Divine Milking System

Chapter 437: 437 | The Second Prototype of the Phase Edge

The inside of the building did not match the outside, which I should have expected, because nothing about Vale ever matched what it was supposed to be.

The ground floor opened into a workshop the size of a basketball court. Steel beams crossed overhead, hung with chains and pulleys and things I could not name. Workbenches lined the walls, covered in tools that ranged from ordinary hammers to devices that looked like they belonged in a laboratory run by someone with no respect for physics. Blue-white light came from somewhere I couldn’t identify, casting everything in the cold glow of a forge that had learned to hold its temper.

The air smelled like hot metal and ozone and something underneath that made my teeth ache, the same wrongness I felt around mana-dense equipment.

And there, at a bench near the back, working over something that glowed orange between a pair of tongs, stood a woman.

I noticed the goggles first. They sat high on her forehead like a crown, industrial things with multiple lenses that could swing down and lock into place over her eyes. Twin red rings pressed into her skin where they’d been resting for hours, maybe days. Her hair was bright copper, the color of fresh wire, chopped short and messy like she’d done it herself with the nearest available blade and no mirror. Grease marked one cheek in a long streak. A leather apron hung from her neck, cinched tight at her waist, and underneath it she wore a tank top that might have been white once but was now the gray-brown of old oil.

Her arms told a different story than the rest of her. Lean and hard, the kind of muscle that comes from actual work instead of a gym membership. Every line of tendon visible when she moved, the definition of someone who’d spent years holding metal steady while fire tried to bend it.

She was maybe five-seven, built like a runner who’d given up cardio for the forge. The apron covered less than it should have. The straps left her shoulders bare, and the sides of the thing gaped open whenever she shifted, showing the edges of the tank top that was working overtime just to contain what it’d been given. Her waist tapered in sharp under the leather, then flared out again at the hips in a way that was impossible to ignore, because the apron was designed for function and did not care about modesty.

She didn’t look up.

"You’re late," she said. Her voice was quick, clipped, the words tumbling out faster than most people talk. "You said noon. It’s four. Do you know what I could have finished in four hours? I could have finished the resonance stabilizer. I could have finished the second prototype of the phase edge. Instead I finished a coffee and then another coffee and then I got so bored I recalibrated the entire mana furnace, which took two hours, which I did not need to do, because I was waiting for you."

"Hello, Yumi," Vale said.

"Don’t hello me." She set the tongs down. The orange thing between them dimmed to a sullen red on the anvil. "Ten years. Ten years and you show up with no warning, no gift, no apology, and a kid who smells like he got hit by a truck."

I opened my mouth.

"Don’t talk," she said, still not looking at me. "I’m not done being angry at him yet. When I’m done I’ll be interested in you, and trust me, you’ll know the difference."

She finally turned around.

Her eyes were bright green, almost neon, the kind of color that only shows up on people whose awakening rewrote their pigment. And when they landed on me, they did something I had seen exactly zero times in six weeks of women looking at me.

They lit up like I was a machine she wanted to take apart.

Snake Eyes activated on reflex, because that’s what it does, that’s the whole point of it, and the overlay flickered up and then failed the same way it had with Frankie at the burger stand.

Name: Yumi Kessler

Bust: 34D

Rank: ERROR - Too high to analyze

Current Attraction: ERROR - Recalculating

The attraction reading had never errored before. It had gone to zero on Hikaru. It had climbed and fallen and given me percentages on everyone else. But it had never just refused to compute, and the fact that it did that now, on a woman with copper hair and neon eyes who was staring at me like I was Christmas morning, felt like the universe warning me about something.

"There it is," she said.

"There what is," I said, because apparently I had already forgotten the instruction not to talk.

"You just tried to scan me." She crossed the workshop in fast strides, closing the distance until she was two feet away and looking up at me with those bright green eyes wide and delighted. "Analysis ability. Cheap one, low mana, probably a stolen copy given your dimensional signature. It failed because I’m three ranks above you, and it failed loud, which means it’s tied to something bigger than the ability itself." She tilted her head. "What are you?"

"Yumi," Vale said.

"Shut up, Dominic." She didn’t look away from me. "I’ve been reading about the Void Gate for three days. Everyone has. Ten first-years, one dead, nine out, and one of them turned gold and ripped a guardian’s heart out with his bare hand while burning through lifespan he shouldn’t have had, because lottery kids don’t have lifespan reserves, they have stipends and anxiety." She reached up. Her fingers stopped an inch from my face. "May I?"

"May you what?"

"Touch you. I want to feel the frequency. I’ve only felt something like it twice, and both times it was on artifacts, not people, and I’ve spent ten years wondering what it would do to a living nervous system, and now here you are, standing in my workshop smelling like antiseptic and burger grease, and I am asking permission like a polite person even though every cell in my body wants to strap you to that table and run seventeen diagnostics."

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!