During a $10,000 Elden Ring speedrun contest, the "holy grail" of glitches emerges as speedrunners learn to run across the sky

Speedrunners are, to me, among the closest our world has to wizards. Through hours of devoted study, they're able to casually slip the bonds imposed by their simulated reality. When a new technique appears, it can be like watching mages trade around a new cantrip—a locked door clipped through here, an enemy forced to despawn there. But some methods, like a newly-discovered Elden Ring speedrun tech that lets the player walk through the air, are like watching the high art of sorcery advance in real time.

Where the average Elden Ring player has to toil through a world of lethal terrors, the new exploit allows the speedrunner to look at all that and say, "Nah, I'll just go over it." It's called the "Legasus" glitch, a play on "Pegasus," on account of the flying, and "leg," on account of doing it with your feet. The portmanteau is among the speedrunner's greatest loves.

Discovered and initially tested by speedrunners Joo, Lumi, and vir, the glitch "allows you to enter a limited no-gravity state" by interrupting the animation that plays while summoning Torrent. During the animation, the player briefly triggers a series of flags and effects that they would normally never notice, because the effects are lost as soon as Torrent's summoning is complete. Suspending that animation at a specific frame before the player begins riding Torrent, however, means those effects—including anti-gravity—remain active until the animation resumes.

There are a few ways to suspend Torrent's summoning. The simplest involves activating a Stonesword Key statue. Some in-game actions in Elden Ring put you in a state that "prevents certain actions from disabling others," according to vir's glitch writeup. Generally the state only lasts momentarily, but an oversight from FromSoft means Stonesword Key statues leave you in the state indefinitely, until you die, teleport, or pick up an item. The state is called being "stoned," which vir writes "is supposed to be funny. Please laugh."

While in a stoned state, whistling for Torrent and then interacting with a site of grace with very precise timing will activate the Legasus glitch. Alternatively, you can perfectly time a madness or sleep effect to trigger on the necessary frame to suspend Torrent's animation. Either way, you're now able to walk weightlessly through the air. Here's a video of the glitch in action:

Unfortunately, the glitch ends as soon as your character enters their idle animation, and you can only walk directly forwards. Luckily, as you can see in vir's video above, you can prevent your idle animation by blocking with a shield, and you can change your direction by aiming a bow and rolling. Nobody said sorcery was simple.

As noted by GamesRadar, the discovery comes in the middle of a $10,000 Elden Ring speedrun competition. Elden Ring speedrunner Distortion2 posted a $10,000 bounty reward for whoever successfully kills all Shadow of the Erdtree remembrance bosses at rune level 1 in the shortest time before August 12, 2024, using only DLC weapons, and leveling up the Scadutree blessing just once per boss killed. Hell of a challenge, obviously, but it's suddenly a little easier. In the Discord for the speedrun competition, Distortion2, who provided additional testing for the Legasus glitch, wrote that it's "the holy grail of DLC skips," allowing speedrunners "to directly fall into the later section of Abyssal Woods, and also potentially opens up new routing options."