Divine Milking System-Chapter 17 | One-on-One with the Professor

Forty-five minutes for thirty questions about gate mechanics.

I’d rather eat glass.

Not because the material was hard. It wasn’t. Basic ecology, mana theory, rank structures, gate classification systems.

Stuff any competent hunter knew before their second year. I’d absorbed most of it by osmosis reading the novel, and the rest was just pattern recognition.

No, the problem was that I was sitting in a college classroom doing a test.

Again.

I dropped out three years ago specifically to avoid this exact situation. The chairs that were built for someone without a body. The fluorescent lighting that turned everyone into corpses.

The ambient smell of anxiety and bad coffee. I had escaped all of this. I had a career. I had an apartment. I had a sex life that didn’t involve homework.

And now I was eighteen again, crammed into a lecture seat that was actively trying to bisect my thighs, staring at a multiple choice diagnostic on my phone.

I scrolled to question six.

What distinguishes a mana-active gate from a dormant gate?

The options were painfully easy. I tapped B and kept moving.

Around me, the room had settled into the particular silence of academic performance. Pencils against paper. The occasional frustrated exhale. Someone three rows ahead was tapping their foot against the floor at a frequency that was going to give me an aneurysm before question fifteen.

I did not look at Dr. Cross.

I absolutely wanted to look at Dr. Cross.

She was sitting at the front desk reviewing something on her tablet, legs still crossed, purple hair catching the morning light through the classroom windows. The glasses were perched at the end of her nose.

This world needed to calm down.

Every woman in it was engineered to make a man lose his mind. The professors. The students. The whole population of this island was apparently optimized for maximum distraction. I had sixty-six hours to live and the universe kept putting beautiful women in my peripheral vision like it was trying to make me forget that I would literally die if I didn’t focus my energy on one.

I was not going to forget.

I tapped through questions seven through twelve in under four minutes. Monster classification. Gate stability indicators. The difference between a mana surge and a mana bleed. Straightforward.

Then I heard it.

A very soft, very controlled breath from my left.

Naomi.

She was staring at her phone with the expression of someone reading a death sentence. Her bottom lip was tucked between her teeth. The pink and black striped hair fell forward slightly as she hunched over her screen. She hadn’t tapped anything in at least two minutes.

Her leg was bouncing.

"Hey," I said quietly.

She looked up fast. Like I’d caught her doing something wrong.

"Don’t overthink it," I said.

"I’m not—" she started, then stopped. "Okay. Maybe a little."

"This isn’t something you need to ace."

"But the rankings—"

"It’s a diagnostic," I said. "It literally doesn’t count. Cross said it herself."

Naomi looked back at her screen. "I know. I just don’t know half of these."

"Nobody does," I said. "That’s the point. She’s finding out what we know before she teaches us. You could answer everything wrong and it wouldn’t matter."

Naomi was quiet for a second.

"You told me before," I said. "Everyone starts somewhere. Right?"

She blinked. "I said that?"

"At dinner. You were talking me and my body."

Her posture loosened slightly. Just a fraction. 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

"Okay," she said. "Okay, you’re right."

"Tap something and move on. You’ll be fine."

She nodded. Looked back at her phone. Tapped an answer.

Good. Last thing I needed was Naomi having a panic attack next to me while I was trying to work through a test I was genuinely considering tanking on purpose.

Because here was the thing.

If I aced this diagnostic, Cross would slot me into the competent pile and move on. No special attention required. No reason to schedule additional sessions. No academic excuse to get near the most interesting teacher on this island.

But if I flunked it spectacularly?

One on one tutoring was a legitimate institutional option.

The thought was so objectively terrible that I respected it.

I kept moving through the test. Questions thirteen through twenty were slightly harder. Gate breach protocols. Emergency mana venting procedures. The physics of how a gate collapse affected surrounding territory. I knew the answers. I tapped them.

Then I got to question twenty-two.

Describe the primary risk factor in second-entry gate clearance without updated scouting data.

It was fill-in. Open response. Not multiple choice.

I stared at it.

The correct answer was overconfidence leading to underestimation of dynamic monster respawn patterns. Any first-year with basic prep work knew this. It was almost insultingly foundational.

I typed: insufficient environmental reconnaissance compounded by assumption bias in threat level assessment.

Which was the same thing, just longer and with more syllables. It would read as someone who understood the concept but liked the sound of their own brain.

Adequate. Not impressive. Exactly where I wanted to land.

I finished the remaining eight questions in six minutes. Deliberately fumbled two of them. Not obviously wrong, just questionable enough to register as knowledge gaps without looking like I hadn’t tried.

Submitted at the thirty-two minute mark.

Then I put my phone down and looked at the room.

Naomi was still working. She’d relaxed after our exchange, though, tapping steadily through questions with less visible dread. Good.

Across the aisle, the Sapphire section was interesting.

Gong Sun-Hee sat four rows ahead on the opposite side. She was working through the test with rigid posture and her pen moving across a paper notebook in parallel, cross-referencing something. She’d brought a notebook. To a phone-based test. For the supplementary notes.

The girl was taking a diagnostic that didn’t count with the energy of someone whose entire future depended on the score.

I almost felt bad.

Then I looked two rows ahead of me on the Obsidian side and saw Blair Davenport.

Short red hair, pale skin, blue eyes that could strip paint. She sat with her back straight and her screen tilted slightly away from the people around her, which suggested she was paranoid about people copying, which meant she either didn’t trust her classmates or she was competitive enough that even a meaningless test felt like a battlefield.

Probably both.