Divine Milking System

Chapter 451: 451 | The Absence of Armor

Hikaru Tanaka. The girl who flinched away from handshakes. Who’d told me on our first day not to touch her things in a voice that promised the alternative involved my organs. Who communicated affection through the absence of insults and gratitude through protein bars slid under a door.

Hugging me.

My arms went out to the sides like an idiot. My whole nervous system stalled out somewhere between alarm and something warmer, and for a solid two seconds I just stood there with a girl wrapped around me and no idea what to do with my hands.

Holy shit. Is Hikaru hugging me?

She held on. Tight. Her forehead pressed against my sternum right over the graft, and I felt her breathe, one long shaky pull of air like she’d been holding it for four days and only just remembered how lungs worked.

"You almost died," she said. Into my chest. Muffled. Not a question. Not an accusation. Just a fact laid down flat, the way she laid everything down, except her voice had a crack in it I’d never heard before.

"I’ve been told." My arms came down. Slow. Landed light across her back like she was something that might bolt. "Repeatedly. There’s a whole line of women who want to yell at me about it."

"You threw yourself off a cliff."

"There was a leopard situation."

"You fought a guardian bare-handed."

"There was a stick involved for part of it."

"Stop making jokes." Her fingers curled into the back of my jacket. Aurora’s jacket, still with a ghost of flour on the shoulder from Frankie’s diner. "The news showed it. Naomi carrying you out. You looked. You looked like a body."

And that was the thing that stopped the reflex snark cold in my throat, because Hikaru didn’t do this. Hikaru didn’t crack. Hikaru had spent three years and an ocean and a stolen identity building walls so high and so thin that a single wrong breath could bring them down, and here she was with her walls flat on the floor, holding onto me like I was the last stable thing in a collapsing gate.

She’d watched me carried out on national television. She’d thought I was dead. And when I wasn’t, when I came home smelling like hospital and someone else’s cheap coffee, this was what came out from under the armor.

"Hey." My voice dropped. Lost the joke. "I’m here. I’m alive. I’m annoyingly hard to kill, apparently. It’s my whole thing now."

She made a sound that might have been a laugh if a laugh could also be a sob, and she held on tighter, and that was when my brain finally caught up to the rest of the sensory data it had been frantically flagging for the last ten seconds while my higher functions were busy being emotionally moved.

Because Hikaru was pressed against me. All of her. From forehead to hips, no gap, no polite distance, just warm girl and thin cotton sleep shirt and

Oh.

Oh no.

DAMN those breasts.

They pressed into my ribs. Soft. Full. Generous in a way that three years of ruthless bandaging had erased so completely from public knowledge that half the academy would have bet their lives Hikaru Tanaka was flat-chested, if he had a chest to speak of at all.

A single layer of cotton between her and my skin. That was it. No binding. No armor.

No binding.

My spine locked.

The compression bandages. The corset-tight medical wrap she spent fifteen agonizing minutes applying every morning behind a locked bathroom door. The daily torture that flattened her, hid her, kept the whole desperate fiction of "Hikaru Tanaka, male transfer student" from crumbling into scandal and expulsion. The thing she would rather bleed out on a bathroom floor than let a medic see her remove.

She wasn’t wearing it.

She’d come out of her room in a thin sleep shirt and reading glasses with a cup of tea and a shojo manga. She’d seen me upright. She’d dropped everything. And she’d thrown herself at me full-body, chest to chest, arms around my neck, face buried in my shoulder, crying like the world had almost ended and been saved at the last second.

And she was so lost in the sheer relief of me being alive, so consumed by whatever nightmare scenario had been playing in her head since the broadcast, that she hadn’t even realized she’d just blown her secret into a million irreparable pieces.

36E.

My brain offered that up completely unbidden, still running on autopilot from the first time I’d glanced at her weeks ago and Snake Eyes had just... told me. Courtesy of a novel I’d consumed in a life that now felt like fiction itself, I’d known the other numbers too. 36E-25-35. One of the five best distributions of mass and curve in the entire narrative.

And all of it was against me now. Warm through cotton. Soft in ways that made the exhaustion in my limbs irrelevant and the corruption damage in my chest feel like background noise.

The System wasn’t part of this. This was just physics and biology and three weeks of five a.m. gym sessions where we didn’t talk much but somehow said everything.

My body, tired as it was, started making executive decisions I had no say in. Blood flow redistribution. Nerve ending prioritization. The kind of autonomic response that didn’t care one bit about secret identities or fragile trust or the fact that Hikaru had just accidentally nuked her entire cover story because she thought I’d died.

Stop it. She’s not doing this for that. She thought you were dead. Don’t be that guy. Don’t make this weird. Don’t break what she built back up over three years of hiding.

"Hikaru," I said. Voice level. Careful. The tone you’d use for something wounded that could also gut you if startled. "You feeling okay?"

Blood, which had spent all day being asked to repair mana corruption and knit muscle and generally keep me from dying, apparently decided it had capacity now for other projects, and it started making decisions I would very much have to answer for if Hikaru shifted her hips half an inch lower.

Every fiber of my exhausted body screamed at me to enjoy this. Every fiber of the thin, fragile thing that had grown between Hikaru and me over three weeks of five a.m. gym sessions and shared silence and a bathroom full of blood screamed something else entirely.

She’s not doing this because of that. She’s doing this because she thought you were dead. If you make this weird, you break something that took her three years to build back up.

"Hikaru," I said. Careful. Even. The voice you use on a wounded animal that could also disembowel you. "You feeling okay?"

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!