Divine Milking System-Chapter 45 | The Countdown to Extraction

The walk back to Building C took twelve minutes.

I know because I checked the timer twice.

Six days, two hours, forty-one minutes remaining. Naomi was coming over at eight. That gave me roughly an hour to shower, clean my room, and figure out the Hikaru situation before any of that could happen.

The Hikaru situation.

Right.

I’d been so focused on locking in the evening’s extraction session that I’d completely blanked on the fact that I share an apartment with a girl who thinks she’s a boy, hates men, and could literally cut me into geometric shapes while I sleep. The kind of oversight that gets people killed. Normally I’d call that a rookie mistake, but given that I’ve been alive in this body for exactly two days, I’ll allow it.

The elevator dinged open on five.

The hallway smelled like someone had microwaved fish at some point and the ventilation system had given up on fixing it. Building C problems. I walked to 5E, keyed in the code, and pushed through the door.

Hikaru was sitting on the couch.

Not doing anything. Not on her phone, not reading, not looking at anything in particular. Just sitting there with perfect posture and red eyes that tracked me the moment I walked in like I was an object she was calculating the weight of.

"Hey," I said.

"You’re sweaty," she said.

"Three hours of field training will do that."

She looked back at the wall. Not the TV, not a book, just the wall. I don’t know what she was thinking about and I don’t think I want to.

I set my bag down by the kitchen counter and tried to decide the best way to approach this. The direct approach is always better than letting someone find out mid-situation. Nothing more awkward than Naomi showing up at the door while Hikaru stares at her like a wolf deciding whether to eat the rabbit or just observe it as an academic exercise.

I knocked twice on the side of the couch.

Hikaru’s head turned approximately three degrees.

"I have a classmate coming over tonight," I said. "Around eight. Just to study. Figured I’d let you know."

A pause.

"Why are you telling me."

"Because we live together and it seemed like the polite thing to do."

Another pause. Longer this time.

"Fine."

She looked back at the wall.

That was it. No follow-up questions. No interest in who was coming or why or what we’d be studying. Hikaru Tanaka operates on a need-to-know basis and apparently my social life falls below the notification threshold.

I grabbed my shower stuff and retreated to my room.

The bathroom door had barely clicked shut before I started stripping off the training clothes. Everything went straight to the floor, which was where the smell was coming from I realized. Three layers deep of athletic gear from the last two days, a damp towel from this morning folded incorrectly over the back of the desk chair, and one shirt that had somehow ended up under the bed in a location that defied the laws of basic physics.

I looked at my room.

Then I looked at it again, from a different angle, hoping the second viewing would be more charitable.

It was not.

"What the hell," I said to no one.

Two days. I’d been in this body for two days and the room already looked like a crime scene.

Clothes on the floor in three distinct piles that suggested I’d been changing outfits multiple times daily, which I had because sweating in the gym and then sweating in class and then sweating through Misato’s personal hell circuit meant I’d gone through more sets of clothing than a reasonable person should accumulate in forty-eight hours.

The desk had my orientation packet spread across it with the corner of the campus map folded wrong.

The bed was technically made but in the way where you pull the duvet up over everything rather than actually arranging it, so there was a suspicious lump in the middle where I’d shoved the pillow sideways at some point.

Naomi was coming over.

Naomi, who sent me a text that morning thanking me for last night with a sincerity that made the system tick her devotion up to seventy-eight percent. Naomi, who agreed to come back with full knowledge of what we were doing and still said yes. The least I could do was make sure she didn’t have to step over yesterday’s gym shorts to sit down.

The shower could wait two minutes.

I kicked the floor clothes into a pile behind the closet door and shut it. The damp towel went on the towel bar where it belonged. The orientation packet got stacked at the back corner of the desk. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

The bed I actually fixed this time, pulling the duvet properly and stacking both pillows against the headboard so it looked like a place a human intentionally slept rather than a location a body had been abandoned.

I checked the room.

Better. Not good, but better. Functional. The kind of room that says I live here and I have some awareness of basic standards rather than I found this space and colonized it.

Satisfied enough, I grabbed my shower stuff and went.

The water pressure in this building is genuinely excellent, which I appreciate more than I should.

Hot water, good pressure, and the kind of quiet that only exists when your roommate communicates exclusively in monosyllables and considers staring at walls to be an acceptable evening activity.

I stood under the stream longer than necessary, feeling the field training ache dissolve from my shoulders and the backs of my calves.

The Silver-tier essence was still doing something to my recovery. I could feel it. The soreness from the morning gym session had faded faster than it had any right to, and by the time Misato had us doing our final circuit on the field, I was pushing reps I shouldn’t have been capable of yet.

My Endurance had ticked up another full segment during practice. Strength was close behind. Whatever Naomi’s milk was doing to my system, it was working faster than conventional training alone ever would.

Which meant tonight mattered.