Divine Milking System

Chapter 399: 399 | Wake the Fuck Up, Davenport

"Naomi—"

"Don’t." Her eyes met mine. "Don’t make this harder. Just... when you get out, remember what I told you in the farmhouse. About the future. About what I want."

"You’re going to tell me yourself. When we’re all out of here."

"Jace—"

"No." I grabbed both their shoulders. "Nobody’s dying for me. Not you. Not Belle. Not anyone. We’re all getting out of this together or we’re all dying in here, and I’m too stubborn to die in a dimension that smells like someone set fire to a wet dog."

Hikaru appeared beside us without warning. Her red eyes swept across the creature, cataloging, analyzing, searching for the weakness that had to exist.

"The shell is too thick for direct assault," she said. "But shells can crack under sustained pressure. If multiple attacks hit the same point simultaneously..."

"We don’t have enough firepower."

"We have her." Hikaru nodded toward Blair’s unconscious form. "Hellflame at maximum output combined with your death mana and enough covering fire to create an opening."

"Blair’s unconscious."

"Then wake her up."

I stared at Hikaru. "You want me to wake up the most dangerous woman at San Nicolas Academy so she can help us fight a dimension monster."

"Yes."

"By doing what, exactly?"

Hikaru’s expression didn’t change, but something in her eyes shifted. "You have three bottles of essence. Silver-tier. Drink one. The healing properties should restore enough of your reserves to—"

"Wait." Belle’s head snapped around. "How do you know what’s in his vault?"

Silence.

Hikaru looked at me. I looked at Hikaru. The creature was still standing between us and the exit, still watching with that patient hunger, still deciding who to kill next.

"Later," I said. "We’ll figure out the ’how does Hikaru know about my abilities’ thing later. Right now I need to wake up Blair."

I moved before anyone could argue.

The creature tracked my motion across the clearing but didn’t attack. Why would it? I was injured, depleted, clearly the weakest member of the remaining group. It was saving me for last. Dessert.

Blair lay where she’d fallen, crumpled against the broken tree trunk like a discarded doll. Her red hair covered her face. Her chest rose and fell with shallow breaths. The burns along her left side looked worse in the gate’s dim light, raw and weeping and terribly human.

I dropped to my knees beside her, wincing at the sharp stab of pain in my ribs. The gate’s oppressive atmosphere pressed down on us both, thick and humid and wrong in ways I couldn’t articulate even if I had the time to try.

"Blair."

Nothing.

"Davenport."

A twitch. Her fingers curled against the dirt, nails digging into the earth like she was trying to ground herself through sheer force of will.

"Hey." I reached out, hesitated for half a second at the intimacy of the gesture, then pushed it aside and brushed the hair away from her face. Her skin felt cold beneath my fingertips. Her ice-blue eyes were closed, her expression peaceful in a way I’d never seen while she was conscious. No judgment. No condescension. No mask of perfection.

Just a girl who’d pushed herself too far and paid the price.

"Remember what you said in the cave?" I kept my voice low, conversational, the way you’d talk to someone who was right on the edge of waking up. "About winning the bet? About making me wear a collar?"

Her eyelids fluttered.

"You can’t win if you’re unconscious. And you definitely can’t make my life miserable from the afterlife. So wake the fuck up, Davenport. We have a monster to kill."

Blair’s eyes opened.

For a moment she just stared at me, confused, disoriented, trying to process why she was lying in the dirt and why I was kneeling beside her and why everything hurt. Then memory crashed back and her expression shifted into something sharp and furious and absolutely, devastatingly alive.

"Monroe."

"Present."

"Did we win?"

"Define ’win.’"

She pushed herself upright, grimacing at the pain but refusing to acknowledge it. Her gaze swept across the clearing, taking in the creature, the scattered bodies, the shimmering exit that remained tantalizingly out of reach.

"Charles?"

"Dead."

"Dante?"

"Down. Maybe alive. Maybe not."

"Jordan?"

"Hurt but mobile."

Blair processed this information in the space of a heartbeat. Then she looked at the creature. At its size. At its power. At the casual way it had swatted aside every attack we’d thrown at it.

"That thing killed Charles."

"Yes."

"Charles Leone. Frame Perfect. The most annoyingly perfect combatant in our year."

"Also yes."

Blair’s hands began to glow. Blue-white light gathered around her fingers, hotter and brighter than anything she’d produced since we entered this gate. Her mana reserves should have been empty. Her body should have been incapable of generating this kind of output. But Blair Davenport had never cared about what her body should or shouldn’t be capable of.

"Good," she said. "I never liked him anyway."

The creature turned toward us.

Blair smiled.

It was the most terrifying thing I’d seen all day.

"Hey, Monroe." She stood up, swaying slightly, fire dancing across both arms now. "Remember what you said in the cave? About trusting myself?"

"Yeah."

"I’m going to trust myself to burn that thing until there’s nothing left but ash and regret. You’re going to trust yourself to do whatever the fuck you did with your death mana that made my fire work better." She looked at me, and for a moment the mask was completely gone. Just Blair. Raw and real and ready to die fighting. "Think you can keep up?"

I reached into my vault and pulled out a bottle of Belle’s essence.

"Only one way to find out."

The creature roared.

We charged.

And somewhere behind us, through the chaos and the fire and the desperate screaming of people fighting for their lives, I heard Belle’s voice rise above everything else.

"JACE! LEFT SIDE! THE SHELL IS THINNEST ON THE—"

The creature’s tail, a appendage I hadn’t even noticed until that moment, swept across the clearing like a battering ram.

It caught Belle across the ribs.

She flew.

She fell.

She didn’t get up.

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