Divine Milking System

Chapter 439: 439 | My Little Test Subject

"I’m not a car."

"You’re better than a car." Her grin came back, all teeth and neon. "A car I understand. You I want to figure out. Do you know how rare it is for me to want to figure something out? I built a resonance amplifier that shouldn’t function according to four separate branches of physics, and I understood it before I finished the first draft. I haven’t been genuinely curious about anything in two years. And then Dominic walks in with you, and you’ve got a divine graft feeding on human essence and a lifespan counter and a stolen analysis ability that failed on me, and I have never wanted to strap someone to a table more in my entire life."

"That’s the second time you’ve mentioned the table."

"It won’t be the last."

Vale walked past both of us to the third shelf on the far wall and, with the air of a man who had decided to make a point, picked up the thing he’d told me not to look at.

I looked at it.

It was small, about the size of a fist, a black metal sphere threaded with veins of that same blue-white light that lit the workshop, and it pulsed, slow and steady, like it had a heartbeat. Looking at it made the wrongness in my teeth get worse, made the graft in my chest go tight and hungry in a way that had nothing to do with milk.

"Dominic," Yumi said, and her voice changed. All the fast chatter went out of it. "Put that down."

"He should know what it is."

"He should not, actually, because it’s not finished, and it’s not stable, and if it resonates with his frequency I don’t know what happens, and neither do you, so put it down."

Vale set it back on the shelf. The tightness in my chest eased.

"What was that," I said.

"That’s question five," Vale said. "You’re out of questions. And it’s not my thing to explain, it’s Yumi’s, and she just told me to put it down, so." He spread his hands. "Ask her. She likes you. She’ll probably tell you more than she should, because she has no impulse control and hasn’t been curious about anything in two years."

"That’s true," Yumi said. "I have no impulse control. Everyone in my life has told me this, including my father, who has less impulse control than I do, which is why he lives on a boat in Mexico." She grabbed a rolling stool and dropped onto it, spinning once, then planting her boots to stop. "Sit. Not on the table. The table’s for later. Sit on the crate."

I sat on the crate. It was steel, cold through my new jeans, and something inside it shifted with a sound like coins.

"Here’s the situation," Yumi said, and she leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and those neon eyes fixed on me like I was the only thing in California worth looking at. "Dominic brought you here because you’re going to need a weapon that can channel your abilities without burning your body out. You’ve got a death-aspect scythe thing, I can feel the residue on you, and you’ve got some kind of energy conversion, spiral pattern, uses stamina instead of mana, unusual, and you’ve got a graft that lets you steal abilities, and none of your current gear can handle what you’ll be pushing through it in a year. Your spear cracks. Your suit dissolves. You need something built for you, tuned to your frequency, that grows as you grow."

"And you can make that."

She didn’t so much sit back as recline, like she’d just offered me a drink instead of a vivisection experiment. "I’m the only person alive who can make that, yeah. But free? No. Dominic’s favor covers materials. The steel, the mana circuits, the forge time. But my time?" She tapped the side of her head with one greasy knuckle. "My time costs more than any favor Dominic Vale could ever owe me. So here’s what I’m thinking."

She stood up. Walked three steps to a workbench. Grabbed something small and metal and threw it at me without looking.

I caught it. A ring. Copper. Simple, no markings, but the weight was all wrong, like it had a second mass layered underneath the visible one.

"I want to study you. Regular sessions. Full diagnostics. You sit on that table, you let me run frequency maps, you let me figure out how the extraction refills your lifespan counter and whether I can build something that stabilizes the bleed-off so you stop burning a day’s worth of life every time you use Overclock. I want to understand what you are, Jace. The graft. The System. The whole mess. And in exchange, I build you a weapon that makes Dominic’s stupid infinity tricks look like a parlor gag."

I stared at the ring. It was warm, like it had been sitting in a fire.

"You want me to be your test subject."

"I want you to be my test subject." Her whole face lit up when she said it. "My little test subject. You have no idea how long I’ve waited for a test subject with a divine graft and a pulse. Artifacts don’t talk back. Artifacts don’t have a harem or a death timer or a hickey that says a woman with strong opinions got to you last night. You’re the most interesting thing that’s walked into this forge in a decade, and I am going to take you apart and put you back together and figure out exactly what makes you tick, and I promise, I promise, you will enjoy at least sixty percent of it."

"Only sixty."

"The other forty involves needles."

Vale had drifted to a bench and was eating my second burger. The one Frankie wrapped for the road. He’d unwrapped it and taken a bite and was watching the two of us with the expression of a man who had orchestrated exactly this and was enjoying the results.

"That’s my burger," I said.

"You were going to save it," Vale said around a mouthful. "You save things. It’s a character flaw. This is a lesson."

"The lesson is that you eat other people’s burgers?"

"The lesson is that consequence is inevitable, so you might as well let me have the burger."

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