While the rest of the day from that point on went about as smoothly as you would expect, Vaile was, in the end, just glad that the rat women didn’t end up making him ‘disappear’. Thankfully, the five crazy rat ladies didn’t get the chance to try and lay their claim on Vaile’s body, nor did they get the chance to snatch him up.

Part of this was due to the many other eyes that were on them at every single moment, but part of it was also due to the fact that the five ended up needing to leave before they were ready. As it turned out, having a civilization whose existence could only truly sustain itself off of endless cruelty and malice, directed at everything including itself, was a recipe for chaos and potentially civil war.

The five rat people ultimately needed to return home, as their ‘vacation’ over the past week or two had resulted in their entire nation undergoing a near-total collapse as the ones who held it in an iron grip were away and unable to trust anyone to carry out their will in their absence. Simply by being away for a few days, they had nearly caused the entire race they ruled over to rip itself apart at the seams, which would have been exploited by any number of other forces.

As such, Vaile and the dense bastard named Axis were able to continue on their way, but Vaile knew damn well that if the five crazy rat women were in on this ‘game’ that Monarkea had cooked up, it was a near-absolute certainty that other Tamed Beings would be as well. He could only imagine what entities would show up on this road next, and he would not have to wait long to find out.

He should have gotten the first hint of who was up ahead in the forest when he ran headlong through a number of strands of spider silk, but he had assumed that these were from the normal spiders that were of normal, non-giant size. Oh, how wrong he was, as he felt a shiver in his spine as the gaze of what felt like thousands of eyes hit him from every direction at once.

…

“Step into Our parlor…” hummed a highly compacted Arachnaerok as she hung by a single thread above a person passing beneath her. With a single step, the being beneath her form was yanked by one foot up into the canopy, where she then began to run her razor-sharp claw-like fingers across the face of her new ‘guest’.

Vaile soon joined her and her prey, and he began to insist that she let the dumb Human go. She honestly couldn’t care less about that one little brat that she had tied up in her webs, but it gave her a poor feeling to experience her inevitable mate vouching for a member of the Races that was so emphatically opposed to those like her.

“What purpose does this ‘game’ serve?” She complained as she held the tied-up upside-down youngling by his hair and shook him a bit. “It is a waste of time and resources, not to mention attention. If these lesser creatures will not willingly serve, then they should exist as nothing but food or labor. Why do you care for this one?”

Her inevitable mate did not seem able to come up with an answer that he felt was satisfactory for himself, but despite that, he attempted to articulate his reasoning regardless. He spoke of this being a way to pass the time, and that despite the annoyance the Human forced him to endure, he did find pleasure in toying with it.

She was actually quite surprised by that. She had known that he had only a small bit of positive feelings for those of the Races that were not positively connected to those loyal to him, but that he found joy from making this fool dance about was still rather shocking.

It was not a bad shock, but a welcome one, and was only further proof that she had made the correct choice when thinking about his role with her and her domain in the future. It would be a pain and a half to change her size over and over, but she was sure that her inevitable mate would be much more comfortable helping her make more children when she was more compact than when she assumed her true form and size.

But all of that was beside the point. What mattered right now was that she was trying to remove this tumor from her inevitable mate’s life. The giant flying lizard could just as easily set the groundwork for another one and then entertain herself with that, couldn’t she? Why waste her inevitable mate’s time and energy like this when he could be doing other, more productive things, such as giving her a few hundred thousand more children?

And yet, her inevitable mate insisted that he and the insignificant creature that she was being forced to waste her time with be allowed to move on. All this did was make her even more adamant about the death of that worm and that her inevitable mate come with her.

She would likely have gotten through to him eventually, had it not been for the damn whimsical whore who called those equally whimsical others her subjects… The Red Queen, the Vaile-damned nest-wrecker that was Queen Fay swooped in before she could do much more to try and convince her inevitable mate to be with her, and she was left cursing the whore to no end when Vaile and that youngling were seemingly popped out of existence and replaced by a pair of very confused livestock.

However, she knew one thing for certain. The Red Queen, though capricious, cruel, and whimsical, would never let a ‘game’ like this end until she was satisfied with it. Or bored. Either or.

Her inevitable mate was almost certainly simply a bit away, dropped back on the path he had been on with that dumb shit at his side. But if Fay had gotten involved, then it would not be a good idea for her to go after them for now.

And while she was still fuming about the loss that she had just suffered, along with the slight itself, she did have a pair of cattle that she could vent her frustrations upon. Sure, they could whine, beg, plead, and scream, but that just made the enjoyment she would get out of torturing them that much more satisfactory.

Already they were crying out to their non-existent deities to save them, and even now their non-existent deities remained silent and watched on, either out of apathy or malice. After all, they claimed their gods were not just all-good, but also all-seeing and all-powerful, so if they were doing nothing…

Well, what kind of all-good being stands idly by while their followers suffer, and what kind of all-powerful being does the same unless they are apathetic or malicious? Or maybe they just were not ‘all-seeing’, as that would explain their seeming inability to notice what was happening?

Or maybe it was just that they didn’t exist in the first place? Well, she would find out, one way or another, and in the event that they did exist, she would, along with the others in the Alliance, inevitably tear them from their thrones and feast upon them.

And their followers? Well, if she had heard the philosophers and theologians speak true, then a god can only truly die when nobody worships them, and she, at least, would make sure that she had god-flesh to eat for quite a while.

But that would need to wait until later, as while her inevitable mate and that parasitic entity were out of her grasp, she would see them later, though not in person. If there was one thing that she was looking forward to occurring in the next few days, it was the show that only one person didn’t know was going to happen.

The flying lizard would throw that interloper around like a rag doll, and she could take enjoyment in the secondhand torment of that being, at least.