Divine Milking System-Chapter 19 | Gym Class of the Damned

The men’s locker room smelled like fresh rubber and industrial cleaner, which was the most aggressively inoffensive smell a locker room had ever produced in human history. Give it two weeks. It would smell like every other locker room on earth. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

I found a locker with a yellow tag matching the number on my academy app and started working the combination. The gym uniform was already inside, folded in that specific way that meant someone got paid to fold gym uniforms, which was a sentence I never expected to think.

Black compression shorts. Black athletic shirt with the Obsidian house trim in dark charcoal. Black sneakers. The whole thing was nicer than anything I owned in my previous life.

A guy two lockers down yanked his shirt over his head with the casual efficiency of someone very comfortable with being shirtless. Built like he’d been doing pull-ups since the womb, shoulders wide enough to block a doorframe, brown skin with the kind of muscle definition that came from actual training rather than gym selfies. He caught me looking and nodded.

"Jace, right? I’m Marcus." He extended a hand. "Met you at breakfast."

Right. Marc. Atlanta. Invisibility ability.

"Yeah," I said. "Good memory."

"Small group." He shrugged. "We’re all we got over here."

This was true. The lottery kids in Obsidian numbered six, and we’d all ended up in the same homeroom. Probably intentional. The academy liked its social experiments.

Jordan Wayne materialized beside me seemingly from nowhere, locker door already open, moving with the specific energy of a person who’d decided that doing everything slowly was a personality trait. He dropped onto the bench and started unlacing his shoes at the pace of continental drift.

"Pacer test today," he said to no one in particular.

Marcus made a face. "How do you know that?"

"Read the syllabus."

"There’s a syllabus?"

"There’s always a syllabus." Jordan pulled one shoe off. Set it down. "Nobody reads it."

I had not read the syllabus. I was already composing my apology to every cell in this body.

The pacer test. The fitness gram pacer test. The thing they made middle schoolers do in gym class where you ran back and forth while a recorded voice counted down your remaining dignity. I hadn’t thought about that test in fifteen years. I hadn’t needed to. I’d been in shape.

I looked down at my current situation.

The gym shirt was going to fit fine. The compression shorts were going to be a conversation piece.

Javier Mendoza from the breakfast collision came in with two other guys I didn’t recognize, both in Emerald house green trim. One was tall and lanky with wire-frame glasses that he kept pushing up his nose. The other was short and stocky with the kind of haircut that suggested he’d asked for something specific and gotten something else entirely.

"Pacer test’s gonna kill me," the tall one announced to the room. "I’m not built for cardio. I’m built for standing still and analyzing things."

"Same," said the short one. "Emerald is a thinking house."

"Emerald is a sitting house," Jordan said, without looking up from his second shoe.

The tall Emerald kid pointed at Jordan. "Exactly. Thank you."

Marcus was pulling his shirt on when he started laughing about something, and the conversation in the locker room shifted the way locker room conversations always did, which was away from anything meaningful and toward whatever thought occurred to whoever spoke loudest.

"You guys see the girl from Sapphire with the silver hair?" The short Emerald kid, whose name I still didn’t know, sat down on the bench across from us. "She walked past me in the hallway and I forgot what language I spoke."

"Yuki Hoshizawa," the tall one said immediately. "Elite Ten, Rank Six. Barrier specialist."

"I wasn’t asking for her stats."

"You should be, she’s genuinely terrifying in combat."

"She’s genuinely terrifying in general," Marcus said.

Javier, to his credit, was very focused on his locker and not contributing to this conversation. Notebook already open on the bench beside him. The kid never stopped working.

Jordan finally got his second shoe off. "Mana does something to people physically," he said, with the tone of someone delivering a documentary narration. "Read a study about it. The awakening process restructures cellular density. Has cosmetic side effects."

"Is that why everyone here looks like that?" Marcus gestured vaguely at the air.

"Statistically yes."

"I appreciate science," the short Emerald kid said.

I pulled the gym shirt on and it was fine. The shorts were not a conversation piece after all, which was a relief. The body I was currently occupying was not built for compression anything, but the academy apparently sized everything generously, so I looked like a person preparing to exercise rather than a person being slowly compressed into a tube.

The pacer test was going to eat into that buffer in the worst possible way.

We filed out of the locker room and onto the field, which was a massive open arena space that the Zone Two map labeled simply as "The Arena" in a font that suggested whoever named it had been going through something. The grass was real and the sky was California-perfect and the ocean was visible from three sides because we were on an island and the architects apparently wanted to make sure nobody forgot that.

The girls were already out there.

I was going to need a moment.

The gym uniform for female students was a black athletic shorts and tank top combination.

The Obsidian house trim ran along the sides in dark charcoal, and the tank top had a racerback cut that was genuinely useful for athletic activity and absolutely nothing else was going on there.

Blair Davenport stood near the edge of the field with perfect posture in a uniform that fit like it had been custom-made, which it probably had been, her red hair catching the morning light.

Misato Ayame stood beside her with her lime green hair pulled back into a high ponytail that swayed when she moved, and the gym uniform on Misato was doing things that gym uniforms were not technically supposed to do.

Belle Fox was somewhere in the middle of the group, her blue hair loose for once and falling past her shoulders, shorts hitting mid-thigh on legs that her Obsidian skirt had been covering all morning.

"Jace."