Somewhere else, in a time that waits within her ambitions, Scout Minion's having a totally kickass time.
"You'll never defeat me," Overlord Superkill says as it looms over the mountainside, its grand dragon skull wreathed in evil flame. "I devour galaxies, breathe worlds, and—"
Scout Minion interrupts it with a quick scoff, twisting the blades around in her hands the way a pro basketball player might spin a ball if she had two of them… or whatever.
"Arrogant welp. I'm immortal. You couldn't dream to surpass the power of your master, as weak and foolhardy as he i-"
"Right on. We'll see about that 'immortal,' part," she says, glancing back behind to dozens of mountainous corpses as High Overlord Chaos battles in the distance, downing silhouettes the size of countries and nations and planets. She does her own part, drawing her blades against this dragon pretender.
"Die!" Superkill shouts, spewing black flame with a white-hot core across the entire country or something – dream logic messes around with the distance a good deal.
Scout Minion spins, flips, dashes, slides, and dodges her way across the mass of fireballs, laser beams, rockets, missiles, bullets, ballista munitions, crossbow bolts, and more as she enters his striking space. With a single godly cut, she obliterates the neck of Superkill in one strike, splattering his cosmic blood across the universe like the eruption of a star.
Sick guitar music plays a radical riff as the battle chorus says something in Latin.
She falls to the ground and sets her blades back into their sheaths, and no, she doesn't look behind herself to see Superkill's corpse crash into the wasteland valley behind her.
With a sigh, she smiles. "Nice one, f****t," is all she says causing the body of Superkill to explode in a violent detonation that sends tidal waves of its blood across the world.
Please understand, dear reader, Scout Minion's internal world is almost as crude as the kinds of things that come out of her mouth – she simply cannot help being a product of her upbringing.
Her scarf, blown back from the immensity of the blast, billows in the wind before she grasps it to brush it off for dust.
"And that's number ninety-two," she says, drawing a quick scratch mark in the notebook tucked into her scarf. She turns and sees number ninety-three coming along, some enormous Cthulhu-looking octopus dumbass weightlifter guy with machine guns for eyes. Just as she prepares for the next battle, someone else taps her on the shoulder. The little minion skirts around with a sharp glance and sees a strange-looking man.
Immediately, she doesn't trust him.
"Ah, doing pretty good, eh?" he asks, smiling.
She gives a short nod. "Hell're you?"
"Oh, an interestedbenefactor," he responds, "a big fan," he says again before he unrolls the document in his hands and hands a pen to her.
Her expression curls up crassly. "Huh?"
"How's this? I'm sure you'd like to continue serving your beloved overlord as best as you can."
She squints and mouths out the words and the terms.
"Matter to him… forever," she recites.
There's no need to contextualize for her as to who "he" is. It's High Overlord Chaos, the one person whose approval she simply cannot do without.
"Well, of course, only for those most deserving… I'm sure you understand," the weird man says.
She nods and looks over the terms of the contract in this language that seems to her vaguely demonic. She knows she's seen it before. She's seen quite a few languages when campaigning with Overlord Chaos, and this one looks like some kind of Abyss Script. She doesn't care enough to actually learn Abyss Script, yet she can by some magic understand all of these scary-looking squiggles on the contract. The words seem to reach out to her, and she sees the terms of the contract for what she's giving up.
She smiles.
"Nah, dude," she says, attempting to rip the contract in two, failing, and then tossing it aside. "That ain't me. You can go do your… I don't know, Faustian bullshit somewhere else."
The tall, slim man with a hat gets a big grin on his face and nods.
"Sounds good. I'll just leave it here if you want it."
"I won't," she reassures.
All at once, he disappears into the wind.
The sick guitar music begins again, but this time there's a heavy metal twinge to it, as if she is approaching something particularly rough. In fact, the Cthulhu guy from before, that tentacle-faced idiot, has totally disappeared. Something else is waiting for her. At first, she doesn't see anyone, until she looks up at the moon at night and sees the moon staring back: its pupil fiery with anger.
"Ah," she says. As the form of the cosmic destroyer slowly turns its head to behold her, its 80,000,000 eyes looking straight at her with untouchable malice. The sick guitars begin sounding more like a funeral dirge than boss fight music. Surely, once she hears the pipe organ come in on the track, she knows that this isn't going to be easy, perhaps not even possible.
"Die," is all it says before shooting a billion-billion–billion energy bolts at her. They aren't fast, but they sting like hell, and there's so many of them it's impossible to escape.
Like a bat out of the nether, she dodges, scrambles, dives, blocks, and seethes in pain as millions upon millions of bolts cut into her from all sides. After long minutes of concentrated struggle, she's already pushed to her end. Ninety-two Superkills, ninety-three, ninety-four, it doesn't matter.
She could have fought a million of them and still wouldn't be ready for this battle. It is truly a Sisyphean task to even land a single hit on this thing. despite its immense size looming over her like the night sky. It's a critical, wild battle where she uses every ounce of her skill, speed and wits, but increasingly it feels like she's a rat trapped in a cage: poked at with a long needle. She hasn't decided if the cage is real or not. That is something she's not ready to admit.
With a Grand Slam strike, the enemy buries her into the ground, pummling her into an aching, bloodied ether-spilled mess. It raises a massive longsword perfectly the size of her skull, a star-system back, to impale her with a realm-traveling strike.
"Die," it says again, throwing it down to destroy her. She dodges out of the way with everything she has and runs for the only one she knows who can help.
"Poppi, I'm comin'!" she squeaks, dashing as fast as she's ever dashed before. It takes a long time for her to get to him, and she takes a few injuries while running away that she thought would be fatal, and yet she keeps going. She doesn't give up. She just continues on running to her world-conquering surrogate father.
A swamp appears as if out of nowhere to slow her down, and then an obstacle course and a gauntlet of traps, and then a massive volcano that she has to swim through, but she doesn't stop. She just keeps going.
Walls box her in, but she smashes through them, and infinite distance shows up between her and her destination, but she just keeps running as if nothing at all could deny her from the love of her Master. With every ounce of faith she has from a wellspring of belief that borders on eternal, she finally, finally makes it to him, as if reality itself has surrendered to her will.
"Poppi, I need you to help me with this guy," she shouts, pointing over High Overlord Chaos, who has just murdered an entire rival galaxy that is not simply their nations and militaries, but the galaxy itself. He glances over to the thing that Scout Minion is worried about.
"Ah, this?" he says, picking it up by its collar and waving it around like it is a puppy. She doesn't know how the thing that is as big as the planet is now small enough for Chaos to just mingle around and treat like a little baby, but that doesn't bother her too much. She's seen him do crazier things.
"Y-yeah, that," she says.
Chaos tosses it into the air, swings his sword: The Kingdom Slayer over his shoulder, and delivers a broadside strike into the small thing, sending it out into the cosmos like a batter hitting a home run.
"Don't worry about any of that," he says.
She leaps into his arms and embraces him, and he spins her around before looking at her.
"Ah, darling, I'm so happy. Everything's good. So how are you doing?"
She laughs with relief. "Oh, I'm doing well, Poppi. Very nice."
He smiles. "Very nice. Goodbye then," he says, putting her down and turning away to go off somewhere.
"Well, what? But, but wait, wait. Poppi, wait," she says, catching up to him, if only barely. "It's not like before. We're, we're, you know, daughter and father, we're together. We're buddies. We're pals."
"Are you sure? I don't even know who you are," he says. "And besides, I'm just too busy to worry about things like that: The Versescall me to remind them of their frailties," he says, his jaws growing wide enough to encompass a human head.
Something deep in Scout Minion activates. She's able to beat through the trauma of the fight, but now it seems like the person she cares about most in her life has… reset. He's forgotten about her again, (again!) and she's going to have to do everything in her power to be remembered if it could even be called remembering. She doesn't even know how to start.
"I…" She winces. "I don't get it. I worked so hard for us to be together. I worked so hard to win your love."
"You cannot win love by working hard," he says, looking up to the stars. "You get love by being special."
Her eyes slant. "I mean… that does sound like something you'd say, Sir, but that just makes sense to you, Poppi, not to me."
Chaos does not look over. "And you're not very special, by the way," he adds.
She slants her eyes. "Th-thanks." She does her best to put on a crass tone, but it's obvious to both of them that he hollowed her out from that alone.
"Perhaps you should be more like, hmm, Communications Minion. She's always very helpful, and she's special, too."
Scout Minion waves her hands around her head in disbelief. She hops in irritation like a frightened cat. "You think that bitch could do this?!" she snaps, leaning back to show the High Overlord all the other overlords that she killed, you know, the ninetyplus overlords that she's just destroyed for him, that should be more than proof enough of her dedication, surely.
He scoffs.
She looks back where he is looking, and they are all gone. Chaos shrugs with his moonlit grin and shakes his head.
"Perhaps Cooking Minion could use some more ingredients. That might be a nice thing for you to do if you want to be more useful."
She hops furiously, like an angry little black rabbit. "You, you!! That's not how this works!" she shouts like a breeze. The wind of the dream blows and the contract, with its pen lighter than air, seems to move over to her with a power that seems almost intentional.
"The hell is…" she stops herself. She looks down to the contract. Yes, the terms are something that are undeniably attractive to her, and yet her sense gets the best of her. Clasping the contract in her hands she looks slowly over to her father, and she stops herself.
"And you… don't care about me?" she asks.
The dream Chaos shrugs. "You're only a minion, after all."
Her gaze slims, trembling over as if she's about to submit. She tightens her grip around the contract more and more.
A rumbling around her emits as she tries, once again, to destroy the contract – this time, not simply with her dream body, but with her spirit as a conscious effort.
"I… I won't cheat!" she says as the rumbling becomes louder. "There's nothing here worth a soul, and there's nothing worth getting without fighting for it!"
Just as she sees the dream Chaos' face contort into hatred, the paper gives way, and the contract, as well as the dream predicating its existence, shear in-twain.
The moment she feels the contract tear in her grasp, she pulls in a breath of air from the waking world.