Josephine tried not to look at her left hand after Ulaz cut it off and the Druids attached a cybernetic hand to her arm instead.

The second they had left her alone in her cell, she tried everything to take the Galran technology off. Pulled at it with her other still human hand. Scratched and bit the area where metal melded into flesh.

She did not care for the pain. This, she was used to. And neither did she care if she died bleeding out. That, she wished for.

Anything to end the hell she went through in this place, Josephine abided as she violently banged the mechanical hand against the wall in hopes to destroy it.

Hearing the raucous coming from inside her cell, the guards opened the steel door and were quick to knock her unconscious with their weapons in an effort to stop her.

She was kept under constant vigilance in the interrogation room for the next two weeks, where the Druids dove into her mind and made her comply. Yet they kept her in chains for another five days, before sending her to the gladiatorial arena again.

This time it wasn't a brute, giant alien as her opponent, but a young and fearful one. The sandy-colored alien with eyes sticking up on his oval head like a pair of antennae reflected nothing but fear.

The sight of his long and round-edged ears shaking on either side of his head formed a lump of remorse in her throat.

She had never wanted to not hurt anyone so much than at this moment.

The hungry shouts for blood from the hundreds of Galrans taken seat to watch the match resounded within her chest.

A sharp pain grew inside her head and no matter how loud she screamed inside for them to stop, the Druids had done a splendid job in winning control.

With no other option, she forced the feeling down to the pit of her stomach as the gates opened.

The power of her cyborg hand activated with a hot and glowing purple light as she stepped forward. Nervously eyeing her piece of the high-tech weapon, the guard in charge of putting electric-shock cuffs on the gladiators worked fast in cuffing her after she chose her trustworthy blade.

It was the Galra that had put her against this inculpable being, she had to remind herself while weighing the light weapon in her right hand.

It was them who'd played with her mind and made her kill.

The young woman who stepped into the arena with a robotic hand and a dagger to end the lives of others was not Josephine Milos.

It was the Emperor's Victor who won victory after victory. But never her, the altruistic biochemist that fought for what was right in the world.

Each fight she won as the Victor, with every being- no matter what species - she killed, a piece of who she was died with them too.

Gradually, she realized it was going to be impossible for her to survive if she continued carrying her soft and human heart.

The Galra loved laughing at the human species for being such frail creatures, so easy to bruise and break. And though it cost Josephine to admit it, what they said about her was true.

But with time she learned to change.

By the end of her six months of imprisonment, she had both figuratively and literally turned to steel.

Josephine's heart that had once been wondrous and light, now weighed heavy inside an iron-forged rib cage. In order to survive under the Galra Empire's hold she tried to become what they asked of her, welcoming the crowd's clamor as they hungrily waited for her to give them a show each time she stepped into the gladiator's arena.

---

Myzax, the undefeated Galra Gladiator, stood around three feet taller than Josephine, making him the biggest alien she had yet to face. The well-worn armor and the staff in his left hand, carrying an orb of quintessence on its upper end, were enough to let anyone know that he was one of those rare and privileged gladiators.

The monsters she had braved before were nothing compared to Myzax.

With five operations done to her left hand and most of her right arm now, it was obvious this match was the last in testing Zarkon's weaponized soldier.

Josephine's stance faltered at the fearsome realization, which made her earless opponent smirk knowingly as they waited for the starting bell to ring.

If she won this fight, she would be ready to serve Zarkon in his army. She would be sent to massacre families and take over planets.

In trying to keep herself alive she had ignored the bigger picture, letting the Galra turn her into one of their monsters, and even allowed herself to kill for their entertainment.

It made her sick, to realize she had lost the only thing her mother told her to always hold on to: hope. To realize that she had dishonored the promise to her father to look after those who needed protection.

The bell's ringing in her ears disoriented her, and she tried not to vomit as she was hit with flashbacks of all the beings she had killed.

The ghost feeling of her first victim's translucent yellow blood covering her hands blinded her from Myzax's incoming attack. The vibrant purple light of the quintessence, flying towards her, brought her back just in time to jump out of the way.

The volt of dark energy crumbled part of the arena's wall as she rolled her body to safety behind a metal pillar. She barely had time to think before the orb hit one side of the pillar, outing her as the deadly ball of glowing energy boomeranged at her face.

Collective gasps and angry shouts escaped the audience above them when she ducked out of the orb's way and made a run towards Myzax.

The alien's eagerness to end her was becoming a problem, so she got down on her knees at the last minute and activated the blade in her cybernetic left hand to slash his leg as she slid past.

The giant alien bent down in pain, putting one of his clawed hands over the unprotected part below his knee to stop the bleeding.

While Myrax took a few seconds to stand and let his guard down, the crowd chanted wildly for the Victor to finish him. But that wasn't Josephine's intention, as she only wanted a few moments to think and the alien flinging his weapon around had made that impossible, until now.

Slowly standing up, pretending to be seriously exhausted, she took deep breaths and let them out.

Everyone knew there were only two ways of getting out of the Ring: either you killed your opponent, or your opponent killed you. None of those options were going to work for her, though.

Winning this fight meant winning a place in Zarkon's evil army, which she absolutely didn't want. But neither did she want to die, as a small fragment of her heart still hoped she would escape and go back home.

Sensing the alien shift behind her, Josephine decided that making a third option was the only way for her to win this time. Granted her third option would put her under more torture, but it would also give her the time to come up with a plan to finally escape.

God knew how long she had endured as their prisoner, and she wasn't going to take another minute of it.

Myzax finally stood straight again and surprised Josephine by not using his magical staff, lunging himself at her in an attempt to land a brutal punch instead.

As part of her plan she pretended not to see him in time and brought up her right arm to protect her face, his hit throwing her nearly all the way across the arena. Being slammed onto the wall she felt bones breaking and she spit out blood, taking in staggered breaths while looking up at the full stands, entirely taken up by the cheering Galrans.

In the smack-dab center of all spectators sat Emperor Zarkon, at least a handful of guards surrounding his royal seat as he was accompanied by Haggar. The sight of him made Josephine's blood run cold and her breath hitched in her throat.

"I am Josephine Milos," she murmured, trying to stop the fear from paralyzing her as Myzax came closer, "daughter of Tania and Bence Milos." She took her eyes away from Zarkon and moved to stand up. "And I will not-," a painful groan escaped her, definitely feeling a broken rib, "be placid."

Both her hands lit up with the violet energy of the Druids' magic, anticipating the hard impact of Myzax's orb as it was flung her way again. Putting her arms up against her face, she felt the quintessence burn through the metal of her mechanical body parts as the force sent her unconsciously flying across the arena one last time.

Josephine might have been expendable as a human but the Druids, more importantly Haggar, valued their creations too much to let them be destroyed. And as the Emperor's Victor, she was one of the witch's most prized experiments she would not give up on so easily.

At least Josephine hoped she didn't.

She really hoped she was worth even a smidge to the Galra as their potential "perfect weapon," otherwise letting Myzax destroy their technology would do nothing to save her.

---

By the time Josephine came to, she had been strapped down to the surgical table for a couple of months, having suffered from a short-term coma after the damage Myzax's staff had done to her.

It had been a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant she wasn't sure, but it had stunned her to know that they kept her useless body alive for that long.

It had been a couple of days since she woke. Like usual they had been hell but at least awake she was able to fight, unlike the months she had spent in total surrender to the Druids' experimentations.

Little by little everything they had done to her in the past year or so had been coming back in the form of nightmares and, in extreme cases, night terrors. For the past week her surgeon and his guards had to come in the middle of the night and sedated her, but tonight Ulaz entered the medical bay alone.

Ever since he first met the human he'd been waiting for a chance to be alone with her, and now that he had earned the trust of his Commander everything was going according to plan. He only hoped Josephine would come to trust him in time, seeing as Haggar and her Druids had broken the human girl worse than the others.

Her shrill screams were heard a hallway away before he entered the room and encountered her thrashing violently on the medical bed. It wasn't another night terror, but the vital-sign monitors she was plugged to spiked as her heart raced uncontrollably.

Ulaz ran over to her and took all the plugs off her, silencing the room from the annoying beeping equipment. While removing a sensor from her chest, he accidentally pressed for the cuffs on her left arm to be released, and Josephine bolted upright on the bed to squeeze the Galran's neck.

"Let me go!" Still dazed from her nightmare, Josephine's eyes were blurry with tears as she growled, "Let me go!" She didn't know exactly what she was doing. She only knew that she was trembling with fear and that she would kill the Galran first if he tried to hurt her one more time.

"Calm down, I'm- I'm letting you g-go," the alien struggled for air, but he told the truth as the rest of her restraints were released with a press of a few buttons on his keypad. "Calm... calm."

"Why are you doing this?" Wide-eyed, she looked down at her freed and stared up at the surgeon with confusion. She finally loosened the grip on his throat, though still kept her only functioning hand around it.

Not moving from where he stood, Ulaz's yellow eyes softened a little as he lowered his voice, "I want to help you. Listen to me-,"

"Is this another one of your sick tricks?" Josephine pulled back her hand with disgust. "'Cause my mind is pretty much yours for the taking already." To think she thought they had put her through every kind of torture possible - Here he was, playing with her again.

"Please," the tall alien sighed, "just lay down. I am not here to hurt you."

"Not yet," she spat back, but without much strength in her body to retaliate she obliged to rest her head against the flat pillow of her bed.

Where any other Galra would've stroke her hard across the face, the surgeon simply ignored her spiteful comment and continued with the check-up.

"It appears the parts malfunctioned during your match with Myzax. The hits you took from his orb destroyed them entirely," he said, connecting her back to the monitors.

The gentleness in him as he went about doing the routinely examination didn't go unnoticed by Josephine. Ulaz's drastic change in character, compared to the way he acted with company around, made her all the more nervous as he continued, "As you can see we were able to repair the left hand while Haggar's Druids are still working on the arm piece. I couldn't salvage any scrap from that one, but a new-and-improved one should be ready for you soon."

"Good to know, Doc. That's so gonna help me sleep well at night." She masked her dread with sarcasm, an easy way of defense as she waited for him to do something to cause her agonizing pain.

"For now," he took out a syringe filled with a clear substance and she sucked in a sharp breath, "let's just hope this will."

The needle pierced the side of her neck until the strange liquid entered her bloodstream, nothing else to do but wait.

Wait for the excruciating pain- She waited, but the unpleasant feeling never came as her vision blurred.

Slowly, Ulaz turned into a vague figure, the bright lights in the ceiling dimmed, and the steady beep of the heart-monitor lulled her to sleep as she finally let her heavy eyelids close.