After a bit, we arrive in front of a simple-looking mansion. It is as featureless and colorless as everything else around here. As with everything, it is infested and covered in glitches, except for a small region around the top-rightmost window, which looks suspiciously normal and uninfected.

  And the whole house is surrounded by a sea of withered gravestones. I didn't know Orpyne lived in a graveyard, but maybe that expins why she didn't hesitate that much to deal with me, an undead vampire.

  I point toward the obviously suspicious window, "What's with that window?"

  M/Il1ce looks up and then sighs, "That's where the hag lives. No Glitch that understands the situation we're in dares go near her, not even the smallest one. Even they wait until it is time. But here we are, me and one special case that doesn't belong to that group."

  "So if she is a hag, and you are the same as her, then-"

  "No. Now this is your final chance, asshole, either you're sane and we leave, or... that", she angrily points towards the main entrance with her wing made of syringes.

  If I don't help Orpyne, who else can? Noone, nozero either.

  Damn, the stay here must've messed with my head a lot...

  "If I actually had a choice in this matter, we wouldn't be here, so door it is."

  She defeatedly screeches, "Great, so another tombstone then..."

  I point at a random grave nearby, "You mean like those? I thought they were for dead people, now you want to tell me they represent a whole universe?"

  "Not one. Hundreds, sometimes even thousands. After a while, I only wrote on a tombstone what was particurly noteworthy about a destroyed universe, but for many that space stayed bnk. There were too many like them already in the past, they had nothing new. All repeats, all the time..."

  I look around again, how many gravestones are there exactly? Easily tens of thousands, there's no end to them. They appear stacked so close to each other, that you'd even have trouble moving between two stones, and you want to tell me that each marker is worth hundreds of realities that have already ended?

  "Hundreds...?", what a load of crap!

  That would mean millions, or even billions of times all of this went already down. Ugh, she said that she handles the gravestones, so who knows how many there were before she got infected...

  As I think that, a memory fshes before my eyes. The binder with the tallymarks? Was that about the same? But...

  Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!

  Angrily, I stomp the ground, "Stop pulling my leg! Ah, forget it, we've somewhere to be."

  "But I'm not..."

  I ignore her whiny protest and hurriedly enter through the mansion's front door, and Malice soon follows after me. After a few steps, the annoying whiteness of the mansion's exterior is repced by the nothingness of space covered in hundreds of creepy eyeballs.

  "What's that now?"

  M/Il1ce smacks her forehead, "Oh, right, forgot about him."

  "Got it, it was the wrong way... So should we go back through... the entrance that has already disappeared?"

  "Nah, you'll be fine, that's just Yokeyerie, The One Who Unsees, an ancient Outer One - in short, you can simply ignore him", she stops whispering to me and turns toward the center of the room, waving with a fake smile, "Yo, big brother Yok, can you give us a minute? Pretty, please?"

  The eyes look at each other for a moment, wavering back and forth, and then a new, angry voice echoes through the void, "Fine, false master, I permit it."

  "Thank you, bro!", she turns to me again, "He's not dangerous, just a bit overly eager with his efforts to maintain order, but in fact, he's quite weak. You see, he's from one of the oldest universes when the worlds were pathetically weak compared to now. Like an army of their strongest dragons would lose to a single ant now, that kinda weak. Some of the Solids thought it was a good idea to increase the baseline power of newer worlds, but as with everything, once it is infected, we can easily use it against them. So yeah, that backfired on them big time."

  Yuck-eye-ray objects but gets ignored, "Could you cut it out with the insults, brat?"

  They sound like siblings that try and never get along. I wouldn't be surprised if they've tried to kill each other in the past.

  "What do you mean by stronger worlds, Malice? Is that some powerlevel bullshit?"

  "Kind of, and you have to work on your pronunciation, you were not even in the same reality with it, idiot. Say, have you ever pyed around with your menu settings while you still were a Solid? By default, it dispys your stats as easily digestible values in the three to four-digit range. That value is retive to the world you belong to. You can change it to an absolute dispy with some impractically big numbers."

  What do you mean 'when I was a Solid'? I haven't changed into anything else yet!! And it certainly ISN'T on my bucket list!

  "Hn-yeah, I think the values were ten digits long."

  "Oh, then your world was one of the highest rated, consider yourself lucky, that carries through to your new form. So, uh, be a bit more careful around the old timers then, your sneeze could kill them even easier than their own sneezes would."

  "Oh, god..."

  "Nah, he's not on the menu today. Though, if you want we can invite him as food next week?"

  "I think I'll pass. So what about him? His angry stares make me feel uncomfortable."

  The eye creature sounds annoyed, "Oh, now you remember that I exist..."

  The half-beheaded girl shrugs, "Uh, yeah, that's his special attack, but no one remembers what it does because it never works."

  The other voice boasts, "I'll have to remind you, little girl, that my eyebeam can simply erase anything - well, there was a condition to it but I erased that, too. Hah! I'll have you know I erased an entire universe by looking away!"

  "That sounds like utter nonsense.... so why does nothing happen to us?"

  M/Il1ce provokes him, "As I said, he's completely harmless to anyone that matters, and the majority of those who don't."

  I join in as well, "Oh, yeah, instant death effects never work when they'd matter. So why even bother with them?"

  "Why you...!"

  The little brat flips him off, "Yeah, yeah, can we move on now? I've some business with the impostor to take care of."

  "Not on my watch! It is years too early for her demise!"

  Malice expins to me, "You have to know that Yok was my personal assistant and quite the fanboy of Stel, or whatever our name is today. He does his best to prevent harm to his idol. Not that his efforts amount to much, heh~"

  "But we don't even want to harm her, rather, we want to help her with her current problem."

  Once again, the disembodied voice chimes in, "Nonsense! Not a single Glitch can approach her without spelling her doom. I shall see to it that the tragedies of the past will not be repeated!"

  "See? A lot of bark behind the nonexistent bite. All the bh bh bh you want with none of the substance. Just like him", M/Il1ce stabs one of the eyeballs with her syringe wings, then rips the whole eye out, and crushes it.

  I don't know how I should feel about this situation. On one hand, I agree with his stance, Glitches shouldn't get anywhere near Orpyne, or anything in general. On the other hand, I'm confident that I can fix this mess. I have to.

  Sorry, buddy, your sacrifice won't be in vain, and you already futilely tried your stupid gaze attack on us.

  "Yeah, we're not getting anywhere like this", I extend my cws and stab into the closest eyeball. Feels very squishy.

  Due to disagreements and excessive violence, the rest of the encounter has to be skipped....

  After finishing the sad excuse of a boss battle, I look at myself: completely covered in gore and other smithereens. They have even seeped into my coloring; the green-bck mess of my glitch disguise has been disfigured into a slight shade of red. Disgusting.

  "I need a shower, too many eyeball chunks..."

  The half-beheaded girl picks up the guts with her wings and licks them up with the grace of a dead cat, "Don't compin, that stuff is delish!"

  "I'll pass... So, when does the exit open?"

  "Huh? It's been open the entire time, right over there", she points in a random direction, but there's nothing to be seen, still the same void as everywhere else.

  "Then why did we have to kill him?"

  "Noone said we had to but who doesn't like bullying that simp, Yok? He'll be back in a moment anyway, crying like always", she throws a package of tissues on the ground, then after a moment facepalms, "Oh, right, sorry m'bad. He's not a Glitch. Yet. So he'll stay dead until he's restored by the next Hard Reset. Whatever, his problem, not mine."

  "And here I was afraid you'd care about your former assistant."

  She grins mischievously, "Yeah, yeah, I'm a heartless bitch. Right, right. So can we go now? My vacation and your GF are waiting."

  "She's not... forget it, let's move on."

  We walk through the random spot Malice pointed out before and suddenly stand in a hallway that appears to be only half-infected. At the end of it, is a door the glitched air obviously avoids.

  "I guess that's her room then. The infection avoids it exactly like the window outside."

  M/Il1ce seems uncomfortable, "Ye-yeah..."

  "What's wrong?"

  "Nothing. Uninfected air just stinks, I'm just not looking forward to it."

  "That's it? And here I thought it was somehow harmful..."

  Or rather, I hoped it would be a bit more severe than a hint of nausea, something that would force the Glitches to keep away from our reality for longer until the infection spreads around at least...

  I take a sniff of the clean air and it is a bit different from the infected section, like a faint scent of burnt cookies from three days ago.

  That's it? God, she's such a drama queen...

  I walk over to the door and try to knock, but the door immediately falls apart revealing a messy room.

  3QGN73