Divine Milking System

Chapter 449: 449 | A Milk-Based Support Harem

Vale didn’t answer right away. The hills rolled past, gold going amber as the sun dropped lower, and the Charger hummed underneath us like a living thing.

"I want," he said finally, "the next generation to be strong enough that I get to stop." He said it so quietly I almost missed it under the engine. "That’s the secret nobody tells you about being the strongest. You don’t get to rest. You don’t get to be tired. Every gate that goes wrong, every Void event, every thing that crawls out of the Under too big for the current generation to handle, it lands on the six of us who can actually do something about it, and the six of us are getting older and slower and there’s nobody coming up behind us fast enough to matter."

His jaw worked.

"Gate frequency’s up forty-three percent in a decade. Entity sophistication tripled. The Under’s pushing harder every year and the academy’s still producing hunters at the same rate producing the same washouts, and the math doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. In fifteen years there won’t be enough Diamond-tier hunters alive to hold the line, and everyone in the IHC knows it, and their solution is to recruit harder and train the same and pray."

He turned to look at me, and behind the sunglasses I could feel the weight of it.

"My solution is you. Kids who shouldn’t be possible. Freaks carrying systems that break the growth curve. I find them, I train them until they hate me, I point them at the thing that’s coming, and I hope to whatever’s out there that at least one of them gets strong enough that when I finally go down, the line holds."

The freeway sign for the academy ferry appeared, blue and clinical, forty miles out.

"So yeah," Vale said, settling back into the seat and returning to his lazy slouch like he hadn’t just handed me the actual shape of his entire life. "I want you to catch up. I want you to blow past me. I want you to become so absurdly, obscenely strong that the things building Void Gates around first-years decide it’s not worth the effort anymore. And I want to be there when you do it, cheering, because it’ll mean I finally get to sit down."

I drove in silence for a mile. The graft pulsed slow and steady in my chest, that new not-hungry feeling still holding, and somewhere out there six women had different-colored rings on a crystal plate in a Santa Barbara workshop, keeping me alive one bond at a time.

"No pressure," I said.

Vale grinned. "Enormous pressure. Crushing, generational, species-level pressure. But you’ve got a milk-based support harem and a weapon that runs on love, so honestly your odds are better than most."

"When you say it out loud it sounds so stupid."

"Everything true sounds stupid out loud. That’s how you know it’s true." He propped his feet on the dashboard, and I decided the interior of a nine-hundred-thousand-credit car was his problem, not mine. "The lies are the ones that sound reasonable."

The sun kept dropping. The Charger kept eating miles. My phone buzzed in the cupholder, and I glanced down at a message from Belle.

Are you dead. Vale better not have killed you. I have a formal complaint drafted and everything.

I couldn’t type and drive, and I wasn’t about to hand my phone to a man who’d steal my burger for a lesson about consequence, so I let it sit. Another buzz. Naomi this time.

Misato’s debrief was awful. Jordan cried. I miss you. Are you okay?

And then, thirty seconds later, a third.

Belle says if you’re dead she’s taking your jacket. I told her Aurora bought it and she said she’d fight Aurora. Please come home.

Come home. Two words that would have meant nothing to the version of me who’d woken up in an amphitheater six weeks ago with seventy-two hours to live and a spreadsheet where a heart should be.

Now they landed somewhere under my ribs, next to the graft, and pulled.

"You’ve got that face again," Vale said.

"What face."

"The one where the emotional detachment corpse twitches and you remember you’re a person now. It’s very disturbing to watch." He said it fondly, which was somehow worse. "Who’s texting?"

"Belle wants my jacket if I’m dead. Naomi wants me to come home. There’s a threatened fight over the jacket involving Aurora."

"Ah." Vale nodded sagely. "The recursive loop hums along. See, this is what Yumi means. Every one of those messages is a data point. Devotion measured in petty jacket disputes and please-come-home texts. Your weapon just got infinitesimally stronger and you didn’t do anything except drive a car."

"That’s insane."

"That’s love," Vale corrected. "Which is the same as insane, structurally, but with better outcomes and worse decision-making."

I merged toward the ferry exit as the sky went orange behind the hills. The academy waited across fourteen miles of water, and everything waiting there with it. Misato’s Monday training. Cassandra’s shadow. Blair’s twenty-seven percent devotion with three question marks and a frequency that could sit closer to center than Addison’s if she ever stopped fighting it. A gate schedule. A ranking board. A death timer sitting at seven days that I’d have to refill by convincing people to keep loving a dying kid who shouldn’t matter.

And a weapon, three weeks out, built from folded dimension and every bond I’d ever made.

"Hey," I said. "That whole cheering-you-on-from-behind thing. You actually mean it? You want me to pass you?"

Vale pushed his sunglasses down his nose and looked at me over the top of them, and for once there was no joke in it at all.

"More than I’ve wanted anything in ten years, kid." He pushed them back up. "Now drive faster. There’s a girl with black and pink who wants you to come home, and I’ve got a burger place to visit before Frankie forgives me enough to close the window."

I hit the gas. The Charger roared. And somewhere behind the exhaustion and the near-death and the divine parasite in my chest, the graft pulsed once, steady and warm and full, like it knew exactly where it was going.

Home. Wherever that was now.

Turned out it was fourteen miles of water and a handful of women who wanted to fight each other over my jacket.

Could be worse.

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