Divine Milking System-Chapter 75 | The Goldfish and The Wet Sand

The crash hit me at 4:47 PM.

Not gradually. Not with warning. One minute I was walking toward the east field with my bag over my shoulder feeling like a functional human being, and the next minute my legs weighed approximately four hundred pounds each and my brain had the processing speed of a very tired goldfish.

Silver-tier essence buff: expired.

I checked the system out of pure morbid curiosity. The little progress bars that had been cheerfully climbing all morning had settled back to their actual positions. Endurance at D-rank 0/10. Strength at E-rank 9/10. Agility at E-rank 5/10.

So. That was what my body actually looked like without Naomi’s supernatural milk running through it.

Outstanding.

I looked at Naomi walking two steps ahead of me and watched her nearly trip over a perfectly flat section of sidewalk. She caught herself on Jordan’s arm. Jordan didn’t react because Jordan was moving at the speed of someone being transported against their will toward a destination they actively resented.

"You okay," I said.

Naomi looked back at me. Her eyes were slightly unfocused in a way I recognized because I was currently experiencing the same thing. The gold-tier buff had burned through its remaining hours sometime after lunch and she’d come crashing down right alongside me.

"Fine," she said.

She was absolutely not fine.

Neither was I.

We were both going to die out here.

Belle had apparently noticed the synchronized collapse of two of her teammates because she fell back from her position near the front and matched my pace. Her blue hair caught the afternoon sun as she looked between me and Naomi with the expression of someone completing a math problem they had suspected the answer to for some time.

"You both look terrible," she said.

"Thank you Belle."

"Like, genuinely. What did you do at lunch." She paused. "Actually don’t answer that."

"I had the sandwich."

"The sandwich didn’t do that to you." She looked at Naomi again. "She’s barely keeping her eyes open."

"I’m awake," Naomi said, from several feet ahead, without turning around.

"You walked into a signpost thirty seconds ago," Belle said.

"That signpost was in a bad location."

I genuinely loved Naomi. I meant that in the most complicated way possible.

The east field opened up ahead of us, and Misato was already there. Of course she was. Misato was always already there, like she manifested out of thin air specifically to make everyone else feel late and inadequate. She stood in the center of the field with her arms crossed and her lime green ponytail catching the breeze, wearing her modified gym outfit. Black athletic shorts that ended well above the knee, a fitted black top with Obsidian trim, and an expression that said she had already catalogued every one of our inadequacies and was simply waiting for us to arrive so she could address them in order.

I was tired. I was crashed out. My body felt like someone had replaced my skeleton with wet sand.

I still noticed the way the afternoon light hit her shoulders.

I was a simple creature and I had made my peace with that.

Jordan materialized beside me from wherever he’d been shuffling. "I’m going to die," he said, conversationally.

"Not today," I told him.

"That’s not a promise you can make."

He had a point.

Misato looked at all of us as we assembled in front of her and did that thing where she catalogued everyone’s current condition in about three seconds flat. Her green eyes moved from Jordan, who looked like he was reconsidering his relationship with consciousness, to Belle, who was maintaining dignity through sheer force of personality, to me, to Naomi.

She stopped on Naomi.

Then she looked back at me.

Her expression didn’t change exactly. But something in it shifted.

I maintained complete neutrality. The practiced composure of a man who had absolutely nothing to explain.

"Alright," Misato said. "We’re doing footwork today. Core conditioning and footwork. Then I’ll run you through some basic positioning."

Belle raised her hand.

Misato looked at her. "This isn’t a classroom Fox."

"I know." Belle lowered her hand but kept talking anyway, because Belle treated social conventions as rough guidelines rather than actual instructions. "I just want to register that the four of us have now done three days of physical training with zero simulation time. Zero. We haven’t touched the VR chambers. We haven’t run a practice gate scenario. We haven’t done any actual hunter training, we’ve just been exercising."

Misato’s expression suggested she had been waiting for this conversation and had prepared for it.

"Your foundation is weak," Misato said.

"My foundation is fine," Belle said. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

"You got winded walking up two flights of stairs this morning."

"The elevator was broken."

"The elevator wasn’t broken. You just didn’t want to wait for it."

Belle opened her mouth. Closed it. "That’s not the point."

"What’s the point Fox."

"The point is that simulation chambers exist and we haven’t used them and Friday’s assessment is going to involve actual combat scenarios and I would personally enjoy not embarrassing myself in front of the entire first year class."

Jordan raised a hand without looking up from his shoes. "I also want simulation time. On record. Formally."

"Noted," Misato said. She looked at Naomi. "Love. Opinion."

Naomi looked up from whatever middle distance she’d been staring at. She blinked twice. She was running on approximately forty percent operational capacity and everyone could see it. "I think," she said carefully, "that maybe a balance of both would be, um. Good."

"Diplomatic," Misato said. "Monroe. What do you think."

Everyone looked at me.

I thought about the exponential math of progression. I thought about the D-rank Hollow Crawlers that Cross had described, the ones that identified the weakest member of a squad within forty-five seconds and worked from there. I thought about Endurance at D-rank and Strength still crawling through the high E’s and the fundamental reality that putting me in a simulation right now would be instructive in exactly one way, which was showing me precisely how fast a monster would decide I was the weakest link and act accordingly.

I thought about all of this.

Then I thought about how Misato was currently standing with her weight shifted to one hip and her arms crossed and the afternoon sun doing genuinely unfair things to her general situation.

"Foundation is important," I said.

My voice came out slightly more exhausted than I intended.

Misato nodded once, satisfied.

Belle looked at me like I had personally betrayed her. "You’re only agreeing because you’re too tired to form a real opinion."

"I have opinions. They just happen to align with hers."

"You’ve been staring at her for the last thirty seconds."

"I’m listening. I’m a visual learner."

Misato pointed at a spot on the grass ten feet in front of her. "Monroe, come here."