Divine Milking System

Chapter 446: 446 | I’ve Got People Waiting

She turned from the blueprint to face me. Her copper hair caught the forge light and her green eyes held none of the playful flirtation from earlier. This was the real Yumi. The one who lived inside equations and alloy compositions and the gap between theoretical models and physical reality.

"When you hold it for the first time, the graft will recognize the Phase Edge as an extension of itself. The resonance coupling will happen automatically. And when you channel your abilities through it, the weapon will amplify them by a factor I cannot predict because the variable that determines amplification strength is how many people in this world are willing to die for you."

She held up a finger. "Not fight for you. Not care about you. Die for you. The distinction matters because the dimensional field responds to the threshold of sacrifice, not the threshold of affection."

"That’s..." I didn’t finish the sentence because I didn’t have a word for what it was.

"That’s the most romantic weapon design in the history of metalwork," Yumi said. Her tone carried the faint exasperation of someone who’d spent weeks trying to express poetry in mathematics and failed.

"I hate that it is. I’m a scientist. I want my creations to operate on principles I can express in peer-reviewed notation, not something that belongs in a love song written by someone who’s never actually been in love." She turned the prototype over one more time before setting it down with the kind of care normally reserved for live explosives.

"But your patron designed a system that runs on connection. The weapon I build for that system must honor that architecture or it will not function at all."

She picked up the case of blood vials. The light from the forge made the crimson samples glow like tiny captured suns.

"The Phase Edge needs your field. Your field needs your people. Your people need to matter to you enough that the graft registers their investment as dimensionally significant."

She paused at the threshold of her workspace, looking back at me over her shoulder. "So keep doing whatever you’ve been doing. The milk thing. The buffs. The relationships. All of it. Every bond you build makes the weapon stronger. Every weapon strength increase makes you harder to kill. Every survival you achieve makes the people who care about you care more. Which feeds back into the field. Which feeds back into the weapon."

The corner of her mouth twitched upward in something that might have been amusement or might have been professional fascination at an elegant proof she couldn’t quite hate despite wanting to.

"It’s a perfect recursive loop," she finished. "Your patron built a perpetual motion machine out of sex and love and the human refusal to let people we care about die alone in dark places."

She opened the fridge. Inside sat rows of labeled containers alongside what appeared to be a six-pack of craft beer and a takeout box from the same pier restaurant where Frankie worked. Yumi deposited my blood samples with clinical care, closed the door, and turned back to me.

"You have questions."

"About nine hundred of them."

"Save them for next Saturday. Bring the pink-haired one. Naomi. Her frequency coupling is the tightest and will give me the cleanest data." Yumi crossed the workshop and retrieved a small box from a drawer. Inside sat a ring identical to the copper one she’d thrown me earlier, except this one was silver and warm to the touch.

"Wear this. It monitors your frequency baseline and transmits data to a receiver I’ll calibrate tonight. If the readings spike or drop outside normal parameters, I’ll know. If you use Divine Overflow again, I’ll know. If you die..."

She closed my fingers around the ring. "Well. Then the readings stop and I lose my only test subject, which would be professionally inconvenient."

I slipped the ring onto my right hand. It fit like it had been made for my finger, because it probably had been, sometime between Vale’s two AM text about harems and Yumi’s twelve hundred words of theoretical analysis in response.

"One last thing," Yumi said as I pulled my shirt back on. "The sphere on the shelf. The second prototype."

I looked at it. The blue-white veins pulsed in time with the ring on my finger and the graft in my chest, three nodes in a network that I was only beginning to understand.

"That sphere killed a bird by existing near it. If I build the weapon correctly and the resonance coupling holds and your field is strong enough, the Phase Edge will do the same thing to anything you point it at." She paused. "Except it won’t kill birds. It will kill the things that build Void Gates around first-year training exercises. The things that sent evolved leopards and dimensional guardians to test whether a boy with a milk problem could survive long enough to become something worth fearing."

Her green eyes burned with the same light as the sphere. Not playful or clinical or seductive. Something older.

"Can you do that, Jace Monroe? Can you become the thing they’re afraid of?"

The graft pulsed once. Strong. Steady. Not hungry for the first time in six weeks. Just present. Like it had been waiting for me to arrive at this exact question and this exact moment in this exact workshop with a copper-haired weaponsmith who kept dead birds in jars and understood my biology better than I did.

"Still working on it," I said.

Yumi smiled. The full version. "Good enough."

The steel door opened and Vale walked back in with two cups of coffee from somewhere, because apparently even interdimensional conspiracies required caffeine. He handed one to Yumi without looking at her and the other to me.

"The man in Santa Barbara is dealt with," Vale said, which answered no questions and raised approximately forty new ones. "We should head back."

I pocketed my phone and looked at the blueprint one last time. The curved blade. The channels. The circle at the base that would hold a piece of folded dimension. A weapon powered by every woman who had chosen to care about a dying lottery kid who shouldn’t have mattered to anyone.

I finished the coffee. It was terrible. Yumi’s taste in coffee was the only thing about her that didn’t terrify me.

"Let’s go," I said to Vale. "I’ve got people waiting."

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