There were, in Max's opinion, quite a lot of people in the audience. Alice and Peppa Grinda weren't part of the event, but they were watching anyway. Performing for the members of his party was something that he compartmentalized. Miriam and Fiona were literally watching, but they needed that for their seals, they enjoyed it, they were part of the event, and he didn't mind their presence. But that still left two people who were just there to judge him. It was just an audience of two, but it felt like a lot. In the dungeon, he'd given spankings to Miriam and Sophie for an audience of four, but he hadn't been expected to wave his dick around for that. Having people who weren't part of his party watch him take his pants off for sex was new, and he didn't like it.
Of course, Peppa Grinda was there because she was considering becoming one of his slaves. Alice was as well, although Max did not yet have the ability to take a second extra party member into the dungeon. The truth was that he did have an empty slot for a hunter slave, but he wanted to leave that slot open during a dungeon raid. There was a very real possibility that they'd be able to capture a Tartarian if he had an open slot, and that was too big a possibility to blow off. Putting seals on Alice would have value, the progression she gained would carry over if she ever joined his party for real, and in the meantime she could use a fraction of the seal boost going into a dungeon with another team. He was withholding power from another hunter that might be the difference between life and death, and that gamble weighed on him. But the possibility of capturing a Tartarian was simply too large of a potential prize to ignore. He'd been
ordered
to leave that slot open, because Command thought it was a risk worth taking. Alice's life against the possibility of eventually ending the war, it was probably an easy decision for them to make.
Perhaps it was ridiculous to think of it as risking Alice's life. After all, Alice had not actually agreed to join his harem at any point. While she had come to watch him claim Chloe, she had never explicitly said that she was going to be claimed as well. She hadn't even committed to anything in particular that she was looking for to decide one way or the other. But there was no catch-up mechanism for the seals as far as Max could tell. If one of his slaves missed a day of seal progression, they were just one day behind the curve. Forever. The next time they went into a dungeon, they'd be one day behind and possibly just a little bit weaker. And the time after that, they'd still be one day behind. It was maddening, it made him feel a constant pressure - like every moment he spent doing something other than helping his women progress was putting them in danger. He was glad there was a daily limit to allay his guilt about
eating
and
sleeping
, but he couldn't do anything about a whole lost day.
He chuckled to himself. Here he was, able to have sex with his own harem of beautiful women whenever he wanted, and his sense of duty was giving him anxiety that he wasn't doing it
enough
. Imagining what a younger version of himself might say to him over the fact that he was considering having multiple girlfriends as a chore was pretty funny. His own train of thought derailed when he realized that he'd thought of Chaeryn, Ulzhari, Fiona, and Miriam as his girlfriends. He wasn't sure if that was right.
Sophie
was his girlfriend, certainly, but what was his relationship with the others? They were women that he risked his life alongside, he had sex with them, and he felt responsible for their safety. When he thought of it like that, maybe he was practically married to all of them already. On the
other
other hand, being a hunter wasn't a forever kind of career - death or retirement came for almost every hunter before the age of thirty-five. He couldn't imagine any of the women staying with him once they stopped raiding dungeons and fighting monsters together. They put up with the weirdness of his class because the support benefits were substantial, but when they no longer needed his help in the dungeon he assumed that they'd all leave. As he thought about it, even his relationship with Sophie probably wouldn't survive all the cheating he was doing, whether she
understood
that or not. With a very real time limit on the horizon, he should probably just wallow in pleasure while he had the chance, but not for the first time he wished that he'd had a normal class and he could just have one girlfriend that he could grow closer to, get married to, and eventually retire with.
A hand passed in front of his face. "Why the gloomy face?" Sophie's question broke through his brooding. "You're about to have sex with a beautiful woman so hard that she becomes yours. Try to remember how awesome that is."
"Yeah, sorry," Max apologized, "I was just thinking... I guess I was thinking about dungeon romance. The idea of two people fighting monsters together, loving each other. I'd like that." He looked her dead in the eye. "You know I'd be happy with just you. I love you Sophie."
The Valkyrie blushed. She looked... guilty? It was a strange expression. "I love you too, Max. But this is the part of the dungeon romance where you take her. Forcefully. Like in the book." She gestured at Chloe, the woman of the hour. The Hoplite was walking into the room wearing a military issue bath robe, wearing more makeup than they'd ever seen her wear. Makeup didn't travel into the dungeon, but it also didn't
weigh
very much. Many hunters brought makeup as part of their personal effects. A five month tour was a long time to plan for, but it didn't eat that deep into a kilogram of lipstick.
Chloe had brown hair that she cut short so that it fit into her helmet. She did strength exercises every day, and her muscles kind of reflected that. Her efforts were slightly obscured by the baby fat that stubbornly hung on in her cheeks, her arms, her legs, and even her belly. She was eighteen, they all were, but it looked like some of her body just hadn't gotten the memo and clung to a softness that gave the impression of immaturity. "You'll need to be wearing your dungeon gear," Max explained, "when the seals go on, your body shape will probably change, and dungeon equipment you're wearing will change with it. Anything you leave off might not fit anymore."
The prospect was obviously daunting, and Chloe swallowed before responding. "How big are the changes? Are we talking...?" The Hoplite left the question unfinished, because she had no reference frame to complete it with. Magical body transformation wasn't normally a thing in her life, and so she floundered on trying to find something to even compare it to.
"It varies," Max began, an answer that was unenlightening but true, "Sophie, Ulzhari, take off your shirts." The two front liners perked up at the opportunity to follow a command and removed their tops like they were being scored for time. Both women stood proudly, their breasts on display. Hunters had increased physical strength and vigor, which meant that the natural tendency of larger breasts to sag and cause back problems were largely eliminated as an incidental effect of the physical enhancements given to every hunter of every class. Even in that rarefied company, Ulzhari's breasts were amazing. They were enormous, and moved as objects with real weight and inertia, yet they were held aloft by powerful shoulders and held in shape by supernaturally enhanced ligaments. Chloe found them intimidating. "Ulzhari's breasts grew the most," he explained, putting a hand on the tit flesh and giving it a squeeze to demonstrate their reality, "while Sophie's barely changed." This was more a testament to how pleasantly proportioned her breasts were in the first place, as Max's other groping hand demonstrated that her mammaries were every bit as solid and supple as those of the orcish hunter.
The display shocked the D-tier defender. She mouthed a swear word. "You really let him do that to you?" She blurted out in shock.
"Of course," Sophie giggled, "he's my
boyfriend
, and I
love
him." The smile she directed at Chloe was downright predatory. She knew full well how those words dovetailed into the brunette's fantasy-wrought fantasies. "Ulzhari, tell her why you like having Max hold your breasts."
Oinking bashfully, the Berserker tried to explain. "Um... Max owns my breasts. Feels good when he touches them."
It seemed that Chloe was about to ask more questions, but Max had more to explain. "So far, we've been just letting the changes happen, being surprised by the results every time. But we should try to take control of these things. It makes you more beautiful to me, but there's a lot of ways people can be beautiful. First, you're going to show me the way you are now. Chloe, get naked." His tone was firm and direct, like he was instructing her how to bake a cake or change the battery on a phone.
For her part, Chloe felt like the story game had already begun. "Um... OK." The robe came off. There was a sports bra and bicycle shorts underneath, both blue. Max simply waited, and she removed both other items. She didn't shave, hadn't really seen the point of doing so when she wasn't in a relationship. Like the hair on her head, she cut the hair of her pits and pubes until it was short enough that it didn't get in the way when she wore her armor. She had a brown patch of skin on her upper thigh that a careful study of map images had taught her was kind of shaped like the island of Cyprus. Her first inclination was to cover herself with her arms, an impulse that she fought back with difficulty.
Max looked at her with an appraising eye. She was prettier than she obviously thought she was. Hunters had a tendency to be young and active and have supernaturally enhanced vigor that they channeled into heavy exercise regimens, which meant that they all tended to have bodies that were
fit
if nothing else. He was biased of course, but he thought Sophie was much more beautiful, and yet he also thought that in any objective ranking that Chloe would end up in the top ten percent for beauty even in an area of stiff competition like Camp Acheron. She looked not only embarrassed by her nakedness, but also ashamed of her body, and that seemed unwarranted to him. He thought it was probably the result of a lifetime of comparing herself to rare beauties like Sophie and Sidewinder Kate. "Chloe, I want you to understand that you
are
beautiful just the way you are. The seals are going to change you to match
my
preferences, but you should never believe that you weren't lovely before. Now, tell me what
you
think a more beautiful version of you would look like. I think that if you paint a picture in my mind, that it will probably change you toward that." He pointed to the pile of armor. "You can put on your armor while you think. We aren't making any changes until you're wearing it."
While most of her equipment was from lead and brass sigiled chests, there was a lot more metal in her equipment than even Sophie's. Only her belt and shoes looked to be leather, and those were probably hand-me-downs from the armory. Her breastplate was thick bronze, and weighed thirty-two kilograms by itself. Her plated skirt, the pteruges as they were called, had more metal strips than did Sophie's. It meant that the skirt articulated a bit more, which was helpful because it also hung down farther, covering Chloe's knees. Her bronze greaves came up almost to her knees, and her forearm guards ran from wrist to elbow. Her round shield had a stylized storm cloud painted on it, a bit of thunder resistance that had come from a brass sigiled chest. Finally, her Corinthian style helmet masked much of her face, leaving her looking like an angry owl and hiding the roundness of her cheeks that might leave the impression that she was younger even than she was. As she put on each item in turn, she thought about beauty, and what it would be like to have it. She did not believe Max's statement that she was beautiful as she was, just as she had never believed such statements from her mother. Between actresses and models and the images of women dreamed up by artists and computers, Chloe saw women who
were
beautiful every day. And while some of them looked like Sophie, none of them looked like Chloe. "Can you make me look like Tamora Whateley?"
"Who?" Max lacked the frame of reference to place a face to the name of any model, super or otherwise. Fiona brought up some pictures on her phone. Since they weren't on Earth, the internet wouldn't give pictures in response to a new request until the next information exchange across the portal, meaning that Fiona had already made relevant image requests some time in the past. The pictures showed a blond woman demonstrating various underwear on her thin body. This was a woman with an angular face, high cheek bones, and visible bumps where the bones of her ribs and pelvis ended. "Oh no, definitely not." His visceral reaction disappointed the Hoplite, and even with her helmet on, she looked offended. "The thing makes you look more attractive
to me
than you already are, it doesn't make you into a completely different person. You'd still have, you know, meat on your bones. You'll still be you, it's just a question of what changes we're making to you, not what person we're replacing you with."
It was a terrible question. "I... I don't know. There's no
part
of me that I want to keep!" Her statement wasn't exactly surprising to Max, but he still felt bad for her actually hearing it.
Fiona shook her head. "It's worse than I thought. But really, you have a cuteness about you right now that most women would love to have. To make it easier for you, consider some of the women that Max already owns. Do you want to look more like Chaeryn? She's a delicate flower of youth and athleticism. Do you want to look more like Ulzhari? She's a brick house with mind melting tits. Would you want to look more like Sidewinder Kate? She's a farm-girl fuck-doll. How about looking like Miriam? She's a teenage tradwife. Or would you prefer to look like Baba Iva, Marceline de Russy, or Ginevra Holmes?" An A-tier hunter, a hunter-turned-talkshow host, and a soccer star. Three beautiful celebrities that even Max could identify, and notably all women who were known for having engaged in strenuous physical activity rather than simply being photographed while looking pretty.
