"Wh-what? How!?" the king of this world screams like a chipmunk caught unawares.
Justice scoffs. "I didn't come here the same way you did. I broke into the dream. I don't surrender to fantasies," he explains. "Your childish delusions have no power over me."
"That… doesn't make… any sense!" Maniac Minion shouts. He waves his hand, and suddenly a massive abyss opens under Justice, but the Lord Knight is undeterred. He just stands upon the surface of thin air, with the looming drop of one billion lightyears beneath him. Justice steps forward, preparing his sword for another strike.
"Th-th-this can't be. This is my world. It doesn't make any sense!" Maniac Minion shouts, throwing aside his crown and taking up the sword with two hands as he steadily backs off the throne. His servants, now all crude caricatures of who they were supposed to represent, run off in droves.
"A power given is never true— it has to be crafted within— it has to be earned," Justice says as he lifts up his blade, as if to strike into Maniac Minion, but instead twists into the throne and cuts across with a dragon-leveling strike. The stone shards blast in all directions, and a malevolent screech fills the massive throne arena, the clouds themselves parting with the force of the scream.
"This matters not. I have their souls!" a voice booms out in desperate triumph.
Justice reels his sword up for another strike as an amorphous black gas, smoking with demonic cinder, curls in and prepares to lunge.
"No," Justice says with a tone of undying, practiced certainty. "You could not take that which cannot be given. I do not trust their master, but I do trust that he would never allow you to sneak underneath his nose and steal his children away like this… Just the same as I will not allow you to exist on this plane, or any other where you can deceive and usurp humankind."
Scout coughs out another helping of white blood. "In whatever form they're in, humans only?" Scout Minion asks, holding her wound with a sassy refrain.
Justice bends his head down with a critical sharpness as his eyes lock in on the demon, readying for another attack.
"I didn't stutter, minion. If you benefit from it as well, I have no issue in that, but I do what I do for humans and the Reinish people." He looms over the demon that throws nonsensical, amorphous attacks at him, but each one is immediately thwarted by Justice's epic blade. "Mankind ill needs a savior that does not save. Even in dreams, it doesn't matter. Trading someone's last hope of reality for a pleasant illusion: It could never be worth it."
"That's NOT for you to decide," Long Night shouts back with another slap from one of its fluctuating limbs. "You do not have the RIGHT to decide what the—"
"I have the right to decide if you live or die, because I have the power to kill you, and the will to do so," Justice says, raising his blade. "And I say you die." Throwing his blade down and finishing the incantation under his breath. Justice destroys the illusion that the demon created as he cuts into it. The throne, the clouds, the gold plated buttresses and galleries, every bathing suit, every plate of food and tasty drink, every guard, every helmet, every spear, every coin, every scratch on every piece of metal, destroyed in an instant.
Only those that are real remain.
"This… no matter. I won't let you have the satisfaction. Goodbye!" the demon shouts, riling up to exit the dream and escape.
Justice says nothing as he exits the dream as well, the minions fast behind him, most of them unconscious, Super Insane Maniac screaming his little head off, and Scout Minion pulling in her third wind to kick her little friend's ass and help him "understand" the acceptable range of things one may dream about.
She looms like a harpy over an innocent, terrified villager as the kaleidoscope of color emerges around them and pushes them out from Insane Maniac Minion's shattered dream.
Instead of the dreary attic, a bright light shines through them, and the next thing they know, they are out on a large boat.
"Perhaps you'll see me again, in another drea—" the demon stops, looking in all directions, as he's surrounded by a lake.
Scout Minion stumbles over her words a moment as Justice steps onto the boat as well, with the unconscious minions phasing in right after.
"What… the hell happened?" she asks, holding tight into her wound, only to realize that it's completely disappeared. Dream weapons, for dream injuries, she guesses.
Fishin'ion, his rod out, gives a long sigh and reels it in. "Ya' know, if y'all are gonna be rockin' th' boat, it'll scare th' fish away," he says.
"You brought everyone on… the boat?" Scout Minion tries to correct as the demon skirts around to find a place to jump off.
"Well, naturally. Nothing's going to stop me from my fish."
Scout Minion gives a weird smile. "Uh, yeah, alright," she answers, laying a solid grip on the groveling Super Insane Maniac Minion.
Long Night trembles on the boat, an amorphous gas of rotten dreams and caked on makeup.
Justice looms over the rocking demon. "Decided to face your end?" he asks.
Long Night just shakes his head. "I can't… believe you've done this to me."
The Lord Knight pauses a moment as he tries to understand just what is going on now. "What do you mean?" he asks before Fishin'ion chimes in.
"Yeah, so, this actually goes into an ocean. It's a saltwater inlet," he explains.
Justice nods as Scout Minion wins a genuinely impressed look.
"I'm… surrounded by salt," the demon whines just as Justice steps behind him, his sword poised to strike and dismiss the demon back to his forsaken pit of a realm. "A fitting end: surrounded by the horrors of your own reality as you surrounded others with the falsehood of your nightmares."
With a scream, Long Night throws up his hands for mercy, but Justice brings down his sword all the same. It is like a star is born for a second in the sky, and then just like that, it dies. The blast almost throws Druid Minion, quite unconscious, over the rim of the boat, but she's caught by Cardio Minion, whose already regained her wits.
The minions stay silent, except for Fishin'ion, who just sighs irritably as Justice waves his sword of the smoking blackness of the demon's remains before replacing it into his sheath. He turns over to Scout Minion, which is, incidentally, the only one he recognizes.
"Let this be a lesson."
"Don't lecture me," she snips back. "It was all this idiot's idea," she says, waving a whimpering Super Insane Maniac Minion around by the antenna.
Justice pauses, nods, and then gets down on a knee in the boat, as if addressing a school kid. "Hey, you shouldn't do that," Justice starts to the squeaking moron. "Life's never so bad that you have to ask for something big like that to take away your life in exchange for help. A spirit that cared about you would allow you to learn yourself and become a person that could handle hard days, not someone that enables you so you could run away from them."
Maniac Minion, held tight under the ironclad grip of Scout Minion, scoffs with adolescent dejection. "Oh, lecture someone else, you turd ass dumb idiot! Knights suck!"
Justice scoffs. "Turd… and dumb idiot," Justice recites, offering a slightly more family-friendly translation to Maniac Minion's response. "That's very rude. You shouldn't talk to people that way."
"I said F*** YOU, moron!"
Justice bows his head a bit and then looks over to Scout Minion. "…I suppose I can trust you to help him understand." Scout Minion's eyes flicker, and Justice scoffs. "I saw what he thought of you," he says with a good-humored tone.
Scout Minion's eyes flinch, as if Justice had just identified a chink in her emotional armor. "If you tell—"
"And I won't tell anyone," Justice says reassuringly over her voice. He stands up and begins walking across the water with a quick spell under his breath. "Don't summon any more demons," he says.
"Yeah, thanks," Scout says, poorly concealing the flush of white on her face with her scarf. "Now get the hell off our property."
With a wave of the hand, Justice begins formulating a coalescence gate, a sort of way to teleport between dimensions for the magically inclined.
"The Knights of Reinen go where they must when there's work to be done," he says. "That demon was outlandishly powerful to have such an obvious mana signature. We picked him up the minute your… friend completed the ritual."
Scout Minion's grip on Super Insane Maniac Minion's antenna gets so tight it begins drawing out white infusia from the sharpness of her claws. "Yeah. Why don't you go tell Chief," she snips, "tell her all about how you were a good boy today," she mocks.
Justice flinches, causing the coalescence gate to flicker for a moment, and he slightly sinks into the water before catching himself. "It's perfectly reasonable to call your commander-in-chief 'the Chief,' you know. It makes perfect—"
"You're the only one that calls her that, dude. Just get out of here, weirdo," Scout snips at him, "or I'll call Poppi over here and he'll sort you out for real!"
As if his veneer of coolness has been shattered, Justice scoffs as the coalescence gate completes. He moves to step inside, but not before he wags his finger at the group one more time. "I mean it," he says.
"I mean it too. Now, scram!" Scout says, on the brink of embarrassed tears.
Truly, of all the Knights, him? The cute idiot one?!