Divine Milking System

Chapter 397: 397 | The Cage Was the Core

The creature took another step. The forest shook.

My brain did what it always does in situations where I’m definitely about to die. It started cataloging useless information.

The thing stood maybe fifteen feet tall. Its skin looked like volcanic rock that had been stretched over a skeleton built by someone who’d only heard about human anatomy through a game of telephone. Each finger ended in a claw longer than my forearm. The hollow eye sockets weren’t empty after all. Something moved in there. Something that pulsed with the same color-shifting light the core had produced before we’d shattered it.

The core hadn’t been the boss.

The core had been the cage.

"Fucking fantastic," I said.

"Monroe." Naomi’s grip on my arm tightened. "Tell me you have something left."

"I have about three percent mana and a very strong desire to not be here."

"That’s not helpful."

"I’m aware."

The creature opened its mouth. The sound that came out wasn’t a roar or a scream. It was something else entirely. Language. Syllables that felt wrong in ways I couldn’t articulate, words that made my teeth ache and my vision blur at the edges, a voice like tectonic plates grinding together in the depths of some black, lightless ocean. I couldn’t understand the words themselves, but the meaning came through anyway, transmitted through some channel that bypassed language and went straight into my hindbrain.

It was thanking us.

We’d freed it from its prison. We’d shattered the very cage that had been built to contain it. And now it was expressing its gratitude in the only way a thing like this could.

By killing us slowly.

Blair moved first. Because of course she fucking did. The woman had second-degree burns covering the entire left side of her body, a leg that could barely support her weight, and absolutely zero mana reserves left in the tank. Any reasonable person would have been curled up on the ground crying or passing out from shock. But Blair Davenport wasn’t a reasonable person. She was someone who’d been trained by a psychopath to view anything less than perfection as failure, and right now, failure meant death. Her hands came up despite the tremor running through her arms. Blue-white light gathered between her palms, coalescing into something bright and terrible and desperate.

"Davenport, wait—"

She didn’t wait. The Hellflame beam lanced out from her position and struck the creature’s chest dead center. A perfect shot, geometrically speaking. Enough concentrated heat to melt through Steel-rank armor plating like butter. Enough raw force behind it to crater solid stone and turn sand to glass.

The creature didn’t flinch.

The fire splashed against its rocky hide like water against a dam. The light scattered. The heat dissipated. Blair’s attack, the same attack that had helped me kill an alpha leopard and destroy a dimensional core, accomplished exactly nothing.

"Oh," Blair said quietly.

The creature backhanded her across the clearing.

Blair flew. Not dramatically. Not cinematically. She just stopped being in one place and started being somewhere else, her body ragdolling through the air and crashing into a burned tree trunk with a sound I never wanted to hear again. The tree snapped. Blair dropped to the ground and didn’t move.

"BLAIR!"

Dante’s void fields erupted outward before anyone else could react. The kid who’d spent six hours too scared to properly deploy his ability suddenly found something that scared him more than combat. Purple-black mana nullification zones expanded from his position in overlapping spheres, trying to suppress the creature’s power, trying to create an opening.

The creature walked through his fields like they didn’t exist.

"That’s impossible." Dante’s voice cracked. "Nothing should be able to ignore total nullification. Nothing—"

A claw the size of a stop sign caught him across the chest.

Dante went down. Blood sprayed. He screamed once, high and sharp, and then he didn’t scream anymore.

"SCATTER!" Misato’s voice cut through the chaos as both her clones erupted into motion. "Standard defensive pattern! Do NOT engage directly! Buy time for extraction!"

Nobody scattered.

Jordan’s shadows exploded from the ground in a wave of darkness that wrapped around the creature’s legs like chains. Hikaru materialized beside him, her tantō flashing in the gate’s dim light as she carved at the shadow bindings with her phantom edge, reinforcing them with cuts that shouldn’t have been physically possible. Javier threw something, a flask that shattered against the creature’s shoulder and released a cloud of corrosive vapor. Belle fired her crossbow, bolt after bolt punching into the creature’s hide with accuracy that spoke to the Silver buff still running through her system.

The creature ignored all of it.

It reached down and grabbed Jordan’s shadow constructs. Grabbed them. Like they were physical objects. Like darkness had weight and substance that could be crushed in a massive fist. Jordan screamed as his connection to the shadows was severed with brutal simplicity, blood pouring from his nose and ears as the psychic backlash hit him like a train.

"We need to go." Naomi pulled at my arm. "Jace, we need to go."

"The exit’s right there."

"It’s between us and the exit!"

She was right. The creature had positioned itself between our group and the shimmering tear in reality that represented our only escape. Intentional. It wasn’t just free. It was intelligent. It understood what the gate exit meant and it understood that letting us leave meant letting witnesses escape.

Misato’s first clone attacked from the creature’s blind spot. A distraction. A sacrifice. The clone’s short swords carved into the back of the creature’s knee with everything she had, biting into the volcanic rock hide just deep enough to draw something that might have been blood.

The creature turned. The clone died. One hit. Nothing left but dissipating mana and the echo of a woman who’d thrown away a piece of herself to buy us three seconds.

"Belle." I grabbed her shoulder. "Where’s the weak point."

"What?"

"Everything has a weak point. Your ability, your treasure sense, whatever the fuck. Find it."

"I can’t just—"

"Belle."

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