Divine Milking System

Chapter 268: 268 | The Belle Fox Emotional Damages Tax

"What was that about Gong and Blair’s bodies?"

"Huh?"

"You heard me, Jace." freewebnovёl.ƈom

I absolutely had heard her. I was choosing not to have heard her in the same way a person standing on railroad tracks might choose not to hear the train. The problem was that trains don’t care about your preferences and neither did Belle Fox when she smelled blood in the water.

Naomi had gone very still beside me. Not the angry kind of still. The watching kind. The "I want to see how you handle this" kind of still that was somehow worse because it meant she was going to let me dig my own grave and then judge the craftsmanship.

"I said she has the same background as Blair," I tried. "Same tier of money and training."

"You said body," Belle corrected. Her smile hadn’t changed. The chip in her hand remained pointed at me like evidence in a courtroom. "You specifically referenced both of their sexy bodies. While discussing why Gong Sun-Hee is, and I’m quoting you here, Blair without the bitchiness."

"That’s not what I..."

"Do you have a ranking system for this?" Belle leaned forward on her elbows, her blue ponytail falling over one shoulder. The yellow academy shirt pulled across her chest in a way that was absolutely not helping my ability to form coherent sentences.

"Like, is there a spreadsheet somewhere? Gong Sun-Hee, 36E, nice. Blair Davenport, 39F, also nice but mean. Aurora Fitzgerald, 34D, available for dates. Belle Fox, 38DD, currently deciding whether to stab you with this chip."

"There is no spreadsheet."

There was a spreadsheet. It was called Snake Eyes and it ran automatically every time I made eye contact with a woman. The entire system was built around cataloging physical measurements and attraction percentages. My divine power was literally a breast-scanning targeting computer crossed with a charm effect.

Jordan had picked up his breadstick and was eating it while watching me burn with the relaxed enjoyment of someone attending a matinee performance of a play called "Jace Monroe Destroys His Own Life Through Casual Commentary."

"For the record," Naomi said, her voice carrying the careful neutrality of a diplomat addressing a border dispute, "I’m curious about the answer too."

"There is no answer because there was no ranking."

"You ranked them."

"I compared their backgrounds."

"You compared their bodies."

"In the context of socioeconomic privilege and its relationship to physical development through access to personal trainers, nutritional programs, and healthcare that most people can’t afford."

Belle and Naomi looked at each other.

Then they looked at me.

"That," Belle said, "was the most elaborate dodge I’ve ever witnessed. And I grew up in a town where people dodged bill collectors for sport."

Naomi picked up her water glass and drank from it, and over the rim her pink eyes communicated a full paragraph of commentary that I was not going to be allowed to forget during our next private conversation. The shell necklace caught the light as she tilted her head, and the tiny reddish mark on her forearm from sparring that morning served as a reminder that this was a woman who could blast me across a field with spiral energy if properly motivated.

"Moving on," I said.

"We are absolutely not moving on," Belle said.

"We are moving on to the extremely important topic of how we close a forty-point gap against the strongest house in the academy."

"The strongest house that contains two women whose bodies you apparently have detailed opinions about."

"I have detailed opinions about everything. That’s my personality. You’ve met me."

Jordan crunched his breadstick. "He’s not wrong. The opinions are constant and they cover all subjects."

"Thank you, Jordan."

"They’re also usually terrible."

"Less thank you, Jordan."

Belle’s dangerous smile softened by exactly one degree, which in Belle mathematics represented the difference between active hostility and grudging amusement. She ate her chip. She did not break eye contact while doing so.

"Forty points," she said, letting me off the hook because she’d already filed the conversation away for future leverage. Belle didn’t forget things. Belle stored them like ammunition in a vault with excellent organization and alphabetical indexing. "That’s what, two strong gate runs? Three if we play it safe?"

"Two if we hit Tier II with clean clears and solid core counts." I pulled up the point breakdown on the app. "The system weights clear time, core quality, coordination scores, and bonus objectives. If we max coordination and hit bonus objectives that other squads are leaving on the table, we can make up ground faster than raw combat metrics alone."

Naomi nodded, already taking notes in her lecture notebook despite this being lunch and not class. "Nishimura’s environmental reading techniques could help with that. If Belle’s detection maps the whole fracture space before we engage, we can plan routes that hit bonus objectives while clearing. Two birds."

"Sapphire has coordination baked into their culture," Jordan said, surprising everyone by contributing something useful to a strategic conversation instead of complaining about consciousness. "Tsukishima’s been drilling teamwork into that house since before Katt took over. Their worst squad probably has better communication than most Obsidian squads at full strength. We’re not going to out-coordinate them across the board. We need an edge they can’t replicate."

He was right. Jordan was almost always right about strategic analysis, which was infuriating because he delivered his genius observations with the enthusiasm of someone reading a terms of service agreement aloud.

"The edge is versatility," I said. "Sapphire runs the same formations every time. Their playbook is deep but predictable because it’s institutional. If we build loadouts that adapt per gate instead of per doctrine, we can hit scoring categories they’re not optimizing for."

Belle finished her sandwich. She folded the wrapper into a neat square and placed it on her tray at a perfect ninety-degree angle to the chip bag.

"So we need more gate runs, better core quality, and an X-factor that Sapphire can’t counter by throwing Katerina at the problem."

"Basically."

"And we need all of this before winter evaluations in six weeks."

"Also basically."

She looked at Naomi. Naomi looked at her. Something passed between them in the silent language that women developed through shared group chats and coordinated schedules for managing the romantic and supernatural feeding habits of their mutual boyfriend.

"Fine," Belle said. "But you’re buying me chips every day this week as reparations for the body-ranking comment."

"I didn’t rank anyone’s body."

"Thirty points a bag, seven days. That’s two hundred and ten points. Consider it the Belle Fox Emotional Damages Tax."

"That’s extortion."

"That’s the cost of doing business with women whose bodies you have detailed comparative opinions about." She stood, collecting her tray with the serene satisfaction of someone who had won a negotiation before the other party realized negotiation was occurring. "I’ll send you my chip preferences by flavor. Don’t cheap out."

She walked toward the tray return station, her hips swaying in the academy skirt with a rhythm that was one hundred percent deliberate and designed to punish me for the comment I’d made about physical development and socioeconomic privilege.

Naomi gathered her notebook and stood beside me, close enough that her arm pressed against mine.

"For what it’s worth," she said quietly, her pink eyes warm and her mouth barely containing a smile, "I thought the socioeconomic dodge was actually pretty clever."

"Thank you."

"You’re still in trouble."

"I know." free𝑤ebnovel.com

She kissed my lips. Quick and soft, gone before anyone could register it happened, and then she followed Belle toward the exit with her staff case over her shoulder and her braid swinging behind her.

Jordan remained across from me, the breadstick consumed, his expression carrying the specific exhaustion of a man who has witnessed too much of someone else’s love life.

"The spreadsheet is real, isn’t it," he said.

I ate my mashed potatoes and did not answer the question.