinite Flagstaffs (SPIF). The most most useful glitch for speedrunners, but doesn’t matter in this situation.

Glitch #2: Partial Launch glitch. Excellent movement glitch in the game, but instadeath trap in this world. Launching yourself backwards in high speed would turn this real-life run into a splatter movie.

Glitch #3: Sticky Invincibility aka Half-in-the-Bag (Hit-B) glitch. A lesser glitch related to SPIF, also called Sticky Invincibility in the early days when casual players trigged it by accident.

Hit-B wasn’t consistent, but you could attempt to trig it practically anywhere when you had the Sultanate flagstaff and an inventory bag.

The sad downside was that a prereq for trigging Hit-B was to drop your health under 60%, which is why you wouldn’t normally use it in a speedrun because low health directly affects your speed.

In other words, Hit-B glitch wasn’t for speedrunners, but it was useful in casual runs – and maybe, possibly, right now...?

I’m pretty sure both my health and speed are already halved right now.

There’s nothing to lose by trying, is there?

Right, allow me to explain further. We’re not in a hurry or anything, right?

As far as I know, the hidden game-mechanical secrets behind the item called Sultanate flagstaff were two-fold: first, it was somehow erroneously categorized as a ‘small item’ rather than a ‘long item’. Secondly, the staff and the flag attached to it were counted as separate items even if they were a linked pair. Normally, two linked items were categorized as set (like wine-liquid and glass-container together became “Glass of Wine” temporarily), but Sultanate flagstaff and Sultanate flag never seemed to link into “Flag attached to a Staff”… except when you set the flag on fire. And since the flagstaff was made of mysteriously sturdy Strangers metal, the fire didn’t get it warm.

The attribute errors of this combo somehow turned into several weird game-breaking tricks. And as said before, players found that three of these tricks were useful.

This is how Hit-B glitch was explained in the forums: you can’t normally put any ‘long items’ like swords or spears into your inventory. Depending on item, it’s either disallowed or breaks your bag when you try to do it. But since Sultanate flagstaff is categorized as ‘small item’, it is possible to put it in the bag, which is why the autocorrection system happily starts treating it as “Sultanate Flagstaff (Miniature)” instead of a full-size flagstaff. But then, if you take the flagstaff out of your bag, its still a full-size flagstaff and comes out of like telescoping wand from a magician’s hat, behaving like two overlapping objects, full-size and miniature, and taking properties from each other.

Another obvious game mechanism is that you can’t put burning items in your inventory bag (because fire destroys your bag, duh), but the game system thinks the flag is a separate object from the staff even when attached, so you can ignite the flag and then put the flagstaff in your inventory – and behold, you have a [Sultanate Flagstaff (Miniature)] with a separate [Sultanate Flag (Burning)] in your bag. Are these item files or attribute files?

At this point the autocorrection system basically gives up trying to straighten the discrepancies and allows player to run wild. And since the flagstaff is counted as miniature, it’s weight is low, and when you shake a burning miniature flagstaff out of your bag instead of grabbing it, it flies out like loaded on a spring due to the sudden shift in weight and size. You can aim your inventory bag at enemies, shake the bag, and deal high-velocity blunt plus piercing damage, sometimes with added burning damage.

All this together leads to the final trick, the Half-in-the-Bag glitch: if you interrupt the miniature staff launch by grabbing the staff midway, the autocorrection system metaphorically throws in the towel and quits. Suddenly all your gear, including your character avatar, morphs into one ‘set’ with the half-miniature Sultanate flagstaff and half-open inventory bag. This halfway grab requires precise timing, frame-perfect dose of luck, and also that pesky sub-60% health for some reason.

But if you can do it – and as long as you keep half-wielding the flagstaff – this ‘player set’ turns into a reactive armor that tanks all damage as a whole instead of assigning damage to a single part that gets hit. Your character turns into a living ceramic plate that dissipates impact damage somewhat equally across everything carried before the glitch.

For example, rock thrown at your face normally does collision damage to your face, but if you are a ‘glitched player set’, the collision damage turns into something like being showered with fine rock dust from every direction. It just irritates your eyes a bit at most.

Another example: since your character’s body parts and belongings are treated as one item, even piercing point damage from a bullet is distributed to everything – flagstaff, bag, weapons, armor, clothes, and so on. Thus, if you carry lots of small, sturdy items at the moment of the glitch (like small rocks in your pockets) it means that, statistically, most of the damage is taken by the small items. The damage distribution values seem to be random within certain limits, so you generally want to collect as much items as you can to even out the damage over time.

Conversely, if you don’t have much items and the inventory bag itself takes too much damage, the glitch is canceled. But even in the worst case scenario (completely naked with only Sultanate flagstaff and inventory bag), you would take approximately third of the normal damage.

I don’t think the deeper reasons of how and why these glitches worked were ever fully understood by the community. It was just informed speculation about the AI-builder and autocorrection systems background tricks.

Casual show-don’t-tell runners who didn’t care about technical details treated the glitch as a variation of kawarimi, a ninjitsu substitution technique from genre anime. Like when a ninja disappears and leaves a log behind to take the hit.

From my perspective, as a world-record runner, Hit-B glitch was a marginally useful backup emergency trick when you got to the latter half of a marathon speedrun, but suffered from bad RNG and low health. During serious attempts you wanted to avoid using it because getting stuck into inventory draw animation slowed you down considerably, and tanking damage with extra weight was not good either. But in case of really bad RNG where you cannot reset and start over, you could fall back to this inconsistent safety net: some skill and luck to grab the stick halfway, and you could just pimpwalk unharmed for a while. If you messed up the grab, it was time to forget hopes of new personal best anyway.

The further downside of Hit-B was that you risked downgrading essential items in your inventory. If you got hit too many times, your items started breaking down from the damage. But this downside was also easy to avoid by dropping important items before the glitch and picking them up afterwards; the glitch ignored new items added to the inventory and treated them as separate from the ‘player set’.

---

Now, returning to cruel reality –

I have the Sultanate flagstaff, one out of two necessary items to trigger Hit-B.

But I don’t have the second one: an inventory. You need an actual game inventory bag to trigger the glitch. The stylish shoulder bag I received as a gift from Sera is just a normal shoulder bag.

Even if it’s made from apparition snake’s shed skin, it’s just a normal bag.

...But for an apparition, imitation is also real. The fake bag is real bag...

No, that cannot be the answer. Expand your mind further, Qwerty.

If there has ever been a time to think outside the box, that time is now.

Inventory bag in Mu-Ur is basically just a separate pocket dimension where you can collect limited number of game items.

And Sparkling Source is basically a portal into a hyperreal pocket dimension where the conceptual pyramid called Warehouse of Everything spits out random assets to lower-level worlds.

So theoretically…

...just for the sake of argument...

…Source is an inventory? Maybe you can abuse Sparkling Source like a non-wearable inventory bag?

It doesn’t specifically need to be your personal inventory where you hold the flagstaff, as long as half of it is kept in a different dimension.

A pocket dimension is a pocket dimension. Any stick is any stick.

Source expects a stick. Let’s give it a stick.

Let’s label this a new Hit-B variant: Hit-D.

In a normal playthrough, you would bring the Stick Witch’s Sparkling Staff and stick that into the Sparkling Source, which would make both the Sparkling Staff and Sparkling Source disappear, and that would clear the Winter Forest stage.

Sultanate flagstaff comes so much later in a normal game that you wouldn’t think about using it in the Winter Forest. More than that, you wouldn’t think of trying to swap these two sticks of sketchy provenance anyway because you cannot carry the Sparkling Source around like an inventory bag, and the two other glitches are more useful for speedrunners.

There are many, many dangerous and inconsistent boosts in Mu-Ur I cannot attempt here with my one and only life – like the practically useless trick of using Wintersmith’s death-disappearance animation to boost yourself over the Winter Forest and hopefully landing on top of sloped iceberg without dying from fall damage – but since I’m in one of the glitchiest locations of Mu-Ur world and there’s a ball of burning oil coming…

Grasp for the straws in your blind spot, Qwerty.

Do it. There is no try. Do it now.

...No, wait, come up with a clickbait stream title first.

[Mu-Ur Quincunx] ︻デ═一 Let’s Play: Never Attempted Before Half-in-the-Bag Glitch Setup w/ SPIF Flagstaff ► This IMPOSSIBLE Hardcore Challenge Will SURPRISE You!!! ► [QwertyUozewe]

Preparations complete. Let’s do this. Start the clock.

I collected handfuls of bone pebbles in my shoulder bag and more in my jacket pockets.

Now I just need to get the flag burning. That’s all.

When the ball of burning of oil comes, I’ll hit it with the flag to get it on fire, then insert the flagstaff in the Sparkling Source the same way I would put it in my nonexistent inventory and move it like a witch stirring a cauldron. Improvise, mix the intended and the unintended.

I have the Revolution Movement’s bluebird flag equipped, not the Sultanate flag. Sorry about this, I must burn our own flag.

I grabbed the flagstaff with my left hand. I could feel the bare skin of my fingers sticking to the metal pole due to the cold. Incoming frostbites.

Doesn’t matter. Bases loaded, ready to run.

Is this really how I want to spend my final seconds alive? How deep of a gamer do you have to be to even think of doing this on your last moments?

People don’t follow streamers who give up. That’s not entertainment.

Despair was never an option. Take the leap and fail spectacularly.

Do it for the content.

“It’s your boy Qwerty Uozewe, the world record holder in Mu-Ur Quincunx any percent speedrun... Tonight we’re going for the newest, most dangerous trick never attempted... The stream ends immediately if this doesn’t work...”

Rage, rage against the end credits.

It’s now or never, stupid isekai world. If this doesn’t work, I’ll uninstall the game.

One last try and I’m out.