Divine Milking System

Chapter 457: 457 | Grip Pressure and Blade Balance

We had forty minutes before Tsukishima’s class, which Belle used to eat her oatmeal with the deliberate slowness of someone reminding me that I’d wronged her and she intended to extract every ounce of contrition available. Jordan slept. Naomi stole my last piece of bacon and pretended she hadn’t. The morning proceeded with the mundane rhythm of people who had not, four days prior, watched a friend die in a dimension that shouldn’t exist.

"We should move," Naomi said eventually, checking her phone. "Tsukishima docks house points for anyone who’s late, and she counts the seconds."

Jordan lifted his head. "Weapon building. My favorite. Nothing says fun like a woman who can crush your skull by making it heavier."

"That’s Mass Manipulation," Belle said, gathering her tray. "Localized density control. She could make your head weigh eight hundred pounds and watch your neck decide whether to hold."

"I don’t like that you know that off the top of your head."

"I know everyone’s stat sheet, Jordan. That’s the entire point of me."

We walked across campus in the mid-morning light, four abreast, and I catalogued the shift in how the crowd moved around us. Six weeks ago I could have set myself on fire in the middle of the quad and nobody would have looked up from their phones. Now heads turned. Conversations stopped mid-sentence. A cluster of first-year Emerald students actually parted to let us pass, and one of them whispered something that included the word alive with the particular reverence people reserved for things that had come back from where they shouldn’t.

"This is going to get old," I said.

"You survived a black gate on national television," Belle said. "You’re going to be a mascot for at least a month. Enjoy the free chips."

"I’m buying the chips."

"For me. Which is close enough to free."

The combat annex sat at the edge of Zone Two, built from steel beams and padded panels that carried the particular smell of a building where people hit each other for credit. Ruby students had already claimed the right half of the training floor, loose and confident in their red-trimmed gear. They filled the space with the casual entitlement of a house that hadn’t spent the semester getting its emotional support structure kicked out from under it on live television.

Tsukishima stood at the front with her back to the door.

Blonde ponytail hanging past her shoulders. Cargo pants slung low enough on her hips that you could see the definition of her obliques when she moved. Instructor jacket hanging open over an athletic tank that fit the way expensive things fit when they’re tailored for someone who doesn’t need to hide anything. A lollipop stick jutted from the corner of her mouth, candy long gone, just the stick now because apparently she’d decided nicotine was too mainstream. She scrolled through a tablet with the bored authority of someone who had been the strongest person in every room she’d entered since her early twenties and had made peace with the isolation of it.

She turned when the last of us filed in.

Golden-brown eyes swept the room in a single pass, counted heads without moving her lips, and stopped on our cluster. Specifically on me. The lollipop shifted from one corner of her mouth to the other with a small click of wood against teeth.

"Well," she said. "Look what crawled out of the ground."

The room went quiet in a way that told me every single person had been waiting for someone with authority to acknowledge the elephant. Or, more accurately, the black gate.

"Professor," I said.

"Twenty-nine, Monroe. Not Professor. We’ve been over this."

"Tsukishima."

"Better." She set down the tablet. Leaned against the weapon rack, crossed her arms, and studied me with the flat assessment of someone reading a diagnostic she didn’t like the numbers on. "You know, I run this class on a very specific principle. Weapons over abilities. Mana runs out. A good blade doesn’t. Physical skill is the floor you stand on when everything else fails, and I don’t waste breath on drama."

"I’m aware."

"So it’s going to bother me, personally, for the rest of the week, that I can’t teach this class today without addressing the fact that half of you spent the last three days doom-scrolling footage of five of my students walking out of a Void Gate."

A ripple went through the room. Ruby and Obsidian both, the house divide temporarily suspended by shared morbid curiosity.

Tsukishima pointed the lollipop at us like a conductor’s baton. "It’s not my specialty. I clear gates, I don’t philosophize about the ones that eat people. That’s Cross’s territory, and Nishimura’s, and every FGRA analyst who’s spent a career studying dark tears they’ve never actually walked into." She paused. "But I’ll say this once, because if I don’t, none of you are going to hear a word I say about grip pressure or blade balance for the entire hour. Your brains are stuck on it. So let’s get it out of the way."

She looked directly at me, then Naomi, then swept to where Blair stood at the far edge of the Obsidian cluster.

Blair had come to class. I hadn’t expected that. Her burns had been the kind that put people in medical beds for weeks, but there she was, in a fresh uniform, her red hair sharper than usual, her posture the rigid perfection of someone holding herself together through pure aristocratic willpower. Her left side moved carefully. But she stood, and she watched me with an expression that shifted the moment our eyes met, that unstable twenty-seven-percent flicker that even the System couldn’t categorize.

Hikaru stood apart, as always, arms crossed, male uniform crisp, red eyes revealing nothing. Only I knew about the wound under her binding, mostly healed now, and the way she favored her left side by half a degree.

Javier had his notebook out. Of course he did.

"Five of you were in there," Tsukishima said. "Ayame, Fox, Wayne, Love, Monroe. And Davenport’s squad ran the same tear. Tanaka, Mendoza, Pope. Leone." A beat, and the temperature of the room dropped.

"Leone didn’t come back."

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