“You crazy bitch!” Axis screamed as the blast engulfed him. He spoke his next words despite the pain he was experiencing, while also believing that his words would not be heard over the roar of the breath attack. “You’ll kill off your own kind! Blow a hole in the mountain and bring it crashing down! Are you mad?!”

After a thunderous half-minute of solid assault, the storm of energy abated and Axis crumpled the ground in pain. He lifted his head and looked behind him, expecting to see a massive hole gouged out where the attack from Monarkea had gone, and yet not only was the rock and other material still intact, but the people, or rather, monsters in the stands were not merely alive but also none the worse for wear.

“H-how?!” he muttered before a swipe from Monarkea’s claws sent his body rolling across the ground and head-first into the lava. He pulled his head out of the molten rock quickly, but the heat had caused him great pain while also setting some of his clothing on fire.

He desperately flailed around as more of his rags caught fire, burning with an intensity that normal clothing could never hope to match under equally normal circumstances. Monarkea and the high-level Tamed Beings that were there by projection laughed at him as he ripped pieces of his outfit off and flung them away, ultimately resulting in him being as naked as the day his body was born.

“My, my!” mocked the dragoness. “Maybe you should have invested in multiple changes of clothes, or maybe just ones that were not oily tinderboxes ready to burst!” A light laugh followed that line before Monarkea delivered another jab at the hapless idiot and the equally hapless idiot inside him. “But that would have jeopardized your ‘masterful plan’ that ‘no mere monster would ever be able to see through’, wouldn’t it?”

Monarkea sauntered up to Axis who was still patting his body down, trying to brush off the last bits of super-heated rock. By the time he realized she was near, she had already pinned him to the ground with a single claw, pressing hard with its tip against his gut.

“And yet, not merely did we all see through it, so too did the, and I quote, ‘moronic tool that refused to do as it was supposed to’.” She pressed harder, and if Axis was not invincible and made of any natural material, he would already have had Monarkea’s full talon buried through his body up to her palm.

“Did you honestly think that I wouldn’t plan for that?” She hissed. “That I didn’t create that little vessel specifically for this kind of fun?”

Axis could not even get enough air into his lungs to mete out a gasp in response. He may have been invincible, but the body he had was still subject to the limits of a fleshy one, and that meant that he needed to move his innards in a certain way to get air into his lungs.

And he had a massive claw pushing down on his soft stomach with enough force to make diamonds, so how the hell would he have been able to move his diaphragm in order to pull his lungs open? Hell, his lungs were also being pressed, with his rib cage literally being forced downwards to squeeze everything inside their ‘protection’ to the point that, were he not invincible, he would have long since had mere paste inside of his body instead of simply deformed organs.

“And, as if you were so smart, you used your connection to them to mock our Lord n front of his own face!” Monarkea pulled back her talon and began to ram punch after punch into Axis, whose position only sunk deeper and deeper as the arena cracked and shattered, with each punch making a deeper and deeper hole as the diamond-scaled dragoness let her anger flow freely.

“I can’t kill you,” growled the hill-sized reptile. “but I can make you wish for death, but be perpetually unable to achieve it!” She gripped the edges of the hole her fists had made and poured a massive blast of pure dragonfire into it. The fire filled the hole nearly in an instant and then flooded out from there, melting the arena and slowly turning the battleground into a molten wasteland, much to the delight of all watching the show.

“And when you beg for death, when you plead with me to give you a final, merciful end…”

Monarkea shoved her hand deep into the mass of molten stone that had filled the hole she had made, formed a fist around Axis, and began to squeeze.

“I’ll remind you who it was who gave you this fate, and who it is who can free you from it.”

Pulling her fist from the hole, Monarkea swung it around and released her grip, sending Axis flying into the stands, where he was quickly ganged up on by the eager crowd for a while before being unceremoniously dumped into the ring of turbulent lava that flowed endlessly around the edge of the nearly destroyed arena floor.

The teen was tumbled around as the heat from the lava and the chill from his much colder body repelled each other violently until the escaping gasses no longer kept him above the molten rock and he began to sink, only reaching the point where he was about halfway submerged before being yeeted out by an extremely pissed mass of sapient magma.

“And stay out of me!” the humanoid mass of lava grumbled before resuming its endless trip around the arena as a ten-meter deep, five-meter wide circular border between the arena proper and the wall around it.

“See, you dense bastard?” asked the draconic sadist. “Even the elements themselves want you fuckers to just give in and let us do what we want.”

…

Axis coughed and heaved as chunks of molten rock caused his lungs and throat and other orifices to scream in pain and general discomfort. His eyes burned with pain, and his body was screaming at him to simply go to sleep and take a break, but he had one last jab to deliver before he gave out and the viruses had their way with him.

“I have… an army…”

He tried to laugh, as he knew that the army he had risked his essence to prepare ahead of time, which should have spawned into being by now, was more than enough to wipe out the rabble of this place.

“I know.” Monarkea purred as she looked down on him. “And so do we. But while you put your trust in an army of Level 30 to 40 chumps…” She looked away and then sent Axis a cruel and mirthful glance out of the corner of her eye. “I and my father put our trust in an army of draconids whose levels are, at their lowest, in their 20s.”

Axis, though, could not hear her. Had he been able to, though, he would likely have given a single obvious response.

That response being, and I quote, “Fuck.”