Divine Milking System

Chapter 267: 26-7 | A Trust Fund That Has a Trust Fund

The dining hall hit different after three consecutive classes of people trying to kill me with information, weapons, and cardiovascular exercise.

I loaded my tray like a man who’d been starving for a week. Turkey club, double portion of garlic mashed potatoes, grilled chicken thigh, two dinner rolls, a Caesar salad because Naomi would give me that look if I didn’t eat something green, and a massive glass of whatever fruit punch the cafeteria was calling "Mana Recovery Blend" today. It was Hawaiian Punch with a fancy label. I respected the hustle.

Belle had already claimed our usual table by the windows, her tray arranged with the obsessive geometry of someone who treated lunch like a board game. Chicken salad sandwich on the left, chips in the center, sports drink on the right. Nothing touching. The system had rules.

Jordan occupied the seat across from her, face down on the table with his arms hanging over the sides like a puppet whose strings had been cut. His tray sat untouched. A single breadstick balanced on his forehead. Whether he’d placed it there himself or Belle had done it as a social experiment remained unclear.

Naomi sat beside the empty chair she’d saved for me, her grain bowl half finished, her notebook open beside her plate with color-coded notes from Nishimura’s lecture already organized into subsections. She’d added small drawings of the monsters in the margins. Hers were better than mine. More anatomically correct and less likely to be wearing hats.

I dropped into the chair and my body thanked me by making every joint pop simultaneously.

"That sounded medical," Belle said without looking up from her sandwich.

"That sounded like Rice Krispies," Jordan mumbled into the table.

Naomi slid her water glass toward me. "Drink before you eat. You look dehydrated."

I drank. She was right. The water tasted like survival itself after Vale’s morning demolition of my skeletal system followed by Nishimura’s brain-melting lecture followed by Tsukishima using me as a living demonstration of why proper grip technique matters. Three classes in a row on a Monday. Three different instructors with three different methods of making me question every life choice that had led me to this island.

"I can’t wait until we’re just hunters," I said, tearing into the turkey club. "No classrooms. No lectures. No professors who show up an hour late to their own appointments and then lecture you about punctuality."

"Vale?" Naomi asked.

"It’s a power move." Belle said. "The man runs on a clock nobody else can see."

"The man runs on pure disrespect for the concept of other people’s time."

Jordan raised one hand from his dangling position without lifting his face. "Can we talk about literally anything that doesn’t involve more work. My brain has exceeded its daily input capacity and I need at least forty minutes of complete intellectual vacancy before I can process another concept."

"Eat your breadstick," Belle said.

"It’s load-bearing. If I move it, my forehead loses structural support."

I pulled up the academy app between bites and navigated to the House Cup standings. The rankings updated every Monday after the weekend’s gate results and evaluation scores got processed, and I’d been too busy getting kidnapped by Misato, committing federal crimes, and getting my body systematically destroyed by Vale to check them.

The leaderboard loaded.

I stared at it.

"We’re second," I said.

Jordan’s hand went up again in a lazy thumbs-up. "Second is good."

"Second is great," Naomi added, leaning over to look at my screen. Her shoulder pressed warm against mine, and the shell necklace swung forward as she tilted her head. "We were Fourth two weeks ago. Second place in House Cup standings after one month? That’s incredible progress."

Belle set down her sandwich. Her amber-brown eyes found mine across the table with the focus of a sniper acquiring a target.

"It’s not first," she said.

"It’s not first," I confirmed.

"Obsidian doesn’t do second." Belle picked up a chip and pointed it at the leaderboard on my screen like a tiny sword. "The third-years would rather eat glass than finish behind Sapphire two years in a row. Alexander’s probably already scheduling emergency training sessions for every squad in the house. Second place for Obsidian is first place for losing."

She was right and we both knew it. The House Cup wasn’t just about bragging rights. It determined resource allocation for the next semester, training facility priority, equipment budgets, gate assignment tiers, and about seventeen other things that directly affected whether students lived or died during their second year. First place got everything. Second place got leftovers. The gap between first and second at this academy was the gap between thriving and scrambling.

And sitting right there at the top of the leaderboard, in clean Sapphire blue, was the number one position with a comfortable forty-point lead.

House Sapphire. Of course.

"Sapphire," I said.

"Sapphire," Belle agreed.

"They have Katerina," Naomi said, which was the polite version of saying Sapphire had a walking natural disaster at the helm. Katerina Volkov, Elite Ten Rank One, the platinum blonde with ice-blue eyes who could simultaneously freeze and burn everything in a fifty-meter radius. The girl who cleared A-rank gates solo at nineteen and turned down every guild offer because she wanted to graduate "properly." Katt didn’t need a squad. Katt was a squad.

"And Gong Sun-Hee," Belle added, scrolling through the individual rankings on her own phone. "She’s been climbing since week two. Matter Genesis gives her insane versatility in gate runs. She can manufacture whatever the team needs on the spot. Weapons, shields, medical supplies, explosives. It’s like having a walking hardware store that also does custom orders."

Jordan lifted his head from the table for the first time. The breadstick fell off his forehead and landed on his tray with a soft thud. His grey eyes, usually half-lidded with cosmic indifference to the universe, showed actual recognition.

"Gong Sun-Hee," he said. "Gong Industries. The Gong family."

"You know her?" Naomi asked.

"I know of her." He sat up properly now, which was the Jordan equivalent of a full standing ovation. "She’s the famous nepo baby. Her dad sits on the IHC board. Mom was an S-rank hunter before she retired to do philanthropy and look stunning at charity galas. The family basically invented half the equipment we use in gates. That mana detection system in the staging areas? Gong Industries. The stabilization tech that keeps Tier III gates from collapsing during clearance operations? Also Gong Industries. The girl’s trust fund probably has a trust fund."

"So she’s another Blair," Belle said.

"She’s not another Blair." I took a long drink of the fake mana juice. "She’s got the sexy body and the upbringing, sure. Same tier of family money, same level of training since childhood, same pressure to perform. But from everything I’ve read and everything the student directory shows, she doesn’t come with the bitchiness. People actually like her."

I bit into a dinner roll. "She’s basically Blair if Blair had been raised by functional human beings instead of whatever Johnathan Davenport is." freewebnσvel.cøm

A silence developed at the table.

Belle’s lips curved into a shape that was technically a smile the same way a bear trap was technically a piece of metal. Her eyes caught the afternoon light from the dining hall windows, and the intelligence behind them was doing something that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

"What was that," she said, her voice sweet like antifreeze, "about Gong and Blair’s bodies?"