Divine Milking System

Chapter 461: 461 | The Mascot of Trauma

The Sapphire girl blinked twice, her eyes moving between Belle and me with increasing confusion. "Oh. Are you two—"

"We’re something," Belle interrupted. Her amber-brown eyes ran the full length of the other girl’s body, starting at her perfectly styled hair and ending somewhere in the vicinity of her uniform skirt. Her expression turned sharp in a way that made me think of knives. "He’s also busy Saturday, Sunday, and the following Friday. His entire schedule is managed, so if you’re interested in discussing anything, I can provide you with the appropriate contact information for inquiries."

The Sapphire girl’s mouth opened slightly. "Managed by who?"

"By me. There’s a group chat. There’s a waitlist for priority meetings. There’s even a formal complaint process if you feel your concerns aren’t being adequately addressed." Belle’s hand tightened around mine and she steered me toward the stairwell without breaking stride. Over her shoulder, her voice took on a sugary sweetness that made my skin crawl. "Love the skirt, by the way. Very brave with those knees."

We climbed four steps before I pulled my hand free.

"You’re insane."

"I’m efficient," Belle said. She paused, made a face, and corrected herself. "I’m thorough. That girl was about to hand you her number in a hallway packed with two hundred witnesses, and by dinner the entire first-year class would be saying you’re single and available. Then I’d have to deal with sixty new complications I don’t have time for. No thank you."

"So this is purely administrative," I said.

"Purely administrative," she agreed. Her thumb traced a slow circle across the back of my hand where she’d grabbed it again. The motion felt deliberate in a way that had nothing to do with spreadsheets. "Also, she was ugly."

"She was very pretty."

"She was ugly, Monroe. Trust me."

Footsteps sounded behind us and Naomi appeared at the landing, her staff case bouncing off one shoulder. She was breathing harder than a light jog should have warranted and already trying not to laugh. She fell into step on my left side and glanced past me toward Belle with barely suppressed amusement.

"How many today?"

"Four." Belle didn’t miss a beat, didn’t even slow her stride. "Breakfast, two outside the annex, and the knees just now."

"You counted."

"I keep notes." Belle pulled her phone out, screen angled just enough for Naomi to see but not me. I caught the header anyway: INTERCEPTS, with timestamp and rating columns. She noticed me looking and tilted it away. "You’re both welcome."

Naomi’s shoulder bumped mine, warm through her uniform shirt and a little damp from class. Her hair smelled like sea salt and something sweet I couldn’t place. "I’m not complaining."

"You should be. You’re too nice about it." Belle tucked the phone away, fingers quick and practiced. "One of them’s going to be Silver-rank and stubborn, and then we’ll all have to sit down and discuss boundaries like adults."

She said "adults" the way someone else might say "corpses."

The rest of the day ran variations on the same theme. Nishimura’s fracture ecology lecture drew eleven raised hands about Void classification, plus four separate students asking me to confirm details of the seal in front of a room packed with forty witnesses. Nishimura killed the questions with the flat authority of a man who’d seen panic tourism ruin a perfectly good curriculum before.

Lunch made the morning look restrained.

Somebody had printed a shirt. An actual cotton shirt, screen printed, featuring my face rendered in what I can only describe as hostile abstraction beneath block letters reading I NEED A BURGER. A Ruby third-year wore it into the dining hall and threaded through the crowd until she reached our table.

"Would you sign this?"

Belle looked at the shirt, then at me, then back at the shirt with an expression that could have stripped paint.

"Where?"

The girl turned around and pointed at her shoulder blade. "Right here."

I signed the sleeve. Jordan photographed the moment for what he described as blackmail equity.

"You realize this makes you a mascot," Jordan said around a mouthful of pasta. He’d propped his chin on his palm and his eyes were mostly closed. "Like the guy in the foam suit at a baseball game. Except the foam suit is trauma."

"It’s a phase. It’ll die in two weeks."

"It won’t." Belle stole a chip off my tray without looking. "Forty-one million views. My mother sent me the clip. My mother, who does not know what a gate is, sent me a clip of my."

She stopped. Recalibrated mid-sentence with the grace of a woman who’d nearly stepped on a landmine of her own construction.

"Of a classmate," she finished. "Sent me a clip of a classmate."

Naomi made a small sound into her water glass.

"Say the other word," I said.

"No." Belle took another chip without pause. "That costs extra."

I ate three thousand calories, my C-rank body processing food like high-grade fuel, and let the noise blur into white sound. Second-years who’d never once made eye contact with me before were now calling me by name.

The guild kid who’d definitely muttered fat lottery charity case behind my back in September gave me a chin nod from across the hall like we’d served in the same unit.

Two months ago these same people would have forgotten I existed before their spit dried on the ground, and now they all wanted a piece of the story to bring home for dinner so they could say I know that guy.

It got old. Fast. Not the attention itself. Attention is currency and I’m not dumb enough to turn down free capital. It got old because none of them gave a single shit about me. Charles Leone died in a Gate because he broke formation the same way he’d been breaking formation every week since orientation, and not one person on this island wanted to talk about that. They wanted the gold light. They wanted the burger line.

They wanted the story without the corpse.

So when Vale moved homeroom from morning to last period, on nothing but pure Vale-does-what-Vale-wants energy while the registrar tore her hair out somewhere, I was almost grateful.

Almost.

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