Divine Milking System

Chapter 348: 348 | Ten People, Zero Trust

I showered fast. The hot water found every scratch and bite mark on my body and reminded me of exactly who had put each one there. Addison’s parallel lines down my back. Belle’s constellation of teeth marks across my throat and chest. The faint pressure bruise on my hip from Naomi’s grip during the Sanctum session. My body looked like a topographic map of bad decisions drawn by talented cartographers.

I dressed in clean tactical underlayers and the academy combat suit, which fit properly now that three weeks of Limit Breaker and Vale’s torture had carved away thirty-five pounds of the original Jace Monroe’s soft engineering. The suit sat snug across my shoulders and chest without pulling or bunching and the material moved with me instead of against me. I strapped the spear across my back and checked my reflection.

The guy in the mirror had sharp cheekbones and amber eyes and a jaw that could cut glass and a neck covered in hickeys that no amount of high collar could fully conceal. He looked dangerous and stupid and ready for a fight.

Good enough.

Hikaru’s door remained closed. I knocked twice.

"Hikaru. Briefing in forty minutes."

A pause. Then: "I know."

"You eat anything?"

"Tea."

"Tea isn’t food."

"Tea is sufficient."

I grabbed two protein bars from the kitchen drawer and slid them under her door. Heard the quiet scrape of her picking them up. Didn’t wait for thanks because Hikaru communicated gratitude through the absence of insults rather than the presence of words.

The walk to the academic sector took twelve minutes. Campus at five-twenty on a Friday morning existed in that weird liminal state where the night crowd had finally surrendered to sleep and the morning crowd hadn’t yet committed to consciousness. The paths were empty except for the occasional maintenance worker and one very lost Emerald student who asked me for directions to the library and received the honest answer that I’d gotten lost six times during my first day and was not qualified to provide navigation assistance to anyone ever.

Conference Room B sat on the second floor of the administrative building, a windowless space with a long table and uncomfortable chairs and a holographic display unit bolted to the far wall. I arrived at five forty-two, which for my track record constituted a minor miracle of punctuality.

Misato was already there. Because of course she was.

She stood at the head of the table with a tablet in one hand and a mug of coffee in the other, her lime green ponytail pulled high and tight, her tactical suit fitted and zipped to the collar. The bruise from Cassandra’s slap had faded to a yellowish shadow on her left cheek that she’d made no attempt to conceal. Her eyes tracked me from the door to the nearest chair, cataloguing my state of readiness through that rapid assessment she performed on everyone who entered her vicinity.

"You’re early."

"I set three alarms."

"Smart." She sipped her coffee. "You look like you got attacked by a vacuum cleaner with teeth."

I touched the bite mark on my neck that Belle had planted with the specific intent of making it visible during today’s briefing. "Training accident."

"Multiple training accidents. Across your entire throat. From what appears to be at least two different mouths." Misato’s expression remained perfectly neutral. "Very unfortunate."

"Very."

Jordan arrived at five-fifty, looking exactly as dead as expected. He wore his tactical suit unzipped to the navel with the underlayer visible and his hair pointed in four competing directions. He collapsed into a chair and placed his forehead on the table and did not lift it.

"I’m here," he announced to the table surface. "I hate it."

Belle entered at five fifty-three, her blue hair still damp from her shower and her combat suit fastened with the same disregard for regulation that characterized everything she wore. The crew neck she’d stolen from my closet was nowhere in evidence, replaced by proper tactical layers, but the look she gave me when she sat down carried the specific warmth of someone wearing your underwear beneath their clothes.

"Good morning, team." Belle’s voice dripped with false cheer. "Everyone sleep well? I slept amazingly. Like a baby. In a bed. Alone. Moving on."

Naomi arrived at five fifty-six and took the seat beside me without fanfare. Her braid was perfect and her suit was fastened correctly and her pink eyes held the steady focus of someone operating under Gold-tier enhancement. She smelled faintly like my soap because she’d used my shower, and I could tell that Belle noticed because Belle noticed everything and filed the observation away in whatever psychological filing cabinet she maintained for future leverage.

At five fifty-nine, exactly one minute before the scheduled start, Blair Davenport walked through the door.

She wore the standard academy tactical suit in Obsidian black but it fit her the way expensive clothes fit people whose families own the companies that manufacture them. The material had been tailored to accommodate her build without sacrificing mobility, with the collar sitting higher than regulation to frame her face and her red hair cut sharp against the dark fabric. Her ice-blue eyes swept the room and found me immediately and stayed there for three full seconds longer than necessary.

Behind Blair came her squad. Charles Leone entered with the swagger of someone whose net worth exceeded his talent, his blonde hair slicked back and his green eyes landing on me with the same contempt he’d worn since the first week. Dante Pope followed, the Elite Ten Rank 10 who looked perpetually exhausted and perpetually terrified of losing his position. Javier Mendoza slipped in behind Dante, his expression caught between his usual puppy-dog enthusiasm and genuine anxiety about sharing a room with two teams that had spent the semester trying to destroy each other.

Hikaru came last.

She’d changed since I slid protein bars under her door. Her short black hair fell with the usual sharp precision around her face, and her red eyes held their typical intensity, giving nothing away. The compression bandages beneath her tactical suit were invisible as always. She moved with controlled economy, favoring her left side so slightly that only someone who knew about the wound would catch it. She sat at the far end of the table without acknowledging me, which was exactly how our public dynamic worked. Roommates who tolerated each other’s existence. Nothing more.

Except now I’d seen her bleed on a bathroom floor and held towels against her body while she whispered "don’t look" and shared a truth that could destroy everything she’d built. That knowledge sat between us like a live wire hidden under a rug.

Misato looked at the assembled ten people. Two squads. Two captains. One room. Zero trust.

"Close the door," she said.