Divine Milking System

Chapter 261: 261 | Dungeon Ecology for Cynical Pragmatists

The walk to Nishimura’s class was the best morning I’d had in weeks.

Belle was on my left, blazer hanging open the way it always did, the yellow shirt underneath doing its absolute best and failing magnificently. Her blue hair caught the morning sun and the chips she’d bought from the vending machine were already half gone. Naomi was on my right, staff case over one shoulder, her pink and black braid still holding from when I’d done it this morning in her room. She smelled like my soap. I caught it every time the wind shifted.

Vale had nearly killed me. Cassandra Davenport was about to investigate my entire existence. Blair was somewhere on campus plotting elaborate revenge.

I felt fantastic.

Something about an absurdly good breakfast, two warm bodies on either side of me, and the knowledge that we’d beaten Blair’s squad fair and square had muted the portion of my brain dedicated to catastrophizing. The California morning was doing the rest. Seventy degrees, salt air off the ocean, sunlight turning the campus into something that looked designed for a brochure rather than traumatizing eighteen-year-olds with monster combat.

"You’re smiling," Naomi said.

"I’m allowed to smile."

"You look suspicious when you smile."

"I look suspicious when I do anything. It’s the face." I glanced at her. "You’re also smiling."

Her nose crinkled. "I’m happy."

"See? Same."

Belle looked between us with the expression of someone watching a television show she’d already seen twice. "This is deeply irritating." She ate another chip. "You’re both disgustingly content and it’s undermining my aesthetic."

"What aesthetic?"

"Cynical pragmatist, obviously." She gestured vaguely at her general existence. "You two are ruining it." freēwēbηovel.c૦m

Naomi laughed, and the sound did the thing it always did, which was put something warm in the middle of my chest that I pointedly refused to analyze during class hours. Strict policy. Nothing good came from examining feelings on an empty stomach.

My stomach was full. I still wasn’t going to examine them.

We hit Building A at eight fifty-two, practically early by my current standards. The hallways carried the usual morning chaos, students in their house colors sorting themselves into class configurations, the social geometry of who walked with whom revealing more about academy hierarchy than any ranking board.

Amber students mixed in with our crowd near the third-floor stairwell. Gold trim, the energy of people who’d actually slept. I respected it deeply. Amber’s collective stress response was apparently more sustainable than Obsidian’s.

"Nishimura’s class," Belle said, like she was announcing something vaguely unfortunate. "I hear he’s decent."

"Decent is a word people use when they mean ’doesn’t make me want to die.’"

"Exactly."

Naomi’s voice carried the particular tone she used when correcting both of us simultaneously. "He’s actually supposed to be good. Jordan said his dungeon ecology notes saved him on two theory exams."

"Jordan sleeps through everything," I pointed out.

"Jordan sleeps through everything and still aced both exams." She raised her eyebrows. "That’s either a very good professor or a devastating critique of exam difficulty."

She had a point. I let her have it.

The classroom was larger than Cross’s, which tracked. Dungeon Ecology pulled from two houses in the combined first-year curriculum, forty students minimum, and whoever designed this building had planned accordingly. Wide amphitheater setup, the same holographic display infrastructure I’d seen everywhere, decent lighting that didn’t make everyone look like they were auditioning for a zombie film.

Amber students had already claimed the left section. They sat with the organized comfort of people who genuinely liked each other’s company, which was a little remarkable given that they’d all met six weeks ago. Some houses bred loyalty through shared suffering. Amber bred it through something else. Actual warmth, maybe. Radical concept.

Maria Santos sat near the aisle, Elite Ten Rank Nine, House Amber’s sole representative in the top ten. She was laughing at something with two other Amber girls. She had the kind of face that made you immediately trust her, round and brown and openly kind, which was basically a survival liability at this academy and somehow didn’t affect her ranking.

Obsidian took the right section. I aimed for the middle rows and got there first, the kind of seat that offered good sightlines without being close enough to the front that professors made direct eye contact.

Belle dropped into the seat on my left before I’d even set my bag down. Naomi took the right with the particular care she gave to arranging herself in classroom settings, everything deliberate, bag positioned, notebook opened to a fresh page, pen ready.

"You’re going to take actual notes, aren’t you," I said.

"Someone has to."

"I take notes."

She looked at my unmarked notebook from the last three weeks. I looked at it with her.

"I take mental notes," I said.

"That’s what people say when they’re not taking any notes."

I wrote "Dungeon Ecology - Lesson 1" at the top of the page with great ceremony. Belle watched this with the dead-eyed expression of someone witnessing performance art.

"Better?" I asked Naomi.

"Meaningfully." She turned to her own notebook and I resisted the entirely unprofessional urge to watch the way her lashes sat against her cheek when she looked down.

The classroom filled around us. More Amber students, a scatter of Obsidian faces I recognized from shared training cycles. Jordan, noticeably absent, was probably still in his room filing complaints with whoever processed grievances from lottery kids about Monday morning schedules.

The door opened.

Kira Nishimura walked in late, which I respected on principle, wearing an instructor jacket that had seen better days over a rumpled dress shirt, collar unbuttoned. Silver-grey hair, thoroughly uncombed. The permanent tired expression of someone who’d been awake for either too long or exactly long enough. He carried a coffee cup in one hand and his tablet in the other and he moved to the front of the room with the unhurried ease of a man who had long since stopped performing urgency for an audience.

He set the coffee down. He looked at the room.

"Right," he said.

He pulled up the holographic display. A gate fracture appeared, the familiar vertical tear with the dimensional shimmer at its edges. Below it, a dense ecosystem diagram that looked like someone had asked a biology professor to map a nightmare.

"Dungeon Ecology." He said it like the subject slightly bored him. "The study of fracture space biomes. Monster behavioral patterns. Resource distribution. Environmental hazards that aren’t the monsters themselves, which account for roughly forty percent of hunter deaths in E and D-rank gates, so pay attention." fɾēewebnσveℓ.com

He took a sip of coffee.

"The other sixty percent is also interesting but that’s Cross’s territory."