Divine Milking System

Chapter 460: 460 | A Repossession Notice

Tsukishima paired me with a Ruby second-year named Okonkwo who stood six-foot-four and carried a training halberd like it weighed as much as a broom handle. He spent the first two minutes apologizing for his reach advantage and the next eight minutes proving it existed.

"Sorry," he said, after a shaft strike caught my forearm hard enough to numb three fingers. "You good? I keep forgetting people are smaller than me."

"Everyone is smaller than you. You’re a building."

He laughed and reset. That was the thing about Ruby students. They hit you, apologized, and then hit you again harder because they’d decided you could take it. I liked them more than I expected to. Obsidian treated sparring like a status audit. Ruby treated it like a conversation where everyone got to shout.

I caught his fourth pass on the spear haft and slid inside his guard, and my body did the thing it had started doing around week four where it moved before I finished thinking about it. My grip found the balance point Tsukishima had drilled into me. My hips turned. The butt of the spear tapped his ribs at half speed and he made a noise like a deflating air mattress.

"Okay," Okonkwo said, stepping back and rubbing his side. "Okay, yeah. That’s the gate thing. That’s what everyone’s talking about."

"That’s a stick and bad manners."

Across the floor, Naomi’s staff clacked against her partner’s practice sword in a run of exchanges that had the whole west side of the annex glancing over. Her braid had lost the fight with gravity twenty minutes ago and now hung half undone across her shoulder. Sweat darkened the collar of her gym shirt. Her Gold buff had faded out days ago, so this was just Naomi Love, unbuffed, fisherman’s daughter, going four rounds against a second-year who’d been holding a blade since she was nine, and holding her own well enough that Tsukishima stopped to watch for eleven seconds without saying anything.

Eleven seconds of Tsukishima’s silence was worth more than a written commendation. Naomi didn’t notice. That was Naomi’s entire deal. She was too busy trying not to lose to realize she was winning.

Two racks down, Blair drilled alone.

Nobody had partnered with her. The Ruby students didn’t know her well enough to volunteer, and the Obsidian students knew her far too well. She ran forms against empty air with her burned left side pulled tight against her ribs, jaw locked, red hair sticking to her temple, and every third repetition she flinched in a place her uniform hid.

Tsukishima walked past her once, said something short, and Blair’s spine went straighter than architecture had any right to allow. Whatever the instructor said, Blair didn’t argue. She just kept going, slower, with her elbow lower.

I looked away before she caught me again. My track record on that particular staring contest was zero and two.

The bell rang at ten-fifty. Tsukishima called us into a loose half-circle, worked a fresh lollipop into her cheek, and gave us the weekly verdict.

"Half of you are learning. The other half are performing." She swirled the stick at nobody in particular, which somehow made it land on everybody at once. "Racks. Then go. Monroe, your grip held all forty minutes. Do it again Wednesday and I’ll teach you something that isn’t a glorified tent pole."

"Was that a compliment?"

"That was a status update." She turned. "Don’t die again. I hate the paperwork."

And that should have been that, except the part of the day I didn’t plan for started the second I left the training hall.

Six weeks ago I was a two-hundred-forty-pound social ghost in a uniform that gave up at button three. I got shoulder-checked in hallways by guild kids who didn’t register the impact because you don’t register bumping into furniture. A Sapphire girl once apologized to the empty space behind me after cutting through my bubble like I was a door hinge. I was furniture. I was wallpaper with a pulse.

Now I couldn’t get from the annex to the East Tower without a receiving line.

"Monroe. Hey. Monroe." A first-year Amber kid in a blazer three sizes too big fell into step with me and matched my stride with the enthusiasm of a labrador. "So the gold thing. Was that an aspect awakening or a secondary manifestation? Because my cousin says secondary manifestations only happen under lethal stress and I told him you obviously qualified, and he owes me forty credits if I can confirm it."

"Tell your cousin I flexed really hard and got lucky."

"That’s not an answer."

"It’s the answer you’re getting, and it’s free."

He peeled off. Two Sapphire girls replaced him at the stairwell, and one of them touched my arm, right above the elbow, and held it there four seconds longer than physics required.

"You’re taller than you look on video," she said. Her friend giggled into her hand like this was a scripted bit they’d rehearsed on the walk over. "Everyone thought you’d be shorter."

"Everyone thought I’d be dead."

"That’s dark." She smiled anyway. She had a nice smile, honestly, and Snake Eyes tagged her before I could stop it, tossing up numbers I did not need in a hallway at eleven in the morning. Bronze rank. Baseline attraction climbing past forty percent on a stranger who’d learned my name from a news clip.

Six weeks ago that number would have been a lifeline. Now it landed like junk mail.

"There’s a thing at Sapphire common on Friday," she said. "You should come. I could send you the details, if you gave me your."

Belle arrived like a repossession notice.

I didn’t hear her. I never heard her. She just materialized against my right side, hooked her arm through mine at the elbow, pressed her hip to my hip, and rested her cheek very briefly against my shoulder in a display of physical affection she would deny under oath.

"He’s busy Friday," Belle said.

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