Divine Milking System

Chapter 423: 423 | Don’t Die Before I Collect

Addison launched off the desk with the urgency of someone who has just been told there’s a spider on their pillow. She found her bra under a student chair. Her trench coat had materialized near the door since the Sanctum preserved whatever we’d brought inside. She jammed her arms through the sleeves and buttoned it with fingers that moved faster than her scythe training.

"Combat boot." She pointed at the floor near the chalkboard. "Where’s my other boot."

"Behind the garbage can."

She retrieved it and shoved her foot inside, hopping on one leg while simultaneously buttoning the trench coat’s collar and trying to wipe mascara off her face with the back of her hand. The entire display looked like someone trying to evacuate a burning building while also preparing for a job interview.

I pulled my hospital gown back on. It covered approximately none of the marks she’d left on my body but at least the important parts were concealed.

"Two minutes." I announced.

"Stop counting. You’re making it worse."

"One minute and forty-five seconds."

"I will manifest a scythe and remove your head from your body."

"With what mana? You’ve been drained."

She bit down on the sound, but it still came out through her teeth. The noise hit every surface in that fake classroom, loud enough to rattle the fake windows and the fake motivational posters and the very real desk we’d reduced to something the janitor would need therapy to touch.

The classroom broke apart.

First went the fluorescent lights, then the drop-tile ceiling, the chalkboard, the student desks, that stupid kitten poster telling us to "Hang in there," the nonsensical equations, and every piece of evidence of what we’d done in here. All of it collapsed inward like someone hit rewind, edges dissolving until nothing was left except the soft amber glow of the Sanctum shifting between worlds.

Then I was back in California.

Hospital smell hit my nose immediately. Monitors beeped their rhythmic confirmation that I was still alive. Somewhere nearby, an air conditioning unit rattled and wheezed like it had been built before OSHA became a thing people cared about.

I was back on the hospital bed. Same sterile white sheets as before. The IV stand loomed beside me, tube hanging loose from when I’d activated the Sanctum, still waiting patiently like medical equipment tends to do. The blinds were crooked the same way they’d been this morning. The water stain on the ceiling still looked like an angry rabbit if you squinted hard enough.

The room was empty.

No Belle asleep in the corner chair. No Naomi with her binder. No nurse Sakura with her wire-frame glasses and her extremely observant assessment of my cardiac responses to female visitors. Just the room, the bed, the equipment, and the two of us.

I exhaled.

"Oh thank fuck." Addison stood beside the bed, trench coat buttoned to the throat, boots laced tight, looking like someone who’d spent the last hour attending a student council meeting rather than screaming my name loud enough to test the structural integrity of a pocket dimension’s acoustics. Her hair was still a disaster.

The purple highlights stuck out at angles that defied both physics and whatever hair products she normally used. "Imagine if your pink-haired girlfriend had been sitting right there when we materialized. Just. Boom. Hi Naomi, we were definitely not fucking in another dimension for the last forty-five minutes."

"Or Belle."

"Oh Belle would have been fine." Addison tugged at her collar, trying to straighten fabric that had been thoroughly wrinkled by activities the International Hunter Commission definitely did not include in their curriculum guidelines. "Belle would have taken notes. Probably asked if she could film the next session for personal research purposes. That girl has priorities and dignity is not on the list."

"Fair point."

Addison turned to the darkened window. Used the glass like a mirror. Saw what I saw, which was a woman who looked like she’d been thoroughly demolished by someone who knew exactly what he was doing. Smudged eyeliner. Flushed cheeks that hadn’t quite returned to their normal pale goth palette. Lips still swollen from the kind of kissing that left marks on more than just skin. She made a face at her reflection. A disgusted, self-aware grimace that somehow made her look even more attractive because Addison Baxter hating her own vulnerability was a whole aesthetic unto itself.

"I should go." She said it like she was trying to convince herself rather than inform me. "Before the nurse does her rounds and finds me looking like I lost a fight with my own makeup bag."

She looked at me. The hospital light wasn’t kind. It washed out the color in her cheeks and made the smudged eyeliner look like bruises and turned her purple highlights into something closer to grey. But her eyes. Those brown eyes that the world never got to see because Addison Baxter had decided at some point that vulnerability required a disguise.

"Tuesday." She said.

"What about Tuesday."

"I’m dying your hair Tuesday. After training. Before dinner. You’re coming to my room and I’m doing it myself because I don’t trust anyone else to get the shade right."

"Deal."

She leaned down. Kissed me once, soft and brief, tasting like cherry candy and dark chocolate and the beginning of something neither of us had clean language for yet. Then she pulled back, adjusted her trench coat one final time, and walked to the door.

"Addison."

She stopped with her hand on the handle.

"Thank you." I said it the way I meant it. No games. No system optimization. No points calculations or devotion percentages or extraction efficiency metrics. Just a man in a hospital bed thanking a woman who showed up when it mattered.

She didn’t turn around. Her shoulders rose and fell once with a breath that carried more weight than the trench coat.

"You owe me three coffee jellies, Monroe. Don’t die before I collect."

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