Divine Milking System

Chapter 394: 394 | Jace!

The explosion of light faded into something gray and formless, and for a moment I thought I’d actually died this time.

Then the pain hit.

My chest. My ribs. My legs. My back. Every single nerve ending in my body screamed in unison like a choir that had been waiting years for the opportunity to perform its magnum opus of suffering. I was on my back, staring up at a sky that shouldn’t exist, watching clouds roll past in colors that hurt to look at directly.

The Void Gate’s atmosphere was destabilizing. I could feel it in the air, in the way the mana pressure that had been crushing us for hours was finally, mercifully, beginning to release. The core was dead. The dimensional seal was collapsing. We were going home.

If we survived the next five minutes.

"Monroe."

Blair’s voice came from somewhere to my left. I turned my head, which cost me approximately six years of lifespan based on how much it hurt, and found her lying on the quartz platform three feet away. Her red hair spread across the crystal surface like spilled wine, and her ice-blue eyes were fixed on the cavern ceiling with an expression that might have been relief or shock or the particular blankness that came from pushing your body past every reasonable limit.

"Still alive," I managed.

"Disappointing."

"Your mouth says that, but your actions tell a different story."

"Shut up about my actions."

I laughed, which was a mistake because laughing made my ribs feel like they were trying to escape my chest cavity through the path of least resistance. The sound came out strangled and wet, and I had to spend a few seconds just breathing through the aftermath.

The tendrils were gone. The fractures in the volcanic glass floor had sealed themselves, or maybe they’d never been fractures at all, just manifestations of the core’s desperate final defense that had ceased to exist when the crystal shattered. The cavern looked almost peaceful now, the bioluminescent moss casting its gentle blue glow across polished stone and still mineral pools.

I pushed myself up on my elbows. The System interface flickered in my peripheral vision, struggling to maintain coherence as the dimension around us began its terminal collapse.

Lifespan: 13D 21H

Points: 8,480

Health: CRITICAL

Mana: 3%

Three percent. I’d pushed Wave Motion past every safety threshold the System had installed, burning through reserves I didn’t have to ensure that beam hit with enough force to crack the core. My body felt like it had been hollowed out and filled with sand and regret.

"Can you walk?"

Blair didn’t answer immediately. She shifted on the platform, testing her burned leg, and the hiss of pain that escaped through her teeth told me everything I needed to know.

"I can move."

"That’s not what I asked."

"It’s the answer you’re getting."

She rolled onto her side first, then onto her hands and knees, the movement jerky and uncoordinated in a way that would have horrified her if she’d had the energy to care. Then she forced herself upright through what could only be described as pure, distilled Davenport stubbornness, the kind of thing her father had probably beaten into her at age six alongside piano lessons and French conjugation.

Her seven-hundred-fifty-thousand-credit tactical suit—the one she’d probably ordered custom-fitted by some designer who charged more for a single consultation than most people made in a year—hung from her body in charred ribbons. It exposed more skin than it covered at this point, strips of reinforced fiber hanging loose like funeral shrouds, and the burns along her left side looked significantly worse in the cavern’s blue bioluminescent glow than they had in the canyon’s harsh orange light. The flesh there had gone from angry red to something closer to raw meat, the kind of injury that would have sent most Bronze-rank hunters into shock.

She shouldn’t have been standing. Basic medical science said she should have been flat on her back, conserving energy, letting her body’s natural regeneration focus on critical systems. She shouldn’t have been conscious, not with the blood loss and the mana exhaustion and the thermal damage that had probably cooked some of her nerve endings. She definitely shouldn’t have been glaring at me like I was personally responsible for every problem in her life when I was literally, objectively, the only reason she was still breathing instead of ash scattered across volcanic glass.

But there she stood. Defiant. Furious. Completely incapable of accepting help even when accepting help was the difference between survival and slow death from infection.

Christ, I respected it. I also wanted to slap her.

"The gate exit will manifest near the original entry point when the seal fully collapses," she said. Her voice was steady, controlled, the voice of someone who had been trained to function through any level of physical degradation. "We need to move."

"Entry point is somewhere in that forest you torched."

"The fire will have burned itself out by now. The vegetation was mana-saturated, not conventionally flammable. Once the mana density dropped below the ignition threshold—"

"Blair."

She stopped talking. Her eyes met mine across the quartz platform, and something passed between us that neither of us would ever acknowledge in daylight.

"Let’s just go."

We went.

The cavern had an exit on the far side, a natural tunnel that angled upward toward what my failing Sensory Hijack registered as open air. Blair limped ahead of me because she refused to accept help, and I limped behind her because my body had finally decided to present the invoice for everything I’d put it through in the past eight hours. Every step sent shockwaves through my damaged chest. The leopard’s claws had done more than slice through muscle and skin. The mana corruption they’d left behind sat in my tissue like splinters of ice, fighting against my natural healing with a persistence that suggested the Void Gate really had been designed to kill me specifically.

The tunnel opened onto a ridge overlooking the valley we’d entered through. The forest below still smoldered in places, columns of smoke rising into the purple-orange sky like signals marking the sites of our various near-death experiences. The river we’d jumped into cut through the landscape in a silver ribbon, and somewhere downstream was the canyon where I’d kissed Blair Davenport for the first time.

I didn’t look at her when that thought crossed my mind. She didn’t look at me either.

"There." Blair pointed toward the valley floor, where the original gate site would have been. "The seal is already weakening. Another ten minutes and we can—"

She stopped.

I saw it a second later.

Figures moving through the burned forest. Not leopards. Not centipedes. People.

Seven of them, visible even from this distance because one of them was glowing blue-white with spiral energy.

"Naomi."

The name left my mouth before I could stop it. The figure wreathed in blue-white light looked up, as if she’d heard me across five hundred meters of ruined jungle, and even from here I could see the moment she spotted us on the ridge.

Her scream echoed across the valley.

"JACE!"

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