Fighting Them There

###Fighting Them There: Chapter Twenty-Four###

###Fighting Them There: Chapter Twenty-Four###

Working with research assistants who were on another world was surprisingly difficult. Despite the essentially limitless bandwidth she was afforded, Doctor Heidi Kwok could only send or receive communications once a day. Dungeon hero shows always spent a period of screen time with the heroes composing video essays to their families, and now she understood what that was about. The lack of instantaneous sending meant that there was a forced time of contemplation and reflection. Not that sending was truly instantaneous on Earth, there was measurable lag even on nominally 'real time' video calls, but waiting for the next data gate for a message to be sent and then having to wait at least a day for the data gate after that before a reply could be received was a new kind of torture. Or perhaps, a very old kind of torture. At least it meant that the urge to constantly refresh in case replies or updates came was curtailed. No updates were even possible until the next data gate.

"I've attached the MRI imagings of the..." She realized that she'd made an autological error because theIin MRI already stood for imaging. It indicated that she was distracted or tired. Maybe both. Fortunately she could start again. "Melinda," she addressed her RA, "there is a significant reduction in diffusion for the DWSO images of the peri-mark region of the hunter post-class change. That is, sulfur oxides diffuse more slowly in the area of tissue under the hunter's mark after she became a Beacon Wizard than it did when she was a Night Caller. I've checked the marks of a D-tier Hoplite, and she demonstrates a comparably higher diffusion rate than the C-tier Assassin, Bloodletter, and Geomancer from the party we are investigating. The diffusion rate for the B-tier Valkyrie is lower still, and the outliers are a higher rate for the Tartarian and our primary subject."

Pausing briefly, she pinched the bridge of her nose right between her epicanthal folds. She needed a paper out of this, and there was a lot she couldn't tell anyone. Sighing, she started the recording again. "The embargo is still up on the class change, the Tartarian, and the primary subject. There are differences in the measured diffusion in the hunters, though broadly all of the C-tier hunters exhibited slower diffusion rates than the two D-tiers and faster than the lone B-tier. As far as I can tell, there is no literature value here, so we're going to go fishing for followup research by publishing a case study. I've already gotten assurance that you'll be able to publish open access in Radiology as long as you write it in English and don't use a crayon." She paused again and tried to sort her feelings out. On the one hand, having the Space Force lean on a major one-word journal to agree to publish her findings sight unseen wasfraudulent, but on the other hand she needed a bunch of independent groups to check hunters for sulfur oxide diffusion so she could find out if she had a coincidence or a real effect on her hands. Even if other results came in and it looked like the change was statistical noise, she still needed to know that.

Starting the recording, she delivered her directives. "So what you're going to do is to write the paper with six subjects. Two D-tier, so we use the pre-change storm caster, three C-tier, and the B-tier. We show the diffusion rates. In the discussion you raise the question of whether sulfur oxide diffusion rates could be used as a predictive marker to identify the tiers of newly discovered classes." She sighed, and internally cursed that she hadn't thought to pause the recording. "Your conclusion is going to show the ranges of measured diffusion at the three tiers, and obviously put me down as first author. You can be last author, and the rest of the RAs can be named in whatever order. You're going to be cited a lot, so try to make it look good. We're trying to provoke other people to check those diffusion rates on other hunters who aren't part of... who don't have these permanent seals."

What the Space Force really wanted was away to trigger a change in classwithoutrelying on Hunter Mitchell. If they could identify a genuine physical difference between the runes of different tiers, they might be able to engineer a solution to transform one into another. At least, that was the idea. Someone in the Space Force believed in that idea strongly enough to give her an equipment budget large enough to buy prime real estate. To have literally built her a building to house high tech equipment in the kinds of timeframes that government agencies only managed when they weren't pretending to be ponderous and immobile bureaucracies. Someone believed in it enough to lean on nominally independent journals to secure publishing agreements before the papers were even written. It was technically fraud, but it was for a good cause.

Even if she was barking up the wrong tree, the faster they knew that the better. She was going to get a literature value for the sulfur oxide diffusion impedance of higher tier hunter's runes. She just had to convince a bunch of radiologists that they could get findings published. With the Space Force's interest, it wasn't even a lie.

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Sixty centimeters of enigma, the black wand hadn't elected to reveal any of its secrets. It generated a red glow, and sometimes it made his slaves glow red. Worryingly, sometimes it generated text messages on his status window that informed him that his slaves had been retained. "When the Mictlan mage used this," he pondered aloud, "it glowed red and then Sophie glowed red at a distance. She got a message that a new master was being assigned, and she saw a progress bar. But the whole thing ended, and then I got the slave retained message. Nothing I do seems to make anyone glow red at any distance, but when I spanked Fiona with it, she glowed red for a bit. I saw the slave retained message, but she didn't see a new master assignment message." He experimentally swung it through the air. It had a slight flex to it, like it was a bamboo pole.

Too light weight to be an effective weapon. At least, not when compared to his arming sword or even the whip. Perhaps it could be justified as equipment to take into a dungeon if its secrets could be unraveled, but as a weapon of battle it left much to be desired. A bit short even to be a baston or yantok, and he had never done as well with Escrima or Penjak Silat as he had with HEMA and fencing. Still, it was clearly magical, and had allowed him to claim it as dungeon equipment. It was a shame he couldn't read its item description. Sometimes the descriptions were limited or misleading, but at least it would tell himsomething.

"Perhaps you should use it on someone who isn't already your slave?" Sophie suggested the most obvious course of action. It was of course something he'd considered himself, but he was worried about what might happen.

He deflated. "It's a good idea, Sophie, but what if it does something to them? What if itacquiresthem as a slave? This is so stupid. I can't use it in the dungeon in case it doesn't work, but I can't use it at the base in case it does." It didn't leave a lot of options.

Chloe had a suggestion. "What if you try it on Alice?" She asked hopefully. "If she becomes your slave, you could teach her how much she'll love being fucked in the butt. I know she doesn't think she wants you to own her butt, but I know she'll be so happy once you own her butt."

Max stared at Chloe for quite a while before he answered. "IfAlice wants to join, we could try that." He meant using the wand after she agreed to join and before she actually got the seals, but he could tell from her excited expression that she thought he meant that he intended to teach her the joys of anal submission whether she liked it or not. It was genuinely worrying how much Chloe seemed to like that idea. "Actually, do you think that we should have Quirky check these items?" They'd been reticent to put weapons into Kwrtzl's hands, because she was a Tartarian invader who had pledged to murder people of the Alliance to the very best of her ability, but Max felt that she was really becoming part of the harem and it might be time to put some real equipment in her hands. Everyone looked at their winged companion.

The Tartarian fidgeted under the attention of the other hunters. "{Master, I am not normally able to identify equipment any better than any other conqueror. The messages from the Ancients, though sometimes enigmatic, are all the same.}" The other members of his party had no idea what she'd said, and so turned to Max for answers.

"I don't think that's true," Max objected, "we can't read the item descriptions for your world at all, but presumably you can. Right? I mean, youcanread the descriptions of the items you get in chests?" She made the tongue flicking gesture that he had come to believe meant the same thing as a head nod of agreement in his own culture. "Right. So we can read the item descriptions of our chest items, and you can read the item descriptions of your chest items, but we can't read each other's." After he placed the wand on the table, retrieved the whip and placed that on the table as well. "We'd like you to read both these items, if you can."

Neither item was something that was supposed to exist in Camp Acheron at all. Invader equipment did not, as a rule, travel with hunters when they opened the gate to return. This rule was good enough that as far as they knew it hadn't been violated in three generations. According to elvish lore, it was a rule that hadn't been violated in thousands of years. And yet they were undeniably physically present. Both the wand and the whip had made the journey back to Alliance territory, and they weren't the only pieces of invader equipment to have done so. Kwrtzl's own sickle-like weapons had arrived with her, bringing the total number of Nemesis weapons Max's team had recovered to four. Although two of them were a pair that had come in a single chest, apparently.

The Alliance was no stranger to Nemesis weapons. When dungeon breaks happened, Invaders brought whatever equipment they had with them, and such equipment was left in whatever state it was in when the enemies were defeated. Often that meant that a blade or a shield was still nominally usable, but then sometimes it was ruined with bullet holes or even melted into radioactive slag. Not that it mattered much either way. Since Alliance hunters couldn't take equipment from Nemesis World Invadersintothe dungeon any more than they could take it out. In ages past, unidentifiable captured magical equipment was taken into battle by warriors defending the Home Worlds, though that had fallen out of favor before Max was even born. These days the strange magical items left behind when the invasions from the Nemesis Worlds were contained simply languished in vaults or were displayed in museums.

Both the whip and the wand had status windows that Kwrtzl could read. Or, at least they had Ancient text that she could see. Many of the runes on the wand were unfamiliar to her and she ended up simply writing them down for Max's other slaves to puzzle over. She had more luck with the whip. "{It's an incubus tool. Probably from a silver chest. It produces thunder blasts and amplifies incubus domination after a thunder blast.}" Not much different from what Max had already surmised. He'd figured out how to make it create the thunder blast, but contrary to Kwrtzl's understanding he wasn'tactuallyan incubus. He didn'thaveany incubus domination to amplify. It left open the question of whether he might have some other ability that was close enough to get an amplification after a thunder blast, but he couldn't think of any.

The description of the wand was more puzzling, and it was Chaeryn who translated the Ancient runes into English. "It's a caster implement." No surprise there, almost every handheld item that wasn't a terribly effective weapon or a shield was some kind of caster implement. Some things that actually were decent enough as weapons were classified as caster implements, like Fiona's athame. "It increases control radius, strengthens controlled slaves, and increases the distance that slaves can be brought under control." There was a great deal of discussion on that point. It gave a window into how things looked from the point of view of Mictlan's blood gem holders - their equivalent of hunters. Their equivalent ofconquerorsfrom the forces of Tartarus. It didn't tell them what the forces of Mictlan called their blood gem holders, but it looked like golems and corpse constructs used the same rune for 'slave' as Max's class did. That revelation made Max vaguely uncomfortable, but it wasn't necessarily something that had as much meaning as he was inclined to ascribe to it. The Ancient rune for slave was also used for all kinds of dependencies, and many support caster classes had the hunters they provided seals to designated as slaves without that seeming to have any special meaning beyond the direction of seal bonuses going from master to slave.

The larger point was that the forces of Mictlan had variable control radius, and indeed that the distance that a blood gem could support their corpse constructs was called a radius. That terminology implied that it was equal distance in every direction. Mictlan's corpse constructs went to default scripts if they traveled too far from their blood gems, and military theorists had suggested the possibility that the distance could be the same in every direction. They hadn't one hundred percent confirmed that, but it was strong evidence that that was the case. And it was a complete confirmation that different blood gems could have different control distances, because obviously an enemy holding the wand would have a larger control distance than the same enemy without that equipment. All in all, it was enough to write another report that would get the Space Force operations people very excited.

Max, however, was having an even larger thought. "Chloe? Get naked and pick up the whip. I'm going to put you in storage." Her face lit up like the decorative tree for the Midwinter Feast. She was always happy to be put into storage.

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When she reappeared, Chloe was still holding the whip. Confirmation of something that Max had only barely been aware that he suspected. He was going to have to have a discussion about his team's equipment. "Master Max," Chloe inquired, "what would you have me do with the whip?" Her voice betrayed a bit of worry, and no wonder as she was quite ambivalent about being beaten by her master and even more dubious about beating someone else.

"Hmm?" Max was under no illusion that Chloe wanted to whip people, and he didn't think that a whip that periodically created deadly thunder blasts was something to be swung around during sex. The whole combination of domination and dangerous explosions seemed terribly counter productive to him, but he supposed that the typical Tartarian incubus wasn't expecting to worry much if the people who they dominated were hurt or killed. "Don't worry," he assured her, "no one is being hit with a thunder blast. I just wanted to make sure that you guys could carry Invader equipment into dungeons. At least, the ones of you that I put into slave storage can. We should do a small scale test with those of you whoaren'tin storage when we use the dungeon gate the next time we raid a dungeon." Miriam and Fiona gasped, followed closely by Chaeryn and Sophie as they realized the import of what he had said. "In the meantime Chloe, you can put it down unless you'd like me to tie your wrists together."

The question wasn't answered right away. Chloe moved as if to put the whip aside, thought better of it, did it again and stopped herself again. "Actually, Master," she finally communicated her decision, "I would like to be bound when my submissive urge is happening." Holding out the whip to Max, her voice became clearer, more confident. "Now that we're giving ourselves to you permanently, I think that's what I need. Before, I didn't know that I wanted to be a butt slave, but I was held down and helped to see the truth. Now I know that's what I want. What I need. You're taking me as your forever slave, I should be tied up for that butt sex. That is how you should own me, as a wrapped present."

While Fiona rolled her eyes a bit at the corniness of the declaration, it wasn't her submission party. Max smiled at her and looped the whip around her wrists, tying them together in front of the brown braided woman. "Chloe, if you want to be a bound butt slave, I will make that happen. You always have a place in this harem, and that place is with you tied up and getting fucked in the ass." He pressed on her shoulder and she bent over the bed with her hands together as if in prayer. "Are you ready?" Chloe moaned in answer, and Sophie began lotioning the Hoplite's butt crack.

As that part of the preparations was being performed, Max opened her status and selected her immovable guard skill for progression. It now granted temporary magic resistance in addition to the temporary durability when blocking attacks. Max didn't dwell on it much because he was preoccupied by the lovely woman who was anticipating a brutal reaming from his cock, but it seemed like it would be pretty helpful if the enemy was using a lot of magical projectiles like they had been in the last dungeon he'd been in.

"Master!" Chloe wailed. "I can feel it! You're going to own my ass!" She raised her butt and gave it a little tail wagging in case there was any question of what tab she wanted in which slot.

Not desiring to make the Hoplite wait or prolong the neediness of her submissive urge, Max gave her bottom a light smack to get her to hold it still, and then slammed his rigid cock into her waiting ass. She screamed wordlessly, astonished and ecstatic. He wasn't afraid ofdamagingher because of the protection afforded by her durability, but he didn't want tohurther. Nevertheless, she had requested the most thorough possible butt-fucking, and so he began pounding her with the force she seemed to want. He hoped that he'd calibrated the roughness to what she really wanted. The pile driving was harder than what he would have attempted if Chloe hadn't specifically asked for him to be more vigorous and dominating.

It seemed that he had calibrated to her desires, as the brunette beneath him began babbling. "Thank you, Master. Thank you thank you. Oh Master, my butt is so owned. So owned by Master. Ooooooh! So ooooowned." She flopped under him as best she was able, or at least as much as she was willing to. In reality, her hunter's strength was enough that she could have thrown him off like an untamed horse and broken the bed by slamming her arms into it. The fact that she remained within the designated area between Max and the bed was proof that she chose to do so. She groaned out her orgasm and collapsed onto the bed, luxuriating in the feeling of Max's pole going in and out of her conquered rectum. "Mmmm. Mmmmm. Mmmph." He sped up into her until she got the message that her master's Essence had been acquired, and then she sighed in contentment.

Max picked up the Essence lock that they had begun to think of as Chloe's. When his cock exited her rear, he replaced it with the tail plug. The Hoplite smiled, satisfied. Sophie reclined on the bed, her head next to Chloe's. "Master Max owns us, Chloe. We're going to fight monsters together, get fucked by our Master together, even raise his children together." The blond traced her fingers along Chloe's dark brown braids, and both women smiled.