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The whole time, he’s just out there in the wild, busying himself with side quests.

“Get outta here, Ferny.” Every uses his nickname, coming up to stand in front of Lily, who stands on the ground near the regent and her seven guards. He keeps a possessive arm around her like the jealous, overprotective, territorial mama hen he is.

The villain then voices the corniest I’m-a-bad-guy-and-I’m-threatening-you line he could think of. “I’m gonna skin you alive, Every-boy.”

“Fight me then; I am the plot armor. No way I would die.” Every’s eyes darkened.

How did he do that again?

Oh, well, probably the clouds shifting.

“But I could still try,” Fernando, whom we decide is a cruel, heartless villain who mutates mice, bluffs. “And even if you don’t die, I could still send you back to your daddy in an Amazon Prime delivery cardboard box. How would he feel when he opens it, thinking it to be a new silicone blowup doll, and instead finds his half-dead child inside?”

Welp, that’s disgusting.

Tears sting Every’s eyes as he imagines how hurt his papa would be by his death. No, that can’t happen.

As her sweet boy sulks, ever the manly but sad bad boy, silenced at last by his archenemy, Lily the Fairy Queen decides to grow a spine out of the tense atmosphere and protect him. “What the fuck is your backstory, Fernando? Why are you doing this to us all?”

“Nothing. I was simply written to be a villain, in the same way that your boyfriend was written to be a very vanilla person. And there is nothing wrong with that, my dear fairy queen. Or should I call you my dear prisoner, since that will be your status in a few seconds, if my plan doesn’t go awry. “

Bonus villain brownie points to him because he is oh-so-cringe.

“The fuck is wrong with you?” she repeats. “Your mama threw you out at birth because she couldn’t stand your ugly face? And now you’re coping with your trauma by fucking with others?”

“I don’t have a mama, but thanks.” This ketchup-flavored popcorn man sure has guts.

Lily sighs. “You’re crazier than the bitches who bullied me back in middle school.”

The taller man—not as tall as Every, though, no one is—cocks his head to the side. It is an unimportant body-language thing that we just include for no reason. “Again, thanks for the compliment. So can we move on to our fight now?”

Honestly, this villain would make a good love interest in his own book.

“Yep.” Every swings at him with a fist, finally getting a hold of his emotions. His knuckles swerve over the mouse king’s head, who bends backward dramatically just in time to miss it. Kinda like Neo in The Matrix, but in jeans and a tie-dyed Henley instead of a priest’s robe.

But not.

His thousand generals, the hybrid humans in realistic mouse heads, charge.

One of them runs straight to Lily, who stands a few feet behind her man. She curls down into a tight ball instinctively—a move she learned from hedgehogs on Discovery Channel back before her home’s electricity bill piled up too high to watch anything—to evade the mouse goon in tactical gear from tackling her down like he was about to do. So he simply moves on to his next victim. That is, some unlucky bird-like guy in the vanguard he busies himself wrestling with.

Why he and the others don’t use their guns, we do not know.

Either because those are in fact faux ones they got from a toy store, or they are simply too violent for a lighthearted romance-comedy setting like this.

The sugar plum fairy, Glycogen, and the other nutcrackers all fight the generals in the background, but whatever. Don’t worry about them—these might only be minor characters, but they’re too important to not survive this shit.

Both armies collide, now, with everyone going at each other in a platonic, wartime fighting kind of way. Aliens in the front rows screech as they throw a whole collection of hit-or-miss stones at different mouse people they see.

They do score some hits, but the attempts are mostly misses.

These folks should really practice their basketball skills. They’re kinda lacking.

At the back, the real mice, not just the mice-people, have recovered from the onset of Every rolling over them like a bulldozer flattening a tarmac road. With them being the unfortunate tarmac road. The scientists and lumberjacks shake them off, unable to do anything more to the tiny, whizzing pests in bowties.

Seems like no one remembered to call pest control.

“Fuck your ass with this.” The mouse king swings his gun—now decidedly a plastic toy—at Every, who hits it with his bare palm and chops the weapon in half.