Thank you for reading! Me and my coauthor Darinost are gradually combining forces and blogs, so the joint comment section for our stories is currently located on discord! Come on in and let us know what you thought, we don’t bite.
Four days earlier.
“Wakey wakey, sunshine!” chirped an obnoxiously bright voice. “We’ve got a busy day ahead of us!” Seo-yun winced and her ears flattened in annoyance as someone began using an electric screwdriver to remove the screws sealing her container shut. From this close, her sensitive ears registered the noise as little more than pure pain.
Her journey had been an endless cavalcade of rape. With her body forced to remain mangled and broken to prevent any resistance, she’d been helpless to stop any of the men from violating her. They’d reached the thousand rapes that Levi had demanded well before the deadline. Seo-yun had long ago lost count, but she was fairly certain that more than twice that number of tally mark threads had been stitched into her body by now, leaving barely any exposed skin.
The days-long gangrape had continued right up until the point when she was bound with metal cables and stuffed into this tiny steel crate. The last time she’d been in something like this, she’d been getting delivered to the Wilmingshires. Seo-yun expected that whatever her destination turned out to be, it would make her former owners look positively friendly.
She missed Sam.
For a long while, all the jostling and shaking of transport had been a torture in and of itself, but eventually it had eased enough – or she’d just grown desensitized enough – for her to sleep. She was glad to have managed it; she didn’t know what sort of nightmare awaited her at her destination, but she knew she’d need as much strength as possible.
The harsh whining of the screwdriver ceased, and the container lid was pulled off. Seo-yun wasted no time drawing in deep breaths of the outside air. There had been air holes in her prison to keep her from suffocating, but not enough to keep the air inside it from becoming stale and unpleasant. Besides, if her experiences with the Petrovs and the Paradisium had taught her anything, it was that every last breath was precious, and she should never turn down the opportunity to fill her lungs.
Her chest heaving, Seo-yun looked up into the glittering eyes of Tanya Petrov. She’d only seen the girl’s face a handful of times, but she would never fail to recognize it, nor the stench of insanity that clung to her. Once, she had considered this woman a friend. Once she had begged her to spare her life. Seo-yun found herself harboring little desire to say anything more to this murderer.
Tanya tapped the tip of the fox’s nose. “Boop!” she announced cheerfully. “Let’s get you dressed so we can get started.”
Whatever hopes Seo-yun had harbored about finding an opportunity to escape, they were dashed when she saw the precautions the girl was taking with her. She began with the fox’s tails, bundling them all together with a zip tie at their base. Eleven more zip ties went down their length, transforming what had been four tails into one. Then she wound the combined tail around the woman’s waist once and tied it off with a knot. Seo-yun thought that was the end of it… until she saw the nail gun. “Spoiler alert,” Tanya teased as she pressed it against the tail. “You’re gonna really hate this!”
Seo-yun grimaced as the tool stabbed a nail through her tail and into her torso. “If one of these goes in the wrong place, it’ll puncture something valuable and you’ll bleed out and die,” the winged girl told her as she lined up another nail. “But don’t worry…” Seo-yun let out a gasp of pain as the second nail penetrated her. “I’ll make sure you don’t get away from me that easily.”
Sixteen nails were buried in Seo-yun’s body by the time Tanya was satisfied. Not only were her tails completely immobilized, the slightest movement jostled the embedded metal and sent hot agony rippling through her entire body. “There!” Tanya said happily. “That’s the easy part done.”
“You’re… wasting your time…” The red haired fox said through gritted teeth. “I’ll never… tell you anything…”
Tanya giggled. “Oh, poor Gingersnaps. You don’t need to tell me anything. Did you think I brought you here to interrogate you, as though I could care less about what a pitiful primitive fox girl has to say? You’re here to be studied, silly.”
She started taping electrodes all over Seo-yun’s body. They didn’t seem to be connected to anything, but that didn’t stop her from placing them carefully and deliberately on her few remaining patches of exposed skin. Once Tanya had placed about thirty she snapped her fingers, and two waiting guards helped her restrain Seo-yun while she freed the fox’s arms. Tanya wrenched her left arm behind her, palm out, and pulled her arm up until something snapped. As Seo-yun cried out from her broken arm, the dark haired girl was already pressing her hand against her back and positioning the nail gun. Three nails in the center of her palm fixed her hand to her upper back, and four more were divided between her upper and lower arm.
Seo-yun pulled at her arm, trying to free it, but even if that didn’t cause excruciating pain, she had no leverage. It didn’t matter how enhanced her muscles were if she couldn’t apply them properly. The worst part was that the break in her arm wasn’t able to heal because of the fixed position. Every attempt to adjust caused bone to scrape against bone and made her want to howl.
“There. Pretty as a picture!” Tanya declared after repeating the process with her right arm. “Oh, and Ginger? When I said you were really going to hate this, I wasn’t talking about the nails.” She buckled some kind of collar around Seo-yun’s neck.
It didn’t feel like much of anything at first, but then it grew tighter. And tighter. And tighter. Seo-yun’s eyes bulged at the sensation of her throat being crushed in a merciless iron grip. It wasn’t just strangling her – though it was certainly doing that too – it felt like it was trying to literally pop her head off!
She hadn’t meant to call upon her bond with Morris if she could help it, preferring to save it as a trump card for when her captors grew careless, but she had no choice. Seo-yun let the strength flow into her, and concentrated on tensing her neck muscles against the crushing pressure. It didn’t stop the collar from being uncomfortable, incredibly uncomfortable, but it allowed her to draw a trickle of oxygen into her lungs.
“Much better,” said Tanya approvingly. She stood the fox up, letting Seo-yun finally look at her surroundings, her chest already heaving with the strain of drawing in air. The place was… bizarre. It was a large and unfriendly looking room with bare metal walls and no windows to be seen. A small but conspicuous floor safe was set up against one wall, and there were large contraptions everywhere, most of which she couldn’t begin to guess the purpose of. Others made her think of torture devices and the pirate dungeon she had fought Sam in years ago, but also of a place Morris called a gym. What was this?
She was still staring when Tanya jabbed a cattle prod against one butt cheek, delivering an electric shock that made her stumble forward and nearly fall before she caught her balance. “Up and at ‘em, lazybones!” Tanya said, and jabbed her again. “Let’s stretch those legs a little, take a lap around the lab.”
Seo-yun started to walk and immediately regretted it. The dozens of nails inside her all produced fresh waves of agony, as did her broken arms. Walking with her arms bound behind her wasn’t easy, and the thought of how much it would hurt to fall made her flinch. She instinctively tried to call upon Morris for stamina, and gasped as her collar began to choke her again.
The prod shocked her a second time. “Come on, Gingersnaps, I know you’re just a dumb animal, but all I’m asking you to do is walk. I’m not even asking you to chew bubblegum at the same time.”
Seo-yun staggered forward, trying to avoid the pain of the cattle prod. She dug in deep, and managed to draw enough power from her bond to both breathe and move, though she did both clumsily. Using the connection she had with Morris had become as easy as using any other muscle over the last few years, but she hadn’t been forced to strain it this hard since the Paradisium.
Tanya walked happily behind her as the fox unsteadily made her way around the large room, sticking her with the cattle prod whenever Seo-yun slowed down. “There’s a good doggie,” she said approvingly. “What we’re doing right now is using those sensors on your body to track everything we can about what’s going in in there.“
“You know… nothing… about this… power…” Seo-yun gasped out. She was dizzy from lack of oxygen and her legs wobbled unsteadily as she stumbled forward.
“Oh, you mean the soul bond you and Jack Morris have shared since you ate him without any foxfire present?” Tanya asked innocently. “The bond that awoke from seeing his wife again, functions when the two of you act in sync, and provides strength, stamina, and unconscious knowledge? The one that’s so unique the only other kitsune you’ve ever spoken to had no idea it was even possible? That power?” She whistled. “You’re right, I’m ab-so-lutely clueless about this indecipherable arcane mystery. But I’ll try and muddle on regardless.”
“How…?” Seo-yun’s legs got tangled up and she fell for the first time. It was even more painful than she’d expected, and blood was streaming down her body from a dozen different places as Tanya grabbed one of her pinned arms and helped her to stand back up.
“I wouldn’t waste any energy on thinking if I were you, Gingersnaps,” Tanya told her. “Goddess knows we’re not interested in you for your brain. Just shut that pretty little mouth and keep on walking, that’s it. Look, we’ve almost done an entire half of a lap already! How do you feel about another forty nine? Just as a warmup for the real exercise, of course.”
The fox’s legs felt like jelly, and she was having trouble mustering enough strength to even keep her airway open. She had to settle for letting the collar tighten painfully around her neck for ten to twenty seconds until the blood was pounding in her ears and her windpipe felt like it was about to be crushed, and then use just enough power to force a single breath through. She had to keep going, she reminded herself. Sam was going to be coming for her. Seo-yun had to hold out until then, however long it took, or else not only would she never see the woman again, her wife would probably get herself killed trying to reach her.
“Anyway,” Tanya chirped, “we obviously can’t just replicate what happened to you, but we don’t need to. We just need to understand enough about exactly what it’s doing to your body, and then I can start finding ways to mimic it, like I did with the fox marbles.” She jabbed Seo-yun in the side with her index finger. “You’re chock full of data right now, and all we’ve gotta do is sweat it out of you. If you’re a good girl, I’ll let you die once we have what we need. Levi will be super duper angry about it, but that’ll be half the fun.”
Seo-yun fell again before the first lap was finished, and she didn’t bother trying to get back up, shying away from Tanya when the girl tried to grab her arm again. What was the point? It was clear that Tanya intended the rest of her life to be agony, right up until her death. And the harder she fought to stay alive, the closer Paragon would get to being able to abuse her powers for their own gain. The fox released her grip on her power and felt her airway tighten once more, forcing what would possibly be her last breath from her lungs. She still had no desire to die, but right now, Tanya wanted to keep her alive more than Seo-yun wanted to stay alive. Let her figure out how to keep Seo-yun from dying.
“Oh my oshkosh b’gosh”, Tanya intoned in a deadpan. “My valuable test subject has chosen the sweet escape of death over helping her vile captors. No one could have possibly predicted this turn of events.” Someone knocked on the door to the room, and she grinned. “And there’s your motivation, right on cue.” She raised her voice. “Bring her in!”
Seo-yun didn’t recognize the kitsune that the guards wheeled in, but that didn’t matter. She was young, bald, naked, and clearly terrified. She’d been bound face up to a large barrel, her arms, legs, and tails all secured to leave her exposed and unable to move a muscle to defend herself.. “Gingersnaps, meet Sakura,” the winged girl said. “Sakura, this is Gingersnaps, and she…” She patted the girl’s bare stomach. “She is the reason I’m about to hurt you very, very badly.”
Then she raised the cattle prod and stabbed it down, right into the girl’s stomach, hard enough that the metal prongs went straight through her soft flesh and made an ugly sound as they struck the barrel beneath her. She pulled the trigger, and Sakura howled as electricity coursed through her insides. “It’ll take about a full minute and a half of this to kill her!” Tanya shouted cheerfully over the screams. “But just thirty seconds will fry some parts of her so bad that even a fox won’t go back to normal, and fifty will turn her into a complete vegetable! I’d hurry up and get back on my feet if I were you!”
Seo-yun had begun doing just that since the moment she’d seen the girl. Her chest ached as she sucked in air and struggled to right herself. The first time had been hard enough with Tanya helping, and now it was so much worse. She had to channel more and more of her power, enough to fuel her legs and torso along with her neck. By the time she stood, she felt like she’d just climbed a mountain. To her horror, the girl didn’t relent with the cattle prod. It had only been fifteen seconds, and already Sakura had screamed loudly enough to lose her voice and burst a blood vessel in her left eye. “Stop…” Seo-yun wheezed. “Have to… stop…”
“Not while you’re just standing there like a lazy kitty,” Tanya said. She gave the prod a sharp twist that made Sakura utter a wet, miserable groan. “Someone has laps to do.”
Seo-yun nearly fell over when she extended her foot forward, but she managed to retain her balance and adopt a clumsy, halting pace. “That’s the spirit,” Tanya told her after finally pulling the cattle prod out of Sakura’s twitching body and tossing the bloody thing to the floor. “And it’s not like that butt of yours couldn’t use the workout. Levi likes his fucktoys nice and lean, you know? Anyway, you just keep this little object lesson in mind next time you’re thinking of taking a break. I need you alive for now, sure, but you came with hundreds of worthless furry cum dumps in tow, and I will murder every last one of them if that’s what it takes to make you behave… understand?”
When the redhead didn’t respond, her attention fixated on continuing to put one foot ahead of the other, the winged girl clucked her tongue. Sakura didn’t have the breath to scream when Tanya rammed her fist into the bound fox’s pussy, but she tried her best. The bald girl squealed and squirmed in place as Tanya snapped her arm back and drove it in again, and again, setting a quick rhythm that used her insides as a punching bag. “I asked you if you understood,” Tanya said reprovingly.
“Yes!” Seo-yun cried out quickly. “Yes.. I understand… I understand…!”
“Good.” Tanya kept her entire forearm buried inside Sakura as she leaned forward to plant a little kiss on the woman’s clitoris. “Yes, what?” she asked, without taking her eyes off of the bald fox.
“Y-yes… mistress…” Seo-yun answered.
“Now there’s the sweet submissive Ginger I used to know,” Tanya said. “I think that’s enough walking for now. We’ve got a lot to do in the next few days, after all. Let’s step it up to a jog.” While Seo-yun suppressed a whimper and forced her tortured, exhausted body to push itself even harder, her torturer wasn’t even watching, her attention on the bound kitsune. “I’m sorry I had to do that to you, Socks. I know you’re a good little fox slut who just wants to do what she’s told, right?” The girl nodded fearfully, her eyes still fixed on Tanya’s arm inside her.
“So here’s the deal,” Tanya said softly, though her words were loud enough to reach Seo-yun’s ears, and the fox was certain that was deliberate. “I’m going to have to hurt you again in about ten minutes, when your fox friend over there slips up and takes another nasty tumble..” Sakura immediately began to beg for mercy, the words rushing out in an unintelligible stream of desperation, and Tanya raised her free hand. “Shhh, Socks, none of that now. It’s out of my hands, okay? But there’s no reason the two of us can’t be friends and have ourselves a good time until then, is there? Is there?” The bound girl shook her head. “Exactly.”
Tanya began pumping her arm in and out of the fox again, but at a much slower pace, her fingers gently stroking the girl’s walls. “Does this still hurt?” Sakura shook her head nervously. “It feels good, right? Even after everything I did to you, even knowing that I’m going to make you scream some more in a few minutes, this still feels really good, doesn’t it?” A shaky, hesitant nod. “There’s no need to be so quiet. I like vocal pets, Socks. Are you enjoying getting fisted by one of your owners?”
“Y-yes, mistress,” Sakura said, her voice barely above a whisper.
“There’s a good girl,” Tanya cooed. “I like honest pets too, and that deserves a treat.” She lowered her head and began to lap and suck at Sakura’s clit, making the girl gasp. “Mmm, you taste REALLY good. Is that why you’re called Sakura? Because you taste as sweet as a cherry blossom?”
“I-I don’t kn-know, mistress,” the girl panted.
Tanya giggled. “You’re adorable! I think if we work together, we can make you cum before time is up. Call it a thank you present for being such a good sport about all this. All I need you to do for me is close your eyes and relax, and I’ll take care of everything else.”
“I, I don’t…” Sakura said uncertainly.
“Don’t worry, sweetie, it’s not time to hurt you yet. And who knows? Maybe I’m wrong. There are a few futures where Gingersnaps over there beats the odds and stays on her feet, and you and I get to spend the next hour seeing how many times we can make a cute fox slut cum. I can think of worse ways to pass the time. And think of it this way…” Tanya stroked the girl’s trembling face. “If I hurt you, when I hurt you… do you really want to see it coming?”
Sakura gulped and closed her eyes.
Seo-yun tried to ignore the shooting pains that were running up her legs after every step now. She’d pulled a muscle, or maybe several muscles, and all she’d need to do is rest for a minute or two to recover, but she knew the price that would be paid for it. And she knew that Tanya was right: she couldn’t keep doing this forever. She’d finished four uneven laps by now, and her gait was growing more unsteady by the second. It was inertia more than anything else keeping her moving forward by now. And when she expended the last of her resources and fell, she wasn’t going to be able to get back up anytime soon.
But that was a problem for later. Even if Tanya wasn’t being serious when she’d said that she might be able to stay on her feet, the woman was neither omniscient nor omnipotent. If Seo-yun could just keep moving, keep enduring, she could defy her fate. She had to believe that was true, or there was no hope at all.
Her attention wavered when Sakura let out a moan, and she nearly fell right then and there before correcting herself. She couldn’t spare the two of them more than a glance, but it was enough to see that Tanya had replaced the arm she had inside the girl with a dildo. She was stroking it in and out of Sakura with one hand, while the other teased the girl’s clitoris. “I think this might just be my favorite part of seeing the future,” Tanya told her. “I can see as clear as day that if I just do a little of this, and this, and make sure to rub right here every time I push in” – Sakura moaned again – “See? You’re like an open book to me, Socks, except that I’m the one who gets to write the ending. I could give you the most mind blowing, hair raising orgasm of your entire life if I wanted. And all you have to do, my little foxy pet, is say please.”
“Please, mistress,” Sakura gasped, her entire body taut as a wire now. Seo-yun remembered how she’d felt during her own early days of captivity. Enduring the guilt and shame whenever she felt stimulation from being raped, no matter how much she didn’t want to feel any pleasure at all. Being mocked and humiliated whenever one of her captors noticed what was happening to her, and labeled her a slut and a masochist who deserved everything she got. Having to help disgusting pigs find pleasure over and over, while being cruelly denied any of it herself, for no other reason than to make her miserable. There had been moments when she’d wanted to cum, just one single genuine orgasm that was all her own to enjoy, even more than she wanted to escape.
“Say it like you mean it, Socks.”
“Pleaaaase, mistress,” the fox begged.
Seo-yun tried not to look, tried not to listen. Tanya was stalling for time, waiting for her to fall and spoil things, but Seo-yun wasn’t going to let it happen. It would be the most minor of victories, but it would be a victory nonetheless, proof that for all of Tanya’s power, she couldn’t control everything. One foot forward. Another. Another. Another.
“Third time’s the charm, Socks.” Tanya had let the vibrator slip out of the girl, and held it poised at her entrance, sliding the tip of it up and down her pussy lips to make the fox shiver in anticipation. “And you should really watch this, Gingersnaps. Maybe it’ll change your mind about me.”
Seo-yun knew her words were a trap. She knew it. But she couldn’t help looking anyway, just one more quick glance that lasted less than a heartbeat. And she saw it. Saw what Tanya was holding in her hand. Saw what the girl was planning to do to her oblivious captive. She didn’t know if it was her or Morris who spun back towards the two of them, leaping forward to stop what was about to happen.
Three things happened in quick succession.
Her spent, overtaxed body couldn’t handle the sudden change, and her legs gave out from under her to send her crashing face first to the floor.
Sakura gasped and trembled as Tanya pinched her clit, causing a burst of stimulation that pushed the girl over the edge and started sending waves of pure bliss rippling through her body.
And Tanya, who had already set aside the vibrator, winked at Seo-yun, and then drove the cattle prod into Sakura’s pussy.
The bald girl convulsed and gurgled as pure bliss collided with searing agony. Her body flopped in its bonds and an inhuman scream was ripped from her lungs. Her frenzied movements only grew more violent with each passing second, and Seo-yun realized to her horror that Tanya was still using the cattle prod, fucking the hapless girl and electrocuting her at the same time. She was orgasming, and she was being tortured to death, and Seo-yun was certain that in that moment, Sakura had no idea which was which.
Tanya’s gales of laughter rose above the girl’s cries. “Goddess, I love you foxes,” she crowed. “Sweet and innocent and so much fun to play with!”
By the time she finally stopped electrocuting the girl, Sakura had long since passed out. Her body twitched sporadically as she drooled, her eyes wide open and unseeing. “Looks like it’s naptime for Socks,” Tanya observed after she’d calmed down. “I really should let the poor thing sleep if I don’t want to cause any permanent damage, and who’d ever want to hurt a lovely little fox like her? Sooo….” She smiled at Seo-yun, who was still prone on the floor. “Which one of my two fox fucktoys gets to rest? Her or you?”
The redhead slowly forced herself up to her knees. She expected at any moment that Tanya would punish Sakura for her slowness, but even the madwoman seemed to understand that this was as fast as she could manage right now. Her muscles begged for mercy as she made it back to her feet, but Seo-yun herself remained silent while she pushed her body to its limits. She already knew that asking a creature like this for help would only entice her to hurt her more. Without saying a word or looking at the winged girl, the fox got back to jogging.
Seo-yun gave her plate another suspicious look. There had to be something wrong with it. She just didn’t know what.
Tanya let out a good natured sigh. “Gingersnaps, your food is going to get cold at this rate. I promise you, there’s no drugs or poison or yucky stuff or ground up people or anything in there. Here, look at this way: if I wanted to make you eat something like that, I wouldn’t have to play games: I could just pry open your mouth and do it. And we both know I’d enjoy it too. This isn’t about playing with the family pet, it’s just dinner time.”
Chicken breast. Mashed potatoes. A salad on the side. Something about the arrangement tugged at the fox’s memory, but she couldn’t grab hold of it.
Seo-yun had felt more than half dead by the time Tanya had called an end to the torture session she’d been calling a study. Just as the girl had promised, the jogging had only been the beginning. She’d spent the rest of the day in one or another of the contraptions in the room. It had been no coincidence that their appearance reminded Morris of a gym, because they were like fitness machines, only punishingly difficult and without any kind of safeties. Seo-yun had exercised what felt like every last muscle in her body, forcing them all to lift huge weights, to strain against heavy cables, to stay in constant motion… and whenever she couldn’t keep up, it was someone else who paid for it. Tanya had brought in several other foxes as the day progressed, exchanging bloody, unconscious bodies for fresh terrified victims.
The bondage she was in had changed from time to time, to accommodate whatever new torturous exercise was being demanded of her, but after the first couple hours, they weren’t really even necessary to keep her subdued. If not for Morris, she wouldn’t have been able to do more than twitch and moan after the third machine. Even when calling upon his assistance and stretching his power to its fullest, she was little stronger than a normal kitsune. But the painful restraints remained, and no matter how weak Seo-yun became, Tanya had already anticipated it, every new ordeal perfectly calibrated to be just barely manageable.
When it was finally over, the redhead had expected to be tossed in a cell and left to starve for the night, and that was the best case scenario; she’d have been unsurprised to be delivered to a gangrape and told that their cum was going to be her dinner. But instead, Tanya has brought her… here. To the kitchen of what the woman claimed was her own living quarters. And while Seo-yun had been restrained once again with zip ties and nails, and still wore the ever unpleasant collar, she’d been otherwise left unmolested. She was sitting in an actual chair, for Inari’s sake.
“It’s really good!” said the young woman next to her earnestly. “Tanya is awesome when it comes to cooking!” Nami proffered once again the forkful of chicken and potatoes that she was holding. “And I don’t mind helping you eat, promise!”
“It’s not as bizarre as you seem to think it is,” Tanya said dryly from across the kitchen table. “I know my brother and almost everyone else in a hundred miles with a dick thinks women should be kept on a liquid protein diet, but I’m not here to fuck you, Ginger. I need you to stay alive for the next three days, and that means providing proper nutrients. I’m already cooking meals for the brat, and for this stray dog that followed me home. One more doesn’t mean much.”
The last person at the table, Astaria, arched an eyebrow. “Last night, you called me the most beautiful woman you had ever met, and now I am but a stray dog?”
“It’s not too late to make you eat on the floor instead of at the table,” Tanya countered with a smile. “You are here to get fucked, Delphy, and I still haven’t decided whether your dessert is going to be what’s in the freezer or what’s between my legs. Keep giving me lip and I might not let you eat me out at all tonight.” She looked at Seo-yun. “My slave here is still in the closet about what a wonderfully submissive slut she is. She wants me to ride her hard and put her away wet, but she doesn’t want to want that.” Astaria’s face flushed, but she didn’t argue. “Luckily for her,” Tanya added, “it’s adorable to watch her squirm.”
“Why three days?” Seo-yun asked slowly, ignoring the girl’s attempts to make it seem like this was just a casual dinner.
“Hmm? Because that’s when Sam and Hanabi get here, of course,” Tanya answered easily, and munched on some of her chicken.
Seo-yun’s heart sank at the knowledge that her captor knew more about her plan to escape than she did. “What do you intend to do to them?”
“Well, it won’t involve cooking them dinner,” the winged girl said cheerfully. “So if I were you, I wouldn’t pass up the opportunity while you’ve got it.”
“Why don’t you want to eat?” Nami asked, confused. “Aren’t you hungry?” The word alone was enough to make Seo-yun’s stomach growl again.
“She doesn’t want to eat because I want her to eat,” Tanya told her. “And she thinks that anything I want must be bad. But what Gingersnaps isn’t considering is that we both have the same goal right now. I want her healthy for my tests, and she wants to be healthy so she can escape.”
“My name is Seo-yun,” the fox said irritably. Whether it was here or in the lab, she felt like the girl was mocking and playing with her. But… she wasn’t wrong. If the next three days were going to be anything like this one, she felt like she would need all of her strength just to survive, let alone initiate a counterattack. So though the tips of her ears had turned pink, she leaned over and closed her mouth around the forkful of food Nami was still holding for her. Part of her still expected to bite into broken glass or something similarly unpleasant, but the food was warm and delicious. Nami grinned at her and offered another bite.
“Sure, sure,” Tanya said waving a hand dismissively. “Seo-yun, daughter of Seijun and Yuudai, wayward scion of Hanei village. But what’s wrong with some nicknames between friends?”
“We’re not friends,” Seo-yun snapped.
Tanya shrugged. “We used to be, though, right? Heck, this isn’t even the first time I’ve cooked you dinner. Though I’ll admit, Betty did most of the heavy lifting back then. That food was positively divine, wasn’t it?”
“And you betrayed her and left her to die,” the fox said coldly.
“Just like Tanya betrayed me,” Astaria agreed. The dragon had seemed to be in good spirits despite herself before, but now her expression was grim.
“It was a game, Gingersnaps. A competition. Don’t blame me for playing it instead of trying to buck the system by banding together. And Betty is fine.” Tanya giggled. “Trust me, if that girl had thought those spiders could actually kill her, she probably would’ve kissed me for helping her out.”
“And Nadia?” Astaria asked quietly. “Is she fine as well?”
Tanya rolled her eyes. “You murder one little sibling, and people never let you hear the end of it. Speaking of gratitude, you should both be thanking me for everything I did back there.” She regarded their disbelieving stares. “What? You’re seriously going to look at me like that?”
She pointed her fork at Astaria, “If you hadn’t gone through that little tussle with the spiders, how much dragonfire do you think you’d be nursing right now? And while we’re rehashing the past, now that you know your father better, can you really see Kitkat genuinely honoring that deal you made with him? He would have murdered you in cold blood before relinquishing a single inch of his empire.”
“But you told me before that without your interference, I would have taken over the Paradisium and transformed it into a beacon of hope,” Astaria said.
“I told you what you needed to hear at the time,” Tanya countered. “That was a possible future, but by no means the most likely. For every path where you became this place’s new head honcho, there were literally millions that ended quickly and brutally for you.”
“So now you’re going to claim you betrayed me to save my life?” Astaria asked.
“Why not? I saved hers too.” Tanya’s fork swung in Seo-yun’s direction. “And her wife’s. No self destructing Nadia means the great Ember gets torn apart by her fans, and Gingersnaps here either gets tossed as meat or left with my brother. Plus, Nadia was already planning to off herself. I just arranged things so she’d get to give the entire Paradisium – and me personally – the finger on her way out, which was literally the nicest gift my sister ever received in her life.” She put the fork in her mouth and nodded.
“Then I will do my best to quench my hatred and learn to forgive all that you have done,” Seo-yun said flatly, “if you can look me in the eyes and tell me that anything of what you just said was done deliberately, and not merely an unintended byproduct of your schemes.”
Tanya laughed and sat back in her seat. “Ahhh, you got me there, Gingersnaps. Like I keep telling Delphy, that’s the trouble with this whole future sight stuff: no perfect outcomes. At the end of the day, all I can do is point things in the right direction and then roll with the punches. If I spent all my time fretting about winged lizard sluts and four tailed fucktoys, I’d never get anywhere. But it doesn’t change the fact that you’d both be dead or worse without me.”
“You do not get credit for simply allowing good things to happen,” said Astaria. “Any more than you would congratulate a man each morning for not murdering his neighbor last night.”
“Tanya is a good person!” Nami insisted hotly as she looked between the three of them. “I dunno what she did in the past and I don’t care! It’s thanks to her that I’m not, not like I used to be!”
“See? I’ve got the kid on my side, and she’s worth more than ten of each of you,” said Tanya. Nami squealed happily as the winged girl abruptly tickled her for a few seconds. “I think someone just earned herself an extra scoop of ice cream tonight!”
“Well, where I come from there’s this kind of tradition where someone who’s been sentenced to death gets whatever they want for their last meal. I don’t think Levinson is going to be quite so generous, but I can at least think about what it would be. Mine would be some chicken. A chicken breast cooked just right, nice and juicy with the skin still crisp on it, and some mashed potatoes on the side, garlic and butter. Should probably have a small salad too, have at least one green thing on my plate.” He reconsidered. “Well, I guess I don’t really have to worry about that anymore. Maybe a couple scoops of ice cream after instead, if I’ve got room. You?”
Seo-yun looked at her plate again. “This is Morris’s last meal,” she accused.
“Yeah, you didn’t notice?” Tanya replied easily. “Levi didn’t let him have one, so it seemed like the polite thing to do. Even got him that chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream he prefers too, and take it from me, that is not a very popular flavor in this corner of the world. Had to place a special order two months ago for it.”
“But how did you know about this?” Seo-yun demanded. There had been guards listening while they’d talked back then, but she couldn’t imagine any of them remembering such insignificant details, let alone deciding they should be passed on.
Tanya grinned and waggled her fingers. “I’m magic, remember?”
“She cheats,” Astaria said bluntly. “I figured it out some time ago. She looks ahead to future potential conversations and pulls information from there, without ever having to actually hold the conversation in real life.”
“Sure, spoil all my fun,” Tanya pouted. “How’d you figure that out anyway?”
“I had a hunch several months ago, after you flaunted it in front of me one time too many . I composed a list of simple questions you might ask, and resolved to lie about them if the time came. Three weeks ago you poured hot wax on me while wishing me a happy birthday. That was exactly the day I’d decided to claim it was, but I had never actually told the false date to anyone or written it down anywhere.”
“That’s mean,” Tanya said. “I love it!”
Seo-yun shook her head. “But… I wouldn’t tell you this,” she insisted. “That was a private moment between the two of us. What possible conversation could you have had where I divulge that information?”
“How should I know?” Tanya replied. “…What? I can see the future. Emphasis future. Once something stops being a possibility, poof! I forget all about it. Only reason I know anything at all about it now is cause I wrote what I needed down. At one point we could have had that conversation, but we didn’t. And now we never will, so I’m as clueless about the context as you are, and thank Goddess for that. My head is already stuffed full of what could be, don’t need to go adding what couldn’t too.”
Astaria was regarding the girl thoughtfully. “So you know nothing of the futures you’ve avoided, or why you avoided them…”
“Aww, Delphy, it’s adorable how you keep trying to think up ways to beat me, like I’m not your best friend and favorite mistress. How should I punish you for this latest display of insolence, hmm? Kitkat has been keeping you busy on and off all week, but he isn’t going to call for you again until he wakes up tomorrow morning needing to piss, so I’ve got all night to train my dragon subby and a strap-on that’s looking forward to its three favorite sheathes. Should I give you a good hard spanking and then plug that ass? Paddle your cunt until it’s all red and sore when I stuff it? Or would you prefer I just sit on your face and make you choke on me while I flog those tits?” When Astaria looked away, Tanya leaned over and tapped the woman’s plate with her fork. “That wasn’t a rhetorical question, Delphy. Better choose fast, or I’ll pick all three. Or if I’m feeling really cruel, none at all.”
“The paddle,” Astaria said quietly, her cheeks red, and then put her head down and focused on the rest of her food.
“When do I get to do that kinda stuff?” Nami asked eagerly.
“When you’re feeling older, kiddo,” Tanya said. “Much, much older. In the meantime, though, how do you feel about a little slumber party with your new fox friend?”
“You would trust me alone with her?” Seo-yun said suspiciously. “You don’t think I’d try to escape?”
“Hey, you wanna try fighting or running from a gumiho, be my guest,” Tanya said. “I’d put money on the kid any day of the week. Give you back your skin and your fox marble, and I still wouldn’t call that a fair fight.” She raised one hand and the girl happily gave her a hi five.
“I don’t get hungry anymore neither!” Nami said proudly. “Tanya made me a special marble. No one else has one like it, and it’s all mine!”
Seo-yun and Astaria shared a look. The vulpan were bad enough, and they were pale imitations of true gumiho. If Tanya really had perfected a method of creating more, she was more dangerous than ever. How many of the imprisoned kitsune could resist being brainwashed by her like Nami had?
“How’d your chicken come out, anyway?” Tanya asked. “I tried to get it just the way your better half likes it.” When Seo-yun didn’t respond, she waited a beat, then added “What, you’ve decided to give me the silent treatment now? Even the brat is more mature than that.”
“What would be the point in answering?” Seo-yun asked plainly. “You already know my responses, yes? I’m not interested in going through the motions.”
The winged girl shook her head. “Doesn’t work like that, Gingersnaps. I mean, it could work like that, but only if I wanted to give myself one hell of a headache. Conversations are a bitch and a half to follow closely.”
“And why is that, exactly?” Astaria asked.
Tanya winked at Seo-yun. “See what I mean? It’s like baby’s first scheming. We keep going like this and in a few hundred years, she might actually work her way up to telling a lie. Anyway, most stuff people do doesn’t have all that much variance: someone starts walking down the hall, chances are they’re gonna keep walking, not start doing cartwheels or break into song. But even a simple conversation has a bunch of potential lines at any given time, and each and every one of those has its own set of potential responses, and then each of those has another bunch of responses, and each of those, and so on and so on. I can look ahead to a future conversation and get the general gist of how it’s gonna go, but in the moment? I’m as blind as you are… unless I try annoyingly hard. And if I have to be annoyed, I’m going to take it out on someone. So I’ll ask again, cause I really don’t know: how’d the chicken come out?”
“…It is fine,” Seo-yun answered. Despite the short statement and sullen tone, the girl beamed as if she’d just been given effusive praise.
“The day you just went through, and it’s so good that it still merits a ‘fine’?” she teased. “I must’ve gotten it perfect!”
Tanya continued making conversation throughout the meal, as though they were all friends gathered together instead of two captives and one badly deluded and unstable kitsune. Seo-yun finished her plate and even asked for seconds, determined to make the most of this opportunity. Tomorrow Tanya might have changed her mind and decided to start starving her after all.
Once the food was gone, Astaria began gathering up all the dirty dishes and bringing them to the sink, where Tanya had begun to wash them. As she walked past Seo-yun, one precariously placed glass slipped and fell to the floor. The fox flinched as it hit with a sharp noise and shattered into multiple pieces. “I’m sorry,” Astaria said quickly. “I’ll clean it up.”
“No worries,” Tanya said. “This is all Kitkat’s stuff, after all, not mine. I’ll go bother him for a new glass tomorrow.”
The dragon finished clearing away the remaining dishes, then came back to gather the fallen fragments. As she knelt, she spoke in a very quiet whisper, low enough that only Seo-yun’s sharp ears were able to pick it up. “She’s not as powerful as she wants you to think she is,” Astaria whispered. “She flaunts her abilities because she wants you to believe that she already has all the cards, and give up without trying.”
Seo-yun did her best to show no reaction to Astaria’s words, save for catching the woman’s eye as she stood back up to signal that she’d heard the message. Astaria was right: Tanya was only human. An incredibly dangerous and seemingly insane human, but not all powerful or all seeing. Seo-yun couldn’t let herself forget that.
After dinner, the girl led her to Nami’s room, where a second bed had been set up. “I’d rather not have to lock you in,” Tanya said. “The brat has to get up in the middle of the night sometimes to use the bathroom. So we’re gonna try an honor system, okay? You’ve studied this place’s security well enough to know that trying to bolt will just get you turned to meat.” To Seo-yun’s astonishment, Tanya began to remove the nails and other bindings on her. “What? You’re going to be no good to anyone if you don’t get a proper sleep.”
“I could kill you right now,” Seo-yun told her softly as she flexed her tails slightly, easing the stiffness from being bound in place for so long. “How are you so certain I won’t?”
“Because if I have so much as a bruise on my cheek when Levi pays us a visit tomorrow,” Tanya said, “he’s gonna rape you to death right then and there no matter what I tell him. And if you do anything worse… I know it would be really satisfying to kill me, Ginger, I get it, but we both know that if I die, everyone goes on high alert and your entire plan will be doomed. Now, if you were a worse person, you might decide to ignore that and murder me anyway, but that’s not you, is it? You’ve already got enough death on your conscience.”
She finished removing all of the bondage from Seo-yun, including the terrible collar, and then patted one of the beds with her hand. “We can keep debating if you want, but you’re exhausted, and tomorrow will be worse than today. Get some sleep; in the morning we’ll have breakfast and then get back to work.”
Seo-yun quivered with barely checked frustration. “Why do you do this?” she demanded. “Why do you play this game of pretending to show compassion? I have seen your true face, Tanya Petrov. Only hours ago I watched you happily torture several innocent men and women. Do you really think I can forget that because you give me food and a place to sleep?”
Tanya shrugged, unruffled by the kitsune’s words. “I know what I want out of you, and I’ll get it… one way or the other. It’s not my fault nothing motivates you better than seeing someone else treated cruelly. We’re under a time crunch, Ginger, and I need you to give it your all if we’re gonna make it. Believe me, if I could get the same performance out of you by just pumping “Eye of the Tiger” through the loudspeakers, I’d do that and save us all the trouble.” She smirked. “It’s really not as complicated as you want to think it is. I’m mean when it helps me to be mean, and nice when it helps me to be nice.”
“You mean that you lie and deceive and manipulate people.”
“Sure, that’s one way to look at it,” Tanya said lightly. “The way I see it, the only real difference between me and everyone else is that you all act the way that you want and hope for the best. I don’t have the luxury of stumbling around in the dark like that; I act the way I need, because I know. Whether that means being the cruel sociopath tormenting you mercilessly, or your best friend in the whole wide world. I’m multipurpose.”
“So easily you shed responsibility for your actions,” said Seo-yun bitterly. “And ignore the victims you have created along the way.”
“And? This is a big omelet we’re cooking up here, Ginger, and we’ve already broken plenty of eggs to get here. I’ve got nothing against Socks and the rest of them, but it’s way too late to start talking about turning off the stove.” She nodded to herself. “Yeah, that’s what we’ll do for breakfast tomorrow, omelets. Goodnight!” She gave Seo-yun a little wave and left, leaving the red fox staring at her departing and defenseless back. It was the most bloodthirsty she’d ever felt since losing her marble, but she already knew that the girl was right. Killing Tanya wasn’t worth the lives of everyone here.
Still, she longed to be foolish.
“Why the hell can’t I fuck her?” Levi growled. “She’s my fucktoy!”
“And she’s MY test subject,” Tanya said calmly. “If you were human, I’d tell you to have fun hosing her down, and to give her a few smacks for me while you’re at it. But right now, you’d tear her in half, and not in the sexy way.”
“And whose fault is that?!” Levi roared. The massive vulpan paced around the room, so enraged that every furious step made the whole place rattle. “You let this happen to me!” His tails whipped from side to side, knocking over several pieces of equipment.
It was difficult to focus on the siblings’ conversation, but Seo-yun did her best, anxious for anything that could distract her. After last night, she’d harbored the faint hope that maybe Tanya would be a little more gentle in her treatment, but if anything the girl was making up for her earlier kindness by being crueler than ever.
She was practically missing the nails by now. Her hands were bound behind her in a similar fashion, but with chains this time that connected to that infernal collar she now wore again. “Today’s mostly a leg day, but it would be a shame if you didn’t get to exercise these arms too,” Tanya had teased, and Seo-yun had soon understood what she was talking about. With her arms now bound to the thing, lowering them would cause it to constrict around her neck even harder, the crushing power of it now beyond even her bond’s ability to protect herself. The only way to breathe was to force her arms as far up as possible, and the weights Tanya had delighted in attaching to her forearms meant that that task too required calling on her bond.
She’d never had to use her ability this much or for this long. It felt… wrong to use it like this, as though it was no more than a simple tool. It was something special and sacred. And though she didn’t even want to think about the possibility, part of her was terrified that it might not last forever. What if she pulled too hard, or too quickly, or for too long, and Morris simply vanished, his soul burned away just to keep her alive for a little longer?
It was almost enough to make her give up and let the collar kill her. All that stopped her were the two people who always managed to set her straight: Sam and Jack. Her wife was going to be here soon, and if Seo-yun had taken the easy way out and killed herself by then, knowing that it would guarantee Sam’s death, it would be as bad as murdering the woman with her own hands.
As for Morris, he’d violently resisted every time she’d even considered stepping away from him. He worried about the risk just as much as she did, but he was determined to see this through. She couldn’t ignore the fact that this was ultimately his decision to make, not hers, and she needed to respect that, no matter how much it worried her.
After all, it was more than just her arms and neck that needed every bit of stamina she could bolster right now. Tanya had strung a length of barbed wire from one side of the room to the other, set a few feet up in the air. It was high enough that once she’d forced Seo-yun to straddle it, the fox had to stand on her very tiptoes to prevent the barbed wire from viciously cutting into her genitals. “All you have to do is waddle all the way to the end,” Tanya had told her, “pick up the little present I left for you there, and then waddle on back. Easy peasy, right?”
Seo-yun teetered in place, and took another uneasy step forward. The girl had lined the floor with a haphazard arrangement of tacks, all of them glued in place. A single misstep when she’d started had confirmed that her weight was enough to drive a tack straight through her toe, the metal spike thrust hard enough that it had ripped her toenail off in the process. She hadn’t made that mistake again, but only through extreme caution, which meant moving even more slowly.
The fox winced as she reached the next “knot” in the wire, a bundle of barbed wire thick enough that she wouldn’t be able to stop it from rubbing against her pussy lips as she passed over it. She’d endured more than a dozen of them in her slow journey across the room, and still had many more to get through.
“You know that’s not true,” Tanya was telling her brother. “Honestly, Levi, you should be ashamed of yourself! I specifically called you beforehand and warned you that Ginger was on her way! I gave you everything you needed to ambush her!”
Levi stalked up to his sister, close enough that he could tear her head off with a flick of his paw. “Then why didn’t you warn me that she would do this to me?!”
His condition was one of the only bright spots of Seo-yun’s captivity. As she’d expected, even a vulpan couldn’t heal what was missing. The damage she’d done to his liver was so severe that the man had to remain in vulpan form permanently now. As a human, he would be dead in minutes. And even in this form, he seemed to be in constant pain from his injury, which suited her just fine.
Seo-yun let out a small hiss as her slit pressed against the barbed wire knot. Her instinct was to focus all of her attention down there to protect her vulnerable flesh, but she couldn’t do that. Relax her arms or her neck and she’d start choking again, relax her legs and she wouldn’t be able to keep moving forward. Either way she’d be stuck. She had to instead strain and squeeze even more from her bond, just enough from the rest of her body to stop the barbs from piercing her flesh, which was not at all the same as painless. The knot felt like someone was scrubbing her pussy with steel wool, and when she looked down to watch her step, she half expected to find herself a bloody mess down there despite her protection.
“Maybe because I can’t walk you through every possible outcome?” Tanya protested, sounding angry for perhaps the first time Seo-yun had ever seen. “There were futures I saw where you killed her, where she killed you, and yes, ones where she crippled you like this. What should I have done, given you choreography steps to follow? Faxed you an instruction manual on all the moves she might try? Don’t blame me for what really caused your injury: you not taking her seriously, thinking she was still just a weak little fucktoy you could slap around a bit and tame again! You got what you wanted. It’s not my fault everything didn’t work out as perfect as you hoped.”
Levi roared again in wordless rage, and Seo-yun thought he might actually lose control and kill the winged girl, but Tanya never wavered, and after a long moment it was the vulpan who backed down first. “You’re going to fix this!” he snarled.
“I am,” she agreed, her tone suddenly much more sympathetic. She stroked his side. “I started making the arrangements as soon as I saw the condition you were going to return in, and Father gave me his full support when I told him what I needed. I’m going to make you better, brother. Even better than you were before. The day will come soon when you actually thank Ginger for creating this opportunity, and trust me…” She winked at him. “I know what I’m talking about.”
“I still want to fuck the bitch,” he said sullenly, but he no longer sounded angry with his sister, just petulant.
“We’re doing the surgery tomorrow, you’ll wake up the day after that, and then you can fuck her as hard as you want. In fact…” she cupped her hand as she whispered into his ear, too quietly for even Seo-yun to overhear.
Whatever she said, it seemed to hit Levi hard. “Is that a joke?!” he demanded. His head swung to look at Seo-yun, and she saw raw hate radiating from his eyes. He’d never looked at her with such fury before, not even the day in the forest when she’d nearly escaped from him. “Then give me one good reason I shouldn’t kill her right now…”
For a second, Seo-yun thought he was going to pounce on her, but he stopped when Tanya put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s only a possibility,” she said lightly. “A teeny, tiny one. I just want to be sure that if it does happen, my big brother has my back.”
“I will,” he spat, not taking his eyes off the fox. “I swear to you, I’ll fuck this cunt to death if that ever happens.”
“See? I knew there was a reason I liked you. And brother? I said you couldn’t fuck her. You don’t really think I’d let my brother visit me and leave without getting to pound even one furry fleshlight, do you? Your entertainment should be here any minute. And in the meanwhile, I have two more gifts for my favorite big brother.”
Tanya pulled out a long cloth made of red and white material, and began gently looping it around his neck. “The first gift is already waiting in your room, along with Celeste. I ran some tests with it earlier, and you’re going to love it. And your other gift…” she finished wrapping it around him. “There! Isn’t that just the cutest scarf?”’
Levi glanced down at it. “I recognize this smell,” he said suspiciously. “You went through my personal belongings, didn’t you?”
“Who, me?” Tanya asked innocently. “Maybe I poked around just a little bit, in order to get the best materials for my bestest brother’s gift. And if I did, and I thought those two old pelts looked lonely just sitting there gathering dust, well… can you blame me? Besides, I didn’t tell you who those ratty furs used to belong to…”
“Why should I care what mutts those things were skinned from?” grumbled Levi.
“Because they were a daddy mutt and a mommy mutt,” his sister told him gleefully, “and together they created your favorite four tailed fucktoy.”
Seo-yun had only barely been paying attention to their conversation at this point, her mind distracted more and more by her weariness and pain, but she stared at the scarf in horror now. She didn’t want to believe it, but she could smell the fur too, and it was familiar, horribly familiar, a scent of home that she’d long forgotten until now. “See?” asked Tanya cheerfully as the red haired woman began to sob. “Her whole family has been nothing but wonderful for us Petrovs. Three centuries ago one of our ancestors struck it rich by killing and skinning Ginger’s parents for their tails, and now she’s your fucktoy, my test subject, and all that’s left of her folks is your fluffy new scarf. Isn’t that just perfect?” She began to laugh, and her brother joined her.
The time that followed felt like hours to Seo-yun as she cried and inched her way ever closer to the other side of the room, but it had probably been less than two minutes before vulpan guards shoved a pair of bedraggled kitsune into the room. The two women clung to each other protectively as they looked at the Petrov siblings, waiting to find out why they had been brought here.
“So what’s so special about this pair of cumrags?” Levi asked skeptically. “If they’re from the nest, they’ve already been used a thousand times by now.”
“What’s special about them specifically? Not much,” Tanya told him. “Aside from the joy of playing with a mother and daughter. But it’s been a long time since the two of us got to play together, and these should be particularly fun fucktoys. After all…” she grinned. “I’ve already given them a little incentive, to make up for them being just a couple used up cum dumps: I told them that whichever one of them gets less of my brother’s tasty cum gets to live.”
“Please fuck me,” begged the older kitsune. “I… I’ll be a much better fleshlight than my daughter, I promise. Your men have trained me to be a wonderful cock sucker.”
“But my holes are much tighter!” insisted the younger. “All your men have loved fucking them. You should leave my m-mother to lick your balls while you pound my tight furry body.”
“See? Aren’t they the cutest?” preened Tanya. “Look at how badly they’re trying to protect each other. You girls are going to try your absolute hardest to be the best fucktoys my brother has ever jizzed into, aren’t you?” Both women nodded, trying not to look each other in the eye.
Soon both foxes were kneeling submissively between their owners’ legs, the mother Kaede devoted to licking Levi’s massive cock while the daughter Rei buried her face in Tanya’s muff. “First we’ll see who has the better tongue and deserves to swallow a load of baby batter,” the winged girl declared. “We’ll switch in five minutes, and Sunshine? If you haven’t made me cum at least twice by then, I’ll make sure that the only cum of my brother’s you ever get to guzzle will be what you suck out of your dead mom’s twat, understand?” The fox did, because Tanya quickly gasped in delight and clutched the girl’s hair. “That’s it, sweetie. That’s the tongue of a fox that wants to choke on my big brother’s hard cock.”
She looked over at Seo-yun. “And naturally, Gingersnaps, if you can finish your exercise there before we’re done playing with these two, we’ll leave them both alone and alive. Call it a little reward for not being such a lazy fucktoy for once.” Levi growled in annoyance, making his sister laugh. “Don’t worry, there’s absolutely no chance she’ll manage it. You’ll get to enjoy these two to your heart’s content. I just want her to know that like usual, innocent people are suffering because she’s an incompetent fuckup.”
Seo-yun’s head buzzed with misery as she listened to the obscene litany of sucking and slurping. She didn’t want to think about her current situation, about how her muscles burned and her bloody toes stung and her lungs ached and the thousand other little agonies of her situation. But her only possible distraction was the rape and torture of two helpless women, and even with Tanya’s admission that her offer of mercy was purely about making her feel guilty, she couldn’t help blaming herself for all of it.
And why shouldn’t she? All of this had begun with her getting herself captured years ago. If she’d just killed Levi on that day, so much suffering could have been avoided. So many good people would still be alive. There were times when she could let herself forget that, and feel almost grateful about the way her life had been upended. It had rid her of the curse of being gumiho, given her direction and purpose that she’d thought were gone forever, and most important of all, it had brought her to Sam.
This wasn’t one of those times. Hot tears blurred her vision and almost made her step on another tack as she worked her way down the rope. This was all her fault. All of it. Every act of cruelty the Petrovs inflicted could be laid at her feet.
Tanya giggled. “Look, Levi, poor baby Ginger is crying again! Maybe she’s sad that she doesn’t get to taste your yummy prick. You love it, don’t you, Kay?” The fox nodded quickly, her tongue never pausing in its quest to please and excite Levi. “Let’s give your daughter a taste too, okay? You can come over here and suck her spit out of my cunt while she slurps your drool off my brother.” The two kitsune obediently swapped places, their desperate mouths picking up right where the other had left off.
Seo-yun did her best to blink away the tears. She needed to finish this game Tanya had stuck her in. The girl had claimed she wouldn’t make it, but Seo-yun recalled Astaria’s message the night before. Whether she succeeded or failed would come down to her own strength and perseverance, regardless of what Tanya wanted her to think. The future wasn’t set in stone.
She had nearly reached the far wall by now. Only three more bundles of barbed wire were between her and the “prize” she was meant to retrieve: a canine chew toy shaped like a bone, dangling from the ceiling by a long cord.
She’d just gone past the last knot, her pussy so abraded that her flesh felt like it was on fire every time it so much as grazed the wire, when the Petrovs reached the end of their foreplay. “Which one of them earned a throatful of dick?” Tanya asked her brother. “They were both excellent cunt lickers, so the choice is all yours.”
“Whichever one knows her place better,” Levi growled. “You. Swallow my cock.” His words were directed at Rei, who immediately ceased tonguing him and took him into her mouth. Despite the hundreds of hours of deepthroating experience she’d been forced to gain recently, his cock was still so large that she gagged as its fat head wedged into her throat, but she made no attempt to stop forcing her head further, let alone pull back.
“Mind if I join in?” Tanya asked, and without waiting for a reply got on her back and scooted beneath her brother’s wide frame. “Hop on, Sunshine.” She grabbed the girl’s hips and helped her reposition so that she was sitting on Tanya’s strap-on, then gave her ass a smack. “Let’s see some bounce!” There was no way Rei could still breathe with Levi so far down her throat, but she meekly began bouncing up and down on his sister’s dildo, now awkwardly spitroasted between the siblings.
“That’s it,” Tanya said approvingly. “And don’t just stand there, Kay.” She spread her legs out to the sides. “Come on over and give my asshole a tongue wash while your daughter fucks me.” Kaede immediately got on all fours and crawled over to plant her mouth on the girl’s anus.
Seo-yun tiptoed the last few inches and took the chew toy between her teeth. The thing was covered in foul tasting grease, and she had to expend even more of her power just to get a decent grip on it, but she was half done. All that was left now was to go back the way she’d started. She tried to look down to see where to safely step, and her low spirits sank further when she realized that she couldn’t. Her neck just couldn’t crane far enough.
She took a single cautious step back, and then another… and cried out in pain as she stepped on a tack and drove it through her toe. The moment her mouth opened, the chew toy slipped out, and returned to swinging in its original spot. Seo-yun could do nothing but grit her teeth and step forward again to retrieve it.
Her second attempt to walk backwards was even more cautious than the first, and she managed four tiny doddering steps before her crotch unexpectedly touched the first wire knot and several barbs tore into her flesh. She tried to stop herself from reacting again, but it was no good: the greased toy slipped from her clamped teeth in an instant.
Seo-yun stared at it as a fresh sense of hopelessness settled onto her shoulders. Half done? No. She had only reached the starting line. How many dozens of knots had she worked her way through? How many hundreds of tacks had she stepped around? And now she would have to do it all blindly, and even a single mistake meant starting all over.
Tanya was right. There was no way she’d be able to do this in time.
But she had to try anyway.
Rei gurgled a final time, her eyes rolling up into the back of her head and her body going limp. “Kay, honey, be a sweetheart and pull your daughter off my brother’s prick before she suffocates to death.” The fox swiftly complied, and Rei began to cough and gasp as soon as her airway was clear. “Good girl. Your turn!”
Kaede looked miserable at the idea, but she didn’t turn down the opportunity. A few moments later, she was right where her daughter had been: seated on Tanya’s cock, with Levi’s halfway to her stomach. Rei had already woken up and was busy tonguing Tanya’s asshole just like her mother had been doing.
Tanya’s fingers played with Kaede’s slit, making the woman squirm between the two of them. “Mmm, isn’t my brother generous? There’s no greater feeling in the world than passing out on his cock, and you two will get to enjoy it over and over until one lucky girl gets her stomach pumped full of spunk!”She stroked the bulge in Kaede’s neck with just her fingertips. “Don’t forget, Kay: oxygen deprivation is no excuse for depriving my brother’s beautiful prick of all the love and attention it deserves. You’d better keep sucking and slurping on him if you want any chance of drinking his warm cock milk.” Kaede couldn’t speak, but she let out a quiet gurgle and her throat muscles began to flex as she sucked hard on the dick that was killing her.
Seo-yun made it past three knots before she failed and had to return to the wall. Then five knots. Then eight. Then one. Arms, legs, neck, teeth, toes, pussy… it felt like every part of her body was demanding her attention, desperate for the power and protection only her bond could provide. She clawed at it with all the desperation of a drowning swimmer fighting to reach the surface.
Tanya clapped in delight as a dollop of cum spurted from Kaede’s nostrils on her fifth attempt. The woman was unconscious before Levi finished ejaculating down her throat, but soon both she and her daughter were hard at work licking the sticky residue off of his shaft. “Isn’t my brother’s cum just the tastiest?” Tanya teased as they cleaned him. “You should both thank him for giving one of you a last meal that’s so warm and delicious.”
“Thahnk ‘ew maashtuh,” the two foxes intoned.
“And now, my little furry whores, I have a job for both of you,” she told them. “Sunshine, you just lay on your back, that’s it, and let me sit down on that cute little face. Mmm, you can go ahead and start licking anytime you want. And Kay, since you proved you’re the better cocksucker, you crawl on top of her and start saying hello to my strap-on.”
Mother and daughter’s limbs intertwined as they both focused on pleasing Tanya. The winged girl gave them a minute to get started before springing the latest act of cruelty. “Now, while we girls are having our fun, you should see which one of you can convince my brother to tear you a new asshole. Ah ah ah, I didn’t tell either of you to stop licking! You shouldn’t need words to persuade him…”
It didn’t take long for the two women to realize what Tanya wanted. Rei cottoned on first, spreading her legs wide and pulling her cheeks apart with her hands to present Levi with her winking asshole. Kaede quickly followed suit. After another suggestion from Tanya, both of them began penetrating themselves with one of their tails, demonstrating what it would look like to sodomize them.
It only took Levi a few minutes to lose his patience and begin fucking them. He skewered Rei’s asshole first, making her scream into Tanya’s pussy despite herself, but a moment later it was Kaede howling around Tanya’s strap-on as her guts were stuffed. The vulpan alternated nonstop, never staying in the same asshole for more than two or three strokes.
Seo-yun felt like she was dying. All her power was draining away, and the trip back kept growing more difficult. The cord that the chew toy hung from was flexible, but not infinitely so. It had grown taut before she was halfway back, and carrying it back felt more and more like a tug of war, her entire body straining to force the cord to stretch further.
Shooting pains ran through her feet with every step. She didn’t have the power to spare for protecting her toes, or enough stamina to justify moving with care. All that mattered was moving. So at some point she’d stopped trying to evade or step around the tacks. Almost every step shoved a fresh metal blade through one of her toes, but she continued, pushing away the pain and doggedly drawing closer to her goal.
Levi threw back his head and roared in triumph as he began flooding Rei’s bowels with his seed. After a few words from Tanya, Kaede swiveled around to get ready, swallowing his dirty prick within moments of it popping free of her daughter’s rectum. Rei continued to lick Tanya to orgasm as Kaede cleaned Levi’s cock and then noisily sucked his cum from her daughter’s asshole. “Looks like we’ve got ourselves a tie,” Tanya remarked as the two foxes worked. “And one hole left for my brother to enjoy. Which one of you would rather die with a womb full of Petrov spunk?”
Both women murmured their desire without daring to stop their tasks for even an instant. Once both of Levi’s loads were in Kaede’s stomach, and Rei had gifted Tanya another three orgasms, it was time for everyone to change position again. The two foxes ended up on their knees, asses up, legs spread, and faces planted on the ground. Their fingers pinched their pussy lips, pulling them wide apart to expose themselves to their rapists. “Mmm, this is gonna be tons of fun for everyone,” Tanya said excitedly. “Well, two out of four anyway. My brother is going to choose which one of those tight little fox cunts that you’re showing off right now gets to be his latest cocksheath. Whichever one of you he doesn’t pick gets me knocking on your cervix instead. But here’s the fun part: I’m a much easier lay than he is. Whichever lucky girl is my gal pal just has to make me cum, and then Levi and me will swap cock holsters.”
A chill ran down Seo-yun’s spine when Tanya suddenly turned to look right at her. Please no, she prayed. She was almost done. There were just a few more meters to go and this would be over for both her and those two hapless victims, but not if… “Oh, silly me, I almost forgot part of your game,” Tanya said as she approached the bound fox. “This will just take a second, okay?”
Seo-yun frantically threw herself into closing the gap. If she could make it before the girl added whatever cruel twist she had planned, then maybe that would be good enough. Tanya might refuse to honor her word, but she could do that regardless; Seo-yun had no choice but to trust what her captor had said.
“Those parents of yours, Seijun and Yuudai, they teach you any magic tricks before my ancestor murdered and skinned them?” Tanya asked. “No? Well, you’re not missing much. I’m the smartest girl in the entire world, and even I needed years just to master a couple cantrips. Like this one.” She uttered several words in a language Seo-yun had never heard before, and the air around her began to buzz like there was a live wire. “Do you remember what we talked about last night? How I’m the reason Delphy is still alive today? Let me give you a taste of how I saved her.”
The fox tried to shy away from the woman’s hand, but there was nowhere to run. Her palm smacked lightly against Seo-yun’s shoulder, and for a second there was no reaction at all, just the warm contact of skin on skin.
And then everything began to itch.
The crotch wire was the only thing that kept Seo-yun from collapsing to the floor. She convulsed and flailed in near mindless agony as the sensation, like a million crawling ants, only grew stronger with each passing moment. Her hands opened and clenched uselessly, unable to scratch even a single spot. She tried – and failed – to keep her mouth shut, and the chew toy sprang from her mouth, erasing all of her progress. She was going to have to do it all over again. All over again while every nerve on her body tingled with madness.
“It was a good effort, Gingersnaps,” Tanya said sympathetically, and patted Seo-yun’s sweat soaked hair. “A good and completely wasted effort. I’m gonna go rape some foxes now, okay?” She blew the redhead a kiss and pranced away without a second look.
Seo-yun couldn’t endure what was happening, couldn’t think, couldn’t fight it off. All she could do was throw herself into her task, putting everything she had into stumbling forward a single step, and then another. Her toes were being skewered by fresh tacks, her collar was choking her, her crotch felt hot and bloody, and she had no idea what she was going to do with the chew toy once she reached it again, but she couldn’t afford to care about any of it right now, not if she was going to save those women. Another step. Another.
While the redhead’s ordeal was restarting from square one, Tanya was lining her strap-on up with Kaede’s slit. “You Japanese folk are supposed to be super polite, right?” she remarked. “So why is it exactly that neither of you has expressed your gratitude for all this hard cock we’re about to gift to your cunts?”
“Thank for the privilege of housing your lovely dildo in my unworthy fox cunt, Mistress Tanya,” Kaede said. She’d already realized that debasing herself was likely to make the girl finish faster, and she didn’t hesitate to take advantage of the opportunity. “I will do my best to give you the wonderful orgasm you deserve as quickly as possible.”
Not to be undone, Rei said “I pray that my furry fox twat pleases your thick cock as much as my tight shithole did a few minutes ago, Master Levi. Please let me know if there’s any way I can make your experience inside my cunt more pleasant for you.”
“See?” Tanya asked her brother. “I told you they’d be a lot of fun.” Levi’s only reply was a short grunt, but his wagging tails betrayed his enjoyment of the situation.
Tanya grabbed Kaede’s hair and used it as leverage to cram her strap-on into the woman’s waiting pussy hard and fast. Next to them, Rei’s pussy was having a harder time accepting the massive vulpan cock, but Levi made up for it by slamming into her with inhuman strength. Neither kitsune could help crying out as their insides were stuffed and stretched within moments.
“Oh, you can be tighter than this, Kay,” Tanya breathed, bending over to suck on the woman’s neck. Her hands found Kaede’s nipples and twisted them hard, making the fox woman stiffen in pain. “Mmm, that’s a good start. See how long you can keep being that tight for me, Kay. Once your nips get desensitized and you start slacking again, I know at least three things I can do to your clit to get you to clench even harder. But until then, think of your baby girl and squeeze this cock of mine.”
Rei was receiving an even worse time of it. Levi didn’t seem in the mood for taunts or insults. He throttled the girl with one tail while several others lashed her back and sides like whips. She let out a hoarse scream that turned into quiet gagging as he stuffed another tail down her throat, and her body jerked as two more began to force their way into her asshole.
The dark haired girl was barely conscious by the time Tanya groaned happily and raised her hands to signal a timeout. “And switch, my lovely fuzzy fucktoys.” It was an effort for both women to pull themselves out of the cocks they were impaled on, and their faces were etched in misery as they crawled past each other to their next torment.
Feeling bloody and broken and more than a little dead, Seo-yun continued to stumble along her task while the two kitsune switched places a second, third, and fourth time. “I think this is the one,” Tanya cruelly teased Kaede as the helpless woman desperately humped her crotch against the girl. “Don’t get me wrong, Kay, your pussy is still sweet and silky, but I know my brother, and I can tell you that he’s about two seconds away from exploding inside Sunshine and filling her up with grandbabies.”
Kaede whimpered and began slapping her hips against Tanya’s in a frenzy, but she was too late. Seo-yun knew Levi well enough to recognize the growing intensity to his thrusts too. With a howl of triumph, he began to unload in the poor girl, her belly swelling even further as her body was forced to store yet another massive batch of vulpan semen. When he was done, he shoved her away from him, his cock ripping violently free from her insides, and left her sprawled face down on the floor with his seed leaking from her gaping pussy.
“Congratulations, Sunshine!” Tanya cooed as she reached her own climax inside Rei’s mother. “Any last words you’d like to share?”
Rei’s body was covered with sweat, and she couldn’t stop shaking from exertion, but she forced herself to lift her head and look up at her mother, who was sobbing loudly. “Fall seven times… and stand up eight,” the girl told Kaede. “Our people will rise again.” Then she closed her eyes and braced herself for the end.
Levi looked ready to tear into her, but he reluctantly paused when Tanya held up her hand. “Good work, everyone,” she said pleasantly. “You ladies can go back to the pens now.” She patted Kaede’s hips affectionately as she slid her strap-on out of the woman.
Both kitsune looked at her in shock, but Levi spoke before either of them. “What the hell are you talking about?!” he snarled. “You promised me one to eat.”
Tanya rolled her eyes. “I promised you some good times, and they sure as heck provided, didn’t they? They did an excellent job pleasing your cock, and more importantly Ginger did an excellent job working on that rope. These two still would’ve worked hard to keep you happy, but she would’ve given up ages ago if she didn’t think their lives were on the line.” She raised her voice. “Now how about a lunch break, Gingersnaps? You sure look like you could use one.”
“You lied to me,” Levi said darkly. He stared hungrily at Rei. “Fuck your game; these furry cunts still belong to me, and I can do whatever I want with them. I don’t need your goddamn permission.”
“I lied to them,” Tanya correctly cheerfully as she stood up, showing no fear for her brother’s wrath. “You just happened to be listening in. Now be a dear and go-” She was interrupted by a tail wrapping around her waist and slamming her hard against the ground, knocking the wind out of her.
“You’ve been out here by yourself for too long,” Levi growled as he crouched over her fallen form. “You forget your place. Being my sister doesn’t mean you’re entitled to disrespect me, and being stuck like this doesn’t mean I can’t make you fucking pay for it.” Tanya grunted as one of his thick tails pushed against her slit and began forcing its way in, while another did the same to her backdoor.
“I’m sorry,” the dark haired girl gasped as both tails began to fuck her hard. “Was only trying to… make a joke… no disrespect intended… sir…”
“Being useful doesn’t make you important,” Levi spat. “And acting like an arrogant cunt doesn’t erase the past. You’re still that squealing bitch I had to pin down and ass rape ten years ago to teach her how to behave. You talked a big game back then too, but you screamed and begged like any other slut when I shoved it in.”’
“Yes sir,” Tanya breathed, her legs twitching and shaking as she was reamed. “I’m nuh… nothing compared to you…” Her hands reached up, but not to shield herself or try and push her brother’s bulk away. She cradled his stiff cock in her fingers instead, meekly stroking it up and down. The shaft was massive enough that she could wrap both of her hands around it as she pumped him. “You broke… broke me in back there… made me your bitch… made me learn to love it…” He was already throbbing before she began, and it took only half a minute before his dick pulsed and began spurting semen all over Tanya’s face and chest.
Levi yanked both tails out of his sister and presented them at her mouth. Tanya began to lick them clean, paying no regard to the spunk dripping off her body. “Thank you, big brother,” she said when she was done, and licked her lips, sounding pleased and relaxed now. “Delphy is a treat, but sometimes what a girl wants is her face in the dirt and stiff cocks in her holes. And you always know how to satisfy.”
“Fucking slut,” the vulpan said derisively, but his anger seemed to have dissipated.
“Only for my dear family,” Tanya replied, and gave the head of his cock a light kiss after she was done cleaning his tails. “But you and I both have a lot of work to do, so unless you’re gonna shove me down and pound me some more, which I certainly wouldn’t say no to, we should both get back to it. I’ll see you at your surgery tomorrow, okay?”
It was only after Levi had left that the girl turned her attention back to the two kitsune that were still huddled together. “Show’s over, ladies,” she said pleasantly. “You both did a wonderful job, really. Those two guards over there will escort you back without any trouble.” The foxes nodded fearfully and began crawling over to them.
“And you, my lovely Gingersnaps,” Tanya declared as she approached the redhead. “Let’s get you off of that thing.” Seo-yun stood there limply, feeling utterly drained and used up. The itching sensation was still running over her flesh, but she was so exhausted that she couldn’t do more than whimper at the discomfort. She’d tried, and she’d failed. If Tanya had been serious about killing the loser of her sick competition, Seo-yun would have been unable to stop her. She felt so wretchedly useless.
“You wanna hear a secret?” Tanya said as she began undoing the woman’s bonds and moving her. “I totally knew what you were going to do to him when you fought. Isn’t that hilarious?” Seo-yun’s eyes rolled in the girl’s direction and she tried to speak, but couldn’t do more than twitch her lips. “Because you’re both so predictable. It’s one of the reasons I’m so fond of the both of you, in very different ways. You’re reliable to a fault, and it makes my job a million times easier. And now thanks to you, I get to put him on that operating table and have some fun. You’re barely gonna recognize him after.”
Once Seo-yun was off the barbed wire, she flopped down, Tanya’s grip now the only thing holding her up. “Then why…” she managed as the girl half walked, half carried her over to one of the machines with a seat. “Why… let him…”
“Why let him rape me?” Tanya asked as she strapped the kitsune into the seat. “Good question!”
“He was… was going to… kill…” Seo-yun mumbled.
“You think I did it to stop him from killing and eating poor Sunshine?” Tanya put a hand on her chest. “Just look at you, still hoping there’s a conscience in here somewhere! No, Ginger, I did it because if Levi isn’t frequently reminded that I’m just another empty headed female, he might start getting suspicious of what I’m actually up to. He’s a simple boy: all women are either arrogant bitches who need to be brought down, or whimpering sluts who’ve accepted their place beneath him. His poor, overtaxed brain has trouble with the idea of someone who can fit in either category.”
The dark haired girl finished tightening the straps and rubbed her hands together. “Alright, ready for your next exercise?”
Seo-yun had been so out of it that she hadn’t even thought about what Tanya was doing or where she was bringing her, and now she looked helplessly down at herself. “You… you said…” she accused helplessly. “Please…”
Tanya winked at her. “I said you looked like you could use a lunch break. I never said I was going to actually give you one, silly. We’ve got hours and hours yet before you get to stop today, Gingersnaps, and plenty more motivation on the way.”
In the grand scheme of things, it was a tiny, almost insignificant betrayal, but Seo-yun began to sob as her next torture began.
“Aww, are you gonna pout all night?” Tanya mocked. “If I were you, Gingersnaps, I’d enjoy your break while it lasts.”
The fox stared dully at the plate in front of her, its contents upside down from her perspective. She was still in Tanya’s lab, now hanging suspended from chains attached to rings piercing her nipples and clitoris. The pain at all three points was excruciating, and made worse by a thick iron hook buried so far up her ass that she couldn’t expel it, and the heavy weight that dangled from its end like an obscene new tail. Seo-yun could literally feel that weight dragging her down a millimeter at a time, stretching her clit and nipples to their breaking point.
Tanya leaned across the table and offered the fork to her again. “Come on, you’re going to need your strength to best me and save everyone, right? And think of the poor table! Delphy is working so hard to help the three of us have this little romantic candlelight dinner.”
The table was a pane of glass resting on Astaria’s back as she knelt on all fours. The green haired woman’s body trembled slightly with the strain of keeping it perfectly flat so that none of the candles, plates, or bottles on it would slide off. Her expression was concealed by the stoppered o-ring gag, the thick blindfold, and the rubber earplugs, but what could be seen of her face was flushed and sweaty.
Seo-yun reluctantly opened her mouth and ate the proffered bit of food. It tasted delicious, and somehow that just made it worse. She’d rather be fed dog food or cum or something else disgusting and treated like the tortured prisoner she was than endure this pretense that Tanya cared about her wellbeing. “Why… do you torment her like… this?” she asked, preferring to focus on the dragon’s plight over her own hopeless situation.
“Torment?” Tanya giggled. “Oh sweetie, I promise Delphy is having the time of her life. Do you know what her biggest problem is right now? That those two vibrators churning up her insides would make her cum in seconds if she let them, but she knows there’s no way she can do that and keep balanced at the same time. Don’t tell me you can’t smell the juices drooling down her legs as she tries to stay focused.”
The dark haired girl picked up a handful of the food from the third plate. Astaria gave a tiny surprised jolt that rattled the silverware when Tanya touched her cheek, but quickly calmed down. When Tanya pulled the stopper out of the gag, the dragon obediently stuck out her tongue and lapped the food off the palm of her hand. Tanya replaced the gag and patted her cheek a second time, then rubbed her under the chin affectionately. “Sweet girl doesn’t really need the vibrators to enjoy this. She’d be soaked right now even without them. But there’s no reason I can’t spoil my pet a little, right?” She purred. “She’s going to be the neediest subby in the world after dinner, and I’m going to make her cum her pretty brains out.”
“A happy slave… is still a slave,” Seo-yun whispered. “And what you’re doing to her… is still rape…”
Tanya seemed unconcerned by the accusation. “Still looking for that conscience, are we? I gave up caring about that a lifetime ago, but it doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy ourselves. I could wine and dine her and talk her into my bed, Gingersnaps, but who has time for all that? I certainly don’t, especially not for a…” She waved her hand carelessly. “A lime flavored fucktoy. Consent is overrated.”
“You’re… lying…”
The winged girl raised an eyebrow while feeding Seo-yun again. “I usually am,” she agreed. “But which lie did you have in mind?”
“I see… the way… you look at her…” Seo-yun whispered. Her nipples and clitoris were throbbing so badly that they felt like drums banging in her head. It was almost enough to make her release her bond and just let them be ripped right off. “Even when she isn’t… looking…”
Tanya sighed and rubbed her neck, some of her gleefulness draining away from her. “This is what I get for being so focused on the big picture that I let the little things slide. You ever hear anyone talk about how much easier their life would be if they could see the future, do me a favor and slap them, will you?”
“Why pretend… she means nothing to you…?” Seo-yun asked.
Tanya gave her a sip of water and fed Astaria again before answering. “Spoken like a true romantic. I suppose if you were in my shoes, you’d abandon all your fiendish machinations and whisk her off to a life of cuddly sapphic happiness.”
“Not… too late…” Seo-yun whispered. “You’ve still got… a lower body count than me…”
This time Tanya laughed. “Oh, I wouldn’t be too sure about that! But I appreciate the effort you’re making to sweet talk me. It’s pointless and stupid, but you’re adorable for trying. Just for that, I’ll share a secret. I’ll even make it a true one. Yeah, once upon a time there were a whole bunch of futures where me and Star made it work. I bet we had some real good times together too.”
“You bet…?”
“They went poof as soon as they were no longer possible, remember? Just like everything else.” She took a drink. “All I know about them now is what I wrote down for myself: what she likes, what she doesn’t, that sort of thing. There were timelines where it took poor Star years to realize that she was a submissive, but she always seemed so much happier once she’d accepted that part of herself, even in all those futures where she called someone else mistress and I was never more than a friend.
“Anyway, most of our futures together disappeared three years ago, in the Game… most, but not all. There are still a handful of them for the two of us, but they’ll be gone by the time the fireworks start in two days. I’d tell you that I’m gonna let her down easy, but a girl like Star deserves a clean break.” She held up one hand in a mocking oath. “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure she doesn’t miss me when I’m gone.”
Seo-yun stared at the girl. “Who… are you?” she asked quietly. “If you didn’t… have that power… what manner of person would you be…?” The fox didn’t know Astaria half as well as she would have liked, but she had seen enough of the dragon to feel confident that the woman would not choose her romantic partners lightly. There had once been the chance that she would consider Tanya Petrov to be worthy of such a relationship, just as there had once been a chance that Seo-yun herself would trust Tanya enough to share intimate secrets with her.
Her captor’s smile had become nasty and sharp. “Let’s not worry about what-ifs, Gingersnaps. You want to hear that there’s a good reason for all this, right? That deep down I’m doing all of this with some noble, if misguided, intention. And do you know why you want me to be more than I appear? Because part of you has already given up, and you want me to tell you that that’s okay. You want to believe that there’s a nice comfy plan that justifies everything I’ve ever done, and that you’re here suffering with me because it’s all part of the greater good, and not because you were a soft-hearted idiot that threw herself into Levi’s jaws.”
Something ugly glittered in the girl’s eyes. “Do you know what you are, Ginger? The most adaptable, flexible, and spineless person I’ve ever met. You can’t wait to change your entire worldview to make your life easier. For centuries, you actually managed to convince yourself that you were a monster who happily feasted on humans. And then you convinced yourself that you were just a mute pet to be ordered around. And long before either, instead of choosing your own path in life, you just built your entire self around your dead parents and your ideas of what they expected of you. Now you’re trying to do the same damn thing with me, and convince yourself that you’re exactly where you belong.” She leaned in closer. “But neither of us can change the past, and intentions aren’t worth spit. I’ve killed and raped and tortured, Seo-yun, and I’ve done it all with a smile on my face. That’s all you or anyone else needs to know about me.”
Tanya looked down at Astaria, and her expression softened a little as she admired the sightless dragon. “We are what we are. There’s no point in wasting time on what we could have been.”
“…Then why?”
“Hmm?” Tanya looked up. “Why what?”
“Why… any of this?” Seo-yun asked. “What could possibly be worth… all this effort…?” She’d always thought of Tanya as someone whimsical and capricious, thoughtlessly playing with other peoples’ fates, but that wasn’t the girl who’d been torturing her for the last day and a half. Everything she did was precise and methodical, especially when she didn’t seem to have a care in the world. “What more could you ever need…?”
“You’ll find out soon enough, Gingersnaps,” Tanya replied. She spoke in a teasing tone, but her body language hinted at something tense beneath the surface. “But you should be worrying less about me and more about yourself! I had such high hopes for you, but your progress has been a disappointment so far. Maybe I really should start killing your little foxy cheerleaders instead of just hurting them. Would that get you to finally start putting some real effort into your job?”
“You… tell me…” Seo-yun breathed, too exhausted to be fazed at the threat. She didn’t doubt that Tanya would murder innocent kitsune to accomplish her goals, but she was equally certain that nothing she said would change the girl’s mind one way or another. If she was truly going to start killing people tomorrow, that was a decision she’d likely made weeks in advance.
“Aww, you’re not nearly as much fun when you’re being fatalistic,” Tanya complained. “Go back to trying to win me over with the power of love and friendship. Oh!” She pushed her chair away from Astaria and rose to her feet, moving quickly but still casually. Seo-yun let out a trembling sigh of relief when the girl detached the weight dangling from the anal hook and the terrible biting pressure on her clitoris and nipples vanished. There was still pain from her own body weight, but it was no longer the growing agony of her body being slowly ripped apart. “Another couple minutes, and you were about to take a big step towards becoming a Barbie doll. No one wants that, do we, Ginger?”
“Are you going to kill them?” Seo-yun asked.
The sudden change in subject didn’t seem to bother or confuse Tanya at all. “Emms and Hanabi? Nah. I mean, maybe, but that’s not what I’m after. It’s not like our goals are mutually exclusive, except for when they are.” She sat herself back down and busied herself with feeding both women for a minute. “I know you’re not going to believe me, Ginger, but at this point, who lives and who dies depends entirely on you and the choices you make. Isn’t that fun?”
For a long while, Seo-yun was silent, her attention focused on the food in front of her. Her body was finally healing faster than it was being damaged, and the red fox felt strength and stamina slowly creeping back into her. Her regeneration did nothing for her pounding headache, though, or the hunger pangs, or the ever present sense of dread.
She didn’t speak again until the meal was finished and Tanya rose to begin clearing the dishes off of the glass pane. “Are there any futures where all of us live?” Seo-yun asked quietly. “Even you?”
“There, that’s more like the Ginger I know,” Tanya said with a grin. “And no, there aren’t, thank goodness. Can you imagine going to all this trouble and no one dies?”
Seo-yun’s thoughts were jumbled and broken as she woke up, and for the first few seconds she had no idea where she was or what she was doing there. She was lying on her side on a hard surface, but her head rested on something soft, and there was… music? A soft, almost tuneless humming to an unfamiliar melody.
Everything hurt, and she was so exhausted that even opening her eyes felt like it would require a colossal effort that she just wasn’t capable of right now. It was taking everything she had left just to breathe through the awful, awful collar that she hated so much. So she relaxed and listened to the quiet music as she tried to recall what she’d been doing.
She’d been in the lab. Remembering that sent a hot stab of anxiety through her stomach and drew a small whimper from her lips. Yes, she’d been in one of those horrific machines that made her push herself harder and harder, until she was certain that she had nothing left, and then harder still. She’d been sweaty, panting, and trembling as she forced herself to keep going despite all her muscles’ screams.
And then she’d collapsed, that was it. Seo-yun dimly remembered the feeling of her body giving up and tumbling to the ground, no longer listening to her demands. It had felt like a great pit opening beneath her feet and swallowing her up, replacing the entire world with heavy and silent darkness.
It was her nose that told her she was still in the lab. There was the familiar pall in the air: sweat and sex and blood and metal. And even closer, the familiar scent of a woman. Of Tanya Petrov, so close that Seo-yun could reach out and touch her… no, closer still. The fox was lying on what she was now certain was the floor, and her head was resting in Tanya’s lap as the girl quietly hummed and stroked her hair.
It felt… good. Tanya’s voice was light and soothing, her fingers soft and gentle. Seo-yun could feel herself relaxing for the first time in days. Her aches and weariness didn’t ease, but they felt more distant, as though they were minor problems that she had no need to concern herself with right now. She didn’t dare risk opening her eyes or speaking, afraid that letting Tanya know she was awake would break the spell, and then it would be time to suffer again.
She didn’t know how long the two of them remained like that, but all too soon Tanya’s song came to an end. “Nadia used to sing that to me when I had trouble sleeping,” the girl said. For once, her tone wasn’t mocking or jovial. “I don’t know where she could have learned it… I suppose she must have thought it up herself. There used to be words too, but I forgot those when she died.” Her fingers ran through the fox woman’s hair a final time. “It’s time to get up, Seo-yun. We have a lot of work to do, and very little time.”
Seo-yun shivered. “I… I can’t do it…” she breathed. In that moment, no task in the world seemed more monumental than standing up. “Please, let me rest just… just a little longer…”
“We can rest when we’re dead” Tanya said with a hint of amusement, sounding more like herself. “Now come on. I know you can do it. This is what you were made for.” There was something to her tone that suggested she wasn’t saying that casually.
“I wasn’t… made for this…” Seo-yun said, welcoming the anger at the idea. The emotion stirred her body to life, sent fresh adrenaline into her system. “I lived and hunted and killed in my forest… long before you were born, Tanya Petrov. I do not exist for your convenience.”
Tanya gently tilted the redhead’s chin to make her look up and meet her eyes. “Your body existed before me,” she agreed, “but you, sweet Gingersnaps, owe your life to me. I’m as much your parent as either of those two foxes. No offense,” she added, addressing her last comment to the empty room.
“Is this where you try again to convince me that I’d be dead without your intervention?” Seo-yun grumbled. She didn’t actually care, but she was willing to take any excuse that might draw out this break from the torture. “I told you before, you don’t get credit just for not stopping good things from happening while you meddle with the future. I owe you nothing.”
“And that’s where you’re wrong, Ginger,” Tanya said. “We’re close enough to the end now that there’s no point in being coy anymore. You think I’ve done everything for the sake of some grand plan, and you’re right, but you’re missing the forest for the trees. The truth is that you weren’t an accident or a byproduct of anything. You’re the entire point of it all. You have been my goal all this time. Everything I’ve done in the last eighteen years has been for your sake. That’s why I love you so dearly, and why I despise you so much.”
“You’re lying,” Seo-yun retorted.
“Am I?” Tanya asked. “Then answer me this, Ginger: what made Jessica Wilmingshire decide that a fox would make for a perfect birthday present for her husband?”
The unexpected question sent a flutter of anxiety through the woman, and she struggled to remember. “Something about… a family friend who had one.”
Tanya nodded. “Mmm hmm. And did you ever ask yourself how Mrs Lancaster got herself something so rare? Or how my brother knew exactly where to find a gumiho that no one had survived meeting in over two hundred years?”
How… Seo-yun’s head whirled as she tried to think through the questions properly. The girl had to be lying, playing mind games with her.
“Not enough?” Tanya asked innocently. “Does that mean you already knew who convinced Mordred that people were saying his furry little cumdump was something special and to toss her black-tailed ass into the game so that she could explain what was going on inside you? Did you already know why I invited Camiel, who helped give you a push when you were ready to give up? Why I gave my sister the means to rebel and help you escape? Why I eliminated Astaria before she would have won the game and gotten your precious Sam killed at the same time? Took down Ying Yue before she could use her powers to drive Morris out of you and ‘save’ your life? Exactly when did you work out that I betrayed you to the spiders to push your wife into cooperating with you, and then sent you both down to the depths of their nest, right on top of the vents she would need to sneak away after her supposed death? Was it when I rescued you moments before my brother killed you and got him to move you to a room right above where Yuki hung, the only woman there who could fool the vampire out to steal you for himself?”
Seo-yun stared at the girl in horror. “And that was just the Paradisium Game,” Tanya remarked. “You’ve kept me busy since then, too. Did you ever bother to think, really bother to think, how Batu managed to find you before anyone else did? Or ask Hanabi what happened that convinced her parents to teach her the skills she would need to escape Levi and rescue you from the nightmare? Did you ever wonder about all the times you and your wife avoided the hunters looking for you? About the accidents that stalled them and let you escape? What about the times that you couldn’t explain, where something small tipped you off someone was coming? How many close calls can one woman really have… Or should we go further back instead? We could talk about why your soulmate ended up working for Levi, or why Sindak decided to take a trip to the Middle East in the first place to find himself a new fucktoy…”
The fox lunged at the girl before she even knew what she was doing, but Tanya was ready for it. Her unseen hand jabbed the cattle prod into the redhead’s side, and Seo-yun screamed hoarsely as she was electrocuted. The winged girl kept the voltage up for several seconds before letting go to allow Seo-yun to crumple down again.
“Did you really think that a miracle like you just happens by chance?” Tanya asked, her tone pleasant. “You can’t even imagine how much effort it took to pave the way to your creation. You are the culmination of eighteen years of effort, Seo-yun. I took a broken, self destructive gumiho, and a weak, ignorant soldier, and I used them as building blocks to make something the world has never seen before.”
“Why?” Seo-yun rasped.
“Soon,” the girl promised. “You’re almost ready. Tomorrow is the day I’ve been waiting for. The day that you were created for. It’s been a long eighteen years, Seo-yun, but it’s finally going to end.” She stroked the fox’s hair again. “I do hate you, Seo-yun, but that’s not why I’m doing any of this. It’s not why I’ve had to spend the last few days hurting you. Far from it. I’m doing it because I also love you, as much as any mother has ever loved her child. But we have very little time left, and there is still work to do.” Her grip on Seo-yun’s hair tightened. “So you. Need. To get. Up.”
The cattle prod went off again.
John Drake's Stories 
“He told me then what Morwen had told me long before, that I was not in any of those futures, those other worlds he could see; there is only one of me. I find that comforting sometimes. It would be too painful to think that there are worlds somewhere where I got everything right.”
– _The King’s Name_, Jo Walton
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As much as I hate Tanya;
She’s clearly just power-leveling Seo-Yun for the boss fight coming up.
Everything here forces her to use her Bond, which is the only way she can be on-par with a regular Kitsune.
That’ll probably help her through the next few parts;
But still, fuck Tanya.
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Ok, so given a day, my mood did dilute somewhat. This review hasn’t changed too much, but it is a little different.
There is something that could go well in here, which I’ll be sure to address. but this chapter is primarily a negative for me, in ways both small and large. That’s not to say that it’s written poorly, merely that the decisions made and plot points revealed are such that while the first part hurt me, I think by now I’ve begun detaching from the story. I’m not in danger of bursting into tears like with some other stories of yours, but instead Lone Fox 3 has gradually become a sort of dull bad feeling in the pit of my stomach, and in this chapter that feeling expanded into other Outfoxed stories with the reveal.
I won’t repeat anything I said in the live reaction thread, so I’ll focus on Astaria retaining her sense of honor by only thinking about lying. In addition to what I mentioned on the server, it also occurred to me that I probably didn’t react much to that because for me, the question of whether Astaria could maintain her sense of honor has sort of been brought up (in the sense that Tanya jabbed at her about how foolish she’d been) but that was about it. Had this been a more significant conflict for the character, this might have felt like a measure of victory for her, but because that particular attack by Tanya sort of felt submerged in Astaria’s general journey into submission, this didn’t really have that feeling for me.
The moment afterward, where Astaria breaks a glass to give herself the opportunity to talk to Seo-yun and reminds her not to give up, was where I realized the problem I was now having with this chapter. See, once upon a time, that would have made me smile, but in this chapter it didn’t. I wasn’t excited to know Astaria was potentially planning something; I wasn’t optimistic. I’d say I don’t have faith in her, but those aren’t precisely the right words to use. I know, more or less, that at some point Astaria will get to do something successfully, but not only can I now not imagine how she’ll succeed, I’m also no longer really invested in how she gets there. I wasn’t anxious or encouraged, and I definitely wasn’t happy enough to be cheering for her. It’s the complete opposite of the end of LF2, where I had only the vaguest idea of how she might succeed, but I was really excited to find out, believed in the character’s ability to succeed and loved her for what she was doing.
I suspect this has to do with the heavy shift in focus, regarding her character anyway, between LF2 and LF3. In LF2 we got to see a lot of Astaria’s courage, her compassion and her determination to help others. Even though there was an extremely painful chapter where all of that was taken away from her, we got to see her start to recover afterward. She was absolutely my favorite character, and I was Team Astaria without even needing to think about it. In LF3, Astaria’s character arc has been focused on how helpless she is, how completely under Tanya’s control she is and how much she likes it. Her journey into sexual submission is very much the defining aspect of the character here, at least from what I can see so far, which is very unfortunate because while I might have enjoyed it under other circumstances, the manipulative aspect of her submissive awakening has ruined it for me.
Since “Tanya’s ‘tender loving care’ teaches Astaria she’s a submissive” is so all-consuming, I haven’t enjoyed a single scene Astaria’s been in so far. Furthermore, I tend to assume what she does is part of Tanya’s plan, whether Astaria knows this or not. So I do suppose that, in a way, I don’t have faith in her the way I did before. I tend to feel like she’ll only succeed once Tanya’s plan has played out, or if Tanya wants her to. Even when she does manage a small victory Tanya didn’t anticipate, well, Tanya’s pleased to see it. Darinost described Tanya and Karakostas as obstacles Astaria must overcome, but by now I genuinely struggle to think she’ll overcome Tanya.
I don’t like feeling this way, by the way. I was the founding member of Team Astaria. It genuinely upsets me to say that I haven’t enjoyed even one of her scenes, and that she’s not a source of happiness or fun in the story anymore, especially since back in Chapter 6 of LF2 I pointed to her as a pick-me-up when everything else was hurting me. Through Tanya’s actions here, the story has even reached back and affected many of the Astaria scenes I liked in LF2. That exciting scene from the epilogue led directly here, after all, and Tanya immediately negated it.
I had hoped to save the positive, the only thing I could see the story maybe taking in a direction I would like, for the end, but I feel like it fits better here.
I didn’t want to bring this up on the server, for risk of going down a philosophical rabbit hole, but when Tanya was sexually playing with Sakura (between torture sessions) and elaborating on how her future sight allows her to perfectly manipulate another person’s body, this made me think. If you can manipulate another person’s biology so perfectly that they’re not so much people but become, in effect, hackable machines, and you can say and do everything in such a way that they will automatically consent…are they really consenting at all? in other words, it’s possible that no matter how much Astaria may think the stuff between her and Tanya is consensual, it actually is rape, not because of the blackmail-based power imbalance, but because she’s more or less a machine being used by someone who knows just what buttons to push.
As you can see, I didn’t mention this on the server because it’s almost inevitably going to lead to a discussion of biological determinism, which may get heated and definitely isn’t going to come to any kind of resolution.
It may be counterintuitive for you, but I actually kind of liked this idea, because that, right there, would be the distinction I so badly wanted to see between what Astaria experienced with Tanya and what she could experience with her new girlfriend. Under this model, what Tanya did was sophisticated manipulation and subversion of consent, and Astaria’s new relationship can immediately be different in a key area if her new domme makes it clear that this is Astaria’s choice to make, free of any form of coercion. This might actually completely solve my problem with this relationship.
Unfortunately…
Key to this would be Astaria at some point realizing that this psychological and body manipulation was a thing that had happened, and I don’t know that that’s ever coming up.
The story gets within the same ZIP code as this idea when Seo-yun and Tanya discuss consent, with Seo-yun stating that “a happy slave is still a slave”, and Tanya mentioning that consent wasn’t a high priority for her. However, I’m not sure if the connection to her abilities was being drawn or if Seo-yun was just talking about the power imbalance. Furthermore, Tanya makes it clear that she loves Astaria, and what she was doing was to teach Astaria about her true nature as a submissive, so I don’t know how much, if any, manipulation actually happened (it certainly seemed that way, but I can’t be sure), and Astaria may never become aware of any manipulation if it did occur, because Tanya’s only going to hurt her emotionally to have a “clean break.” It’s possible Astaria would only know of Tanya as her first mistress, whom she loved, but who hurt her, while Seo-yun would know of it as a sacrifice Tanya made, a sacrifice of the love she desired and could have had.
Speaking of which, this is the chapter where the story makes its play for Tanya as a tragic villain. She shares “truth” with Seo-yun about how much she really loves Astaria, hums a song Nadia used to sing to her and generally paints a picture of herself as someone who regrets what she’s done, but feels it’s too late for her to turn back.
And I just can’t bring myself to feel anything for her.
This is no doubt very much about me and my lack of enjoyment of the sexual stuff surrounding her. For others, Tanya, I would imagine, is a fascinating villain responsible for so many sexy scenes who now has additional complexity and a layer of tragedy to her. But remember what I said in my review of Chapter 4, about how, other character portrayal details aside, Tanya has built up a lot of bad will over LF2 and this story? Here is where the chickens come home to roost on that. Since I’m not into this fetish, for me Tanya has been a source of constant pain, and ever since her future sight was revealed, there has been a sense of inevitability to the character that means that instead of anger, the feeling is more like despair. This character is also responsible for how genuinely miserable the Astaria scenes have been for me, so she has just hurt me a lot, over and over and over.
And now the story asks me to feel something for her, some level of sympathy or pity…and I just don’t have any. I can’t bring myself to care.
All of this feeds into the final reveal of the chapter, where Tanya effectively swallows everything in Outfoxed since the time of, I think, Garnet and the Fox (as I haven’t read that, I can’t be sure if that or Fox Hunt is the last one before we jump to the 21st century). You seemed to expect that this would make me furious, but anger wasn’t really the effect it had. I hate this character, but not in the fun way where I can make a running gag out of it, not since the end of LF2 where her powers were revealed.
I don’t like Tanya at all. I don’t find her funny or charming or intriguingly mysterious, and I don’t take any joy from speculating about whether or not she’s telling the truth at any given time, what her plans are or how she’s going to play everyone next. This character is only bad things for me, and with this reveal she is now inextricably woven into all of the events of this entire series, reaching back through all three of these stories and spilling out into the side ones (Finding Avalon only kicks off because Tanya gets Merielle to Avalon). It’s made very clear that all the bad stuff that happened and all the good stuff that happened are all Tanya’s doing. Not only is every event that hurt me a chess piece moved into position, but so are the happier ones. Camiel cheering Seo-yun up? Tanya needed Seo-yun functional. Seo-yun and Samantha teaming up? Also part of Tanya’s plan. It just keeps going. It’s like learning that cancer has spread through a body. No matter where you look there’s no healthy tissue; festering gray tumors are in every organ. I don’t like this character at all, she’s ruined every scene with Astaria for me, and now she’s in every single thing I used to love, poisoning it.
Now, I am aware that this may well be the part of the story where the villain says “Everything that has happened has proceeded according to my design!” and then the hero gets to thank him for putting together all the pieces needed to screw his plan up, but personally I don’t see that happening. We don’t know what Tanya’s plan is yet, and if it’s even possible for the plan to go wrong in a way Tanya actually won’t like, then it certainly isn’t happening before we know what the plan is.
It’s also possible that Tanya wasn’t actually telling the truth there, which might be better (it won’t save the Astaria scenes, but it would at least mean I don’t have to be grateful, to use just one example, for Ying Yue’s dog rape scene because at least that way she didn’t eject Morris from Seo-yun and Seo-yun kept her superpowers!) but might also feel like a rather large fakeout; I don’t know.
There are large parts of this story I haven’t enjoyed, and ever since we got back to the Paradisium, every moment I’ve liked has either been small enough for me to think of it as “neutral” rather than positive, or counterbalanced by something so upsetting that it thoroughly negates it (the small moment of Ying Yue killing goblins is completely negated by the state Gossamer’s in, for instance). My emotional attachment to the story has been straining, but with this chapter I must consider that the tethers may have begun snapping one after another.
Like I said, I did mellow out a bit, and I realize we are almost halfway through the story, so I’ve decided that I will be back tomorrow and that I plan to give this one more weekend afterwards. If I don’t begin to feel different by Chapter 16, though, I think I’m going to abandon Lone Fox 3 at least, and possibly Outfoxed entirely. I’m not criticizing you two. None of what you’ve written is “bad” by some mysterious objective measure of quality, but you may have taken this story to a place where there’s simply nothing for me to love in it anymore. Falling out of love is painful, and I don’t want that to be true, but I have to admit that it may be what’s happening.
For now, though, I shall continue reading for another three chapters and see if I feel any different.
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Loved this chapter – can’t wait to see more sexy scenes with astaria – love the pics….can’t wait until tanya is brought down though
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Loved this chapter – also can’t wait to see how tanya is brought down.
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