The Scum Emperor's Redemption System - Chapter 166

Chapter 166: Return
[Warning: Old draft.]

Argider expected death. Or at the very least, a hard reset. A blinding light, an overwhelming sensation of being torn apart and pieced back together in a properly functioning reality. But instead, she woke up to… corruption.

Everything was wrong.

She lay on what should have been the palace floor, but the smooth marble flickered in and out of existence, alternating between shimmering gold, pulsating flesh, and a cold, infinite void. The very air crackled like a dying screen, and the sky above her—if it could even be called that—cycled between a vast cosmic expanse, a giant blinking loading screen, and a ceiling made of Squishy’s gelatinous mass.

And then there was the palace itself.

It flickered violently between its original grandeur, its Squishy-fied “perfection,” and something else entirely—something worse. Walls bent at unnatural angles, spiraling into corridors that led nowhere. The High Priest existed in three places at once, shifting between different realities. Fialova’s eldritch baby no longer resembled a cosmic horror but had instead transformed into a sentient error message, its eyes replaced with spinning hourglasses and glitching code.

And Squishy?

Squishy was gone.

Argider sat up, rubbing her temples as reality buzzed and flickered around her. “I swear to every god still listening… I am going to kill that thing.”

She stood on unsteady legs, carefully stepping over a section of the floor that had transformed into floating glass shards. As she did, her own body glitched.

Her clothes shifted—one moment, she was in her usual attire, the next, she was draped in ceremonial robes. Then, a full suit of armor. Then, something horrifying—a much older version of herself wearing a crown.

Argider immediately ignored that.

“Nope. Not dealing with that today.”

She staggered forward and nearly tripped over Faeralys, who was feverishly writing in a massive tome at an inhuman speed. The ink flickered between black, gold, and pure binary code.

“Faeralys?” Argider knelt beside her, cautiously waving a hand in front of her face.

Faeralys responded, but her words came out in error messages.

“Syntax Error. File not found. Reality check incomplete.”

“Great. Just great.”

A few feet away, Esmeralda was frozen mid-step. Her entire body moved in slow motion, a furious snarl stretched across her face as she tried to force herself forward.

And then there was Fialova.

Argider turned, fully expecting something horrific—only to find Fialova smiling.

“The world is evolving again!” she said, cradling her ever-mutating eldritch error-baby with disturbing fondness.

“NO.” Argider snapped, pinching the bridge of her nose. “The world is dying.”

That was when she heard it.

A voice—not Squishy’s, not any of the celestial entities she’d encountered before, but something new.

Something worse.

“𝕀𝕥 𝕚𝕤 𝕟𝕠𝕥 𝕪𝕖𝕥 𝕠𝕧𝕖𝕣, 𝔸𝕣𝕘𝕚𝕕𝕖𝕣…”

She spun around, and there, emerging from the broken fabric of reality itself, was something indescribable.

It had no defined shape—just an endless mass of distortion, flickering between forms, shifting between every possible version of itself at once. It pulsed with unstable energy, its presence warping everything around it.

“You think you can just reset things back?” The entity’s voice fractured across dimensions, overlapping with echoes of itself from different timelines. “𝕎𝕣𝕠𝕟𝕘. This world is 𝕔𝕣𝕒𝕔𝕜𝕖𝕕. And I will make sure it 𝕗𝕒𝕝𝕝𝕤 𝕒𝕡𝕒𝕣𝕥.”

Argider felt it in her bones. This thing was not part of the original world. It had been created somewhere between resets.

A cosmic bug.

And it wanted everything to crash.

The air around them fractured. The palace walls melted into raw data streams, entire sections of the world corrupting like a failed simulation. The ground trembled as the entity’s influence spread.

Argider turned and grabbed Faeralys by the shoulders, shaking her. “HOW DO WE FIX THIS?!”

Faeralys flickered—one moment, she was herself, the next, she was a stone statue, then a glowing orb, then just a floating cursor.

Through the distortion, she managed to choke out: “We—error—must find Squishy—error—**recompile the world properly—”

Esmeralda suddenly broke free of her slow-motion trap, stumbling forward and glaring at them all. “So we’re looking for the eldritch blob that caused all this?!”

“Yes!!” Fialova clapped her hands in excitement, which only made things worse.

Argider groaned. “I hate this. I hate all of this.”

But she had no choice.

If they didn’t find Squishy soon, this entire broken timeline would collapse completely.

In the distance, the corruption entity expanded, devouring reality like a virus consuming a dying system.

Argider clenched her fists. Time was running out.

“Alright,” she growled, turning to her team. “Let’s go find that damn jellybean.”

Reality was collapsing faster than Argider could scream about it.

The cosmic glitch was devouring everything in sight—walls dissolving into static, corridors warping in on themselves, and people flickering in and out of existence like corrupted files. The palace, once grand and imposing, now twisted between states—half-rendered luxury, Squishy-fied perfection, and pure, unreadable chaos. Time stuttered like a broken record. One moment, Argider stood at the entrance; the next, she was three steps ahead without having moved.

“Alright,” she exhaled, hands clenched. “I’ve had enough.”

Squishy was still out there. That meant there was a way to fix this.

The only problem?

Squishy was trapped in the heart of the Glitch Realm, where reality itself was unstable.

A Mission into Madness

She turned to her allies—what was left of them.

Faeralys, normally the voice of calculated reason, now spoke in multiple overlapping voices, each one coming from a different timeline. “Th-eE world will—has—might—cOllaPSE—”

Esmeralda was completely pixelated, her edges jagged and blocky, moving like a poorly rendered game character. She scowled but refused to comment on it.

Fialova, of course, was thrilled. She spun in place, watching her limbs morph into neon lines before snapping back. “This is the best adventure EVER!”

Argider pinched the bridge of her nose. “I despise every second of this.”

But there was no time for complaints.

Taking a deep breath, she plunged into the Glitch Realm.

Immediately, the world shattered.

She landed on something that was both ground and not ground—fragmented pieces of palace floor floating in a void of raw code. Shapes twisted unpredictably, morphing between solid, liquid, and something she had no words for. Time loops sent them forward and backward.

One second, Argider was leading.

The next, she was watching herself enter from behind.

Esmeralda’s eye twitched. “I hate this.”

Faeralys scribbled calculations at lightning speed, the numbers shifting before they were even finished. “If we do not—already did—solve this—”

“Shut UP.”

Somewhere in the madness, they found Squishy.

Or what was left of it.

Squishy.exe Has Stopped Responding

Once a chaotic but strangely adorable blob of eldritch nonsense, Squishy was now… wrong.

Its form was glitching, stuck in a loop, fragments of error messages floating around it like shattered glass.

“𝕀 𝕕𝕚𝕕𝕟’𝕥 𝕞𝕖𝕒𝕟 𝕥𝕠…” its voice stuttered, overlapping with itself. “𝕚𝕥 𝕨𝕒𝕤 𝕤𝕦𝕡𝕡𝕠𝕤𝕖𝕕 𝕥𝕠 𝕓𝕖 𝕡𝕖𝕣𝕗𝕖𝕔𝕥…”

Argider took a cautious step forward. “Squishy?”

The glitching deepened.

A massive error pulse rippled from Squishy, distorting everything in its path. The ground beneath them blinked out of existence for a full second.

And that’s when Argider saw it—the cosmic glitch had latched onto Squishy.

It wasn’t just breaking the world.

It was using Squishy as a host.

If they didn’t restore Squishy, reality wouldn’t just collapse.

It would be rewritten into something far, far worse.

The Final Debug: A Battle Against the Corruption

The cosmic glitch attacked.

A massive, formless entity of flickering pixels and shattered data, pulsing with unstable energy. It moved with no pattern, no logic, its form constantly warping between towering monstrosity and an unassuming line of broken code.

“𝔼𝕣𝕒𝕤𝕦𝕣𝕖 𝕚𝕤 𝕚𝕟𝕖𝕧𝕚𝕥𝕒𝕓𝕝𝕖,” it whispered in fragmented voices. “𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝕨𝕠𝕣𝕝𝕕 𝕚𝕤 𝕒 𝕞𝕚𝕤𝕥𝕒𝕜𝕖. 𝕀𝕥 𝕞𝕦𝕤𝕥 𝕓𝕖 𝕦𝕟𝕕𝕠𝕟𝕖.”

Reality glitched violently.

Argider lunged as the glitch sent a wave of static their way. Esmeralda countered, her slowed movements suddenly snapping back to speed. Faeralys’ words distorted the laws of physics, creating temporary safe zones.

And Fialova… well, she just enjoyed the chaos.

“THIS IS AMAZING.” She dodged a warping tendril of glitch with terrifying ease. “I WANNA DO THIS EVERY DAY.”

Argider dodged an attack that didn’t exist yet. “I WILL KILL YOU.”

As they fought through the madness, Squishy’s form continued to break down.

Its voice grew weaker.

“𝕀 𝕔𝕒𝕟’𝕥… 𝕗𝕚𝕩 𝕚𝕥…”

Argider’s eyes locked onto the core of Squishy—the one stable part that hadn’t been corrupted yet.

A reset button.

The only way out.

She braced herself, dodged another distortion, and charged forward.

But at the final moment—when the glitch was nearly defeated—

She saw something.

For just a fraction of a second, reality… changed.

She stood in a grand hall, wearing a golden crown. The weight of it pressed down on her head, heavier than she had ever imagined. A throne loomed behind her.

People knelt before her.

And a voice—soft, distant, yet impossibly clear— whispered in her ear:

“You are not done yet, Argider. This was only the beginning.”

The vision shattered.

Back in the Glitch Realm, the cosmic glitch lunged for her.

Argider didn’t hesitate.

With a final, desperate push—

She pressed Squishy’s reset button.

The world went white.

To Be Continued…

Did they succeed?

Was the world back to normal?

And what future had Argider just glimpsed?

Next time:

“Reality 2.0 – An Update No One Agreed To.”