Divine Milking System

Chapter 427: 427 | Try Not to Come Back for Six Months

The Gold-rank healer arrived at seven the night before and spent forty minutes rebuilding me from the inside out, and I want it on the record that magical healing is a scam.

Everybody sells it as a miracle. Nobody mentions that closing four lacerations across your chest feels like somebody knitting your muscle fibers together with fishhooks while whistling. The guy’s name was Peterson. Fifties, bald, hands like a bricklayer, personality of a parking meter. He pressed both palms flat over my sternum, told me not to scream, and then handed me eleven separate reasons to scream anyway.

The mana corruption was the worst part. Eight sites where the leopard’s claws had shoved something into my tissue that didn’t belong in a human body, and Peterson burned it out one site at a time, and each one felt like pouring rubbing alcohol directly onto my nervous system. I didn’t scream. I bit through the inside of my cheek and tasted copper for the rest of the night, but I didn’t scream, which I consider a personal victory in a week that has otherwise been a comprehensive ass-kicking.

By morning I could sit up without my ribs filing a grievance. I could breathe with both lungs. The claw marks had turned into four pale ridges running from my left collarbone down across my abdomen, and the System had helpfully informed me they’d be permanent.

Fine by me. Scars are free. Everything else in this world costs points.

The bathroom mirror showed me a stranger again, which was becoming a theme. Six weeks ago the face looking back at me had a double chin and the general structural integrity of a wet paper bag. Now the jaw was sharp enough to open envelopes, the shoulders filled out the hospital gown in a way that made the gown look stupid instead of me, and there were four white lines carved across a torso that had visible abdominal definition.

Also there was a hickey the size of a bottle cap directly over my carotid artery, courtesy of a goth girl who had walked through a hospital lobby wearing a trench coat and lingerie. Two more on my hip. A bite mark on my shoulder that Peterson had pointedly declined to heal, probably out of spite.

I looked like a man who’d survived a dimensional apocalypse and immediately gotten mauled by something with better aim.

"Good morning." Sakura leaned in the doorframe with a clipboard against her hip and her hair already up in that ponytail. "You’re vertical. Dr. Hayashi is going to be insufferable about it. He predicted thirty-six hours."

"Sorry to ruin his numbers."

"Oh, don’t apologize. He needs the humility." She stepped inside and set the clipboard on the tray table, and I watched her white skirt do a thing that skirts should be legally prohibited from doing to a man in recovery. "Discharge paperwork. Sign at the flagged tabs. There’s a medication schedule you’re going to ignore and a physical therapy referral you’re definitely going to ignore, and I’m required to tell you about both."

◆ SNAKE EYES ◆

├─ Name: Sakura Ito

├─ Bust: 34D

├─ Rank: Unranked (Civilian)

└─ Attraction: 12% → 19%

Seven points. From a hospital gown and a scar. My past life spent five years in a gym building a body that got me exactly nowhere, and now I’m gaining attraction percentage by simply existing in front of a woman while injured. The universe has a sense of humor and it is a mean one.

"Any questions before I release you into the wild?"

I clicked the pen. "Yeah, actually. Did you tell my friend to wear a trench coat?"

Sakura’s expression stayed flat. Totally immobile, no blush, no eyebrow quirk. She kept her attention on her clipboard and adjusted the frame of her glasses with one careful finger. Professional distance personified.

"I informed a young woman in obvious distress that the third-floor lobby has a documented temperature control issue," she said. Her tone never shifted from clinical. "It was a professional courtesy, nothing more."

"Right. Sure."

"Your heart rate spiked to one-thirty-eight and remained elevated for fifty consecutive minutes, Mister Monroe." She turned a page on her clipboard like she was discussing bloodwork. "Your oxygen saturation improved by six percent. Your cortisol markers dropped into the normal range for the first time since admission." Another page turn, her pen tapping once against the metal clip. "Medically speaking, whatever occurred in this room was the single most productive hour of your entire stay. I am choosing not to document the specifics."

I finished signing the last tab and passed the clipboard back across the tray table. "You’re my favorite person in this entire building."

"I’m aware." She tucked the clipboard under her arm and pulled a folded slip of paper from the pocket of her scrubs, then set it on the tray table with two fingers and slid it toward me. "That’s the follow-up clinic number. The extension goes to the front desk during business hours."

"And after business hours?"

"After business hours it goes to me." She turned for the door and paused with her hand on the frame. "Try not to come back for six months. I’ve seen what your file looks like when you’re having a normal week and it’s exhausting."

She left. I stood in an empty hospital room holding a phone number written in careful handwriting on the back of a lab requisition slip and felt the System log something it didn’t bother to explain.

I’m not proud of what my brain did next. It ran the math. Unranked civilian, which meant unranked essence, which meant two points a mouthful, which meant an entire cup came out to sixteen points, which was functionally nothing against a clock that ate a hundred points per day.

Then the other half of my brain, the half that had been getting louder ever since a man in a library made of impossible shelves told me twelve souls before me optimized themselves into unmarked graves, reached over and shut the first half up.

She’s a person. She stood in that doorway pretending not to blush about a trench coat. Put the calculator down.

I pocketed the paper and went to find my clothes.

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