Once Diana was close enough, at a distance that was likely to be just within reach of her spear, she looked at the queen for the first time since she had started walking. But there was an air of deliberate intention to Diana’s gaze, forming an unseen spear of defiance that rejected any notion of subservience to this monarch.

  “Let me guess,” said Diana, “you’re the head honcho of this little kingdom, and you won’t stop until you have Kenneth.”

  Diana spoke with both familiarity and impatience, her tone expressing countless experiences of having gone through the same song and dance of conflict in previous Dreams. The way she looked at the queen may as well have been the look a player gives to a boss in a game they’ve replayed a hundred times: the look of being ready to strike them down as nothing more than a negligible hindrance.

  “Such…such…utter disrespect!” The queen’s face turned red at a speed only possible for cartoon characters. It would be comical if not for how her eyes continued to hold a world’s worth of hatred. “You. Peasant and heretic. You shall only speak when we deign you to open your pie hole. And you will address us by title. ‘Your Highest Benevolence,’ ‘Your Gracious Steward of the Land,’ even ‘Your Majesty’ or ‘Your Highness’ would suffice!”

  “Lady,” Diana said with a wicked grin, “you’re sitting on a damned couch. If you don’t get off your high horse, I swear I’ll shove you off—”

  “Silence!” The queen’s voice roared with the wind, crashing down on everyone’s ears as a tidal wave of scorn. She pointed her index finger, topped with a long black talon of a nail, at Diana. “Such insolence is worthy of eternal guilt and shame!”

  Her shouted words held power, for in the strong gust of wind that followed, Lucy felt an ice-cold force that made her hairs stand on end. When it passed, it suddenly became clear to Lucy that what Diana had done was, indeed, wrong and inexcusable. She was captivated again by the queen’s spiteful eyes that glared down at Diana, and Lucy had to admit that Diana had earned at least some of that spite for how she had just acted out.

  Just as Diana brought her hand back to grab her holstered spear’s handle, Lucy called out: “Diana, listen to Her Grace! No matter what our goal is, the way you just behaved in front of Her Excellence is unacceptable.”

  “Oh, for the love of…” Diana gave Lucy a look of revulsion, but instead of her eyes glowing with hostility, they were narrowed and weary with disappointment and annoyance. She turned back toward the queen with her spear pointed accusingly toward her. “The fact you need to turn everyone into obedient little ninnies is pretty pathetic. Can’t handle a little disagreement? Well, we’re never agreeing to handing Kenneth over.”

  “Diana!” said Lucy, appalled and annoyed. It was like dealing with Thomas showing bad manners in front of relatives and family friends: how could one be so determined in digging their grave deeper and deeper?

  “Shut it!” Diana’s eyes were on hers again. “Once I break this damned spell, you’re—”

  “How pathetic indeed!” The queen suddenly roared with laughter, kicking her feet up and nearly falling backwards off her raised couch. All of the royal guards looked at her, silently for a moment, before breaking into raucous laughter themselves as their queen said: “How useless! How ironic! How superfluous! How utterly wrong! For look now at who is approaching our entourage of his own accord.”

  Her indignant gaze left Diana and focused instead on a small figure coming closer and closer toward her.

  “Kenneth!” Diana shouted at him. But in that short moment where she was distracted, a guard wielding a long silver pike thrust his weapon at Diana with surprising speed and force. It struck Diana at the side of her ribs, and while the blade didn’t pierce her armour, the sheer force of it knocked Diana backwards several metres and she fell, only barely managing to catch herself with her hands on the ground. Despite this, the attack had clearly caught her off-guard and knocked the wind out of her, for she remained on the ground breathing heavily.

  Seeing Diana knocked away and hearing both the clang of her armour hitting the stone ground and her laboured breathing sent a jolt of realization through Lucy. A teammate had been bested, and was in pain, and it was in focusing on this that the clouds cleared in Lucy’s mind.

  “Diana!” Lucy called out as she rushed to her side. Keilani and Ricardo also ran over, though they seemed disoriented from having also just been freed from the queen’s spell.

  Diana looked up from where she was still trying to pick herself back up, veins bulging in her neck as she shouted: “Not me, you dolts! Kenneth! Stop Kenneth!”

  But it was too late. Kenneth stood now right in front of the entourage, staring up at the queen who glared down at him from what might as well have been thousands of feet of height looming over the tiny boy. Her eyes practically burned red with that reality-spanning enmity from earlier, yet her lips were curled into a wide piranha grin.

  “Kenneth.” Her voice was low, calm, toothachingly sweet, with the cadence of a grade school teacher. “Do you know why I called you here to speak with you?”

  “N-no.” Kenneth, his shaking hands clasped before his chest, shook his head vigorously. “No.”

  “Oh, you know exactly what you did, you accursed scoundrel!” Midway through speaking, the queen’s voice became a guttural, infernal roar with plumes of fire erupting from her mouth.

  Lucy jumped back in shock and terror, but Kenneth remained standing where he was as if rooted to the spot, his misty eyes still locked onto the queen who was now quite literally fuming.

  Said queen huffed and puffed with smoke exhuming from her nostrils until she spoke: “If you’re sure you don’t know or don’t remember, I will gladly remind you of each and every crime you’ve committed upon this Earth.”

  She snapped her fingers and held her hand out. One of her guards handed her a parchment document so long that it trailed on the ground behind the entourage and had several other guards holding onto the length to ensure it didn’t get blown away by the wind.

  “Let’s see now…” she said with a slow, deliberate, drawling voice as she stuffed her hand into her couch and fished out a pair of reading spectacles.

  “No!” Kenneth yelled—it was the loudest and most emotive Lucy had heard him thus far. Despite this, he didn’t budge from his spot in front of the entourage. “Please! Don’t!”

  “Item one of seventeen-thousand one-hundred and twenty-three,” the queen said in a dry, factual voice. Her eyes scanned the paper, and the moment they got to the end of that first line, the parchment crinkled in her white-knuckled grip and her face turned red with rage. “Forgetting to turn off the light in the bathroom after brushing your teeth! How utterly vile and despicable! You are precisely the reason why we’re drowning in debt from electrical bills! Won’t you think of your poor uncle working thirty-two hours in a single day just to make ends meet? Oh, you careless, you ungrateful, you impudent little imp!”

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “I’m sorry!” Kenneth shrilled, tears streaming down his cheeks. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

  The queen spared but a glance at the boy, her mouth simultaneously a grimace of distaste and a sneer of wicked amusement, before lifting the parchment higher to read another line. Her face turned red again, her entire face looking more pronounced, perhaps even larger somehow, as she roared:

  “And leaving an entire smidge of rice uneaten on your dinner plate! You do this out of mockery, don’t you? Not just to your uncle who spends one-hundred-and-ten-percent of his hard-earned money to feed your pitiful self. Not just to us, the ones who cooked and prepared that food for you, wasting hours of our precious time. No—you foolish, selfish child, you mock the entire world, the entire chain of people who grew and harvested and delivered this food, by saying it isn’t worthy of your ungrateful mouth! You are the reason the economy is going to collapse and we’ll all be poor and out on the street eating grass and dust! You are the reason landfills are piling up until they’re bursting and polluting all our drinking water and slowly killing us, killing everyone alive, killing the whole planet! You are the reason! You are the killer!”

  “I’m sorry!” Kenneth kept repeating. He sobbed deeper and more desperately, wiping frantically at his eyes as rivulets of tears flowed without end.

  As Lucy watched with an arresting mixture of confusion and heartache at Kenneth’s plight, she heard laughter behind her.

  Diana, who had gotten back up to her feet, was laughing.

  “What are you laughing for?” said Lucy.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t hear how ridiculous this is.” Diana stopped laughing but continued grinning. “Forgetting the lights? Not finishing a tiny piece of food? Yeah, some moms sure know how to make the smallest things sound like the end of the world. Kid has it rough.”

  “This is…interesting.” Keilani had a face that couldn’t decide between looking on in concern or laughing out loud. But after Diana’s comment, she looked down at her feet in shame. “I sure hope my own kids don’t have nightmares like these…”

  “I guess that’s true,” said Lucy. She made eye contact with both of them, then nodded toward Kenneth, saying: “But shouldn’t we go help him out? We can’t just let this keep going, can we?”

  Just as Lucy had said, the queen continued reading and exaggerating items one-by-one from her absurdly long list, while Kenneth stood in place apologizing and sobbing profusely.

  “I do feel bad for the kid,” said Diana, “but we might as well use this situation as a distraction for them while we figure out how to take them all on. She’s giving him a good grilling, sure, but it’s just some scolding and ultimatums. We’ve all gone through them, haven’t we? He’ll live.”

  “I…” Lucy tried to say something, but she couldn’t disagree, given how many ultimatums her own mother had given her in the past—at least, back when her mother had been in the right state of mind to care enough.

  “Uh, guys,” Ricardo said, “I don’t think this is just a regular scolding.”

  He nodded his head toward Kenneth and the queen. Kenneth now had an entire puddle of tears beneath his feet, which was strange, but no so much in a world where the ruling queen sat proudly atop a living room couch. Said queen was likely what Ricardo had meant to point out, as she appeared even haughtier and more full of herself than a moment ago. She seemed bigger, which Lucy almost discarded as a trick of the light fuelled by the queen’s increasing pompousness, but that observation proved to be more than just fiction when she noticed the troops holding the couch-throne were now struggling to hold it up.

  “You are the reason!” the queen said. “You are a killer!”

  “I’m sorry!” Kenneth cried. “I’m the reason! I’m the killer!”

  Lucy’s eyes went wide as she watched the queen. She really did grow: not once, but twice, her entire figure enlarging so that she barely fit the width of the couch.

  “It’s Kenneth!” said Keilani. “Every time he admits he’s the reason or ‘the killer,’ the queen uses it to make herself bigger!”

  “Seriously?” Lucy and Ricardo said in tandem. But as they watched the queen continue to grow—the troops carrying her couch-throne falling over from the increased weight as the queen and her seat fell to the ground with a thud—it was clear that each growth was timed in sync with Kenneth’s repeated self-admissions.

  “So what?” said Diana. “She might be able to squash us Godzilla-style if she gets big enough, but all this does is make her an easier target.”

  Diana looked at Keilani, who nodded and unholstered her rifle. In mere seconds, Keilani had brought her eye up to her scope and had the barrel pointed directly at the queen’s ever-enlarging face. She wasted no time in clicking the trigger, and the next moment an explosive bang rung out through the air followed by thick plumes of smoke rising from where the queen had stood.

  “Wow,” Lucy said to Keilani. “Perfect shot.”

  “Bit too early to celebrate,” Keilani said, her eye still up to the scope.

  Sure enough, once the smoke had cleared, the queen still stood atop her squashed entourage. Her face was a bit charred and she coughed violently, but otherwise she was completely intact. She continued to grow, and Kenneth, still standing a few yards from her, had seemingly paid no heed to Keilani’s shot and was still apologizing non-stop.

  Keilani clicked her tongue. “I didn’t want to use this so soon, but there’s no choice. This should finish it.”

  The space around Keilani and the others was suddenly illuminated, crackling and humming filling the air as streaks of electricity gathered into the muzzle of Keilani’s rifle. It formed into a long bullet with a pronounced spike-like vertex, electricity cascading down its length with violent intensity toward that razor-sharp end.

  This had to be one of Keilani’s Feats, Lucy surmised. She didn’t know what the effect was, but based on the bullet’s sharp end point and the thousands of volts of electricity constantly funnelling toward it, Lucy guessed that it had something to do with piercing through anything and everything while paralyzing the target to ensure they remained frozen in the exact right spot.

  There was a thud as Keilani fell into a single-knee kneeling position, her feet grazing the stone ground as she fought against being blown back, but she remained upright with her rifle still trained on-target.

  “Eat this, you nagging bitch!”

  Her finger clicked and thunder roared as the electric bullet pierced the air straight toward the queen’s oversized head. The impact was enormously loud and followed up by the crackle of electrical bolts swarming over the cloud of smoke that engulfed the spot where the queen had been standing.

  Keilani fell back into a sitting position as she panted rapidly and finally let her rifle drop to the ground. Lucy was about to help her back up when Keilani narrowed her eyes and said: “Impossible.”

  A towering shadow emerged from the clearing smoke and dust, the darkness cut through by glowing yellow eyes. The queen, now the size of one of the medieval houses that littered the town, loomed over her guards and the Dream Knights standing against them, casting them all in her enormous shadow.

  “Don’t give up yet!” Diana yelled. “I’ve got this.”

  Walking up in front of the other Dream Knights, Diana cast her open palm toward the towering queen. A blue ray of mystical energy surged forth from her outstretched hand, flying to the queen where it spread and engulfed her entire body in blue. The queen froze as this happened, making whines of discomfort.

  Lucy held her breath. Keilani’s Feat had unfortunately had no effect, but Diana’s seemed to be doing something. She watched anxiously as the queen continued to yelp while smothered in that blue force field—until, all too quickly, that blueness vanished and the queen resumed lording over her massive presence.

  Looking down at the Dream Knights, the queen cackled with the voice of a giant that made the very land quake. “We are unstoppable! None can defy us!”

  “Shit!” said Diana, slamming the butt of her spear into the ground. “That Feat removes all buffs an enemy places on themselves. It always succeeds. That means her buff is coming from something else.”

  “Kenneth!” said Keilani. “She wasn’t using Kenneth’s words—Kenneth’s doing it himself without even realizing it!”

  Lucy glanced at where Kenneth was still standing. Despite everything that had transpired, including the growth of the queen into a several-stories tall titan right in front of him, Kenneth continued to sob and apologize as if nothing else mattered.

  Lucy’s heart was caught between anxiously throbbing in fear of their unstoppable foe, and aching sharply at how alone and trapped in complete suffering Kenneth appeared to be in. But her gaze wandered to Diana, who glared at the boy with a grimace that made the veins in her neck pop.

  Lucy’s breath hitched as she recalled, in all too much detail, how Diana had plunged her spear into the two bakers without remorse. She wouldn’t kill Kenneth, the Dreamer they had to rescue, but the look she had right now told Lucy she wouldn’t hesitate to immediately incapacitate the hapless boy by any means necessary.

  “Diana—”

  Before Lucy could take even one step toward the enraged Knight, another figure zoomed up from behind Lucy and tackled Diana to the ground.

  Diana’s spear clattered to the ground as she yelled, “Let me go!”

  But Ricardo gave no answer as he pinned Diana down and wrapped his arms around her neck, holding tightly without yielding until the fire and light left Diana’s eyes.