Divine Milking System

Chapter 450: 450 | This is a Mistake, Right?

The ferry ride across took twenty minutes of Vale explaining, in exhausting detail, why the burger place in Ventura had ruined all other burgers for him permanently. I let him talk. It was easier than thinking, and after the day I’d had, easier was the closest thing to a vacation I was going to get.

We docked as the last of the sunset died behind the hills, and Vale drove the Charger down the ramp onto academy soil with the smug air of a man who owned everything the headlights touched.

He pulled up outside Building C. Killed the engine. The quiet after eight hundred horsepower felt like a held breath.

"Home sweet prison," Vale said.

I unbuckled and reached for the door handle, and every muscle in my body filed a formal grievance about the movement. The healing had closed the wounds. It hadn’t done a thing about the bone-deep exhaustion of nearly dying, using a divine suicide button, getting probed by a mad scientist, and driving four hours down the coast while my mentor confessed the shape of his loneliness.

"Get some sleep," Vale said. "You look like a corpse that learned to drive."

"That’s the nicest thing you’ve said to me all day."

"Training’s at six."

I froze with one foot out the door. Turned slowly. Looked at him.

"Six," I repeated.

"A.M. The good kind."

"I almost died."

"Yesterday. That was yesterday." He waved a hand like the specifics were beneath him. "You’re healed. Peterson’s a professional. Your ribs are load-bearing again."

"I got my chest opened by a leopard the size of a motorcycle."

"And you learned something about mobility. Six."

"I burned eleven days of my life to punch a heart out of an interdimensional god."

"Which is exactly why we’re going to work on your endurance so next time you only have to burn four." He put his sunglasses back on. Indoors. At night. The man was committed to the bit. "Recovery is a lie your body tells you so you’ll lie down and stop being interesting. Six."

I stared at him. He stared back, or I assumed he did, because the sunglasses gave nothing.

"You know normal mentors," I said, "let their students rest after a Void Gate."

"Normal mentors produce normal students. Normal students die in Tier IV gates screaming about how unfair it is." He started the engine. The Charger woke up with a growl that rattled my teeth in the good way. "You want warmth, go talk to your pink-haired girlfriend. You want to become the thing that scares the things that build Void Gates, you show up at six with your knees working."

"You’re the worst person I’ve ever met."

"I’m the best person you’ve ever met and it terrifies you." He grinned. "Six. Don’t be late or I’ll make it five."

He drove off before I could get the last word, which was probably the point, and I stood there in the dark outside Building C watching taillights disappear up the north ridge road.

"Tch."

The sound came out of me on pure instinct. Some Bakugo-shaped part of my soul that refused to let a man drive away thinking he’d won.

I sighed. Rolled my neck. Something popped in three places, which felt about right for a body that had been through what mine had. The night air off the ocean tasted like salt and clean nothing, and for a second I just stood there and breathed it, alive, on my own two feet, home.

Then my knees reminded me they’d been dead four days ago and I decided standing was overrated.

The lobby was empty. The common room had one guy asleep face-down in a textbook, which was the most relatable thing I’d seen all day. I took the stairs because Endurance was almost ready to hit B-rank and every flight counted, and also because I was too tired to trust an elevator not to trap me in a metal box with my own thoughts.

Five flights. My legs hated me the whole way. I earned it anyway.

The hallway on floor five was quiet. Most doors dark. Somewhere a shower ran. Somewhere else a bass line thumped through a wall, muffled and rhythmic, some third-year’s idea of a Sunday. I got to 5E and pressed my palm to the scanner and the lock clicked and I pushed the door open, already halfway to the thought of my bed, of horizontal, of eight hours of unconsciousness that Vale was going to cut short in seven and change.

The apartment glowed soft.

Not the harsh overhead. The little lamp on the side table, the one Hikaru never used because Hikaru operated on military precision and military precision doesn’t do ambiance. Warm yellow light spilled across the couch, and Hikaru sat in the middle of it with a steaming mug of tea in one hand and a book open on her knee, and on the bridge of her nose sat a pair of thin wire-frame reading glasses I had never once seen her wear.

I stopped in the doorway.

She looked up.

For a heartbeat neither of us moved. The steam curled off her tea. The lamplight caught the red of her eyes and turned them almost soft, almost human, none of the coiled-blade tension she wore like a second skin every waking hour of every day since the moment she’d walked into this apartment and claimed the bedroom I hadn’t wanted.

The book stayed open on her knee. I caught a flash of the cover before she moved and my brain, exhausted and stupid and forever fourteen years old, filed it away with vicious glee. A shirtless guy with a sword. Sparkles. Dramatic font.

Shojo manga.

The Ice Prince of Obsidian, terror of first-years, holder of an A-rank invisible-death ability, sat in our living room in reading glasses with a cup of tea and a romance comic about a delinquent falling for the student council president.

I opened my mouth to say something devastating.

She got up.

Set the mug down on the side table without spilling a drop, closed the book over one finger to mark her place, and crossed the room in three steps, and before my brain could catch up to what my eyes were reporting she had both arms around me and her face pressed into my chest and she was hugging me.

Hugging me.

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