Divine Milking System

Chapter 442: 442 | The Yumi Equation

She said it with a straight face. I couldn’t tell if she was joking. Vale made a sound that might have been a laugh or might have been indigestion from my stolen burger.

Yumi stood and walked to a different workbench, this one covered in technical drawings pinned down with chunks of raw ore. She rifled through the papers until she found the one she wanted and spread it flat with both hands. The drawing showed a weapon I didn’t recognize. Not a sword or spear or any standard academy-issue configuration. The silhouette looked like someone had taken a Japanese naginata and crossed it with something from a fever dream. A long haft terminating in a curved blade, but the blade had gaps in it, channels running through the metal like veins in a leaf, and at the base where blade met haft sat a circular housing about the size of a golf ball.

The housing was drawn in blue-white ink.

"Phase Edge goes here," Yumi said, tapping the housing. "The channels in the blade distribute the dimensional energy along the cutting surface. When you swing without channeling anything, it’s just a very well-made polearm. When you channel Wave Motion through it, the spiral energy feeds into the Phase Edge and gets amplified before it reaches the blade’s edge. When you channel Reaper’s Edge..." She looked up from the drawing. "I genuinely don’t know what happens and I am vibrating with the need to find out."

"You designed this before you met me."

"I designed this before I knew you existed. I’ve been building Phase Edge prototypes for six years looking for someone who could survive the integration. Dominic told me about you four weeks ago. I started modifying the design the same night."

Four weeks. Vale had known about me for the entire semester and had been feeding information to his ex-girlfriend the weaponsmith the whole time. Every training session, every lecture about building monsters, every cryptic comment about someone engineering the Void Gate. Vale had been running a parallel operation that I was only now seeing the edges of.

I looked at Vale. He looked back with the expression of a man who had expected me to figure this out eventually and was mildly pleased it happened before Santa Barbara instead of after.

"You planned this from the start," I said.

"I planned several things. Some of them worked. Some of them didn’t. Charles Leone dying was not planned. The Void Gate was not planned. You burning eleven days of lifespan to punch through a guardian’s chest was extremely not planned." He uncrossed his arms. "Yumi was always part of the equation. The weapon was always the goal. I just didn’t know when you’d be ready to carry it."

"And I’m ready now."

"You survived a Void Gate, killed two alpha-class entities, ripped a dimensional guardian’s core out with your bare hands, and somehow convinced a woman to walk through a hospital wearing nothing but a trench coat and lingerie to keep you alive. I’d say the readiness question has answered itself."

Yumi’s head snapped toward Vale. "The trench coat story is real?"

"It is extremely real."

Her eyes came back to me, and the scientific interest had acquired a new layer. Something warmer and considerably more dangerous.

"How many women," she said, and the question came from a place of pure professional curiosity that I did not believe for one second, "are currently invested in keeping you alive?"

I counted in my head. Naomi. Belle. Aurora. Addison. Misato, in her own complicated way. Hikaru, in a way neither of us had named yet. And now Frankie had given me her phone number and told me to call when things went sideways.

"More than is probably healthy," I said.

"For them or for you?"

"Both."

Yumi nodded like this confirmed a hypothesis she’d been forming since the handshake. "The graft feeds on connection. Not just physical proximity or essence extraction. Connection. Emotional investment. The deeper the bond, the richer the extraction, and the richer the extraction, the longer you survive." She pulled her goggles off entirely and set them on the workbench. Without them her face looked younger. Almost my age. "That’s why the previous subjects died. One of them isolated himself and starved. The other attracted attention from the wrong source before building enough connections to survive the response. You’ve done neither. You’ve built a network of people who would walk through fire for you, and at least one of them literally did walk through fire for you in a Void Gate last week."

She meant Blair. Blair, whose Hellflame burned the forest she was supposed to protect. Blair, who channeled surgical beams through cracks I carved in a guardian’s armor while her body screamed with second-degree burns. Blair, who kissed me in a collapsed cave and then insisted it meant nothing.

"The weapon I’m building will plug into that network," Yumi continued. "Not directly. Not in a way that draws from them or hurts them. But the Phase Edge responds to frequency, and your frequency is shaped by every person who’s invested in your survival. The more of them there are, the more of them who genuinely care, the stronger the resonance becomes. And the stronger the resonance, the more power the weapon can channel without killing you."

I stared at the blueprint on the table. The naginata with its veined blade and housing for a sphere that killed birds by being near them.

"You’re telling me the weapon gets stronger the more people love me."

"I’m telling you the weapon gets stronger the more people are dimensionally entangled with your survival. Love is one interpretation. Devotion, loyalty, investment, dependency. The system you carry quantifies it as a percentage. I’d quantify it differently, but the result is the same. Your connections aren’t just keeping you alive through essence extraction. They’re building a resonance field around your graft that stabilizes it, strengthens it, and creates the exact conditions necessary for Phase Edge integration."

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