Divine Milking System-Chapter 5 | Gold Digger, Meet Pragmatist

The food line moved fast. Good sign. The chef stations ran like they’d done this a thousand times, which they probably had.

I grabbed a tray and started down the line.

The salad station had a market salad that looked like it was designed by someone who actually understood nutrition. Mixed greens, cherry tomatoes, cucumber, a handful of dried cranberries, spicy chicken breast sliced clean across the top. I added the granola instead of croutons because I’d spent enough years in my past life eating right to know that croutons were decorative at best. Low-fat balsamic vinaigrette on the side. Mixed fruit cup.

The drink station had a row of branded bottles I didn’t recognize. I picked one up. Blue. The label said "HunterAde: Mana Recovery Formula, Electrolyte Blend, 350ml."

I stared at it for a second.

It was blue Gatorade.

This world had blue Gatorade and called it a hunter sports drink.

Heh.

I grabbed two.

The tray was heavier than I expected. My arms registered the complaint immediately, which was a useful reminder that E-rank strength was not a metaphor. I carried it carefully across the dining hall and did another sweep with Snake Eyes while I walked.

Belle Fox was still at the same table near the lottery section. Still on her phone. The fruit on her plate was half-eaten. Her free hand rested on the table next to a bottle of the same blue HunterAde I was holding, which I found unreasonably funny.

I ran through the math one more time.

Bronze-tier essence. Ten points per mouthful, doubled to twenty on first extraction. One cup was eight mouthfuls. First session bonus applied to every mouthful during the first session. So a full cup from Belle was 160 points. That was one day and fourteen hours of life added to the clock.

Not enough to solve the problem long-term. But it was a start. A foundation.

She was also in my house, which meant I’d be seeing her regularly whether I made a move now or not. Better to establish something early before social hierarchies got calcified and everyone decided who they were and weren’t going to talk to.

The other thing I remembered about Belle Fox from the novel was the money thing.

She was a gold digger. Textbook, unapologetic, survival-grade gold digger.

She’d grown up poor in rural Oregon, won the lottery slot, and arrived at this academy with one objective: attach herself to power and money and never be broke again.

In the novel, the original protagonist had tried to talk to her in the first week and she’d shut him down in about forty seconds flat because he was a lottery kid with zero resources and she was playing a completely different game.

I was also a lottery kid with zero resources.

Fuck it. I was already walking toward her table.

She didn’t look up when I stopped next to her.

"Anyone sitting here?"

She looked up from her phone then. Took me in from the tray to the face to the Obsidian shoulder trim. Something shifted in her expression. Not warm exactly. More like a recalibration.

"You’re in Obsidian?"

"Looks like it."

She sat up slightly straighter. The blazer did something dramatic in response to this. I kept my eyes on her face with the focused intensity of a man who was absolutely not going to make this weird in the first thirty seconds.

"Jace Monroe."

She considered me for another moment. The amber-brown eyes were doing a little math I recognized. Lottery or guild. Worth talking to or not.

"Belle Fox." A pause. "Nice to meet you."

She went back to her phone.

I sat down.

She didn’t tell me to leave, which was technically a win.

I opened my balsamic vinaigrette and poured it over the salad and cut into the spicy chicken and started eating. It was good. Actually good.

The chicken had a proper sear on it and the spice was real, not the cafeteria approximation of spice where someone waved a chili flake at the pan from a safe distance.

Belle scrolled something on her phone. Her thumb moved fast, the way people do when they’re not actually reading, just moving to have something to do with their hands.

I drank some of the HunterAde. It tasted exactly like blue Gatorade.

I decided to try again.

"So. Lottery or guild?"

She didn’t look up. "Lottery."

"Same."

Nothing. Her thumb kept scrolling.

I ate another bite of chicken and looked out at the ocean through the wall of glass. The light was doing something good out there, that particular late afternoon gold that made the water look almost warm even though it definitely wasn’t.

"Where are you from?" I tried.

"Oregon." She answered before I finished the sentence, still looking at the phone. "You?"

"Not here."

That got her to glance up for exactly one second. "That’s not an answer."

"I know."

She went back to her phone.

Okay. So this was how it was going to be.

Belle Fox was here, she was technically talking to me, and she was also very clearly not interested in talking to me.

Not because I’d done anything wrong. Just because I was a lottery kid with a food tray and no visible resources and she was running a cost-benefit analysis on every social interaction she had.

I’d known girls like this in my past life. Not gold diggers specifically, but the underlying psychology was identical. Every conversation was an investment. They were always calculating return.

The problem wasn’t getting them to talk. The problem was making yourself look like a worthwhile place to put their time.

The issue was that I had nothing to offer her right now. No money, no connections, no status. I hadn’t acquired a single stolen ability yet. My physical stats were embarrassing.

My Charisma was E-rank, which the system had been very honest about and described as "actively off-putting due to fat body penalty," which, okay, that was just rude, but it was also accurate.

Snake Eyes was the only real card I had.

I looked at her.

She was still looking at her phone but she’d stopped scrolling. Her thumb was resting on the screen now, not moving.

Three seconds of sustained eye contact from my side even without her looking back was apparently enough to do something. Because she looked up.

I let Snake Eyes run.

The overlay confirmed 38DD. Unranked. Current attraction from baseline: 8%.

She looked at me with an expression that was 60% suspicious and 40% something she hadn’t decided to acknowledge yet. 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

The charm effect ran its numbers. 8% became 18%.

Not much. Enough.

"What?" she said.