Divine Milking System

Chapter 350: 350 | The Good Man’s Story

Blair’s second condition came fast.

"My team maintains internal communication on our own channel. Misato’s tactical commands come through a shared frequency, but I will not have Monroe listening to private squad discussions."

"Done," Misato said.

"And if this goes sideways." Blair’s voice flattened into something colder than her usual aristocratic performance. "If people get hurt because your team can’t keep up with mine, I want that on the official record. Both captains sign the after-action report."

Misato considered this for roughly two seconds. "Agreed. Anything else?"

Blair looked like she wanted to add a fourth condition, probably something about me wearing a bag over my head or staying a minimum of fifty meters away from her at all times. But she sat down instead, her tactical suit creaking softly against the leather chair, and folded her hands on the table with the posture of someone who had just signed a treaty they fully intended to violate at the first opportunity.

Honestly? I didn’t care.

Blair Davenport could hate me, distrust me, refuse to acknowledge my existence in the operational chain, and spend the entire gate run fantasizing about setting my hair on fire. None of it changed the math. I had fourteen days of life in my account, four essence cups in the vault, two buffed teammates, and a stolen death ability that could carve through training dummies like wet paper. Whether Blair liked me or loathed me or experienced some complicated middle ground that made her stare at me for three seconds too long across conference tables, the gate didn’t give a shit about interpersonal dynamics.

Monsters wanted to eat us. We needed to not get eaten. Everything else was decoration.

Javier raised his hand from the far end of the table like he was in class. "Quick question."

Misato gestured for him to continue.

"If Misato handles tactics and Blair handles offense, who makes the call if they disagree?" Javier’s notebook sat open in front of him with three colored pens lined up beside it, because of course it did. "Like, if Misato says retreat and Blair says push, what happens?"

Excellent question. The kind of question that separated people who survived gates from people whose families received folded flags and condolence packages. Javier Mendoza, the shonen protagonist with the heart of gold and the analytical brain of a war college professor, had just identified the exact failure point that would get someone killed.

Misato and Blair looked at each other.

The silence lasted four seconds. Four seconds in a room full of hunters might as well have been four hours in normal conversation. Belle’s hand found the edge of the table and gripped it. Jordan lifted his head from the surface for the first time since sitting down, his grey eyes tracking between the two women with the sharp focus he reserved for situations that might actually require his participation. Naomi’s posture went rigid beside me, her Gold buff humming beneath her skin with visible intensity that made the air around her shoulders shimmer.

"If we disagree," Misato said, "I yield to Blair on offensive calls and she yields to me on movement and positioning."

Blair nodded once. A single vertical motion of her chin that communicated agreement without concession.

"And if it’s a survival call?" Javier pressed. "If both options suck and someone has to choose between bad and worse?"

"Then I choose," Misato said. "Because bad and worse is my job description."

Blair’s mouth tightened at the corners. For a moment I thought she would argue, would reject the idea of anyone else holding final authority over life-and-death decisions that involved her team, her people, her legacy as a Davenport who was raised to believe that control was oxygen and sharing it was suffocation.

"Acceptable." Blair’s voice came out quieter than expected. Almost human.

Misato pulled the hologram back to full view and began assigning positions. I tuned in with half my attention while the other half ran through my ability loadout and the tactical implications of each combination. Wave Motion sat in my first active slot, Bronze rank, my primary offensive tool with good range and improving stamina efficiency. Sensory Hijack occupied the second slot, Bronze rank, my Swiss army knife for combat disruption and psychological warfare. Treasure Sense held the third slot, Bronze rank, useful for detection in gate environments but redundant with Belle’s superior version.

The real question was whether to swap Treasure Sense for Reaper’s Edge before deployment.

Treasure Sense at Bronze gave me a fifteen-meter detection radius and basic value assessment. Useful, but Belle’s Silver-buffed version covered a hundred meters with material identification. Having both of us running detection was redundant, like bringing two compasses on a trip where one of them was mounted on a GPS satellite.

Reaper’s Edge at Copper gave me a death-aspected weapon that degraded whatever it touched, a short-range teleport dash, and the potential for Soul Harvest energy recovery. The weapon was new, untested in actual combat, and ran on mana rather than stamina, which meant using it wouldn’t compete with Wave Motion for the same resource pool.

The swap was obvious. Drop the redundant utility, equip the combat option, become a genuine threat instead of a backup scanner. But doing so meant revealing a fourth ability to everyone in this room, and four stolen abilities on a lottery kid who’d been at the academy for six weeks would raise exactly the kind of questions that Cassandra had come here to ask and Vale had warned me to avoid generating.

I could make the swap during the gate, after we crossed the threshold and everyone was too busy fighting to catalog my ability roster. The five-minute cooldown on ability swaps meant I’d need to find a lull in combat, but C-rank gates typically had engagement waves rather than continuous contact. Between waves, I could swap Treasure Sense for Reaper’s Edge and nobody would notice unless they were specifically watching my ability signatures.

Misato assigned me to center flex, rotating between Naomi’s fire support position and Charles’s frontline assault depending on engagement distance. The assignment made sense. Wave Motion gave me ranged capability at distance and the spear gave me melee capability up close, so I could shift roles based on what the forest threw at us. She paired me with Javier for the flex rotation, which put the two of us as mobile response elements that could reinforce any section of the formation that started taking pressure.

Javier caught my eye across the table and nodded. No animosity, no posturing, just one professional acknowledging another. The guy whose destiny I was actively stealing from still treated me like an ally because that was who Javier Mendoza was at his core. A good person. The protagonist of a story I’d hijacked and rewritten with every extraction, every stolen ability, every relationship I’d bent toward my own survival.

"Formation drill starts at oh-seven-hundred on the east field," Misato announced. "Full combat gear, full ability disclosure, zero excuses. Anyone who shows up late runs laps until they vomit. Anyone who shows up unprepared goes home. We have eleven hours to turn ten strangers into something that can survive a C-rank forest, and I intend to use every single one of those hours."

Jordan made a sound like a deflating tire.

"Questions?"