Cardio Minion stops flat in shock as she watches the kid slam into the stadium wall.
"Wh-what are you thi-"
"Look!" Scout interrupts as she picks up an elderly lady right in front of Cardio Minion and then swings her into the wall with the kid.
"W-w-w-wh-what the hell are you doing?!"
"They're not real," Scout points out.
"What? Of course they're real! Look at them. They're horrified!"
"By what?" Scout asks.
"The moon!" Cardio Minion says, pointing out the very obvious, gigantic obsidian sphere hurtling down towards their world.
"Right, and you need to pick them up and move them… how far out of the area?"
Cardio Minion double takes, looking for the next person to grab until the implication hits her. She stops herself. "Oh yeah…"
" 'Oh' is right," Scout Minion helps along with an impatient frown. "This is a dream."
Cardio Minion finally stops altogether, looks around, and realizes what she's doing, carrying people out of a stadium to somehow save them from the moon impacting the world?
"Wow, I can't believe I fell for that," she admits before chuckling. "Dreams are engaging things, I guess."
"Come on, Speedo, let's go," Scout Minion snips.
Cardio Minion shakes her hands in a way that tells Scout she's a bit overwhelmed. "But I'm not. I'm not…." Cardio Minion stops herself and looks over to the contract, waiting for her in the same spot where she dropped it. "Will I ever be the fastest, Scout?"
"Does that matter if you didn't become the fastest by working hard? Is your soul really worth that?" Scout asks, not turning back to look at her.
"Well… to me…" the way Cardio Minion says it is so honest, so personal. Truly, she could have her dream of being the fastest thing ever, and she'd deserve it for trying so hard for so long, couldn't she?
Scout Minion sighs. "You should keep working to be as fast as you possibly can, and it won't be your victory unless it's you who do it. You know that the best out of any one of us," Scout Minion says, but Cardio Minion still looks back at the contract.
"…but I could outrun the moon. I could even outrun… Big Coach."
Scout Minion scoffs. "That thing's just going to steal your soul, you dork. You'll be fast in your dreams, but that doesn't matter: it's not real life. You're still not even close to Chaos. He's way faster than you. Full stop. You have to accept that there's always someone with fewer limitations than you. You can remove as many as you want, but there will always be someone who sacrifices more. He's going to be faster than you forever, and you can accept it, or you can keep struggling with not being good enough."
Cardio Minion blinks back tears. "Wh-what?"
"You are good enough, but you're good enough as you are. You'll never be faster than him."
Despite the cheesy, and perhaps nonsensical way of putting it, Scout's words hold the power of the dream at a standstill, as if the thought of humility and acceptance has cut through into her friend's sense of reality.
Cardio Minion gives a long, sad pause. "F…Forever?"
"Yes, forever," Scout Minion reasserts. "Continue doing your very, very best, but you have to play with the cards you're given, and 'instantaneous inter-dimensional travel' is not something anyone else but him can seem to do. So there – forever."
The tall, track-suited minion takes a deep breath, and comes to an accepting nod. "Okay… forever," she reiterates.
"It's going to take time," Scout says, "but you're going to be here with us, and we'll help you get faster as long as you're willing to keep trying," she adds with a surprisingly gentle smirk. "I can relate to not feeling like you're doing well enough – believe me."
Cardio Minion squints at the ground, and then the contract resting on it. She looks over all the people at the podium. The trophies have now fallen over from the panic. She looks over at the second place podium for a second, and then back at first.
"You know, it wouldn't really be my victory if someone gave it to me, would it?"
Scout grins. "No, it wouldn't," she says. "We're not going to give you anything. But you know we're all backing you up. We'll help you every step of the way."
"Really?! You'll go to my meets?" Cardio Minion asks, her voice hopeful and her eyes wide in surprise.
Scout Minion glances away. "M-maybe, yeah." And that maybe alone is more than enough to pep Cardio Minion back to her usual self. She tears the contract in half.
"Alright, let's do it! I'll work to become the second fastest in The Verses!" With the dream already melting away, she picks up Scout Minion and spins her around before bringing her in for a hug. "You know, Scout, you're a good friend," she says, looming over her as Scout Minion falls limp.
"Uh, yeah, whatever," she says. They pause for a second as Scout Minion clears her throat awkwardly. "Thanks, I guess," she adds at the end of it.
All at once, the four open their eyes, ready to go. They bust out of their prospective rooms, and share on-task glances.
"Alright, so now all that's left is…" Scout stops herself, looking down the hall again. The guy is back.
"Pah! Another dream, no doubt," Fashion Minion says with a haughty glare before he starts up to the from of Knight Justice. "And just who do you think you are, Mr. Knight? Very big and strong, eh?"
"D-Dude," Scout Minion starts, trying to pull back even a little bit on Fashion Minion's brash certainty of what all this is.
"Another dream here to trick us, no doubt," he says, loading his finger behind his thumb to give the helmet a flick. "Be gone with you- ow!"
A metallic clang emits from the supposedly illusory Knight Justice as Fashion Minion pulls back his hand.
"…You minions have some pretty sick ideas when it comes to practical jokes, just like your master," Justice says.
There's a pause as everyone comes to terms with what's going on. Three of the minions, excepting Scout, scream at the top of their lungs as they dart around in shock. Scout Minion, who delivers more of a challenging yawp than a scream, draws her blades ready for the fight as the other three cower around the cabin.
"Now you just listen here, you stupid son of a—" before she can strike with her blades, Justice proves twice as fast, cutting through one of her short swords and marking across her face with a wide white scar.
She notches back in surprise, and another emotion that she wouldn't dare admit to anyone. Seriously, him of all people?
"I'm going to stop you and your evil ways once and for all," Justice hisses through his helmet, glowing an authoritative blue from his myriad armor enchantments. Scout, giving a single spirited glance at her broken blade, take the other sword into her two hands.
"Try me then, y-ya' cheesy bitch!"
A wild clashing emits from the living room and kitchen.
Druid Minion turns to the other two. "We have to get Maniac Minion."
"He's in the attic, right?" confirms Fashion Minion.
"But what about Scout?!" Cardio asks with a yelp.
The other two look at her with slant, stressed gazes.
Cardio heads along with them for the attic. "I guess she's the only one for it…" she whines as they reach the stairs.
The three start up as Scout Minion's essentially forced to duel one of history's greatest knights.
With a twist and a cut from his weapon, he cuts through the couch like butter, leaning forward and casting a magic spell to smash her down to the size of a coin. She dodges over when she feels the change of mana in the air, manipulated by such a powerful wizard.
"How could you do this?! We had an understanding," he says with an unbothered tone as he slices forward.
"We didn't do anything, turd. This is our lake.
"Too far away from your tower. We don't consider this your territory. And if you wanted to keep all of your rotten sloven activities to yourselves, you will do it at the towers."
She scoffs, "S'mores are delicious, asshole. There's nothing wrong with s'mores!" she reiterates, going another lightning-fast bout of strikes as she tries to create an opening.
Now it is reasonable to understand that Justice is not the kind of fellow to be trifled with. After all, he's killed armies single-handedly, but so has Scout Minion, as Chaos's top ass-kicker on regular ass-kicking duty, and arguably one of the very, very strongest. She's the kind of minion that's called for when it comes to beating upstart Knights around their home, but Justice is no upstart.
She clings to the wall to avoid another lightning-strike slash and slides across to dodge a blink-fast follow up from Justice's blade.
All she needs is the right moment… and then suddenly, between the beats of a butterfly's wing she sees her spot. She strikes down, looking for the gap in Justice's armor: very slight due to its magically sealed nature, but with enough force, she can depressurize the armor and strike it down into his collarbone in a single hit.
"We decide where we go!" she shouts at the top of her ether-charged lungs as she buries her blade into his shoulder. Real red human blood spits out along the blade as she twists it just in time for him to reach around and catch her.
A hit like that would kill a normal person, but she underestimated him, as incredible as that sounds.
Grasping at her left antenna, he swings her around down to the ground and pins her under his knee before he sends his elbow into her skull. The rock-solid armor is painful as it cuts down deep into her body, and like a pulse of light, she no longer can understand what's happening. Everything speeds up, but it becomes a blur, and she can't respond to the attacks anymore
Another hit, and then another, and then a fierce white-hot gauntlet straight into her face. She feels her blood and nerves splatter out as her consciousness fades. She has enough sense to say one last thing: concentrating her remaining energies, she breathes it out.
"P-pussy."
She can hardly get the word out before everything goes black…