Divine Milking System

Chapter 458: 458 | Davenport, You’ve Been Quiet

Nobody spoke. Charles Leone had been an arrogant misogynistic prick, and I hadn’t liked him, and he’d nearly gotten Belle killed breaking formation, and he’d died screaming when a dimensional guardian caught him for the crime of thinking Frame Perfect made him untouchable. But he was dead, and the room felt his absence the way rooms feel a missing chair.

"So," Tsukishima said, softer now. "Whichever of you feels like talking. Not a lecture. Not a report. Just tell them what it was like, so they can stop asking each other and start listening to me."

A Ruby first-year raised her hand halfway, reconsidered mid-gesture, and just blurted it out. "Is it true the gate sealed behind you?"

Belle answered before anyone else could. She had that crossbow-bolt focus back in her eyes, the analytical mode she slipped into when fear needed something to organize. "The moment we crossed the threshold. Standard gates stay open until you kill the core. This one closed the second the last of us stepped through. Sealed like skin over a wound. No exit for us. No signature for the recovery team to track on their end."

"How did you—" The Ruby girl’s throat worked. "How did you know you weren’t just going to die in there?"

"We didn’t," Belle said. "That was sort of the entire problem."

A murmur rippled through the room, voices low and fast like static.

Tsukishima let it run its course. She was watching the Rubies now, maybe cataloging which ones were still romanticizing the job and which ones had started doing the grim math. A few of them were glancing at the empty seat where Charles had sat three days ago. The same seat that would stay empty for the rest of the year, because that’s how it worked here. You didn’t get a replacement. You got a reminder.

Javier’s hand shot up, and he didn’t wait to be called on either. "The entity density was thirty percent above C-rank baseline. That’s not a variance, that’s a reclassification threshold. The fauna showed active evolution mid-clear. I logged an eleven percent increase in leopard stride length between the entry point and the ravine, which means they were physically growing in real time from the mana saturation." He flipped a page in his singed notebook. "The mosquitoes coordinated. Not swarm instinct, actual coordination. They herded us toward a chokepoint where the alpha predator could—"

"Mendoza," Tsukishima said.

Javier looked up.

"That’s the analysis. That’s good. Save it for Nishimura, he’ll cry with joy." She uncrossed her arms. "But these people don’t want the biology lecture. They want to know what it felt like. There’s a difference between the data and the truth, and you of all people should know which one keeps you up at night."

Javier’s mouth closed. He set the pen down with the deliberate care of someone making a decision. When he spoke again, the eager edge had left his voice. What came through instead was younger and unpolished.

"It felt like the whole place wanted us dead. Not the monsters. The place. Like the trees were watching. Like the air didn’t want us breathing it." He looked at his notebook and didn’t open it. "Charles broke formation forty seconds into the first fight. I saw the thing take him. It didn’t even slow down. He was there, and then he was—"

He stopped.

"The notebook is easier than the rest of it."

The silence afterward had texture. You could feel it settling on shoulders.

Naomi’s hand found mine under the edge of the workbench. I let her hold it. Her fingers wrapped tight, the way they always did when she was bracing for something she couldn’t stop.

"What about the guardian?"

A first-year Obsidian boy I recognized from Vale’s homeroom leaned forward on his seat. "The footage cut off. But there was—there was a light. Gold. Everyone’s asking what the gold light was."

Every eye in the room pivoted to me.

I felt Belle go still beside me. Felt Naomi’s grip tighten, protective, warning. Felt the graft pulse once in my chest, slow and hungry, aware of the attention the way a predator becomes aware of an open field. Somewhere in Santa Barbara a silver ring transmitted my baseline to a woman who kept a dead bird in a jar, and I imagined the spike registering on her crystal plate as forty pairs of eyes decided I was the most interesting thing in the room.

The truth was a divine ability that traded lifespan for power at a rate of one day per ten seconds. The truth was that I’d burned eleven days of the life I had left to punch through the guardian’s chest and rip its heart apart while my own body screamed. The truth was that I was dying, and the gold light was what dying looked like when I decided to take something with me.

I could not say any of that.

"Adrenaline," I said. "Ability overload. When you push everything you have all at once, it manifests visibly." I kept my voice bored, the way Vale did when he wanted a lie to sound like a fact too dull to question. "It’s not sustainable. Nearly killed me. That’s why I spent three days in a hospital getting my organs put back where they belong."

"But you killed it," the boy pressed. "You killed a dimensional guardian. As a first-year."

"We killed it." I looked at Blair when I said it. "Davenport’s fire, my ability, Naomi in the air, Jordan’s shadows, Belle’s detection finding the weak point, Hikaru covering the gaps. It wasn’t one person. It was ten of us, and one of us didn’t make it out, and anyone who tells you it was heroic wasn’t there."

Blair’s jaw tightened. She hadn’t spoken since we walked in. But when I put the kill on all of us, something moved behind her ice-blue eyes, and her lips parted like she meant to argue, and then didn’t.

Tsukishima watched the whole exchange with the lollipop parked in the corner of her mouth and an expression I couldn’t read.

"Davenport," she said. "You’ve been quiet. You were in there too. You want to add anything?"

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