Divine Milking System

Chapter 459: 459 | A Coroner’s Report

The room turned to Blair. Blair Davenport, heiress, ice queen, S-rank Hellflame, the girl whose father sat on the IHC advisory council and whose sister had spent a day investigating me like a tax audit. The girl I’d thrown off a cliff. The girl who had kissed me in a collapsed cave and told me it meant nothing while her body called her a liar.

She stood very straight. Her burned side moved with careful restraint.

"It was the worst three days of my life." Blair’s voice came out measured, each syllable carved from ice, and beneath that aristocratic veneer, something thin and fracturing. "I set an ancient forest on fire trying to protect my squad. Nearly incinerated all of us in the process. I watched Charles Leone die because he did exactly what he’s been doing all semester, just like clockwork. I got thrown off a cliff into a river by someone I despise." Her eyes cut to me. "Because being eaten was worse."

A few students laughed, uncomfortable. Tsukishima’s expression didn’t change much, but something tightened around her mouth.

"And I learned something," Blair said. Her hands were folded in front of her, fingers laced together, knuckles bone-white. "Being the strongest person in the room is worthless if you can’t function inside a team. My squad had superior stats. Better abilities. More experience. We still came in second." She gestured in our general direction without quite looking at any of us. "And inside that gate, when it all fell apart, the line between survival and death was whether or not you could trust someone else to catch you when you fell."

She stopped. The silence stretched. Her jaw tightened as she realized she’d said more than planned, and her posture locked back into its usual impenetrable state like a portcullis dropping.

"That’s all."

Tsukishima watched her. The moment lasted longer than it should have. Then she nodded once, slow and deliberate, the way she did when a student finally understood something fundamental.

"That," she said to the room, "is the only lesson from a black gate that’s worth anything. Everything else is a coroner’s report." She pushed off the weapon rack. "Now. We’ve talked about the tear that ate one of your classmates. It’s out of your system. Anyone who’s still stuck on it can see me after class or see Dr. Cross, who has a doctorate in exactly this kind of thing and a much better bedside manner than I do."

She clapped her hands once.

"Weapons. Racks. Twenty minutes to select. Cross-house pairings, and if any of you groan about that I’ll make your practice sword weigh forty pounds and watch you cry." Her golden-brown eyes found me again. "Monroe. You’re on a spear. Try not to overthink it this time. Your muscle memory is better than your brain."

I moved toward the weapon rack. Naomi fell into step beside me like she had for the last month, the rhythm of it automatic now, the way partners learn each other’s walking speed without needing to discuss it. The short spear I’d used before leaned against the second tier, right where I’d left it. The weight settled into my palms like an old handshake. Tsukishima’s two-inch forward adjustment from weeks ago still made sense in my body even when my brain tried to argue with it, the balance point aligning with my height and center of gravity in a way I’d stopped questioning.

Behind me, Javier’s voice already carried the apologetic overtones of someone negotiating a partnership with a Ruby student he didn’t know, the words tumbling out too fast, the way they always did when he needed to fill awkward silence with sound. Jordan’s groan about the short sword floated through the air, theatrical and resigned, the audio signature of a man who’d rather be sleeping. Belle staked her claim to the crossbow with the territorial precision of a dragon settling onto a hoard, her hands already testing the tension of the string before anyone else could think about touching it.

Blair moved to the far end of the rack where the light from the windows didn’t quite reach, her isolation self-imposed, the empty space around her a product of reputation and fear and the social architecture of people who’d learned not to approach. She reached for a practice blade, something slender and light, and her left arm hitched mid-motion, the burn scar from the gate pulling at damaged tissue that hadn’t finished healing yet. The sound that came through her teeth was quiet, private, the kind of pain vocalization you make when you think no one’s paying attention.

I caught it. Across fifteen feet of training floor, over the ambient noise of twenty-four students selecting weapons, through the buffer of my own deliberate disinterest.

She caught me catching it. Her eyes narrowed. Warning. Don’t.

I looked away first and let her have the fiction that no one had seen. It was the same courtesy I gave Hikaru every morning, the same one I’d learned to give people who wore their strength like armor because the alternative was letting the world see the wound underneath.

The System pinged at the edge of my vision.

Blair Davenport — Devotion: 29% — Status: ???

Up two points since the hospital. Still three question marks. Still a flickering ring at the outermost edge of a crystal plate in Santa Barbara, the one Yumi said would sit closer to center than Addison’s if it ever stabilized, the one whose S-rank-adjacent frequency would generate so much dimensional energy she’d need to build a bigger plate to measure it.

If Blair Davenport ever let go.

I gripped the spear at the balance point Tsukishima had taught me and turned to face Naomi, who was rolling her staff between her palms, warming up, her pink and black braid coming loose the way it always did by mid-morning.

"You’re staring at Blair," Naomi said, not looking up.

"I’m staring at everyone. It’s a training room."

"You’re staring at Blair differently." She glanced up then, and there was no accusation in it, only the quiet perception that made her dangerous and made her Naomi. "Something happened in there. In the gate."

I thought about a collapsed cave and a coffin built for two and a mouth against my jaw and the words this means absolutely nothing.

"A lot of things happened in there," I said.

Naomi studied my face for a second longer. Then she let it go, the way she always let things go, filing it somewhere gentle instead of somewhere sharp, and adjusted her stance.

"Later," she said.

"Later," I agreed.

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