Axis was panting harder than he had ever expected was possible. For the past five hours straight Monarkea had used him as a pint-sized punching bag, and she had not merely directed physical force his way, either.

Magic, dragon breath, pure willpower made manifest, and more were being used to knock him around, and he had not even been able to land a single blow of any kind on the massive target. He was sure that, at any moment, the army he had prepared ahead of time would storm through the entrances and carve the monsters up, but as each minute ticked by, the doubt that Monarkea had planted only grew larger.

“What’s the matter, little shard of the Wardens?” Monarkea laughed as she batted Axis into the air and used her tail to hit him into the rafters. “Where did all that spunk and bravado go? Still waiting for the army that will never come?”

Axis could barely keep himself from screaming in frustration as he fell and inevitably hit the ground again. He just needed to wait a little bit longer, and then, surely then his forces would arrive.

Even if they only were capable of distracting the dragoness, he could use that diversion to escape and call down a much more intense wrath upon this place. However, as deeply as he held onto the hope of that happening, the seed of doubt had already germinated and was beginning to take a more potent hold of his mind and will.

“They’ll be here any moment, bitch.” Axis panted. He may have been unkillable and nearly immune to pain, but he could still feel pain if something hit him hard enough, and as he had rarely felt any kind of pain up till this fight, he had been utterly unprepared for it.

“Ha!” the diamond-scaled dragoness laughed before delivering yet more mockery and degradation. “Your ‘army’ is nearly all dead by now. As I said before, an army of a few thousand level 30-somethings cannot hope to match a defending force whose lowest leveled members are in the high 20s.”

“That cannon fodder will fall like grain before a scythe.” Axis yelled as he forced his body to stand. “And then they’ll be here, and they’ll help me win.”

“Bitch, please.” spat the current ruler of the Dragon’s domain. “When I said the ‘lowest leveled’ ones were in the high 20s, I meant that the vast majority were and are far above that.”

“Don’t try and deceive me, lizard bitch.” growled Axis. This slur was met with a deluge of dragonfire and a pummeling from Monarkea which lasted for a good few minutes before the dragoness decided to sow more doubt into the mind of her foe.

“The vast majority of the rank and file are over level 60, by the way.”

“You LIE!” Axis screamed before being knocked into the stands again and ganged up on for another few minutes by the angry crowd. After a few solid minutes of being hit by mob violence, Axis was unceremoniously tossed back into the arena, where he lay for a while trying to process everything.

As Axis tried to let his mind catch up with the sensations his body was sending him, Monarkea simply smirked at the hapless and helpless moron. Axis had been born to be an idiot and a tool, and she had arranged for that decades prior to his parents even being a twinkle in their own great grandparents’ eyes, and the will that was both parasitically and symbiotically attached to Axis had inadvertently caught the same idiot disease that Axis had been born with.

And, with idiocy usually comes hopeless naivete and gullibility, something that the will controlling Axis’ empty vessel was displaying in spades. He still hung on to the nonexistent hope that the army he had summoned from across the Domain’s history and countless iterations would be enough to save him, but Monarkea never allowed the Races that she had allowed to occupy her realm to get strong enough to even be the slightest threat.

The Heroes and Villains, the Non-Aligned and the more powerful civilians, their mounts, their weapons, their armor, all of it was just powerful enough to go to the heads of the ones who were selected by her own hand to be a piece on the game board, and no self-respecting sadistic manipulator of such a grand and cruel game would ever create a piece or group of pieces strong enough to challenge themselves.

And the will controlling Axis had become just as weak, and just and pathetic. Axis had been engineered for this purpose, to act as a form of entertainment as well as a kind of prison to trap and, hopefully, destroy agents of the Wardens, and this pawn had proved that it could serve that purpose wonderfully. It was just so funny that the shard of the Wardens that was controlling Axis had no idea of this plot ahead of time, despite it literally being written into Axis’ very existence from day one.

“Well, if you want to see where your army is, I can oblige you.”

Axis looked up. Surely the dumb lizard bitch wouldn’t just leave herself open to an attack like that, right? Surely this was just another attempt to sow doubt in his mind, right?

“Oh, don’t get me wrong,” purred the massive winged reptile. “you won’t be able to run. But, if you want to see your forces right now… I could do that for you, as you’ve already served your purpose.”

Axis tried to think of a reason why the dragoness had seemingly turned her position so abruptly and so completely in such a seemingly short period of time. It was only after a few seconds of pondering this question that he came to his own, entirely incorrect, conclusions.

“So, you’ve given up and wish for death?”

Monarkea laughed and looked down at Axis with a look of condescension and scorn. How dare he believe such a thing? Well, she would teach him a lesson that she had taught to all who had been her final toy at the end of each cycle.

“Oh, you poor, stupid boy.” She said with a tone more like that of an elderly person than anything else before immediately shifting to a far more serious one. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you that hope is the first step on the road to despair?”