Fighting Them There Ch. 42

### Fighting Them There ###

### Chapter Forty-Two ###

Susan had been tied up, her arms bound to her body and her limbs attached to a chair. It wasn't the first time she had been tied up, and she hoped that it wouldn't be the last. But it was the first time she'd been tied up by a real kidnapper, and that made the situation much scarier. She had played a kidnapping victim in four separate scenes, but none of that had prepared her for the real thing. Or perhaps it had, because it gave her a framework of how to think about how her situation differed from fantasy.

They had taken the gag off of her once they reached the basement she was currently stored in, which indicated to her that she was either in a sound-proofed room or in a building far enough away from anyone who might be inclined to rescue her that they believed that it was safe for them to do so. This would be the point in a scene where she would deliver the "You'll never get away with this," line, which would be delivered petulantly or bravely depending upon whether the other lead in the story was the kidnapper or a rescuer. A bratty reading of the line if the audience was supposed to relish her impending sexual torture, and a loyally defiant line if the audience was to look forward to her impending reunion sex with her hero. Here there was no audience, and no purpose was served in delivering the line at all. Indeed, there was a very real chance that they wanted her to say useless things in order to extract information out of her. Of course, two could play at that game.

"Why not just hire me for real?" she asked. The two men who had been left behind in the concrete-floored room both grunted. That indicated that they were probably guards who took their jobs at least a little seriously. Susan didn't think there was any chance that she could bribe or seduce her way out of her predicament. "There's nothing I can tell you as a captive that I couldn't tell you in a regular interview."

The other woman tied to a chair in the room let out an annoyed harrumph. "Becky," the camerawoman said with audible exasperation, "You are not actually Agent Super Slut or whatever, no one cares what information you have. We've been kidnapped by very dangerous people, and if we are lucky they are going to ransom us back to our families. So I hope you have a rich uncle, because I fucking don't. Which brings us to the other possibility... that they intend to sell us to some rich psycho who wants to use our bodies and murder us."

Susan definitely did not have any rich uncles she was aware of, and the other option was obviously even less appealing. And yet, while she could certainly follow the other woman's logic, she did not really buy it. "Nancy," she told her, "no one is kidnapping either of us because they want money. I did porn to work myself through culinary school, Los Angeles has entire zip codes full of people who are better prospects for ransom. And if they wanted someone for sex or violence... they didn't have to make a fake production company for that. No... they did all this because they wanted one of us specifically, which means that I'm sorry that you got snagged up in this. Because these guys actually do think I'm Agent Super Slut. Or some kind of Magic Super Slut." She looked back at one of the guards. "Don't you?"

The guard grunted. But he also looked pretty unnerved. It seemed that she'd struck pretty close.

####

The pale black-haired woman placed her gloved hands on the crystal orb. She closed her brilliantly blue eyes and up-tilted her head like she was preparing to look into the distance as soon as her eyes opened. It was similar to how hunters got a vacant expression when reading their status windows. Max had never noticed anyone reading an item's explanatory runes with their eyes closed, but he supposed it would work. Pribatar was making it work.

She was surprised. The Mictlanian woman's whole body tensed up as she saw what the runes claimed about the large crystalline sphere. "{Master} Max," she said with a calmness that her body language did not reinforce at all, "{This is a Domain Key. It is a very powerful item that should only be found at the base of a Well of Misery that had been well stocked with death.}" Everyone was watching her with some amount of confusion, because the language she was speaking was called Erishkar, and all the native speakers were native to the world that the Space Force code named Mictlan. The only person present who could really understand what she had said was Max, and he didn't think he really understood it that well. All the words were translated by his class, but he lacked a lifetime of cultural experience that would make sense of it. Whenever he talked to Pribatar about magic, it was like he was walking into the ninth class of a scientific discipline he'd barely heard of. Recognizing the words only took him so far.

The eyes of the hunters and guardians who had come with him turned to Max. Understandable, because they had all seen him translate for his slaves from Nemesis Worlds before. "Yes, um, she says it's very powerful. It's a domain key." Blank looks almost all around, but Kwrtzl gasped. Noticing that the Tartarian had reacted to the word, he focused on the Reaver. "Quirky, what is a domain key?"

Her nictitating membranes covered her eyes as if she was embarrassed, or perhaps afraid. She dipped her head as if she was concerned about offending him. "{Domain Keys are coveted treasures of the Lords of Weakness or the Towers themselves,} she said, "{They open gates to their owner's Domain.}"

"Wait..." Max held up his hand as he worked through the implications, "This thing makes extra gates to my domain? We can use it to get extra supplies to the dungeon we're defending?" Kyoko and the other Peruvians suddenly had very interested expressions, and all studiously said nothing at all. Chloe and Miriam exchanged a high-five.

The reaction of the defectors was very different. Kwrtzl, Pribatar, and Berry all exchanged looks that seemed to be non-verbally communicating something. That itself was rather expected, as none of the three spoke a language that either of the others could understand. Each could speak to and understand Max because of his class, but they all came from different planets. The time they'd spent together as Max's sex slaves had brought them together in other ways, and they achieved a silent agreement in which Kwrtzl would break the bad news. "{Master} Mahaks," she told him gravely, "{This Key does not go to our Domain. It goes to the Dragon's Domain. You have to defeat the owner before it would connect to your Domain.}"

Max contemplated that, and the humans all waited for a response from him that would indicate what had been said. Chaeryn and Ulzhari gave him their full attention as well, though Luhgra was far more interested in the guinea pigs. This kind of conversation was easier when Specialist Leticia Clark was around, but she was probably still on another planet. Even if she had returned to Earth, she would be in another hemisphere. Either way, she would see different constellations when she looked up into the night sky, and was too far away to facilitate Max's communications with his more foreign slaves. "The Dragon Kaiju of Lima is dead. Has been dead for thirty years. How much more defeated could it be?" He looked around at the three aliens. "Seriously, how am I supposed to defeat the orb's owner if they died before I was even born?"

A thought construct came to him from Berry. {Master, to redirect the trail to your own nest, you must go to the nest that the trail goes to now} A series of moving thought pictures followed that seemed to involve running through tall grass, climbing into a burrow, and taking bites out of hart rats. It really blurred the lines between a nature documentary and a POV horror movie.

Wanting to make sure that both Kwrtzl and Pribatar were on board with that explanation, he fed it back to them as he understood it. "So what you guys are saying... is that right now if we activate this crystal ball, it will open a gate to the dungeon that the Dragon Kaiju of Lima owned while it was alive. And if we defeat that dungeon, we will be able to use it to get into and out of my dungeon?" The three alien women gave the thumb-sign he'd shown them for positive agreement. This was obviously big and confusing news, and so people asked him many other questions. Was he sure that the Dragon Kaiju's dungeon was still occupied? Would it make more sense to just capture the Dragon Kaiju's dungeon and use it to replace the one he already had? Could he take non-hunter war fighters with him? How many troops could he take? These were all good questions, and even after checking with his slaves, he didn't have clear answers to all of them. "Yes, just like the Patalans invade us with monsters that are part of their swarms but aren't dragon chosen, I think that's their name for hunter marks, when we use this to invade them, we can do so with our own guardians. Guns and everything. In the dungeon."

Kyoko immediately threw water on the fires of his ambition. "What magnitude is this dungeon?"

With a bit of conversation with his slaves, he was able to report that he didn't know. "But um, it was literally the dungeon that created the black gate that let loose the Dragon Kaiju on Lima thirty years ago. So while it was probably emptied of monsters when that happened, it had dozens of stationable areas and thirty years to reinforce from their Nemesis World." That drew some blank stares, so he tried another explanation. "The space to support the army of monsters that attacked Lima thirty years ago is still there, and um... it might have an army of monsters about that strong in it again." This news was not welcomed by the Peruvians. The hunters were excited, but even Chloe was quickly made to see how raiding such a dungeon might be beyond their capabilities.

+-+-+

"Do you think the Space Force is coming to save you?" The man wasn't even trying to sound like he wasn't a villain from a spy drama. He was tall and had black hair and one of those medium tans that could plausibly be from almost any continent. Despite how central he was to the most important predicament of Susan's life, she found herself losing track of him entirely when he wasn't actually talking. It reminded her of the way Chaeryn got all spooky when she stood still. If it was really the same ability, it might mean that he was also an Assassin. Possibly even by his real-life career, rather than just simply being the name on his class.

Responding immediately would obviously be a mistake. Such questions weren't meant as taunts. Or at least, not just as taunts. He wanted her to tell him something. Whatever it was that she said, the Seven Heavenly Kings would analyze every word and inflection. Anything she said, anything she left unsaid, they would scrutinize for meaning.

Susan considered her predicament. They had tossed her phone in the trash back at the house they had set up as the fake studio while they were zapping Nancy's wrist chip. That right there meant that they were concerned about her being tracked or calling the police, but they were not concerned about anyone tracking down that rented building. If they didn't mind the authorities finding the house, that meant they thought they'd covered their financial trail pretty well. It also meant that they weren't concerned about anyone finding their fingerprints or running the DNA on loose hairs. She knew from culinary school how very difficult it was to keep finger oil and hairs from getting onto and into basically everything, so there was pretty much zero chance that none of them had left a mark in that house.

They must be already on some kind of wanted list, she concluded. Whatever crimes the authorities already planned to charge them with were already severe enough that a few extra kidnappings weren't going to make much difference. Maybe Nancy was right about the murder thing. In any case, they'd already revealed that they thought it was more likely that the Space Force would come knocking than the county sheriffs. They were probably right about that, but it confirmed for her that she'd been captured because of the seals. She had to say something, or they'd probably hit her to force her out of silence. The key was to say as little as possible. "I don't even know what you think you'll accomplish by holding me," she said with some truth.

He moved quickly enough that Susan was able to see him again, his face twisted in fury. "Don't play dumb," he said with a growl, "We know you have Ancient power now. And you will give it to us!" He was really intense, and Susan involuntarily tried to back away from him. Not that there was anywhere for her to back up to, she was still tied to a chair.

While Susan was recovering from the menacing presence of the hunter, the other hostage was differently upset. "Are you guys serious?! This is actually all about Becky's magic? Why am I here?" No one bothered to respond to her. She'd simply been there as a witness.

Silently, Susan hoped that their kidnappers would not take stock of their reasons for holding Nancy, on the off chance that they might decide that they actually didn't have a reason to keep her alive. Killing off a bystander was absolutely the kind of thing that she'd heard they did in the second and third-hand stories she'd been told. Susan didn't have any direct contacts with the Seven Heavenly Kings, or any organized crime for that matter, she hadn't been lying when she said that all criminal elements had to be kept hidden from erotic performers. She wasn't naive enough to believe that none of the production companies she'd worked for were laundering money for criminal enterprises, but until that very day everyone who had dealt with her had been professional enough to not tell her about it.

She came to a decision: she was going to do what she could do to keep Nancy alive. "OK," she said slowly, "First of all, you have to know that I don't know very much about how it works, right? There isn't a lot I can do to help you. But the other thing you might not know is that if you hurt Nancy, I won't help you at all."

"You think you're in a position to bargain?" The man asked incredulously.

"Yes," Susan replied with as flat a demeanor as she could manage under the circumstances. It wasn't going to win her any awards for acting, but it was audacious enough that it made him stop and consider. He held still long enough that the blond chef could no longer see him, which was an even more disconcerting effect than it was when the elf did it. Being unable to see a young woman who had licked Master's cum out of her pussy was weird, but not scary. Not being able to see an unhinged sword-using criminal who had participated in her kidnapping was on another level entirely.

Without her phone, it was surprisingly hard to know how much time actually passed before he replied. "Fine. I'll get the Bruja." He stomped off up the stairs, the very sound of his footfalls proof that he was acting out his displeasure. If he had wanted his steps to land in total silence, he could have. Susan had definitely noticed that while he'd been pacing in the basement with her. She'd noted that he'd called the person the Bruja rather than la Bruja, and wondered if that meant he knew something she didn't or vice versa.

Given a temporary respite from having a sword-wielding lunatic in her face, Susan considered breaking free from her bonds. She had been tied up extensively, but not professionally. It was an interesting juxtaposition, and revealed that they were competent enough to continue applying ropes until it seemed implausible that she would be able to escape, but that they did not have any experience with BDSM or oceanic freight. Any sailor or bondage enthusiast would have used much better knots. Given her own experience in being restrained and her enhanced physical strength and durability, she was pretty sure that she could force some slack into the lines and wriggle free. Or she could just smash the chair she was attached to. Compared to the sturdy dining room chairs in Max's domain, the furniture used by the syndicate seemed like it was assembled from a flat pack from some Indonesian furniture chain. It probably indicated that the place she was being held was just as disposable as the would-be porn studio she'd been lured to with an offer of employment. A bit of shifting on her part had confirmed that there was enough give in the chair that she could disassemble it even with her limited range of motion.

Before she decided to tear it apart like a monster in an adventure show, there was something she needed to check. "Nancy, are we being filmed right now?" She figured that since the woman worked as a freelance cinematographer, she probably would know if there was a camera trained on them at the moment.

"Obviously yes," the brunette said with exasperation, "There is at least one camera in the cat statue." Susan followed Nancy's gaze, and noted that there was indeed a cat statue with a raised paw. Such things were used in her industry, and Nancy had recognized the model. It was a normal-looking object to have on a shelf, and that meant that it was a good place to put a wireless camera for scenes that were supposed to be filmed from multiple angles. Many scenes were filmed with somewhat hidden cameras around the room and then the final video would be edited together. Without the disguises, the cameras would be very obvious in the shots that included them and while a shocking percentage of the audience did not care about such things, catering to the people who did was what made the difference between the high class stuff and slop. Of course, such cameras could also be used to monitor captives, as they doubtless were in this case.

"They want to see how I escape from these bonds," Susan said, "Nancy, I'm not going to show them stuff like that until I know you're safe." It sounded much more heroic than she had intended it to. The other hostage rolled her eyes and groaned, which Susan thought was fair. That wasn't the kind of movies they made.

####

"Best case scenario," Miriam said, "is that many of the attacks this area has received represent a series of dungeon-breaks from this dungeon. And that would mean that the monsters have been cleared out repeatedly and this is basically a new dungeon." She ended that sentence in a way that implied that she was about to talk about the other hand. "And... the worst case scenario is that they haven't had a dungeon break for thirty years, and they've been gaining strength the entire time. In that case, they could break out and attack the city at any time, and do so with an army that makes the forces of the Dragon Kaiju of Lima look like a New Year's parade. Is that basically it?"

Max checked with each of the three defectors and got three confirmations. "Yeah, that seems to be basically it." He sighed. "Either way, there are going to be monster invasions from this dungeon. It's absolutely still active from what they can see."

One of the guardians who had been assigned to protect them gave voice to a question that had been percolating in the minds of several people. "What if we destroy the rock?" Specialist Walker asked, "No dungeon gate, no dungeon." Responses were mixed, with equal parts supportive grunts and horrified gasps. To the latter, she asked the most basic of all questions. "What?"

Sophie stepped forward, the Valkyrie naturally taking command of everyone's attention. "The monsters do not need the domain key to come out and kill people, they only need it to go back in. If we destroy the stone, we will have no way to clear that dungeon, and Nueva Lima will be attacked by the monsters in it. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next year, but eventually it will happen. And people will die. The thing we have to do, is to go into that dungeon and fight them there!" Her fervor was infectious, and quite a number of people put their hands in the air and cheered.

"Right," Max said placatingly, "but this dungeon could be really powerful. Fortunately, we should be able to take a much larger force than normal. We should get the SDRF in on this, the Peruvian Planetary Defense Force. Everyone we can take. This could be a very big battle, as bad as the one thirty years ago. But this time... we're going to come prepared. We're not going to let millions of people die in a nuclear blast."

From the Peruvian delegation, Kyoko had the most salient question. "We can take more than just hunters and swords on this mission. How many warriors and how many guns can we actually take?"

That required some consultation with the aliens, and when Max was finished, he still had a lot of questions. "I don't really know," he admitted, "Domain keys aren't all the same size, and it might be that this one will get bigger for me the more times I use it. Realistically, we should probably bring some planetary defense troops in here and I'll check to see how many the crystal lets me select. Once we know how much we can bring, we can get the higher ups to decide exactly who and what to send." There was some nodding around the room.

After some deliberations, some additional troops were called in to be counted. With nothing to do with the main domain key but wait and stare at it, it was decided that Berry should check some of the other artifacts. Unsurprisingly, most of them were the equivalent of items that hunters might get out of lead-sigiled chests, though they took the forms of leather, wood, bone, and stone that might be wrapped around or pierced into the body of a Patalan beast. Such items were not impressive, but considering that Max's crew had only completed a single tour, they actually could make use of some of them.

"This black snakeskin strap can be worn as a belt," Fiona explained, "It's no better than mine, but it's not worse. And since we can bring this into a dungeon, we can turn my hunter's belt in to be used by other hunters. It's not great, but using it will indirectly improve the monster fighting capabilities of the Alliance." That created some real questions of jurisdiction and compensation that Max had no interest in. The Peruvian authorities were providing real objects of value, and they weren't going to accept prestige in payment the way the orcish clans on Nurn had. And yet, all of those discussions were going to be taking place well above Max's pay grade, and it genuinely didn't make sense for him to worry about it.

Some of the items were powerful enough, or simply strange enough to raise eyebrows. There was a shiny stone that was wrapped in a net made of cloud spider threads. The stone was apparently an opal, though one that obviously didn't exactly match any of the opals mined on Earth. The threads wound into strings at either end and the stone could be tied to the body. Pribatar and Berry agreed that it was to be tied to the head like a crown. The effect was to improve the bonuses granted to minions by crown effects, an item that was not well suited to any hunter classes that Max was aware of. The aliens considered it good enough that it had probably come from a silver-sigiled chest, and that was reasonably impressive. Pribatar was already wearing a crown item, which meant that it went to Berry by default. This required her to reveal her antlers, which caused some gasps from the Peruvians, but Sophie was able to settle them down with a placating smile.

With the gray cords tied to her antlers, they were almost invisible and the non-metaphorically opalescent stone hung and glinted between them. Max couldn't decide if it made her look like an ancient temple painting or someone with a shiny novelty hat. Perhaps it could be two things. The expectation then was that she would be able to imbue a large increase to agility and precision to her minions. At that moment, her options were just the two guinea pigs. She demonstrated the increased speed of the rodents, which seemed to impress Kyoko. Max thought the small animals were still pretty slow, but the relative change was obvious enough.

Some of the items were essentially unusable. The Patalans had an item class that seemed to be shards of bone that were pierced into the flesh. Some of the effects seemed iron-tier or higher, but there were no volunteers to use them except Berry and Pribatar, and Max vetoed the idea for them. Then there were items that were literally unusable. The Dragon Kaiju had worn a great stone bracelet on each of its forelimbs. They were each larger than even Ulzhari, and so no hunter could possibly wear them except possibly as a barrel to hide in. It was a stark reminder of the sheer size of the Dragon Kaiju that it had worn objects on its limbs that were more than 2 meters tall and wider than an orc's shoulders. One was a pale green, and the other was a dark red, like two kinds of jasper. Each was decorated with intricate carved symbols that even Berry could not decipher. The effects were amazing. The green one provided a pretty significant chunk of bonus durability against every attack, rendering its wearer actually invulnerable against any number of small attacks. The red one provided boosts to physical strength, magical strength, and tenacity that were each larger than the total any of Max's party members had in those stats.

Discussions of what to do with such items were fruitless, but that didn't mean that they weren't extensive. People naturally had a lot to say about such items. Reiterations of the fact that they could not use them. Open pondering about whether they were so powerful as to indicate that there was a type of chest beyond the white sigil or they were just scaled to size somehow. Fiona had had enough. "Are those PDF troopers going to get here soon? Those of use whose status window can't read these things could go to an ayahuasca bar and come back."

"What's an ayahuasca bar?" Max asked the important questions.

Miriam placed her hand on his upper arm. "I love you, Max. Don't ever change."

####

Doctor Vanessa Rosenkrantz was visibly annoyed. The wine bottle top was unscrewed right at the table by the waiter, an old and subtle ritual that signified the value of the wine being served, and the physicist found herself feeling spitefully uncharitable about it all. "Yes, I get it," she told her longtime rival Heidi Kwok, "You got the big grant, you got the big data, and even your preproofs are getting an actual bidding war. And now you can spend grant money on fine Napa wines and no one is going to stop you."

Across the white tablecloth, Doctor Kwok smiled predatorily. "I won't deny that there's a bit of gloating going on," she said, "But I really am doing to this to try to recruit you for a threesome and offer you a job off-world gathering paradigm defining data and getting your name on truly seminal papers that will get you invited to conferences for the rest of your life."

The auburn haired scientist froze. "What did you say?"

"We have the means to transport scientists and measuring equipment into and out of a contested dungeon, and we have a predicted arrival of a Nemesis World invasions force that has so far been accurate to three tenths of a second," Heidi claimed, "I've told the D-O-D that you're absolutely indispensable for this project, meaning that you will have the opportunity to set up a detector array to get high definition thaumaturgical assays from the entrance of an entire war party from a Nemesis World into a dungeon." She was absolutely earnest about everything she was saying, which made it much more terrifying than if she had been obviously lying.

So tantalizing was the promise, that Vanessa almost got derailed into asking questions about the science of it all. Almost. "No. That first part. You and me, we... there is no We."

Doctor Heidi Kwok closed her eyes and nodded sagely. "All this gate crashing? The thing that lets us get these unprecedented readings? The thing that lets us definitively answer questions that Ithil monks have have been arguing about in their towers for thousands of years? It's all based on one hunter's class." She let the suspense build for a few heartbeats until her erstwhile rival began to look genuinely impatient. "Sex magic. He has sex magic. You get marked with his semen and then you get sort of a limited hunter status." Vanessa looked offended enough that she didn't really have to answer with words. The incredulousness was implied. "I'm serious. For good or ill, if you go to the dungeon measuring trip, we are both going to be having sex with the same dude. Probably at the same time. So I am recruiting you for a threesome right now out of professional courtesy. We don't have to start with getting fucked by a man together, we can both take on my grad student to work up to that." When Doctor Rosenkrantz didn't reply immediately, Doctor Kwok clarified. "Melinda. The hot one."

"This is such bullshit," Vanessa decreed, "Why should I believe any of this?"

"Fair question," Heidi conceded, "I have magically enhanced physical strength now, because I have a permanently active set of seals that do not take mana to maintain. Also, the process gave me a magical boob job."

That was met with a dismissive bark of laughter. "You? You've never needed a boob job."

Doctor Kwok immediately agreed. "I know! But now that I got one, I'm never going back." She opened her jacket, revealing the tight tank top underneath. "Look at these sweater puppies, they're riding like they had help from a push-up, but I'm not even wearing a bra." The aforementioned breasts were straining against the white cloth, her nipples making little cones that pointed accusations across the table.

Vanessa harrumphed. "So this is it? You won, and now you're seriously just sexually harassing me?"

"Yes," Heidi said, deep in thought, "I suppose that's part of it. While you're going to have to submit to Master Max, it's not technically required that you and I do anything. But who are we fooling, right? If we're both going to be sex slaves of the same hunter, of course I want to be there with you. I'm going to lick our master's Essence right out of your pussy, I'm going to hold you down while our master thrusts into you, we might even be able to convince him to tie us up together and spank us." She wasn't even trying to hide the fact that a parade of images was passing through her mind, or that she was lecherously pleased with the contents of those images.

And Vanessa was not pleased. "What's wrong with you, Heidi? First you're talking about threesomes and thaumaturgical signatures, and now you're babbling about weird bondage stuff. What's gotten into you?"

The obvious retort was simply too obvious. "Master Max," she replied with a giggle that Vanessa did not share in at all, "OK fine," she reached into her bag and pulled out a pad. After a few swipes, she had something to hand to Vanessa, "Max's class is literally named 'Master,' it's not just a sex thing." The pad was open to the Ancient runes - and the English translations - of the seals and the progression rituals for them. "So just reading that, you might be thinking that it sounds a little pervy. And you'd be right. But in practice, it's really a lot pervy. When the seals progress, we get stronger, faster, more resilient. And it feels great. The more you let him tie you up, to feel you up, to show you the other slaves being fucked, the more you want more." She was going to say more, but plates of food were brought by the server and she elected to keep silent until their table again had relative privacy.

Before even touching her food, Vanessa pointed her fork at Heidi. "You're talking like a drug addict. How has the Space Force not pulled the plug on your entire operation?"

"Results," Heidi said flippantly, "You know that the stuff that's been coming out of our lab is world leading, but you know the military doesn't give a crap about that. They want us to kill monsters, and oh boy, have we been doing that. The reason we have a dungeon for you to investigate, the reason why we know when the monsters are coming into that dungeon, is that Master Max has conquered a dungeon. Not a raid, a conquest. You're not going in there as a hunter, you're going in there like a corpse construct or a vaetti soldier. You'll be living in a dungeon for a few weeks. But the food is pretty good, and there are sex parties every day."

She read the description again. And then she read it again. "You're really serious about this, aren't you?" A firm nod from Doctor Kwok confirmed that she was. "What would joining this... sex and research team actually involve?"

Doctor Heidi Kwok visibly relaxed, then she leaned forward over the table in a manner that allowed her to speak at a more conspiratorial volume and also coincidentally made her cleavage show in the neck of her tank top. "Well, the minimum is that Max kisses you, and then you immediately get touched up according to his aesthetic preferences. He's really accommodating, and if you give him a list of suggestions he will probably work those in. Then he needs to put some kind of restraint on you to get you the binding seal. And finally you need to watch him at least kiss one of the other slaves to get you the envy seal..." She trailed off in a manner that made it obvious that she was about to make a counter-suggestion, so Vanessa held back and let her continue. "But I was thinking that we'd do it together. Like, I'd be there with my mouth next to your nipple so that I could suck on your tits the very moment that they get all big and sensitive. And then, when Max ties your wrists together behind your back, I can drop down and start licking your pussy while you're being made helpless. And then Max could get behind me and fuck my pussy while I'm still licking yours. You'd get your envy seal while watching our Master plow his rod into my juicy slave pussy over and over again. Finally, after Max has cum in me, I could rub my pussy on your face, so you could drink Master's Essence directly from my magma-hot gash."

"Wow," Doctor Vanessa Rosenkrantz said, "You've uh... really thought about this a lot."

####

As soon as he'd made the selection, Kwrtzl returned to their world. The Reaver immediately put the crystalline orb back on its table with a heavy thonk and a pant of relief. The Dragon Kaiju's sphere was incredibly heavy, and even burning through her stamina like mad the Tartarian wasn't able to lift it herself. Four sets of hands had placed it into her possession just long enough for Max to put her into storage. When she came out again, she barely had the strength to keep it from crashing into the floor. "Mahaks. Hehvi," Kwrtzl said in one of her better attempts at making English vowel sounds.

"That should do it," Max said with more confidence than he felt, "If it works like the other items, passing into my storage should allow it to be treated as enough of a piece of Alliance equipment that we can take it into dungeons and use it for ourselves." He looked at the assembled PDF troops, the guardians from home, his own harem members, the Peruvian delegation, the guinea pigs, and of course: Luhgra. There were dozens of people present, and most of them had weapons. "So what I'm going to do, is to see how many of you guys can be selected. I'm not going to activate the gate, but I'm going to try to see how many people we can get through this gate. Once we know how big of a force we can send, then it's up to the Alliance as a whole to decide who gets to go. There's a big dungeon over there, and it might have a lot of monsters in it, we can't let them attack this city, we've got to fight them there."

Kyoko Escobar translated Max's words into the local dialect of Español. A lot of people were milling around, pensive and somewhat annoyed, listening but not really believing what they were being told. An impromptu armed drill for taking on a Calamity Lord in their lair had not been on anyone's itinerary, and even though no one intended to actually go in that evening, the fact that the Dragon Kaiju's dungeon was apparently still there had everyone's nerves on edge.

Narrating what he was doing, Max began by touching the orb and attempting to open his own portal interface, like he was still in his dungeon. Sure enough, the option to select material for transport appeared, but the option of where to send it did not. Presumably that was because there was only one place the orb was keyed to until the Dragon Kaiju's dungeon was defeated. "First, we're going to try selecting the guinea pigs," Max decreed. He selected the black one and the white one, and then unselected them, reporting on his success.

It was determined at that point by the girls that the guinea pigs had been brave enough that they should have names. It was then determined that Max should not be the one who picked those names, which he supposed was fair. According to Berry, they already had names, as there were vocalizations that they used to identify each other. She made the noises, and both of them just sounded like "Pui" to all the other people. It certainly gave an intriguing potential source of the regional name for the animals: Cuy. Seeing that the hunters were at an impasse, Kyoko suggested Shira for the white one and Kura for the black one, and though that wasn't really more imaginative than what Max would have come up with, it was Peruvian enough that it met with general consensus.

Once that had been decided, Max attempted to select the members of his party. He found that selecting the people was separate from selecting their equipment. Even the dungeon equipment had to be selected by volume, and he felt the mass counting against his limit. The air in between the hunters probably counted in there too, but it wasn't very much compared to the mass of a sword or even a shirt. The mass seemed to be the relevant limit, though there seemed to be some other limits that he could feel but couldn't describe. It would have been nice if there were Ancient runes describing the parameters, but there were not.

Having established that he could select living people in their entirety and inanimate objects in cubic volumes, he then tried adding and subtracting people, and shifting the centers of the cubes. That all worked about the way he thought that it ought to. Putting more people in increased the mass, and moving the cubes so that they covered more equipment increased the mass as well. He had people stand closer together so that he could cover all their stuff with smaller cubes, and that predictably made such a small difference that he could barely notice it. He tried having people take off their shoes, and stand in bare feet, and that did cause the mass to go down, but the change was small and he thought it wasn't worth it. So he told them all to put their shoes back on.

With a basic feel for how it worked, and explanations being repeated in several languages so that everyone was on the same page, it was decided to line up groups and see how many people he could actually select. All ten hunters and defected invaders from Max's own team formed a huddle, and he was able to fit it all into a cube. The Peruvians had supplied three veteran hunters of the Planetary Defense Force, and they fit into the cube as well. Getting the guardians and their battle rifles into the selection required another cube, but there seemed to be no restriction on doing that.

Luhgra wanted to be a part of the action, and she had a number of related suggestions. "{I should be in the group with the mommies, because I can} Rar! {And} Worg {can} Rar! {And} Kura {and} Shira {don't} Rar, {but they can help by being very soft. They should be with the mommies too.} She was very earnest and she held up the stuffed animal Worg to show that she could make rar noises with it.

Max shrugged, and no one had any particular objections, and so the child was placed into Ulzhari's arms, and Fiona and Chloe both opted to carry one of the guinea pigs. Luhgra herself had the stuffed animal in her hands. Checking the cubes, the impact of Luhgra's addition to the group was fairly minor. He wasn't entirely sure how to describe it, but he knew there was a substantial amount of additional available mass to go even after he had two cubes worth of people and equipment.

The Peruvian troops were listless and confused. They were armed with old rifles that used five-five-six ammunition, their weapons had less range and firepower than the battle rifles of the guardians Max had brought. Such weapons had less recoil, and crucially had less penetrating power when they inevitably hit buildings. Supposedly, they were safer to use in urban areas, though Max thought that they were probably used because they had a lot of the bullpup assault rifles left over from some previous conflict. Kyoko stood with the troopers in order to help herd them all into the area that Max was going to define into the cube. A dozen PDF troops crowded into the square delineated onto the ground, and Max attempted to mark all the people and select a cube of space that would include all of their clothing and weaponry.

Max's status window filled up with red Ancient runes. SELECTION COMPLETE, they said. He didn't even have time to say "Oh, Fuck," before everything went blue.

####

"You didn't try to break free," the man with the crazy eyes said in the kind of fake-conversational tone people used when they were trying to be unsettling. In Susan's opinion, he was succeeding admirably. "We left you alone, and you're still in the ropes. Still in the chair. Honestly, Becky, I am disappointed."

There wasn't a lot she could do to show defiance or compliance, and so she chose bargaining instead. "I told the other guy that I wouldn't help you with the magic stuff unless Nancy was safe. She doesn't look safe to me, so I'm not helping you."

He looked impatient. Not quite as furious as the other man had been, but genuinely disdainful in his own way. "Oh, I think you will," he said ominously, "There's something I absolutely must know." The man reached into his jacket and pulled out a fork with the grim determination that other men might draw a pistol. Susan's eyes bulged as she realized his intent, but she was powerless to stop him from jabbing it into her face just below her eye. The prongs were sharp, and the man's magically augmented strength pressed them into the cheek bone of the left side of her face.

It was very painful. Not in a sexy way, but in a way that was equal parts unpleasant and terrifying. "Ow!" She wasn't acting, and because of that fact, her scream of pain was flatter and less viscerally realistic than when she was emoting for a camera.

He pulled the fork back and looked down at his handiwork. "Not a drop of blood," he said with a false enthusiasm, "That, is a durability reaction. Oh Becky, you're going to be so helpful to us. Not because we meet your demands, but because we are in control here." He gestured with the sharp implement, the tines coming disturbingly close to her eye.

Susan looked up at him with hate in her eyes. She owed him much more, but it was what she could do at the time. And yet, she noticed that he hadn't actually done anything to the other woman, which made her think that despite his bravado about not needing her to meet his demands, she did still have leverage. Not enough leverage to keep him from stabbing her in the face, but it was something.

####

It was dark. Not dark like nighttime on any of the worlds that Max had been on, but the ghostly bluish light cast by will-o-wisps. He knew it well, he was in a dungeon. That had not been part of the plan. Somewhere in the distance, there were little bits of red and yellow light that filtered through... trees. All around him were large trees. He'd placed a tree in his own dungeon, he knew how expensive it would be to plant so many of them through the dungeon building interface. Perhaps, he thought, they had simply come with the place or even grown the natural way from seeds. Thirty years was a long time, and the dungeon had been there for longer than that.

Likely because of her doom seer ability, Sophie was the first to notice the enemy. "Cloud spiders!" she called out, "¡Sobre nosotros!" she added for the benefit of the PDF troops. And then all hell broke loose.

BRAKAT! BRRRAKATAT! KRAKATAT! It was deafening. The automatic rifles of the Peruvians were held close to the body for enhanced recoil control at the cost of worse precision, and their magazines were being emptied at a horrendous rate. The guardians, armed with heftier weapons and an admonition to conserve ammunition were firing intermittently, though the times between explosions weren't enough for a heart to beat. The muzzle flashes lit up the trees with moments of light that was bright and full, giving brief images of the surroundings in their true colors. Disappointingly, the trees were a dull grayish olive color even when well illuminated. What really stood out though, was the webbing that ran between them. Some strands tight and strong, with many others wispy and tattered, as if the threads had been replaced many times without ever being cleaned away. It was in some respects like looking at the cobwebs of a dilapidated mansion or neglected store room.

Yellow ichor and bits of burning spider chitin dribbled out of the trees alongside twigs and dry leaves. Inhuman shrieks added to the cacophony already provided by the firearms. Kwrtzl growled in fury as she realized that there was no way for her to engage the enemy without getting shredded from behind by her nominal allies. Sophie reached a similar conclusion and tried to say something about it, only for her words to be completely lost in the bedlam.

The spiders were not content to merely stay in the trees while the bullets shredded them, those that were alive jumped from the trees. Those that were already dead fell out and smashed on the hard dirt of the dungeon floor. There was no time to check which was which, and the hunters proceeded to rush in to engage with melee weapons. Chloe intercepted a spider dropping directly onto a PDF trooper's head with her shield, but mostly the spiders were landing on the ground where the swords of Ulzhari and Sophie could cut the beasts limb from body. Kwrtzl was happy to pounce on such enemies as well, though she favored pounding her mace and ax into the bulbous abdomens of the spiders, a process that made cracking sounds like ice in a blender and spilled thick yellow goop everywhere.

Bullets kept getting shot even after the last of the spiders had been hacked into pieces. They were sprayed into the canopies of the trees, they whizzed off at head level. Some of them got close enough to the hunters that their passing left a palpable wind. Ulzhari got hit with three bullets that had been intended to be delivered to a spider that she was chopping to pieces with her long sword. None of them penetrated her armor or flesh, but the durability loss was noticeable and they weren't going to be able to replace the lost bullets. It was, Max decided, a shit show.

When things finally quieted down, he was about to start lecturing them, when Peruvian insults started coming his way instead. "¡Qué jodido!" said one, "¡Sama!" said another, "¡Hijo de puta!" said another, and then the language just got a lot more scatological. Max recognized a lot of rude language in Español, he had had gone to public school in New Mexico after all, but a number of the Peruvian insults were terms he did not even understand. He sighed, accepting that the insults were at least coming from a place of legitimate mortal terror coupled with an understandable feeling of betrayal. One of them ran up and threw a punch at him, which durability or no was actually going to be Max's red line. He did not have the chance, because between his eyelids closing and opening in a simple blink, Chloe's shield appeared between the incoming fist and Max's face. Clang! The man presumably would have been about to yelp and rethink his life choices, but the brunette added to his misfortune by giving him a front kick that sent him toppling backwards a full meter and a half.

"Don't touch Master Max," she said without leaving room for argument or compromise. Luhgra was crying, the child's sobs unmistakable once there were no longer explosions and shouting men. Sophie sheathed her sword and lifted the young orc into her arms, which reduced the wails to muffled sniffles. Max looked on with pride, and a little bit of jealousy. He'd much rather be consoling his daughter than getting yelled at by armed people with limited language overlap.

The hubbub died down, but the bad feelings obviously persisted. Max raised his sword to draw attention to himself. "I'm sorry that we are all here, but I'm glad that I have all of you with me. I do not know why the gate activated, whether it was a trap, the actions of monsters within the dungeon, or our own poor understanding of the Dragon Kaiju's arsenal. But whatever the reason, we are here all the same. No one will come and rescue us, we must fight our way to the final door in order to save ourselves. If we fall, the monsters that defeat us will inevitably loose themselves on the streets of Nueva Lima. We will triumph because we must. The people of Lima are counting on us!" By the time he had gotten to the end of his speech, it seemed that he had mostly won people over.

But only mostly. "Where are we?" competed with "What's going on?" But really the big question on everyone's mind was "Why should we listen to you?" And on paper, that was a reasonable thing to challenge him on. Max had been a hunter for only half a year, and he was a conscripted guardian in the military of a foreign country. Also, he'd been touching the Dragon's ball when they'd all been transported into a deadly dungeon that was likely unreachable by any known dungeon gate on the Ancient world. It was not a pedigree of authority and success, if looked at from that perspective.

"I've conquered a dungeon before," he told them, "Not merely raided one successfully, but taken it for the Alliance. I am the first hunter to have successfully done that. And we are going to need to do that again right here. The Dragon Kaiju built this place as a beachhead to attack Lima from, and the results were devastating. The only way to stop it is to take it back. We have to take this orb all the way to the final door to shut all this down. We'll have to work together, and you'll have to listen to those of us who've dealt with this part of the Ancient's great game."

####

Louise Doyle was quite surprised, and more than a little skeptical, to have received emails from major recording stars. Technically, she was a recording star herself, but her show streamed on the Housework Network, and she wasn't inclined to pretend that put her on equal footing to musicians who got invitations to awards shows and whose albums got certified with various precious metals. It was the kind of thing that she ran by one of the producers before replying, but the emails checked out. And that was why she had agreed to meet Sidewinder Kate and Peppa Grinda at a neutral location: a pizzeria that was always busy enough that she should be able to fade if things got weird.

Of course, things got weird pretty much immediately, because it did indeed seem to be the genuine Sidewinder Kate and Peppa Grinda who showed up to the meeting. The two of them were wearing clothes so tight that they could practically double as swim wear. In person, they were gorgeous. Smooth skinned and full figured, they looked like the kind of people who would be selected for the promotional pictures for streaming shows like her own. And they very much were those kinds of people, having literally been plastered all over the internet to advertise news and shows that they were only tangentially involved with. Some had their faces, or other body parts, shown quite prominently in advertising copy when their involvement was so tangential that an outside observer might rightfully claim that they weren't involved at all. The two of them had some hit songs, but there were a lot of strange stories swirling around them that made them much more popular than even that would warrant. Louise was simply out of her league, and she knew it.

None of which meant that she should be a bad host, so she selected a vegetable feast pizza off the augmented reality menu, and then closed it so that she could actually see the visions of loveliness in front of her without animated pizza chefs running around in her field of view. The two of them looked... anxious. Which was an odd thing for them to be, given that they were years younger than her and already well ahead on the fame ladder from where Louise believed that she would ever reach. Not that such musical fame lasted forever, there were many such people who'd had big hits and ended up losing everything and working in pizza places no different than the one they were meeting in, but the odds were certainly in their favor. Crawl 4 U was probably going to be on the radio somewhere in twenty years, and Rosie's Riveting Revelations was probably going to vanish from HouseNet the moment they replaced her with the face of another fad. The Housework Network only let people stream a very limited and curated portion of their back catalog, so Louise's work was essentially as temporary as the works of a baker or a stage actress. She made art that could last forever, but it definitely wasn't going to.

"What brings you..." Louise trailed off. The two singers were scrutinizing her like they were getting prepared to buy a car. She started again. "Um, hello. I'm Louise. I play Rosie the Riveteer in a HouseNet historical how-to series." They looked hungry, and possibly not for the pizza. "What's... going on?"

Peppa Grinda was the first to blurst. "The things on your show, are they real, are they true? Given old metal and flame, do you know what to do?"

"Uh..."

Sidewinder Kate took an entirely different tack. "Do you have a boyfriend? If we set you up with a hot guy, would there be anyone mad about that?"

"I'm sorry, what?" Louise didn't know whether to be angry or not, but she was very surprised.

Both women looked chagrined. "Right," the brunette pop-country singer took a deep breath, "You may have heard that we went to a dungeon and assisted a hunter team with an extended mission that stopped a large monster invasion." There had been a lot of speculation as to what had happened with them while they were gone, and Louise hadn't really been following it all, but she could believe that was among the rumors. She nodded as if she knew what was being talked about. "So the truth is that that absolutely happened. And it happened because there is a way to have a use for people who have... skills. Not just swinging a sword or shooting a crossbow, but like... singing. Or... blacksmithing."

The implications began to sink in. "Wait, are you saying that you want me to go into a dungeon?" Both women nodded with giant smiles on their faces. "And you want me to go into a dungeon as a..."

"Blacksmith." The singers agreed.

Louise was left with a very strange expression on her face. "You know that I'm a welder and a riveter, right?" On the other side of the table, the women had blank faces of incomprehension and so she continued. "I do two hundred year old metalworking. Blacksmithing is like, four hundred year old metalworking." They continued staring without comprehension. "I don't actually use an anvil and bellows, I use an acetylene torch and a pneumatic hammer." More blank stares. "So I'm not a blacksmith."

"But the metal stuff you do in the show is real, right?" Peppa Grinda asked.

Louise sighed. "Of course it's real," she said glumly, "HouseNet isn't going to give me a special effects budget."

Both singers whispered back and forth, seemingly very excited. "That's fine," they concluded, "Max's domain doesn't require us to be historically accurate to any particular time or place or whatever."

"Who is Max?"

Big grins. Conspiratorial glances. "Well..." Sidewinder Kate began before Peppa Grinda cut her off, "He's the one who makes it work. Do not worry, he's not a jerk. It's all sex magic and it is not tragic. You're a strong one now, but it's like holy cow. When he seals your ass, you'll be first in class."

"What?!" She was beyond being angry and into just thoroughly flummoxed.

Sidewinder Kate sighed. "That's for reals for reals, actually. You have sex with a hunter whose magic makes you permanently stronger. And it also lets you go into his dungeon. While you're in that dungeon, you do stuff and that makes Max get additional magic resources that he can use to help against the next invasion. Becky Boulevard is putting in work as a chef. And also having sex with us, of course." She shrugged. "So that's our offer: you do your duty to help the hunters fighting them there, but you also get super strength and have lots of sex with a hot guy and also well, us."

"You guys want to have sex with me?" The tall woman was too shocked to have much of an opinion on the matter.

Heads were nodded. "Of course," Sidewinder Kate said as she looked the auburn haired woman up and down, "You're taller than most men. Stronger, too. There's already an orc woman in our little harem, and having sex with her is... it's very good. I have every reason to believe you'll be a success as well."

Peppa Grinda agreed. "She's got a submissive itch, she wants to be your bitch." In response to Louise's gasp, she toned down on the rhyming. "Seriously though, once you get the seals, your already substantial strength will be increased even more. Mostly we want to watch Master Max take your every hole. But Cat here is also going to want you to hold her down and fuck her. And it really does help fight the monsters, so it's for a good cause."

She had so many questions, but then the pizza arrived. She swallowed her words so that the server didn't think she was a pervert. Although it sounded like the radio stars were quite committed to being perverts in their own way. "Alright," she said, "We can do it!" They recognized her tag line from her show, and were very pleased.

####

"Well," Miriam said wryly, "they definitely know we're here." She glanced pointedly at the various gun users, drawing her gaze across them so that everyone would know what she was implying.

The American guardians looked a bit chagrined, while the Peruvians didn't seem to mind the Geomancer's sarcasm. Specialist Mendez of the Space Force had concerns. "Even if we conserve ammo, we don't have nearly enough. How big is this place? How many monsters?" They weren't unreasonable questions, although she did sound a bit unreasonable while asking them.

Max shrugged. "We'll know a lot more when Sophie and Fiona get back." He'd sent the Valkyrie to carry the Beacon Wizard over the trees to get her eyes of night on the problem. Since her vision wasn't impeded by darkness, a sufficiently high vantage point should let her see what was going on outside the clump of trees they'd appeared in.

Almost as if on cue, Sophie descended back through the branches and webs that served almost as a roof over their starting location. "Bad news," she said, "This place is a lot bigger than Maxatlan."

"Are we really calling Max's domain Maxatlan?" Miriam asked, "I thought that was just a joke."

"Joke or not," Fiona said when Sophie brought her low enough for her feet to touch the floor, "That's what we're calling it." The black-haired woman wobbled a bit as she found her footing, and then continued. "That's not important right now, because we are not in Maxatlan. We are outside the Tower of Fucking Doom." She waved her arm in the vague direction that Max had supposed the final door must be due to the presence of filtered light coming between the leaves. Several women made noises of despair, but there wasn't much that could be done about it. "We're in a forest on an outcropping, and then there's a ravine between us and the main fort." She started drawing a little diagram on the loamy ground. "Over the ravine, there's a big stone bridge. Looks like there were statues on it, but they've been broken off at the ankles."

"Statues of humans?" Chloe asked.

Fiona shrugged. "Statues of people who had human-like ankles, I guess. But like, Kwrtzl has human-like ankles." The Tartarian recognized her name and asked Max what had been said, so he brought the three aliens up to speed. "Anyway," Fiona stabbed her athame into the ground to regain everyone's attention, "There's a gatehouse on either end of the bridge, and on the far side there's a big fortress. It's built like a wedding cake. Eight layers, each smaller around than the one below it, but each sporting a wall nearly nine meters high. The gates from each level to the next do not line up, and we can only see four of them from this side. So I expect that it's designed to make attackers like us have to go all the way around the circle more than once in the trek from the lowest circle to the highest."

Sophie pointed her sword at where the concentric circles had been cut into the soil. "It looks like each ring is large enough to have a street and a row of tiny houses on each side. It might be that those are just courtyards to run through, but there's a very real chance that they are filled with mazes, warrens, or traps."

Back to Fiona, she had more disturbing news. "On top of the highest part of the tower, there's a big red flame. It's like something from a fantasy movie. Also, there's glitter clouds inside the walls, which adds to the whole Halloween vibe."

Eyes turned to Max. "OK, so we won't be able to just fly in, we have too many people. And there's no way we're going to climb down that ravine and try to climb up again. That means that we're going to have to take the bridge." His brain started going through all the horrible ways that could go wrong, and there were really a lot of them. "Once we take the gatehouse on our end, we'll send a flying team to control the other gatehouse. Only when we have both are we going to send people across this bridge on foot. The last thing we want is the Patalans blowing the bridge while we have people on it."

Which brought them to a discussion of capabilities, and a counting of ammunition. There was less than one full magazine per rifle, which was obviously not ideal. Fortunately, they only had two kinds of ammunition to track, but no one had any machine guns or rocket launchers. There were a grand total of six explosive devices. Three flash-bang grenades, a chemical irritant dispersal, and two fragmentation grenades. None of them were Space Force standard issue, so Max made no effort to pry them away from the Peruvians.

The three hunters were Qori, a Samurai; Lucas, a Master Axeman; and Chaska, a Haruspex. Two front liners and a blood controller, all with a lot more experience than Max. None of them were particularly happy with the idea of taking orders from a teenager, but he was the only one who could make the orb work again. Something that no one had quite wanted to discuss out loud was the fact that hunters could usually get home by simply opening the final door, but the guardians, the PDF troopers, and Luhgra all were relying on Max's successful communion with the orb to have any chance of seeing Earth or even having their bodies delivered into the care of their families. It meant that Max's ideas had to be listened to, regardless of how that made anyone feel.

"Even if we take the gate houses," he said glumly, "there's a really good chance that the bridge is going to be set upon by iron birds."

Miriam looked at him strangely. "That's an awfully... specific prediction. You get your own doom seer ability?"

He shook his head. "Nothing like that, it's just that the tactical position of having us on the bridge would make us very vulnerable to strafing attacks from iron birds. The swarms might not recognize that, but all the dragon chosen or whatever will. And like you said, they definitely know we're here. They haven't come at us already because the iron birds don't think this forest is tactically advantageous for them. Once they see us exposed, they'll come flying in right away." He really hoped there was a small number of iron birds available to deploy. The fact that they had wings meant that he really couldn't expect to fight them one at a time. They could fly together and make a single flock, and that would be bad. So he had to assume that they'd do exactly that.

####

When they were nearly out of the woods, it was time to get the members of his team as battle ready as possible. And that meant having a rotation where different members of his harem could take care of Luhgra while other members got their Essence and Essence locks behind a tree. The guardians milled around to watch and crack jokes, and Kyoko and Chaska stayed in the onlooker group as well. When Max asked about that, he was informed that they'd been invited so that they could see how he took care of his harem. Max wasn't sure why members of the Peruvian delegation needed to see that, but he wasn't going to start a fight over it either. He did check with all the hunters of his own team to make sure they were OK with being watched by South Americans while he tended to them, and they all seemed to be enthusiastically in favor.

The first to get an Essence lock was Chaeryn. They didn't have the luxury to give her a load of rectal Essence in the normal way, but she still needed her Essence lock in to fight at her full potential. The Shadow Elf pulled her camouflage shorts down to mid thigh, exposing the onyx skin of her butt. Hers was the flattest butt of any of his slaves, and barely filled his palm. Still, it was muscular and smooth of skin, and had a distinctly feminine curve. She bent forward slightly when he palmed her ass, making it clear that she would rather that he fucked her tightest hole with his full cock. Sadly, there just wasn't time for that. The Essence lock with a green gem on it really looked like a regular butt plug, and by the widened eyes of the Peruvians, they were as familiar with the shape as he was. Max spat upon the end of the lock and then lined it up with Chaeryn's hole. "Unnnngh," the Assassin moaned contentedly as her sphincter widened to accommodate the metal plug.

"When we get back to the Alliance Worlds," Max said sincerely, "I'm fucking this ass for real."

Chaeryn moaned again. "Thank you, Master."

He helped pull her shorts up, and then it was Miriam's turn. The redhead chose to get down on her hands and knees and then lower her face into the dirt so that her hands were free to pull her red panties down and then spread her ass cheeks. The Geomancer didn't mind getting dirt on her face, as getting it off again was a truly trivial use of her powers. Hers was the red-gemmed Essence lock, and she squealed in delight as the spit-soaked piece of dungeon equipment entered her through the back door. "Oh fuck! Master! I love that you own my ass!" She wasn't normally that vocal and specific when he was putting things in her butt, so he assumed that she was being more demonstrative for the benefit of their audience. Max smiled, glad that she was having fun.

Chloe sauntered up to him with an expression of hopeful anticipation. "Can I be your butt slave now, Master Max?" the Hoplite asked. Of course she could. Her pteruges opened like the curtains of an elegant theater, and the crack of her ass became visible as soon as her blue panties were dropped to her knees. Lately, he'd been noticing that Chloe's tanlines were less obvious, indicating that she'd been getting the sun's caress on parts of her body that had previously always been hidden by underwear. Her Essence lock had a little tail on it, which Max felt made the whole situation even more undignified. Chloe, on the other hand, thought it was great. "Meow!" she cried out in joy when the butt plug portion plugged her butt.

For Ulzhari, Max didn't really like the idea of spitting into her mouth. Instead he decided to get the rest of his team on their knees so that when the orc had sucked his cock, she could share his semen with the rest of the harem members. Six faces looked up at his pole with awe and hunger. Gasps and giggles came from the peanut gallery as soon as his dick was freed from his pants. All of the guardians had seen it before, but they still seemed to get a kick out of watching his cock disappear into the space between Ulzhari's tusks. Kyoko and Chaska said nothing, but the force of their gaze seemed to increase tremendously once the fellatio became evident. "Glk. Glk. Glk." They wouldn't have needed to watch the proceedings to know he was getting his dick sucked. Ulzhari was being particularly loud about it, perhaps to make up for how quiet she would become once the Essence lock was fixed between her teeth.

"I hope there's enough to go around, Master," Sophie told him, "we all need your delicious cum."

As it happened, the Essence seemed to cap out after being snow-balled into a four-way split. And that meant that after he'd done up the Bloodletter's ball gag, it was time for Fiona and Pribatar to kiss his cock back to life from either side.

They were still in mortal danger, but there were certain things about his situation that made him very happy.

### End Chapter Forty-Two ###