Divine Milking System

Chapter 393: 393 | Don’t Miss

But the math was unforgiving. Six percent mana against four thousand tendrils meant roughly ninety seconds of sustained Reaper’s Edge output before I collapsed from mana exhaustion.

Blair’s reserves were higher but finite. The tendrils kept coming, growing from the floor faster than the two of us could destroy them, the core pumping mana into its final defense with the desperate urgency of an organism fighting for survival.

"We can’t clear them all," Blair said through gritted teeth. A tendril snaked past her fire and caught her left arm.

She tore free with a scream of pain and fury that echoed off the cavern ceiling, leaving behind skin and blood on the barb.

Her flames flared brighter, fueled by rage, and a twenty-foot section of tendrils vaporized in a flash hot enough that I felt my eyebrows singe from five feet away.

"We don’t need to clear them all." I looked at the core, thirty feet away on its quartz platform, rotating with increasing speed as the cavern became a nightmare of grasping darkness. "We need to clear a path. One path. Straight through."

Blair followed my gaze. Her jaw tightened.

"You’re going to run for it."

"We’re going to run for it."

"My leg is burned, Monroe. I can barely sprint ten meters without it buckling."

I looked at her. The golden light from the core and the blue-white blaze of her own flames fought for dominance across her face.

Her ice-blue eyes burned with a ferocity that had nothing to do with Hellflame and everything to do with the girl who had kissed me in a stone coffin and then denied it meant anything.

"Then I carry you."

"You will absolutely not carry me."

"Blair. Shut up."

I reached for her and she let me. That fact alone spoke volumes that our entire six-week rivalry could not match. Blair Davenport allowed me to scoop her off the cavern floor, one arm under her knees and the other around her back, her burned side pressed against my chest where it would be protected. She weighed less than I expected, or my C-rank Strength made her feel that way. Her arms went around my neck automatically, her fingers gripping my collar with the same intensity she’d used in the stone coffin, and the smell of smoke and copper and something floral that was just her filled my lungs.

"If you drop me, I will end your entire bloodline."

"You already tried to end my bloodline. It didn’t take."

I triggered Wave Motion through my feet.

The spiral energy gathered beneath my boots and launched us forward in a burst of golden light that turned the cavern floor into a blur.

Tendrils whipped toward us from every direction, barbed tips reaching for legs and arms and throats. Blair responded with instinct that bypassed conscious thought. She extended both arms past my shoulders and released twin streams of Hellflame that carved a tunnel of destruction through the tendril forest.

The fire was concentrated, focused, a display of control that made her earlier forest-destroying Inferno look like a child playing with matches.

Each beam was no wider than a baseball bat, but the heat they carried was sufficient to incinerate everything they touched and wither everything within three feet of their passage.

I ran through the tunnel Blair created. My boots hit volcanic glass, tendril ash, and mineral water in rapid succession. Blair’s arms shifted constantly, adjusting her aim to clear the path ahead while the tendrils closed in behind us like a jaw snapping shut.

The core grew larger in my vision with every stride, its rotation now so fast that the color cycling had become a continuous white-gold blur that pulsed in time with the tendril growth.

Twenty feet. The tendrils were thicker here, closer to the core, and their barbs dripped with the same shifting light.

Blair’s fire pushed them back but couldn’t destroy them fast enough. One caught my ankle and I stumbled, nearly losing my grip on Blair.

She grabbed my collar tighter with one hand while the other kept firing, and I tore free with a grunt of pain that cost me skin and a quarter of my remaining mana to push through with Wave Motion.

Ten feet. The quartz platform rose ahead of us, white crystal catching every light source in the cavern and refracting them into a confusion of color.

The core floated above it, beautiful and terrible, the source of every creature that had tried to kill us since we crossed the threshold of a gate that should have been C-rank and turned out to be something else entirely.

Five feet. Blair stopped firing. Her arms tightened around my neck. Her burned cheek pressed against my jaw in a contact that might have been intentional or might have been momentum, and her breath was hot against my ear when she spoke.

"Don’t miss."

I set her down on the platform, the quartz surface stable and free of tendrils. Blair’s boots hit crystal and her burned leg immediately protested, dropping her to one knee with a hiss of pain.

The tendrils surged toward the platform from every direction, a wave of darkness that rose like a tsunami from the cavern floor. I had approximately four seconds before we were overwhelmed.

I dismissed the kama. The death mana drained from my channels. I brought up Wave Motion in its place, the bronze-tier spiral energy gathering in both palms with the familiar golden warmth that I’d lived and fought and survived with for three weeks.

The energy built quickly, my body converting stamina into destruction with the efficiency that Vale’s training had beaten into my muscle memory through a thousand push-ups and a hundred resistance band curls and the specific agony of maintaining ability output while physically exhausted.

I fired everything I had left at the core.

The golden spiral hit the rotating crystal with a sound like a bell being struck by a cannonball. The core cracked. Light poured from the fractures, blinding white that erased shadows and color and the distinction between walls and ceiling and floor. The tendrils screamed, all of them, simultaneously, a sound that came from beneath the ground and above the ceiling and from inside my own skull.

Blair added her fire. From her knees on the quartz platform, both hands extended toward the cracking core, she unleashed a beam of concentrated Hellflame that punched through the fractures and detonated inside the crystal’s structure. The core shattered.

The world went white.

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