Divine Milking System

Chapter 413: 413 | A Period at the End of Everything

Not through optimization. Not through min-maxing my extraction schedule or gaming the System’s mechanics to squeeze another percentage point out of my stat growth. I survived because Naomi’s Gold buff turned her into an aerial weapons platform that kept the team alive during the initial chaos. Because Belle’s Silver detection guided the group through ravines full of mantis creatures to the core location. Because Jordan’s shadows held the guardian long enough for me to reach its weak point. Because Hikaru moved through the darkness like she’d been born in it, covering gaps that should have been fatal. Because Blair Davenport, the woman who wanted me destroyed, channeled her Hellflame with surgical control through a crack I’d carved with stolen death mana.

Because Misato’s clones bought seconds that became minutes that became survival.

Because Javier took notes about everything and nearly killed two evolved mantises while explaining their chemical communication patterns to no one in particular.

The System rewarded connection. Not as a designed feature, not as something the old man had coded into the framework, but as an emergent property of the underlying structure. People who cared about me fought harder to keep me alive. People I cared about received buffs that made them stronger. The entire architecture orbited around relationships, trust, and intimacy in ways that pure optimization could never replicate.

Twelve souls had figured out the mechanics and died alone because nobody bothered to catch them.

I was number thirteen.

I was also going to die in approximately thirty hours if I didn’t find someone willing to let me drink from them in a hospital bed surrounded by monitoring equipment and medical staff who would absolutely notice if a woman suddenly started lactating during visiting hours.

The math was bleak. I needed essence. Badly. My vault held two remaining bottles of Belle’s Silver milk, each worth two hundred points when consumed. Four hundred points total. Four days of breathing room if I drank both right now. But those bottles also represented my only Overclock fuel. If something went wrong during the healing session tonight, if Davenport’s healer turned out to be an assassin or the mana corruption spread faster than natural recovery could handle, those bottles were my emergency reserve.

Drinking them for lifespan was the safe play.

Keeping them for combat was the smart play.

Neither play solved the fundamental problem. I needed fresh extraction. I needed skin contact with willing partners who understood the arrangement and would consent to what amounted to supernatural breastfeeding in a semi-private hospital room where a nurse named Sakura with professionally inappropriate leg-to-skirt ratios made rounds every forty-five minutes.

Belle was in the waiting room. Naomi was in the waiting room. Both carried active buffs. Both knew my secret.

But asking them to do this here, now, while I lay in a hospital bed wrapped in bandages and connected to an IV, felt wrong in a way that the System couldn’t quantify. Not mechanically wrong. Emotionally wrong. These women had spent three days thinking I was dead. Naomi had carried my unconscious body out of a collapsing dimension while crying. Belle had taken notes on my recovery projections because that was how she processed terror. Asking either of them to whip out a breast in a hospital room so I could drink their milk and extend my lifespan felt like reducing everything we’d built together back to the transactional extraction schedule it had started as.

The System didn’t care about feelings. The System cared about points and essence and the cold mathematics of survival.

I cared about feelings.

That was apparently the whole point.

I closed the interface and stared at the ceiling. The water stain definitely looked more like a rabbit now. An angry rabbit, maybe. The kind that bit people who tried to pet it.

My phone sat on the bedside table. Someone had plugged it in and placed it within reach, probably Naomi given the careful positioning that ensured I wouldn’t have to stretch. I picked it up with fingers that trembled from mana depletion rather than emotion and scrolled through notifications.

The group chat had exploded.

Belle had posted a clinical summary of my injuries at three AM that read like a coroner’s preliminary report. Naomi had responded with a single line asking everyone to pray. Aurora had sent seventeen messages in rapid succession ranging from threats of violence against hospital administrators who wouldn’t provide updates to a voice note that I could tell from the waveform alone contained crying. Addison had contributed a single skull emoji followed by the words "if he dies I’m killing him again."

Jordan had sent: "Monroe’s too stubborn to die. Also someone owes me forty credits from the bet."

Misato had sent nothing. The absence spoke louder than any message could.

Hikaru had sent a single character. A period. Just the punctuation mark, sitting alone in the chat like a full stop at the end of a sentence that nobody else could read.

I typed a message to the group.

"Alive. Hungry. Someone bring me a burger before I start eating the IV tubing."

The responses came fast enough to suggest everyone had their phones in hand. Belle sent a crying emoji she’d probably deny later. Naomi sent a heart. Jordan sent a middle finger accompanied by "you owe me forty credits, asshole." Aurora sent a voice note that I played on low volume, her voice thick and raw and absolutely wrecked as she told me she was finishing a gate clear and would be at the hospital by tomorrow morning or she’d burn the guild headquarters to the ground. Addison sent another skull emoji and the words "still owe me three coffee jellies."

Misato sent: "Training resumes Monday. Don’t be late."

There she was.

I put the phone down and closed my eyes. Not to sleep. Sleep felt impossible with the lifespan counter ticking in my peripheral vision like a bomb that wouldn’t stop. I closed my eyes because the alternative was staring at a ceiling and contemplating my own mortality, and I’d done enough of that inside a stone coffin with Blair Davenport’s mouth on mine.

The door handle rattled.

I opened my eyes.

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