Divine Milking System

Chapter 298: 298 | Progress Measured in Agony

I stared at him.

"Monroe, the look on your face right now is exactly why I enjoy this job."

The next two hours dissolved into a special kind of hell where I learned that Bronze-tier resistance bands existed specifically to humble anyone who thought C-rank strength meant they’d transcended suffering. Vale reappeared with the same equipment from yesterday, except the calibration had increased to match my new baseline.

Every curl, every press, every row now required actual force instead of the relative ease I’d experienced twenty-four hours ago. Fifty reps became a hundred. Chest work doubled. Rows doubled. Squats doubled, which was a crime against humanity considering my legs had already filed for bankruptcy during the warm-up.

He didn’t just torture me. Vale interspersed the stations with instruction, fragments of theory delivered in his infuriatingly casual tone while I gasped for air and my muscles screamed their protests.

Only after the pain receded enough for my brain to remember its job did the pieces fit together into something useful. Strength without flexibility, he explained, created power that shattered its own structure. Endurance without recovery built effort that ate itself from the inside.

Speed without awareness produced momentum that crashed headlong into walls. Each concept arrived during a brief respite before he reset the timer and the next round began.

The real nightmare was how he warped the training space itself. His Limitless ability turned the gym into a physics experiment designed by a sadist.

Resistance bands pulled from angles that shouldn’t have existed, their tension coming from directions the spatial dimensions didn’t support.

The floor beneath my feet changed subtly mid-rep, forcing constant micro-adjustments to maintain balance. Small gravity distortions appeared and vanished without warning, adding phantom weight to a squat before removing it entirely on the next repetition, then reversing the pattern so my body never developed a rhythm. freёwebnovel.com

Nothing behaved the way it should. The only predictable element was the pain, which remained constant and enthusiastic.

At 6:47 AM, we transitioned to ability work. Vale had me fire Wave Motion at targets he created from compressed spatial distortions, translucent barriers that hung in the air like frozen windows and shattered satisfyingly when the golden spirals hit them dead center.

He moved the targets randomly, forcing me to aim while exhausted, to fire while my arms shook, to maintain control when every part of me wanted to collapse.

"Tighter spiral," he called from across the gym. "You’re letting the energy disperse before impact. Concentrate the rotation."

I fired again. The golden bolt wobbled slightly mid-flight, the edges of the spiral fraying as it crossed the twenty-meter mark. The impact against the barrier came at an angle, and instead of shattering cleanly, the translucent surface rippled and absorbed most of the energy. The sound was dull, disappointing.

"Again."

I pulled in a breath through my nose, rolling my shoulders back to shake out the fatigue gathering there. My stance adjusted by a few inches, weight distributing differently across my feet.

The next spiral launched cleaner, the rotation tighter from the moment it left my hand.

The golden energy held its shape across the full twenty-five-meter distance, maintaining the precise helical pattern Vale had been drilling into me for the past half hour.

When it hit the barrier this time, the entire construct exploded into fragments of compressed space that dissipated before they reached the floor. The crack echoed sharply through the gym.

Vale’s chin dipped in a single nod, the barest acknowledgment of improvement. His hand moved lazily through the air, and the next target materialized thirty-five meters away, hovering at chest height near the far wall.

At 7:15 AM, he introduced Sensory Hijack into the mix. He had me maintain the ability on a training dummy positioned at the far end of the gym while simultaneously firing Wave Motion at moving targets, forcing me to split my concentration between two completely different applications of power.

The mana cost climbed steadily, and by the fifth simultaneous activation, my MP had dropped to dangerous levels.

"You’re leaking mana from your left hand," Vale observed. "You’re losing twelve to fifteen percent through sloppy containment."

"My containment is sloppy because I’ve been exercising for two hours on four hours of sleep."

"Your containment is sloppy because you haven’t practiced maintaining it under stress. Sleep is irrelevant. In a gate, you won’t have the luxury of optimal conditions." He paused, then added with the ghost of a smile: "Or the luxury of an enthusiastic evening beforehand."

At 7:28 AM, Vale called time. I lay on the mat staring at the ceiling, my chest rising and falling in a rhythm that suggested my lungs were personally offended by the amount of oxygen I was demanding. Every muscle burned. My mana sat at fifteen percent.

I lay there in the quiet, breathing hard, every part of me screaming. My stamina had to be somewhere around twenty percent. Twenty-five at best. The Endurance notification appeared in the corner of my vision—C-rank achieved. The bar had maxed out at D, filled completely, then rolled over to C with a clean zero. Progress measured in increments of pure agony.

Vale dropped into a crouch beside me. His silver hair fell forward, framing his face. Without the sunglasses, his eyes were startling—one ice blue, one storm grey. There was no mockery in them. No judgment. Just focus. The kind of attention someone gives when they know exactly what they’ve put you through and believe it was worth it.

"Same time tomorrow," he said.

I managed something between a grunt and a laugh. "Can’t wait."

He tilted his head slightly, studying me. "And Monroe?"

"Yeah?"

"Get some sleep tonight. You’re sharper when you’re rested." He rose to his feet, adjusting his jacket with the kind of casual precision that suggested even his posture cost more than my entire wardrobe. "Also, whoever left that bite mark on your neck should know that Silver-rank regeneration can clear surface wounds in about four hours. All she’d need to do is channel a little mana to the area."

I blinked. He kept talking.

"The fact that she didn’t means she wanted people to see it."

He turned and walked toward the door. His footsteps echoed off the high ceiling, sharp and deliberate, until the sound faded and the door clicked shut behind him.

My phone buzzed. Belle.

"you alive?"

I typed back with fingers that could barely grip the screen.

"barely. vale doubled everything because i showed up looking like a crime scene."

"lmaooo. deserved. breakfast in 20?"

"make it 30. i need to remember how legs work."

"dramatic. naomi says hi and also that you need to drink water."

"tell naomi i love her."

"tell her yourself, coward."