Divine Milking System-Chapter 20 | Establishing a Baseline of Failure

"Jace."

Naomi appeared at my elbow, waving once with the kind of friendly energy that belonged to a golden retriever. She was in the gym uniform with her pink and black striped hair loose down her back. Her pink eyes were wide and genuinely happy to see me, which was the nicest thing that had happened to me since waking up in this body.

"We have this class together too," she said, more as an observation than a complaint.

"Seems like it."

"It’s actually kind of nice." She tucked a strand of striped hair behind her ear. "Having someone familiar. I don’t know most of the Sapphire girls yet."

"You’ll figure it out."

"I know, it’s just." She looked at the field. "A lot of people."

"Same core classes," I said, mostly thinking out loud. "Different electives."

She nodded at that, turning it over in her head. "Yeah, that tracks. House pairings for core curriculum, individual electives for specialization." She paused. "Does that mean we’re stuck with each other for Hunter Theory and Phys Con all year?"

"Looks like it."

She smiled. "Good," she said simply.

I was looking for Belle, because Belle was my current operational priority and I needed to know where she was at all times during this delicate early phase of building rapport.

I found her.

She was standing near the right edge of the assembled students, laughing at something, her hand on a guy’s arm.

The guy she was talking to was tall. Good looking in an expensive way, blonde hair swept back with product, green eyes.

His Obsidian uniform had that slightly elevated tailoring that came from having it custom-made rather than pulled from a supply closet. He was saying something and Belle was laughing at it with her whole face.

It took me four seconds to place him.

Charles Leone.

I remembered Charles Leone. Not because he was important, but because he was the kind of character a story uses to give the actual protagonist something obvious to push against.

Minor villain energy. Wealthy, good-looking, legitimate combat ability. His Frame Perfect technique was genuinely strong, the kind of thing that got second years talking about a first year in the first week.

He’d shown up in the novel around Chapter twenty and spent the next thirty Chapters doing various things to justify Javier eventually humiliating him in a sanctioned duel.

The thing the novel got right about Charles was that his misogyny wasn’t performed for effect. It was structural.

He’d grown up in a family that treated women as domestic infrastructure and he’d absorbed that framework so completely that he didn’t even think about it. He was polite to Belle in the way someone was polite to a painting.

Appreciative of the surface. Not thinking about what was underneath.

Belle, for her part, was not thinking about any of that. Belle was thinking about Charles Leone’s family connections, his guild backing, his obvious wealth, and what proximity to all of that could do for Belle Fox from Burns, Oregon.

Which was fair. Belle operated on a different operating system than feelings.

But Charles Leone would use her up and discard her the second she stopped being useful or started having opinions, and that was not a prediction, that was a pattern I’d seen this character execute in the source material.

My hands had done something.

I looked down. My left hand was closed into a loose fist at my side. I opened it deliberately.

"What’s wrong?"

Naomi, still beside me, was looking at my hand and then at my face with that extremely readable concern she projected at everyone within a five-meter radius.

"Nothing," I said.

She followed my sightline to Belle and Charles and looked back at me.

"Nothing," I said again, and I meant it, and I made sure it read as meant.

Naomi accepted this, which was one of her better qualities.

The field went quiet.

Not the polite settling-down quiet of a classroom. The specific quiet that happened when someone with physical authority walked into a space and the air agreed to cooperate.

Michael Garrett crossed the field from the facility entrance and the man was an event. Six-foot-five of retired violence, grey at the temples, a scar running through his left eyebrow.

He was wearing the academy instructor uniform and it looked wrong on him, not because it didn’t fit but because it looked like a costume over something that didn’t need a costume.

Two fingers on his right hand were missing from the second knuckle down.

He stopped in the center of the assembled students and looked at us the way a person looked at a problem they intended to solve.

"I’m Garrett," he said. His voice was the vocal equivalent of concrete. "You will call me Coach or sir. Not both. Pick one."

Nobody said anything.

"Physical Conditioning meets four times a week. You will be here. You will be on time. If you are not on time, you will run until you understand what on time means."

He turned slowly, making eye contact with sections of the group rather than individuals.

"Today we are establishing your baseline." He held up a tablet that looked small in his hand. "Everything you do today goes into your file. I use this file to track whether you are improving. Improvement is mandatory. Plateaus are a conversation I will have with you personally, and those conversations are not pleasant."

Someone near the Emerald cluster cleared their throat nervously.

"The assessment has four components," Garrett said. "Endurance run, strength test, agility course, and mana output measurement. The last one requires the equipment my staff is setting up behind me." He didn’t look behind him, because he didn’t need to. "We start with the endurance run." 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

I looked at the track that ran around the perimeter of the field.

I looked at the body I was currently operating.

The pacer test would have been survivable. A timed distance run was going to be a documentation of every poor choice Jace Monroe had made in the last eighteen months, performed in front of two full houses of people I needed to not pity me.

Garrett looked at the assembled students one more time.

"The baseline is not a competition," he said. "It is information. I need accurate information." He paused. "Do not perform. Do not pace yourself for an audience. Run until your body stops, then keep running. I need to know what you actually are, not what you think you should look like."

He clicked something on the tablet.

"On the track. Now."