Netori: Stealing The Hero's Party!
Chapter 171 - 171: To Each Their Own Struggles

The fight had ended as quickly as it had begun. By the time Lana tried to leap forward, Raven had her ankles locked onto the ground with shackles made of darkness. Unable to move, she was left utterly stunned. Traveling behind her with a swift motion, the mage knocked her down on her knees and bonked her head with a dark paddle.

"You remind me of me before we left Athenia, arrogant and not as skilled as we thought we were," the training with Helga had been overkill for any and all creatures they would encounter down this path for a while, even so, unlike the last, Raven didn't want to grow arrogant in his ability and the quick spar with Lana reminded him of that. "Now tell me something."

Glaring at the back of Lana's head with his mana-fused eyes focusing on her, he asked her a question that would surely make her lie.

"You enjoyed last night, didn't you?"

"WHAT?! NO!" She screamed, but to Raven's surprise instead of a dark miasma for a lie or white for the truth a miasma of gray oozed out of her mind.

It threw him off at first, but after giving it a quick thought he realized what was happening. Lana herself was unsure about what happened last night, although it remained uncertain if she felt like that from the start or that her talk with her wife Diane had changed her mind.

"Alright calm down," letting go of her ankles, Raven turned his attention to Diane and the Shamisha doll Zoey standing beside her. "I guess that settles it, right?"

"Y-yeah…" Diane mumbled, a streak of blush running across her cheeks. Conflicted between her wife and Raven, however, she shook her head and rushed to get Lana back to her feet. "I told you not to do this!"

Giving off an awkward laugh, Lana got to her feet with Diane's help. Towering over everyone at nine feet tall, she turned her gaze to Raven again, but this time, instead of anger, she felt a jumble of complex emotions.

'If it makes her happy to be with him, then I guess…Is it okay? No! Wait-is it?!' Still struggling to wrap her head around her wife's words from this very morning, she wanted to give Diane a chance to explore herself beyond her only partner so far. Even so, thinking about another man laying with her, made her heart burn a flame that she wasn't sure would ever extinguish if she fanned it even once.

"Ughhh…If it has to be a man, I guess it's best a competent one than an imbecile!" She exclaimed, willing to share her wife for now not realizing how slippery of a slope she was treading onto. "But! Leave Zoey out of this okay? This poly-relationship needs to be limited to us."

"Why don't you let her choose then?" Not a fan of letting parents force their choices on their daughters, Raven turned to Zoey who already seemed really confused. "Do you wanna be one of my girls? Possibly wives once my travels are over or do you wanna let your parents decide your future?"

The answer shouldn't have been difficult but lacking any knowledge of the outer world, Zoey turned to her mothers for their permission. Lana instantly wanted to deny her, and so did Diane to some degree, and they would've had Raven not posed the question the way that he did.

'Let your parents decide your future?' For Diane it made her feel like her daughter's captor, and to some degree, she knew it to be true. After all, even when asked to make her own choice, she turned to them instead as if it was instilled in her very nature.

'She'd never asked us for anything, but why does it have to be now?' Were Lana's thoughts as she struggled to allow her daughter to attach herself to a man she barely knew anything about.

"I-I'll think about it!" Unable to make a decision, Zoey squeezed her fists tight and bolted away. Rushing inside the inn from the back door, she quickly disappeared, leaving just her mothers, Raven, and the girls from their party except for Liliyana who was still at the dining with Amedith.

"She…She'll make her decision on her own soon enough," assuring everyone that they won't interfere with her choice, Diane grabbed Lana's hand and led her inside. However, even while walking away, she couldn't help but get a glance of that devious charm on her bull's face.

The sharp look in his eyes, the defined structure of his face, and those silver strands of hair painting him as the perfect bad boy, somehow despite knowing it was bad, she'd found herself fawning over Raven's look. Was it hormones rushing to her belly? Or the fact that her body was flooded with his seed?

She hadn't a clue, and the only thing she knew for sure, was that she was in love–with not one but two people at the same time.

'Like I said…' Shifting her gaze to her other love, Lana, Diane smiled while staring at her face. 'I wanna explore myself just like you had as an adventurer. And perhaps it's the same for our daughter?' A vessel that would conform to any situation, that was how Shamisha had convinced the duo to commission their daughter's making.

She could've been their perfect girl, growing more and more human with every passing day, and yet their constraints on her were so tight that she barely had a personality.

"You know, maybe he's right, we should let her make her choice," recognizing that even Lana couldn't help but feel guilty. "We've coddled her too much, so maybe it's time for her to make some mistakes?"

"I think so too," leading Lana to the kitchen, Diane pulled on her wife's hand to lend her her ear. Cupping Lana's ears with her hand, she took a deep breath and whispered something quite salacious after that heavy conversation that they'd just had. "By the way, since you'd be watching me and him, does that make you a cuck wife?"

"WHAT?! NO!" Lana complained, although her perking tits told a different story entirely.