Diana grabbed Kenneth by the shoulders and brought him in front of her so that he was face-to-face with Lucy. Fresh tears still ran down his cheeks, but he was pouting with his brows furrowed, and his inhalations were less desperate intakes of air but rather the steaming expression of building anger.

  “How do you feel about the way you’ve been treated all this time, Kenneth?” Diana spoke more softly and tenderly than usual, but with a forceful edge that was meant to spur one on and ignite a candid response.

  “I’m sick of it!” Kenneth, despite his voice cracking, shouted this loudly. “I can’t ever rest! I can’t ever stop thinking about…about…” His head dropped, but then he shook his head and added: “It just won’t stop!”

  Diana smiled, her face beaming with satisfaction. “And do you like being told that it has to be this way?”

  “No!” came Kenneth’s immediate response, the sludge around him splashing from how his body lurched forward with the force of his proclamation. “I hate it! I hate it!”

  “See?” Diana said to Lucy with confident assurance in her face and voice. “He’s finally starting to be honest with himself about how much he hates the stuff she tells him. Now, all he has to do—”

  “What tomfoolery!” The queen interrupted with her with a loud blasting voice of indignation that stirred the pool of black sludge as if the winds of a gale had swept over it. She drew both Diana’s and Lucy’s gazes, and it was here Lucy noticed that the queen was floating in mid-air, away from the rising sludge, her robes and hair entirely spotless. She pointed her crooked index finger down at Kenneth. “Behold! The retribution due unto for him each time he struggles and rebels against divine judgement!”

  In hurried panic, Lucy whirled around to find Kenneth also raised a few feet into the air—by tendrils of the black sludge that held him by his wrists and ankles.

  “I don’t want to hear it anymore! I don’t want to hear it anymore!”

  With the same frustrated demeanour from earlier, he writhed and thrashed against the tendrils holding him captive. But each time he tried to break free, some of the sludge poured out and coated more and more of his body, so that his figure was increasing becoming one of cloying, unsightly darkness.

  At the sight of his futile struggle, the queen began laughing from her perch on high. Her voice came as a diabolical chortle, the kind one might expect from a cartoon character’s arch-nemesis, but the pathetic nature of her laugh was overshadowed by how it made the sludge quiver and quake as if it were a living, breathing beast laughing alongside her at the boy trapped in his own inescapable dilemma.

  “You sack of shit!” Diana shouted up at her with the full force of her thunderous voice. Lucy couldn’t blame her; it was clear that all pretense of a peaceful resolution had been shattered. Diana raised her spear, drew it back, then tossed it with blistering speed.

  Her aim was perfect, for it struck right between the queen’s eyes. The hideous laughter stopped, and though the queen remained floating in mid-air, she went still with a blank expression.

  “Oh? What’s this?”

  Her lips curled into a sneer and she began reaching up toward the spear lodged in her skull as if it were a mere scrap of paper stuck in her hair.

  “Shit!” Diana reached her hand out with a grimace toward the queen. A flash of blue energy erupted from her palm, and in an instant the spear flew back into her hand. From how she was cursing under her breath, Lucy guessed she had just used up a Feat.

  Lucy and Diana met eyes, and it was clear they were both thinking the same thing: the queen was going to stay invulnerable until they did something about Kenneth.

  They both turned to him again, but Diana was quicker to speak: “Listen, kid! If you let this poison trap you and overpower you—the poison from her words—all that pain you talked about is never going to stop. Is that what you want? Are you just going to take that from her?”

  “No! No! I don’t wanna!”

  Kenneth grit his teeth so hard they might shatter, and his angered eyes were filled with tears. As if Diana’s words were fuel to an engine, he began struggling against the tendrils even more violently. But their grip only tightened further, inflicting sore red marks on his wrists, and the darkness swept over his body at a more rapid pace.

  Before Lucy knew it, she had shoved Diana away. “I told you stop already!”

  Diana had stumbled backward, her expression positively seething, but Lucy spoke to Kenneth before she could get another word in.

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  “Kenneth,” she said, stepping right up to Kenneth’s side, forcing herself to ignore the tendrils and sludge. “I know you think you have to listen to everything your aunt says about punishment, because you believe there’s something wrong with you. But that’s not true. We saw what really happened, together with Mister Ricardo.”

  Lucy bit her lip at his name, but she dredged up the wherewithal to continue: “None of it was your fault. That’s a fact. And if you know that, then there’s no reason for you to believe in being punished.”

  Kenneth was still lightly struggling, but he hung his head while groaning in distress.

  Lucy put her hand on his shoulder and, with the kindest but firmest voice she could muster, said to the Dreamer: “Let yourself go from this crime you never committed. You’re free, Kenneth. You always have been. You just need to accept it yourself.”

  “I’m…free…”

  Kenneth still hung his head, but he stopped struggling. The tendrils, which had been held taut by counteracting his desperate movements, now went limp and soon fell away, letting the boy go so that he dropped back down to the floor on his feet without a sound. Kenneth looked at himself, at the darkness that had encroached over much of himself, but only a moment later that darkness began to recede.

  Lucy breathed a huge sigh of relief. Looking to Diana with a smile, she said: “See? He just needed to understand himself better.”

  Diana stared at her wordlessly, then shook her head. “Before you gloat, look behind you.”

  Lucy went stock still at Diana’s unexpected response, then used every bit of her willpower to do as she said and turn around. The queen was still floating in mid-air, and her size hadn’t decreased one bit. Nor had the pooling sludge throughout the room receded at all—in fact, the level kept rising and was now up to Lucy’s knees.

  “An applause for your valiant efforts,” the queen proclaimed with haughty sarcasm. “But even if you outwit external judgement, there’s no saving one tainted at their very soul!”

  As if on cue, Kenneth let out a yelp of pain, and Lucy whirled around to find him doubled over, frantically grasping at his lowered head as if he were experiencing an excruciating migraine. The darkness from before appeared again, but instead of washing over his body like a coat of paint, here it revealed itself as lines running through every part of his body internally, centred at his heart.

  “Tch.” Diana had walked up to Lucy before the latter had even realized it, and returned the favour from earlier by shoving Lucy away with an effortless push to her shoulder. “You see what I mean now? She’s got her poison running through his blood. It’s part of him now. You trying to get him to understand poison only gives him back poison.”

  Lucy stumbled as she found her footing. Her head was spinning from being caught between the futility of the situation and her frustration at having no way to refute Diana’s explanation. The words Lucy had said to Kenneth were all true, and for that brief moment it looked like her way of handling the situation had worked. So then why did it turn out this way, shattering Lucy’s efforts in a way that embarrassed her to her core while leaving Kenneth in an even worse state? Lucy had never felt so helpless before, and the feeling made her want to cry out in sheer frustration, circumstances be damned.

  But when Diana locked eyes with her, she found it within herself to retort: “Oh yeah? So then what are you going to about it?”

  “Like I keep telling you,” Diana said with slow, vehement belligerence, “you need to kill it at the source.”

  Immediately, she took hold of Kenneth by the shoulders and raised his chin to force him to look up at the queen. “Tell her, Kenneth. Tell her how you really feel about her after everything she did to you.”

  “I…” Kenneth choked his voice back, biting his lip so hard that blood ran down his chin.

  “Go on,” Diana urged. “Stop lying to yourself and be honest. If you want to stop all the pain, don’t hold back!”

  “I…”

  His voice was clearer, but it quickly faded as he dropped his head down again. But then, without warning, he looked back up with his eyes smouldering in fiery intensity, and shouted:

  “I HATE YOU!”

  “What—?”

  The queen’s look of utter disbelief was cut short by the hard thud of her dropping to the floor. She landed on her behind, but the force of impact made her double backward so she was lying on her back. A rattling sound pierced the air as the crown fell from her head and rolled across the ground,. Like a mouse desperately scampering after a block of cheese, she chased it down and hurriedly affixed it to her head.

  “How—how dare you say that, you miserable whelp?” Her words were accompanied by a plume of fire erupting from her mouth, her skin rapidly turning red with infernal wrath.

  Despite this, Kenneth kept shouting: “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you! You’re horrible, you hurt me, and you need to stop!”

  “Gahhh!” The queen looked at her arms and torso as there came the sound of a balloon slowly deflating. As all of them could plainly see, she was shrinking.

  Grasping at her ostentatious robes to hold them up, she snarled and broke into a dash toward Kenneth. “You’re going to live to regret the day you were born!”

  She tore through through the sludge, kicking up huge swathes of it while she barrelled forward with inhuman force like a demon chasing after one who dared step into its circle.

  “Diana!” Lucy clumsily unsheathed her sword, cursing the memory of Diana saying that her earlier sheathing was a liability, and fumbled her way into what she hoped was a proper defensive stance. “We can’t let her get—”

  “Geeze, calm down.” Diana didn’t even look at her. Leaning forward toward Kenneth’s ear, Diana said: “And what do you wish for your aunt, Kenneth?”

  “I wish…” Kenneth’s entire body trembled like a kettle ready to explode from an unreal buildup of heat. He looked at the feral woman madly dashing toward him, staring fearlessly into her cruel eyes, and shouted something that made Lucy’s blood turn to ice from sheer shock.

  “I WISH YOU WOULD JUST DIE, AUNTIE!”

  The queen had caught up to Kenneth now, reaching for his throat with hands bearing long black nails that looked every bit like talons.

  But the moment Kenneth shouted, she froze with a look of absolute terror.

  Lucy barely had time to take another shaky breath before there was the sound of skin ripping and fluids gushing, one after the other in almost instantaneous fashion. She whited out for a moment as if lighting had struck her very soul, and when it passed she saw Diana’s spear run through between the queen’s eyes again.

  And this time, the queen couldn’t reach up to pull it out.