Divine Milking System

Chapter 448: 448 | Sad Guys and Sunglasses

He looked back out at the hills.

"And then a fat lottery kid sits down in my classroom radiating a dimensional frequency I’ve only seen on buried artifacts, dying on a countdown that bleeds into the local fabric like a broken radio, and I think, well. That’s new."

"So I’m entertainment."

"You’re potential." The word came out sharper than the rest. "There’s a difference between watching a car crash and watching someone build an engine from scratch. Both are interesting. Only one of them ends with something worth having."

The road opened up as the hills fell away toward the coast again, water flashing silver-blue where the sun hit it. I let the Charger stretch its legs, needle climbing past eighty, and Vale didn’t tell me to slow down.

"You could’ve just told me all this," I said. "Day one. Sat me down. Explained the graft, the patron, the Void Gate, the weapon. Would’ve saved everyone a lot of near-death experiences."

"Would it?" He said it mild, almost gentle. "If I’d told you day one that you were carrying a divine-class system designed to feed on love, that your survival depended on convincing people to care about you, that someone on the other side of reality was building traps to kill you before you got strong, what would you have done?"

I thought about it. The honest answer arrived faster than I wanted it to.

"Optimized it," I said. "Treated the whole thing like a build. Farmed relationships for maximum devotion percentage. Turned it into a spreadsheet."

"And the graft would have registered exactly what it was. A con. A transaction. Devotion percentages farmed instead of earned." Vale spread his hands. "The twelve who died before you optimized. Every one of them. They treated the system like a system and it killed them because the system needed something you can’t fake and can’t farm. You had to stumble into it sideways, thinking you were running a game, until the game ran you instead."

I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say, because he was right, and we both knew it, and knowing it sat in my chest next to the graft like a second heartbeat.

"So no," Vale said. "I couldn’t just tell you. I had to let you become the version of yourself who could survive the truth. That version needed to jump off a cliff for a woman he claimed to hate before he was ready to hear any of this."

"Blair’s going to kill me if she finds out you know about the cliff."

"Blair’s going to kill you regardless. That’s just Tuesday." He pulled his sunglasses back down. "Let her."

We passed a sign for Ventura and I thought about Frankie’s burger place, about the number written on the back of an order ticket, about a woman who could punch through engine blocks and chose to make sandwiches instead. About Hector on the pier with his missing fingers and his story about 2033. About the pattern Vale left behind him, this trail of broken people he’d found on the edge of self-destruction and pointed at a problem.

"How many of us are there," I said. "Your projects."

"Fewer than you’d think. More than I’d like." He counted them off without inflection. "Frankie was the first. Yumi was second, technically, though that got complicated. A few others scattered across guilds who don’t advertise the connection. And you."

"That’s a weird thing to collect."

"I collect people the world was about to throw away who happened to be worth keeping." He shrugged, one shoulder, coffee-cup casual. "It’s a hobby. Some people garden."

I laughed before I could stop myself, a real one, dragged up from somewhere under the exhaustion and the near-death and the sheer absurdity of my life. The strongest hunter on faculty compared saving people to gardening while I drove his eight-hundred-horsepower muscle car down the California coast with a divine parasite in my chest and a silver ring on my finger transmitting my heartbeat to a mad scientist who kept dead birds in jars.

"This is insane," I said. "You know that, right? This whole thing. My entire life is a light novel a fourteen-year-old wrote after too much energy drink."

"Your entire life," Vale agreed, "is the most interesting thing that’s happened to me in a decade. So thank you for that."

The way he said it caught me off guard. Not sarcastic. Not deflecting. Just true, in the flat honest register he used for the things that mattered, and underneath it I heard the thing he wasn’t saying. That being the strongest was lonely. That watching everyone else stay small was a specific kind of hell. That a man who’d spent his whole life waiting for someone to make him try had found, in a dying lottery kid with a milk problem, the first genuine reason to hope in years.

He wanted me to catch up.

Not to serve him. Not to entertain him. He wanted me to become something that could stand next to him, or past him, so that for once in his overpowered life he wouldn’t be alone at the top of a mountain waiting for company that never came.

"Vale."

"Mm."

"You’re kind of a sad guy underneath all the sunglasses and murder, you know that?"

He was quiet for exactly one second. Then he laughed, and it was the same laugh from the hospital, the one that had done something unexpected to my chest, warm and genuine and completely at odds with the man who’d sent ten kids into a Void Gate.

"Everyone strong is sad underneath, Heir Apparent. The strength doesn’t fix the sad. It just gives you better toys to distract yourself with." He tapped the dashboard. "Case in point. Nice car, isn’t it?"

"It’s a great car."

"Consequence is a great car. She’s also a nine-hundred-thousand-credit distraction from the fact that I’ve killed forty-seven people and outlived every partner I ever had except the two you met today, and one of them keeps a corpse in a mason jar." He said it lightly, like a joke, and it was a joke, except it wasn’t, and I was learning that this was simply how Vale talked. Everything wrapped in humor because the alternative was drowning.

Gojo. That was the word my previous life supplied, some anime protagonist’s mentor, the strongest guy in the room who never took anything seriously because taking things seriously meant feeling the weight of being that strong and that alone. Vale had the same energy. The same trickster grin over the same buried grief.

"You want me to catch up to you," I said. "That’s the whole thing. That’s why you train me until I break. Why you brought me to Yumi. Why you’re building me a weapon that gets stronger the more people love me."

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