Fighting Them There

### Fighting Them There ###

### Fighting Them There ###

### Chapter Thirty-Three ###

### Chapter Thirty-Three ###

"Please refrain from moving," Doctor Heidi Kwok spoke into the microphone with exasperation. The MRI machine had a woman inside it who benefited from continuous seals and yet did not have a hunter's mark of her own. The very idea was exciting almost to the point of heresy. A person with no inherited power having ongoing magical fortification, the stuff of legends. How many hunters had been dissected to try to find the secret of transferring their power to a person chosen by other means more scientific or economical than the lottery of birth? This woman was an anomaly, and also a famous pop-country singer. No one was going to dissect Sidewinder Kate of all people, which was why they needed to get a very exacting set of magnetic resonance images before someone started suggesting things that might kill the golden goose.

Which of course, was why her fidgeting was so aggravating. "Sorry," the singer's muffled voice reached the control room, "I had an itch."

The source of Sidewinder Kate's supernatural power was in the seals that were granted by Hunter Max Mitchell. Most of the people with those seals were also hunters, and while there were many special things about that which were being investigated, that was categorically nowhere near as interesting as magically enhancing people who didn't have any business having anything at all. But some of the hunters who also benefited from these non-standard seals were present, and one of them wanted to take a turn at the microphone. Reluctantly, Doctor Kwok allowed the Beacon Wizard a chance to speak into the MRI room.

"Cat?" Fiona futzed with the device with the same uncertainty that everyone approached it with on their first attempt, "You really need to stay still, because they aren't letting you out of the box until they take all the pictures. Once you're done, Ulzhari will spank you. She's really strong, Cat. She'll put you over her knee and just smack you again and again. It's really going to hurt, Cat. That's why you have to be a good girl and hold real still." A muffled sound of agreement issued from within the machine.

Heidi was confused. "Fiona, you said that wrong. You said that your teammate would spank her if she stayed still. But wewanther to stay still."

For some reason, all three human hunters present chuckled. "Oh no," Miriam said, "Fiona said it just right. You just gotta know how tomotivateSlave Cat." The redhead rolled her eyes.

Surprisingly for the scientist, Sidewinder Kate did appear to be very good at remaining stationary for the remaining imaging series. The process wasn't fast in any objective sense, but it got finished in less time than Doctor Kwok had been worried that it would take. When the entertainer was finished, she walked on wobbly legs into the control room and immediately proved that the hunters had been correct by getting down on her knees in front of the orc.

Since Sidewinder Kate had delivered her messages from Hunter Mitchell, the other hunters from his party had enthusiastically changed out of their dungeon equipment. Ulzhari was wearing a guardian's uniform, the uniform shirt straining over her substantial breasts, and as soon as Sidewinder Kate knelt before her, Fiona and Miriam started unbuttoning that shirt. More and more of the cleavage came into view, and while the mounds had bounce and jiggle, they did not fall when the support was removed. Ulzhari's skin had so many colors, the lines between them straight and stark like she was a stained glass window or a piece of cubist art. Heidi found the sight amazing, but it seemed that the singer found it even more so. Sidewinder Kate whimpered joyfully as she stared up at the revealed titflesh of the orc.

Ulzhari's pants came down next, taking dedicated and concerted action by both Fiona and Miriam to pass her substantial hips. Heidi saw that Ulzhari's neatly trimmed pubic hair was just as color separated as the hair on her head. Orcs almost always had hair that was patchy in coloration, making coherent spots only if cut almost to the scalp. And yet this particular Bloodletter had hair that came out in simple stripes of black, yellow, red, and brown. Even her pubic hair was like that. The scientist had been told of Hunter Mitchell's "aesthetic preferences" and how they affected the women who bore his seals, but it was with the orc and elf that that preference was truly undeniable. She'd seen pictures of Sidewinder Kate before she had taken Hunter Mitchell's bargain, and she was of course already gorgeous. Famously so. But no elf or orc looked like Chaeryn or Ulzhari. At least, not without a lot of paint.

It seemed that Sidewinder Kate was even more excited by the revealed orcish flesh, as she immediately placed her hands behind her back and leaned forward until she could start nuzzling and licking the hunter's skin. Heidi was scandalized. "I thought your sex rituals only advanced the seals if you did them in Hunter Mitchell's presence?" She had used questioning inflection, although technically it had simply been a statement of her beliefs.

There was no confusion on Fiona's part as to what Doctor Kwok had wanted to ask. "Slave Cat isn't getting any seal progression right now, she just likes getting topped by Ulzhari. I know that if Peppa Grinda was here, I'd have her crawl between my legs and show me how much she'd trained her pussy-licking tongue." She giggled at the scientist's obvious incredulity. "Max's magic doesn't just make us into his slaves, it helps us to enjoy being slaves. When he's not around, we still want... no, we still need this." The Vietnamese American smirked at Doctor Kwok. "And when you come to Master Max's domain and become his slave, you'll find that you want this just as much as we do."

Heidi realized that her mouth was open and closed it. The orcish woman oinked softly and pulled the singer's head roughly into her groin. She imagined herself in that position. In both positions. Would Hunter Mitchell's magic really make her into someone who would so shamelessly do that? He had claimed that it would not, but now his party members were telling her that it would.

Sidewinder Kate was really getting into her role. Kissing, licking, submitting. She was showing this side of herself to Doctor Kwok because she wanted to. Hunter Mitchell's slaves weren't just being exhibitionists, they weren't doing this in a public place. It was something they wanted her to see. These young women had decided to share their depravity with her specifically, and it was hard to look away.

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"Do I know why you're here?" Lieutenant Cortes sat behind her desk and steepled her fingers. The woman had been obviously flustered when she came into the office, and the lieutenant wanted to project as much of a calm and detached demeanor as possible.

Doctor Kwok looked like she was about to cry. "I don't know if I can do it," she admitted. She hadn't said exactly what it was she might not be able to do, though under the circumstances it wasn't hard to guess.

Shouting encouragement and insults at hunter conscripts was something that was both encouraged and limited by the Space Force. Hunters needed to get over themselves and go fight to the death with monsters in alien dungeons, so officers needed to motivate them in almost any way possible. While there were a number of protections in place forbidding Space Force officers from using the kinds of brutal encouragement mechanisms that militaries had used in prior centuries, there was always a bit of blind eye turned toward aggressive motivational tactics that got results. And yet, Doctor Kwok was a civilian, and had even more protections. If she was a hunter, Lieutenant Cortes would be allowed to use quite colorful language as long as she didn't use slurs or make specific actionable threats of corporal punishment. With a civilian contractor, she had to constrain herself to interactions that could be plausibly justified as consistent with a polite business setting.

"There is a very real chance that you will die a horrible death," she agreed, "going down in history as the very first non-hunter human to be murdered by monsters inside a dungeon. An impressive place in history, but obviously that would be pretty horrible to live through." She shrugged. "Ornotlive through, I suppose."

Surprisingly, Doctor Kwok waved her hand dismissively on that point. "Obviously the risks and rewards are very large. If I wanted to be safe and comfortably paid in obscurity, I wouldn't have gone into academia. No, I just don't want to be a teenage boy's sex slave," she said bluntly.

That admission elicited a relieved chuckle from Lieutenant Cortes. "Well, you're in luck. As I understand it, nearly seventeen percent of the women that Hunter Mitchell has put seals on havenotbecome his sex slaves. Twenty-three percent, if we include the orc child." They didn't sound like great odds, and no one was pretending otherwise.

"Risk and reward I can accept," Doctor Kwok said bluntly, "but these women are... they are whores, to be honest. And they tell me that I'm going to be like them, that I'm going to do all that... towantto do all that. I don't know if I'm strong enough for that."

Of course, Lieutenant Cortes had seen Doctor Arumugam's reports, and as such she considered Doctor Kwok's concerns valid. It was tempting to simplylieto the scientist, get her through the gate and have things work out or not. After all, even the literal monsters who had joined Hunter Mitchell's harem appeared to have made peace with that fact. But of course the consequences for dishonesty were potentially quite severe. If all went according to plan, Doctor Kwok would be coming back, and she'd be returning with a treasure trove of answers to questions that had plagued scientists and military theorists for generations. Even if Doctor Kwok came back as a happy sex slave, she was obviously intelligent enough to realize that she had been lied to.

It was worth a sigh. "Look, you've talked to Hunter Mitchell's ex-party members, you know that they could and did decide to leave that team without ever... becoming a sex slave. It is possible." That was technically correct, and earned Lieutenant Cortes another sigh. "As you've probably surmised, they do have regrets. Regrets about getting the seals in the first place, and regrets about having walked away without joining Hunter Mitchell's...harem." She spoke the word with irony and distaste. "But it's also been very clear that Hunter Mitchell is not going to make you do anything you don't want to do. You can get in there and get out with a nothing but a boob job, an apparently permanent magical enhancement to your physical strength, and a lifetime of regret that you never partook in their strength-boosting sex rituals. Obviously, those would be some psychological scars you'd carry for life, but I imagine the data you intend to collect is worth such trauma, yes?"

"Marie Curie..." Doctor Kwok mumbled.

"Excuse me?"

The Chinese American scientist made a dismissive gesture with her hand. "She was a Polish scientist who worked in France because the Russian Empire wouldn't let a Polish woman work in science. She discovered radium, and got very sick because she discovered radium." It had taken quite a number of discoveries before humanity had understood how dangerous radiation was. And crucially, how it was dangerous in ways that other hazards could never be.

Lieutenant Cortes considered the rocky road of human discovery and nodded. In a way she envied the elves and orcs, that they would be able to receive so many of the blessings of the modern world without having to have paid the heavy prices that humans had paid to discover the limits of those blessings. "We do not remember Achilles because helived, Doctor Kwok." The two women appeared to have come to an understanding, and so she was content to continue as if it had been agreed that the mission would proceed as planned. "Is there anything in Hunter Mitchell's requests that you would find onerous?"

The singer had come over from her stint in the dungeon with a list of demands from Hunter Mitchell. Colonel Pierce had thought that the mission was being held hostage, and in a way it kind of was. A teenage boy wanting cutlery like he was moving into his first apartment. Possibly the most important military and scientific mission of her generation, and he wanted to play house with his girlfriend.

"Not...onerous, exactly." She frowned. "He wants a battery-powered computer with the entire known Ancient language on it. He wants a tailor. He wants a gate tech. He wants a cook who can make a decent pot of chili, and he wants a pot to cook chili in." She rolled her eyes, causing her pupils to momentarily vanish behind he epicanthal folds. "They don't sound like serious demands. He's not asking for an electron microscope. These are things that have costs that run into thehundredsof dollars. Hundreds!"

There was more to it than that, of course. Katherine Davis had made it very clear that Hunter Mitchell would only accept volunteers, and had named a tailor and a gate tech for invitations. She further specified that any volunteers had better be "hot enough to be a backup dancer on a Sidewinder Kate music video," and "ready to move to Pound Town."Thatwas the part of the relayed instructions that had sent the Colonel out of the room fuming, and Lieutenant Cortes didn't blame him in the slightest. Given the nature of his powers, Hunter Mitchell's decision to request party supplies for a frat house was understandable, but it didn't exactly reflect well on the history and majesty of the Space Force. She could only imagine how history would record the deliberations as to whether there were any cooks were thathot enough. Her own recommendation that they import an attractive chef was not something that she was proud of. The fact that it had been fast tracked to successfully find a pornographic actress who had gone to culinary school somehow left Lieutenant Cortes feeling more ashamed of her suggestion rather than less. At least she hadn't earned herself as many giggles as whatever Earthside officer it was who had been so familiar with the San Diego erotic movie industry as to have found a candidate in less than twelve hours.

"Their understanding of the magic is that they need to play house in order to defend the dungeon," Lieutenant Cortes explained, "Hunter Mitchell's sex parties do concretely improve their chances at attacking dungeons possessed by the Nemesis Worlds. The claim that they can defend the dungeon against a Nemesis World invasion with sex parties and chili cookouts is no more far fetched than what we've already seen." She shrugged.

"Would you go?"

"Absolutely." Lieutenant Cortes answered easily. She'd given her reply without even thinking about whether her answer was truthful. A hypothetical question, it didn't matter if her answer was a lie or not. There was an answer that Doctor Kwok needed to hear in order to keep her motivation from crumbling, and Lieutenant Cortes had a duty to give it.

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Miriam looked over the candidate that the Space Force had presented them with. "I've seen some of your work... it is impressive." Fiona had had two of her short films downloaded. One in which she had played a high-school girl who got spanked by her teacher, and another in which she played a nurse who got spanked by another nurse. "Can I call you Becky?"

"Becky is my porn name," the young-looking woman replied, "so if we're on set, call me Becky. My real name is Susan. So if we're out and about, just call me Susan." She'd been in the business for six years, so the fact that she was still playing a teenage character had to do with her youthful facial features, rather than her true age. When she wasn't hamming it up as fake high-school girl, she was quite businesslike and direct. "But um... is that really Sidewinder Kate?"

Everyone nodded. "That's me," the real Sidewinder Kate grinned, "the one and only." In person, she looked even more gorgeous than she did on

The star of erotic short films was impressed. "It's just, I heard you ate too many chicken nuggets and exploded." She looked up and down the toned body of the radio star, her eyes lingering on Katherine's prodigious rack. "But it looks to me like you've eaten just the right amount of chicken nuggets."

"I went into a dungeon," she said, to wide-eyed incredulity from the new woman, "and if you accept this assignment, you're going into the dungeon as well. We're not going there to fight the monsters, we're there as cheerleaders. We sing and dance, and have sex parties... and the hunters fight the monsters for us."

Many questions were starting to form, and Miriam attempted to cut them off. "This is Max," she said, holding out her pad with a picture of the man in question. "He is the most important hunter in the world, at least as far as you and me are concerned. It is his powers that allow us to occupy a dungeon, and it is his powers that make us stronger than other hunters. His powers will make you stronger as well, but only if you become his sex slave."

"Excuse me?" The way Becky's eyebrows shot up, it drew attention to how much darker they were than her blond hair. She got her blondness from a bottle, a simple ploy that helped differentiate her porn identity from her daily life.

Fiona jumped in. "Being his sex slave is... it's pretty nice. Having sex with Master Max is something that gives us magic. It's how he gives you the magic, even though you don't have a hunter's rune of your own. You're going to need that magic in the dungeon, but more importantly you're going to need that magic toleavethe dungeon. Once you're there, you will have sex with Max. At least once, but I imagine that you'llwantto do it many times." There seemed to be general agreement on that point from both hunters and the singer. "But you weren't selected because of your filmography, you were selected because you've been to culinary school.Yourbiggest contribution is going to be cooking chili." The surreality of that claim was so self-evident that Fiona anticipated some of the objections and preemptively answered them. "Just like we go into dungeons and fight with swords instead of guns, there are rules to these things. Max has the power to appoint you as like, a court chef. And once you have that position recognized by the dungeon, you making chili gives us the magical power we need to fight the monsters."

The actress and chef held her finger up and her jaw down as the gears in her head cranked through the simple implausibility of it all. Flitting from one objection to another, she decided on perhaps the most foundational. "I thought you had elves and orcs on your team. They can't eatchili, it's not safe."

Her objection caused the women who were interviewing her to break out in smiles. "You really have gone to culinary school," Miriam said with delight, "so yes, you're going to need to cook other food for our non-human party members as well." A manic glint graced the redhead's eyes, and she looked like she could barely contain her laughter as she proceeded to the big reveal. "Andourparty has more than just elves and orcs. Master Max has mademonstersinto sex slaves." She held up her pad and demonstrated pictures of Kwrtzl and Pribatar. "Quirky is from Tartarus, Pribatar is from Mictlan. They are on our side now. Because Max is really that good in bed."

So insane was that claim, that they had to adjourn and actually bring Becky face to face with Max's slaves from the Nemesis worlds. When she had seen them up close, her first impulse was to panic. After she had been calmed down, her next impulse was to be in denial, to reject the possibility that she was in the presence of hostile aliens. After she'd been allowed to play with Kwrtzl's wings and tail, she came to an understanding of how real they actually were.