Divine Milking System

Chapter 401: 401 | The Heart of the Beast

Reaper’s Edge manifested in my right hand without conscious thought. The kama’s crystallized death mana drank the golden light around it, creating a void in my aura where the weapon existed. I drove it into the crack before the shell could fully close.

Death corruption met regenerating flesh.

The flesh lost.

Black tendrils of entropy spread through the creature’s interior, killing the regeneration at its source, preventing the shell from healing. Blair’s fire followed the path I’d carved, pushing deeper, burning hotter, reaching for the compressed core that Belle had detected before the tail had put her down.

The creature grabbed me.

Its free hand wrapped around my torso and squeezed. I felt ribs crack. I felt organs shift in ways organs weren’t supposed to shift. The golden aura flared brighter in response, burning against the creature’s palm, but the damage was done.

◆ HEALTH STATUS: CRITICAL ◆

◆ LIFESPAN REMAINING: 13 days 12 hours ◆

Six more hours. Twelve total. For about ninety seconds of combat.

The math was simple. I could keep this up for maybe five more minutes before I burned through everything I had left. After that, the System would shut down Divine Overflow to prevent complete lifespan depletion. And once that happened, I’d be a normal, badly injured first-year student facing a dimensional guardian that was already pissed off and wounded.

So I had five minutes to kill an unkillable monster.

No pressure.

"NAOMI!"

She was already moving. My Gold buff still ran through her system, amplifying everything she had. Her staff blazed with spiral energy as she launched herself at the creature’s damaged side, driving the crystal tip directly into the crack I’d created and the hole Blair’s fire had widened.

The Wave Motion burst detonated inside the creature’s shell.

It dropped me.

I hit the ground hard enough to bounce, rolling across burned earth and debris until I crashed into something that turned out to be Jordan’s leg. He was still conscious, barely, one hand pressed against the side of his head where blood continued to leak from his ears.

"That’s new," he said, gesturing vaguely at my golden aura.

"Explain later. Can you move?"

"Define move."

"Can you get to Belle?"

His grey eyes sharpened despite the obvious pain. "Yeah. Yeah, I can do that."

"Then do it. Check if she’s alive. If she is, get her to the exit."

"And if she’s not?"

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t answer. Because if Belle was dead, then none of this mattered anyway.

I pushed myself up and turned back to the fight.

Blair and Naomi had done exactly what they needed to do. The creature was wounded now, genuinely wounded, with a gaping hole in its left side that leaked black ichor and exposed something pulsing and bright at its core. The compressed dimensional energy Belle had sensed. The heart of the beast.

But the creature wasn’t dead. And it wasn’t going to let us hit that weak point again without a fight.

It moved faster than something that size should be able to move, faster than it had moved when it killed Charles, faster than it had moved when it swatted Blair aside like an insect. The tail that had taken out Belle whipped around in a circle, catching Naomi across the legs and sending her tumbling. The claws that had ended Charles’s life slashed at Blair, who barely managed to dodge by throwing herself backward in a move that aggravated every burn on her body.

My turn.

I crossed the distance between us in a golden blur, Divine Overflow burning through my lifespan like a furnace burning through fuel. The kama in my hand trailed death mana in a dark ribbon behind me. The creature saw me coming and raised its arm to block.

I didn’t go for the arm.

I went for the leg.

The blade bit through shell and muscle and something that might have been bone if this thing had a skeleton that made any kind of sense. The creature’s knee buckled. It dropped to one side, its massive body listing like a ship taking on water.

"BLAIR! THE CORE! NOW!"

She didn’t hesitate. Hellflame gathered between her palms in a concentration of thermal energy so dense it hurt to look at. This wasn’t the wide-area destruction she’d used in the forest. This was a needle. A spear. A surgical instrument designed to punch through a single point with maximum force.

The beam hit the exposed core.

The creature screamed.

Not the roar it had used before. An actual scream, high and piercing and wrong in a way that made my teeth ache and my skull throb. The core pulsed erratically, its color-shifting light flickering between purple and gold and black with no pattern or rhythm.

But it wasn’t breaking.

The core was damaged. Cracked. Leaking energy that dissipated into the corrupted atmosphere like smoke rising from a fire. But it wasn’t breaking. Blair’s fire wasn’t enough. My death mana wasn’t enough. Nothing we had was enough to finish the job.

The creature’s regeneration kicked in.

I watched in horror as the hole in its side began to close. Watched as new shell material grew over the damaged flesh. Watched as our one chance at victory started to disappear behind volcanic rock armor that would be even thicker than before.

No.

I had two options.

Option one: Pull back. Conserve lifespan. Hope someone else had an idea that could turn this around.

Option two: Use everything. Burn through every second I had left. Die killing this thing so everyone else could escape.

Belle’s face flashed through my mind. The way she smiled when she thought I wasn’t looking. The way her voice softened when she talked about her father and the guild she wanted to build. The way she’d kissed me in the farmhouse, tentative and sweet and completely inexperienced and absolutely perfect.

Naomi’s face. The fire in her eyes when she challenged me. The vulnerability when she admitted she’d fallen too fast. The Gold buff that still connected us, proof that what we had was real even if neither of us fully understood it yet.

Blair. Even fucking Blair. Who I was supposed to hate. Who I’d kissed in a collapsed cave because we both thought we were going to die. Who had looked at me like I was something more than a lottery winner, something more than a rival, something she didn’t have clean vocabulary for.

I couldn’t let them die.

I wouldn’t let them die.

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