Many of the paths of Camp Acheron were simply dirt, or covered in grass. While there was an entire planet worth of resources, Earth had not brought across any real heavy industry. It meant that concrete and asphalt still needed to be produced on the other end of the galaxy and shipped through a portal. Weight limits being what they were, there just wasn't enough refined building material to make properly paved paths everywhere. Despite the fact that they were on a military base, many of the paths seemed more like nature trails. "Rosalita! Wait up!" Fiona ran up to catch the shorter woman. The dirt she was running in seemed just like dirt from Earth in terms of color and consistency, although the smell was different in a way she could not place. The plants to either side were alien, but in her peripheral vision they were a comfortingly familiar collection of greens and browns.
Even out of her dungeon attire, Rosalita now looked like sex on legs. Sir Mixalot had once opined that measurements of breast and hip had greater impact when they appeared on a woman who was five foot and three inches or less. Despite being in that range, Rosalita's breasts and butt would have been impressive on the body of a woman who was actually tall. Fiona was of just medium height, and she felt intimidated by Rosalita's chest. Being that they were both storm classed hunters, Fiona thought that she was perhaps literally Rosalita's replacement. She was
wearing
the mana tether that had been attached to Rosalita on her first raid into the dungeon. Comparisons were impossible to avoid, and seeing how the E-tier Thunder Mage filled out her shirt made Fiona feel inadequate.
Rosalita had asked Max to release her as a slave, and he had done so. She had come in second in the initial damage output rankings, beating out everyone but Sofie; and so it had surprised almost everyone that she had demanded to do her second raid at minimum opposition in a team of E-tiers. The brown-skinned woman had been given a chance to be be part of something great, and she had turned it down. Fiona could understand the appeal of that option, but she couldn't make that choice herself. Just a D-tier herself, Fiona had survived and triumphed in the kind of dungeon they didn't normally send kids from the training crops to at all. She owed her power and her survival to Max, and she intended to give him
everything
in the hopes of getting more.
The Thunder Mage did wait up, and recognized Fiona immediately. It left the taller woman to wonder if she'd have been so quickly recognized if she hadn't been wearing the collar. Rosalita noticed the accessory, and her eyes betrayed an array of emotions from seeing it again, but she elected to say nothing about it. "Fiona. Are you... OK? Do you want to talk about it?" It wasn't really what Fiona was expecting the shorter woman to say.
It was a question that required some thought. As Fiona came up close to the other woman she did not have to catch her breath. A benefit of the binding seal was an increase in vigor that was such that she could pretty much just jog anywhere on the base without needing to catch her breath afterward. It might actually be the single change that made her feel most alienated from her former life. Like if she didn't get tired running around that she was just a passenger in her own body. "Yeah, I'm fine. Better than fine. But I definitely want to talk about it." She looked around, checking that no one seemed to be in earshot. Some hunters had magically augmented senses, so she couldn't really be sure. But to a first approximation, they were alone. "I've built up some Capitulation, and I'm going to ask Max to spend it and fill me with Essence. What do you think will happen?"
The Thunder Mage was shocked. And offended. "Are you serious!? Puta asquerosa! Ramera drogadicta! He's going to
own
you. You're going to be an esclava. A coño para follar. You'll spend the rest of your
life
as his property, bending over and
begging
him to fill your holes with his Essence. With your
master's
Essence. Not even a slut, sluts are allowed more than one man."
Fiona nodded. "Right. But do you think it will make me more powerful as a storm caster?" Rosalita looked at her with angry incredulity, but nodded. Fiona saw something in that nod, something she recognized in herself. "How hard is it?"
"What?" There was a glimmer of understanding within her, and with it came a touch of fear.
Certainty grew in Fiona, and her voice leveled out in confidence. "I mean, how hard is it to keep yourself from going to Max and Sophie and asking them to take you back? How hard is it to go every night without feeling your master's collar around your neck? Without his ropes around your wrists? Without his Essence inside your body?" With every question, Rosalita had an intake of breath, but her downcast eyes were answer enough. "You didn't
escape
, he
sent you away
. I'll bet you still dream about him fucking you. Of him turning you back into one of his slaves." Rosalita looked away. Then she nodded. "Rosalita, how would he dominate you? How would he fuck you into being his?"
Rosalita slapped her. The Vietnamese American took it in stride. If there had been any
real
aggression, a thunderbolt would be involved. Besides, she had begun to see slappings in a new light. The Thunder Mage sighed. "It gets better. For the first few days I wanted nothing more than to offer him my nalga and become his ass whore. I watched... I thought it might go away if I touched myself back there. It didn't. I brought myself off several times, I said shameful things. In the dark." She sniffed. "It gets better though. After a few days, I could go almost all day without daydreaming about Max taking me back and shoving that Valkyrie breaker up my ass and wrapping that collar around my neck again. Now I hadn't wished for it for more than a day until you reminded me of what the claiming seal felt like. You'll get over it, too. Eventually. It's going to be so much harder if you let yourself become his for real."
Not knowing what else to do, Fiona pulled the smaller woman into a hug. She was quite noticeably stronger than Rosalita, a difference almost wholly attributable to the fact that her claiming seal was a vibrant red rather a dull gray. "I'm not trying to get out. The power was... it's a lot of power. The dungeon we went into was a lot more powerful than it was supposed to be. It had three silver chests. I was
first level
. My first dungeon was just a construction zone and none of us leveled up. If it wasn't for the power Max gave me with this master and slave nonsense, we wouldn't have survived. This is something I need to do, not just to fight them there, but so that I can ever come home again." She squeezed the shorter woman, fitting her own breasts over the larger boobs of Rosalita.
Hugging her back, Rosalita sighed. "You can't stay with him. Not once they figure out what he can do. Max and Sophie are going into the SDRF, and soon. Girls like us don't belong in the special dungeon raiding forces. You know that. You're
average
, and I'm not even that. Max might be willing to keep you in his party, but it's not going to be up to him. Once the crop graduates, they are not going to
let
him keep any D-tier hunters in his party. The more you let him take over, the more it will hurt when he throws you away." The two of them held their embrace for a long time.
###
The initial reports they'd made weren't nearly enough, at least that's what Max assumed. He'd filled out a standard form evaluating his team mates, and professing his strong desire to work with all of them again. The last time he filled out forms like that, everyone in his party had circled a strong desire to
not
have him on their team again, which he supposed was fair. This time he suspected that his party members would give him better reviews. Once their forms were filled in and their hunter's marks were photographed with hyper-spectral cameras, they'd been allowed to change clothes, eat food, and go to bed. Even to
shower
, which was surprisingly necessary. The simple act of entering or exiting the gate left all dirt behind, and most hunters entered dungeons cleaner than they'd ever been in their lives. Blood, sweat, tears, and apparently Max's semen were all things that the gate considered transportable, so every one of them needed a shower despite having no dirt in the traditional sense on their bodies.
Still, there was no way that the Space Force would be happy with a basic dungeon report form for an event of that magnitude, and all of them were certain to get called in to meetings with specialists. Just as soon as the officers decided who the right specialists were. He wasn't sure when they were going to call him in, or who he was going to be asked to talk to, but he knew it was coming.
On the first morning, all those considerations were for the future. Max was happy to see that he had leveled up again. He'd picked up a surprising amount of Mastery during the dungeon raid itself. Giving orders to his party members advanced their claiming seals but also gave him Mastery while doing it. Every time he gave motivational strikes to his fellow second line party members, his Mastery grew. And when Sophie had jerked him off into Ulzhari's mouth, that increased his Mastery quite a bit as well. But the biggest chunk of Mastery came when he woke up and had leveled up. As before, nothing actually changed in his skills and stats for going up in level, he just got an infusion of Mastery. He supposed that there was probably a level-based limit into how much Mastery he could put into any of his stats and thus there was some absolute limit on how much benefit he could get out of training with his slaves without going into dungeons. He had no way to check that, and his class was strange enough that perhaps there was not. Maybe he
could
just farm Mastery endlessly and roll it over into his stats until he became a worthwhile front liner in his own right.
He shook his head. It wasn't worth worrying about such things. He didn't have any skills for a front liner. Not even the minimal skills possessed by an E-tier. A Shieldbearer would have shield rush and parry plus to improve their front line role, but Max wouldn't have those kinds of abilities whether he had a decent set of melee stats or not. Then he shook Sophie, who had elected to sleep with him alone. It was a strange thing that he now considered sleeping alongside the most beautiful woman he knew to be
sleeping alone
so long as they weren't sharing the bed with a third or sharing the room with an audience. And yet, that's where his life was just two months after worrying if his class would allow him to be with Sophie at all.
As the blond woman started to wake up, she suddenly tensed and quickly patted his side of the bed. Having read his presence in braille, she visibly relaxed. "You're still here. I dreamed... I was worried that you wouldn't be." She'd had two nightmares, one where Max rejected her to spend more time with his harem, and another where he rejected her for having become too much of a slut and found a new woman that he could be monogamous with. Even awake, those scenarios seemed dreadfully plausible to her.
