Divine Milking System

Chapter 264: 264 | My Love is Non-Negotiable

The hallway was warming up fast with bodies moving through it, the usual post-class shuffle of people checking phones and arguing about whether Nishimura’s reading would actually show up on evaluations.

We were walking toward Tsukishima’s class, the three of us, taking the long way because Belle’s relationship with punctuality was more of a suggestion than a commitment.

The weapon building sat at the far end of Zone Two, past the theory towers and down the hill where the Arena complex started, and Belle had already eaten two thirds of her chips without offering a single one to either of us.

My brain was still chewing on Nishimura’s lecture. Something about the part where he talked about fracture spaces being self-sustaining ecosystems, environments with internal logic, complete food chains and territorial boundaries and apex structures. The kind of thing you could dismiss as monster biology if you didn’t sit with it.

I sat with it. freewёbn૦νeɭ.com

"Hey," I said. "Where do you think gates come from?"

Belle looked at me with the particular expression she reserved for questions she considered below her IQ.

"The dimensional boundary weakens, fracture pressure builds up from the Under, the seam gives and you get a tear in reality," she said, exactly the way someone recites a phone number they’ve memorized without meaning to. "Gates are dimensional pressure events. Every kid who’s been through hunter orientation knows this."

"I mean obviously," Naomi agreed, adjusting her staff case on her shoulder. "The Under pushes against the surface world. We’ve known this since the first gate appeared outside Fresno." She paused.

"My dad used to call them holes in the sky. Said they showed up the way cracks show up in old plaster, you put enough pressure against something long enough and it gives."

"Sure," I said. "But are we sure that’s actually how it happened?"

Belle stopped walking. Not dramatically, just stopped, chips held halfway to her mouth.

"What do you mean are we sure?"

"I mean." I thought about how to phrase this without sounding like I’d been huffing essence vapor.

"What if those aren’t holes in our reality. What if they’re portals to other worlds. Like actual other worlds with their own geography and evolution and power structures that dwarf anything we’ve seen." I watched her face.

"And what if the things that come through aren’t just monsters. What if they’re soldiers. Or refugees. Or something else with a purpose that has nothing to do with us specifically." I let that land.

"Like what if there’s a war happening somewhere and Earth is just one battlefield out of fifty."

Naomi had gone quiet in the particular way she went quiet when something made her genuinely reconsider a position she’d held since childhood.

Belle’s expression did something complicated. Started at dismissal, moved through irritation, briefly visited genuine contemplation, then arrived at a destination that was mostly protective concern.

"No more milk," she said flatly.

I blinked. "What?"

"And no more sex either, I’m serious, you’re getting loony on us." She pointed the chip at me like a professor with a very small prop. "This is what happens when Vale runs you through resistance band torture at five in the morning. Your brain starts generating conspiracy theories about interdimensional warfare as a coping mechanism."

"It’s not a conspiracy theory."

"Monroe. We have monster science. We have the FGRA. We have years of gate data."

"All interpreted through one framework," I said. "The same one we started with."

She stared at me.

"Either way," I said. "It’s not like Belle could last a week without being filled with my love, so no sex is off the table."

Naomi made a sound that was either a laugh or a choke, her hand coming up to cover her mouth. Belle’s ears went pink. Not her cheeks, specifically her ears, the way they did when she was pretending something hadn’t registered while it had very much registered.

"That’s not—" she started.

"Six days," I said helpfully. "Maybe five."

"I will pour your essence bottles down a drain."

"Empty threat."

"Monroe."

"You’d miss me inside four days and you know it." I held the door to the stairwell open for both of them with the specific energy of someone who had just won an argument they shouldn’t have started. "The war theory stands, by the way. Just because no one’s asked the question doesn’t mean the question isn’t worth asking."

Belle walked past me with her chin up and her chips clutched to her chest like I might try to take them as tribute.

Naomi went through next, and she shot me a look that was half amusement and half genuine consideration, the kind she wore when she was actually thinking about something instead of just reacting to it.

"The war thing," she said quietly as we started up the stairs. "I’ve never thought about it that way."

"Most people haven’t."

"It’s terrifying."

"Yeah."

We came out of the stairwell into the corridor that connected the theory towers to the combat complex, and the energy changed the way it always did in this section of campus. More noise from the Arena filtering through. The smell of padded flooring and steel.

The hallway widened and the ceiling dropped, and the lighting shifted from the soft overhead kind used in classrooms to the cooler functional kind that made everyone look like they were already in a fight.

Tsukishima’s class occupied the largest of the attached training rooms, a long high-ceilinged space with exposed beams and padded side panels and weapon racks along every wall. Obsidian and Ruby had this period together. freeweɓnovel.cøm

Ruby students were already there, taking up the right half of the space with the relaxed confidence of a house that had started believing in itself in the last year and hadn’t gotten over the novelty yet.

Tsukishima was at the front of the room with her back to the door when we walked in.

Even from behind she was hard to ignore. The blonde ponytail high on the back of her head, the cargo pants sitting low on her hips, the academy instructor jacket worn open over what appeared to be an athletic tank that fit like it had been selected with malicious intent. She had the proportions of someone who looked like they had been designed to distract, and then underneath all of that was an S-rank Mass Manipulation ability that meant she could make herself weightless or increase her fist mass to approximately that of a geological event.

I kept my eyes at a professional level.

Naomi noticed and said nothing.

Belle noticed and made a small satisfied noise that meant she was filing information for later use.