ONE WEEK AFTER SIMON'S FALL
The Sanctuary smelled of burnt sugar and unshed tears.
Simon's porcelain statue stood in the nave, Pinchy curled motionless at its base. Barry kneaded dough nearby, pounding rage into gluten. "Sourdough is patience," he muttered. "Patience is anger with better hydration."
[Sanctuary Status: GRIEVING / PREPARING]
[Defense Rating: 43% (Mostly Spite)]
Beatrice swung what remained of her hammer – now just a handle fused to a demonic karaoke speaker – against the cathedral's anvil (a repurposed baptismal font). Sparks flew in time to the machine's distorted bassline.
"Why rebuild it?" Jayden asked, tossing her a shard of Grim-2.0's Spreadsheet Shield.
"Because he," Beatrice nodded at Simon's statue, "believed blunt force fixes things." She welded the shard to the speaker. "Turns out… so do I."
[Holy Hammer Reforged: "The Bass Drop of Clarity"]
[Ability: Shatters lies at 120 decibels]
Marcy sat before Yog-Sothmayo, its packet quivering over Simon's frozen hand.
"Can he… hear us?"
"HE HEARS THE YEAST," Yog-Sothmayo pulsed. "THE SOURDOUGH SINGS OF HIM. ALSO, HE REGRETS NOT TRYING BARRY'S TZATZIKI FOCACCIA."
A single mayo-tear oozed down the packet. Marcy caught it in a vial.
[Item: Grief Condiment]
[Use: Unknown. Tastes like salt and unfinished conversations]
Mittens materialized on the pulpit, dragging a burlap sack that hissed with static. Inside:
7 Glowing Croissants (shaped like question marks)
1 Pair of Broken Glasses (lenses cracked like spiderwebs)
A Sticky Note:
> "Malone –
Cleanup Crew arrives at dawn.
They erase glitches… and witnesses.
P.S. Croissants are timed explosives.
– The Cat"
Jayden stared at the flaky pastries. "Why croissants?"
Mittens yawned, showing teeth like shattered stars.
"Fair enough."
Reginald soared over the city, relaying images to Jayden via psychic breadcrumbs:
Cleanup Crew Transports: Sleek, grey pods landing in the financial district.
Weaponry: Not Sanitizer Guns – Erasure Beams that dissolved matter into spreadsheet cells.
Uniforms: Still beige, but with red trim – like dried blood on bureaucracy.
Barry studied the psychic images while shaping sourdough into tactical baguettes.
"Their weakness," he realized, dusting flour onto a blueprint. "Is flavor."
"Flavor?" Jayden frowned.
"They enforce blandness. So we weaponize excess." Barry shoved a garlic-and-chili-infused boule into Jayden's hands. "Throw this. It'll short-circuit their taste for monotony."
[Sourdough Grenade: "The Spicy Paradox"]
[Effect: Forces target to experience joy. 85% system crash rate.]
The demonic karaoke machine flickered. Instead of "Highway to Hell," a familiar staticky voice rasped:
"Malone. The Cleanup Crew's leader is Janus-9. Two faces – one lies, one enforces. Break the lie… the enforcement crumbles."
Jayden touched the screen. "Admin?"
"The cathedral's AI absorbed my… essence. Call it haunting. Call it unfinished paperwork." A pause. "Tell Pinchy… I miss his grumpiness."
[Sanctuary AI Updated: "Ghost in the Machine"]
[Ability: 15% Chance to Roast Enemies With Dad Jokes]
As dawn bled grey over the city, the cult gathered:
Beatrice strapped "The Bass Drop of Clarity" to her back.
Marcy loaded mayo-tear vials into a squirt gun.
Barry distributed sourdough grenades.
Jayden tied the Lace of Infinite Tripping around the Holy Frying Pan.
A click echoed. Pinchy uncurled from Simon's statue. His shell glowed faintly as he scuttled to Barry's flour sack and dug.
"What's he—?" Marcy began.
Pinchy emerged dragging a tiny, dough-covered hammer – Simon's first weapon, baked into sourdough.
[Pinchy's Resolve: 100%]
[New Role: Crustacean Squire]
The cathedral doors exploded inward.
Janus-9 stood framed in the wreckage – literally two-faced.
Left Face: Smiling, salesman-smooth. "We're here to streamline your existence!"
Right Face: Snarling, eyes like broken code. "Comply or be deleted."
Behind them, Cleanup Crew troopers leveled Erasure Beams.
Jayden stepped forward, flipping a croissant explosive like a coin. "Sorry. We're fresh out of compliance."
Janus-9's smiling face chuckled. "Adorable! We'll erase that defiance fir—"
Jayden threw the croissant. "Eat pastry, fascist."
[BOOM]
The explosion wasn't fire – it was pure, unfiltered absurdity:
Rainbows vomited confetti.
Gravity hiccuped sideways.
Three troopers turned into sentient mustaches.
Janus-9's snarling face howled. "KILL THE GLITCH!"
Beatrice swung her hammer. The first BASS DROP shook the universe.
The cathedral trembled under the dissonant roar of Janus-9's fury and the earth-shaking BASS DROP from Beatrice's hammer. Confetti from the absurdity croissant explosion swirled like radioactive snow. Janus-9's snarling face contorted, spitting binary curses, while the smiling face plastered on a grimace of forced calm. "Contain the anomaly! Standard Purification Protocol Delta-Nine!"
Cleanup Troopers, momentarily stunned by mustachioed comrades and sideways gravity, snapped back into formation. Their Erasure Beams hummed, coalescing into a wave of nullifying grey light aimed squarely at Jayden and Beatrice.
"SPICY PARADOX, INCOMING!" Barry bellowed, hurling a glowing garlic-chili boule like a major league pitcher. It sailed over the troopers' heads and detonated against Janus-9's chest in a burst of vibrant crimson powder and shimmering heat.
[Sourdough Grenade: "The Spicy Paradox" - Direct Hit!]
The effect was instantaneous and bizarre. The grey wave flickered and dissolved like bad static. Troopers stumbled, their blank expressions cracking. One lowered his beam, sniffing the air. "Is... is that paprika?" Another touched his cheek, bewildered by a single tear tracking through the grime. "I... I feel... happy? Why do I feel happy?" The enforced monotony fractured under an assault of unexpected, overwhelming sensation.
Janus-9's smiling face recoiled, its plastered grin turning sickly. "Irrelevant sensory input! Suppress emotional leakage!" But the snarling face howled, thrashing as if physically burned by the concept of joy. "DELETE THE FLAVOR! DELETE IT ALL!"
Seizing the chaos, Jayden lunged, not at Janus, but towards the discarded broken glasses Mittens had delivered. He shoved them onto his face. The world blurred, then snapped into horrifying, multi-layered focus. He saw the troopers' flickering fear beneath their programming. He saw the intricate, cold code woven into the cathedral stones by the System. And he saw Janus-9.
Three faces.
Beyond the snarling mask of Enforcement and the plastic smile of the Lie, there was a third, flickering weakly beneath: a pale, terrified child's face, eyes wide with primal fear, mouth open in a silent scream. The Core. The part of Janus that just wanted the scary, unpredictable world to stop.
"Beatrice! The Lie!" Jayden yelled, pointing at Janus-9's smiling face. "Break the Lie!"
Beatrice didn't hesitate. She raised the Bass Drop of Clarity, took a running leap onto a wobbling pew, and brought the speaker-hammer down with a roar that wasn't entirely her own. A sonic boom, visible as a ripple of distorted air, slammed into Janus-9's smiling face.
[Bass Drop of Clarity: Shattering Lies!]
The effect was grotesque. The smiling face didn't just crack; it shattered like cheap porcelain, shards dissolving into pixels before hitting the ground. A high-pitched, electronic shriek tore from Janus-9's remaining snarling face. "NO! THE NARRATIVE! THE CONTROL!"
With the Lie shattered, the Enforcement face went berserk, its snarl deepening into a rictus of pure, unadulterated fury. The Erasure Beams flared brighter, less coordinated but more desperate, lashing out wildly. One beam clipped a stone pillar near Simon's statue, vaporizing a chunk into sterile data-dust.
"PINCHY! NO!" Marcy screamed.
The little lobster, glowing faintly, had been scuttling towards Simon's frozen form. The beam wasn't aimed at him, but the shockwave sent him tumbling through the air directly into the path of a second, wildly sweeping beam aimed at Jayden.
Time slowed. Jayden saw the beam's deadly grey light. He saw Pinchy, small and determined, tumbling helplessly. He saw the dough-covered hammer still clutched in Pinchy's claw. He saw Simon's porcelain face, forever holding the ghost of a caress.
Then, a blur of shimmering white fur. Mittens materialized inside the beam's path for a fraction of a second, a impossible, gravity-defying twist. The beam bent around the cosmic cat like water around a stone, missing Pinchy by millimeters and scorching the floor instead. Mittens landed silently, licking a paw as if bored, just as Pinchy thudded safely onto the base of Simon's statue.
The near-miss broke something in Jayden. Rage, white-hot and focused, surged through the Lace of Infinite Tripping wrapped around the Holy Frying Pan. He wasn't just a glitch anymore. He was the Keeper of the Glitch, and they were hurting his family.
"YOG-SOTHMAYO!" Jayden bellowed, pointing the pan at Janus-9's exposed, terrified Core face, visible only through the broken glasses. "SHOW HIM THE VOID! SHOW HIM AIOLI!"
"WITH CREAMY DELIGHT!" The sentient mayo packet launched itself like a condiment comet, swelling as it flew, becoming a wave of sentient, tangy oblivion. It didn't engulf Janus-9 this time; it splattered directly onto the flickering child-face beneath the Enforcement snarl.
[Yog-Sothmayo: Direct Application to Core Fear!]
The Core face didn't scream. It gasped. The Enforcement snarl froze mid-curse. Grey eyes widened, not with System-driven rage, but with profound, personal terror – the terror of being utterly known, utterly overwhelmed by something incomprehensible and creamy.
"Too... much..." the Enforcement face gurgled, the voice losing its digital edge, becoming raw, almost human. "Make... it... stop..."
The Admin's voice crackled from the demonic karaoke machine, layered over the opening synth of Britney Spears' "...Baby One More Time." "Malone! The Enforcement facade is vulnerable! Hit it with everything! Sync it to the beat! Now!"
Understanding flashed. The Bass Drop. The Spicy Paradox. The Holy Frying Pan. The Grief Condiment. They all needed to hit together.
"BEATRICE! BARRY! MARCY! ON MY MARK!" Jayden roared, raising the pan high, the Lace of Infinite Tripping glowing like a captured lightning bolt. He locked eyes with the terrified Core face visible through Janus-9's cracking Enforcement mask. "This is for Simon! And Pinchy! And every glitch you tried to scrub away! MARK!"
The demonic karaoke machine hit the chorus.
Beatrice swung the Bass Drop of Clarity down on the snarl's temple in perfect time with the beat. Barry hurled a Spicy Paradox grenade straight into the Enforcement face's open, gurgling mouth. Marcy squeezed her squirt gun, dousing the Core face visible beneath the mask with shimmering Grief Condiment tears. Jayden brought the Holy Frying Pan down onto the crown of Janus-9's head with the final, crashing note.
[SYNCHRONIZED FREAKISH ASSAULT: CRITICAL HIT!]
Light – not grey, not white, but every impossible color Yog-Sothmayo could dream of – exploded from Janus-9. The Enforcement snarl dissolved into screaming data-streams. The terrified Core face flickered once, not with fear, but with a dazed moment of quiet, before vanishing. Janus-9 didn't fall. It unraveled, threads of code and suppressed humanity dissipating into the charged air.
The remaining Cleanup Troopers froze. Their Erasure Beams sputtered and died. The blankness in their eyes shattered, replaced by confusion, dawning horror, and the lingering phantom taste of Barry's spicy bread. One by one, they dropped their weapons, staring at their hands as if seeing them for the first time.
Silence descended, thick and heavy, broken only by the demonic karaoke machine softly crooning the outro and Pinchy's soft, rhythmic clicks against Simon's porcelain foot.
Jayden lowered the Holy Frying Pan, breathing hard. The broken glasses slipped down his nose. He looked around the scarred sanctuary, at his exhausted, victorious, grieving family. Beatrice leaned on her hammer, her armor dented, one eye swelling shut. Barry clutched an empty flour sack, tears cutting tracks through the dust on his face. Marcy cradled Yog-Sothmayo, now significantly deflated and pulsing weakly. Reginald cooed softly from a broken stained-glass window.
From the pulpit, Mittens watched, unblinking. Then, the cosmic cat slowly, deliberately, raised a paw and licked it. The gesture seemed less like grooming and more like… sealing a contract.
A new notification, soft and warm, unlike any System alert before, appeared in Jayden's vision:
[Sanctuary Fortified: 200%] [Glitch Resonance: Stable / Ascendant] [New Title: Heart of the Anomaly] [Effect: Within these walls, the right to be weird is now a fundamental law of reality.]
Jayden walked over to Simon's statue. Pinchy clicked furiously, nudging the dough-covered hammer towards the frozen hand. Jayden gently placed the tiny hammer into Simon's porcelain fingers. He looked up at the serene, preserved face.
"We held the line, Simon," Jayden whispered, his voice rough. "We held the glitch."
High above, where the broken roof let in the bruised dawn light, a single, perfect, non-unionized pigeon feather drifted down, landing softly on the Holy Frying Pan. The war wasn't over. The Council was still out there. But here, now, in the Sanctuary of the Glitch, scarred by Erasure Beams and smelling of burnt sugar, spicy bread, and existential mayo, the freaks remembered. And they endured.