Divine Milking System-Chapter 57 | She Loves the Bloated Starter Save File

I woke up at 4:48 AM with a girl pressed against my left side like she had always been there.

Naomi’s face was tucked into my shoulder. Her arm was thrown across my stomach. One of her legs had somehow ended up hooked over mine in the night, and her striped hair was a disaster across the pillow, pink and black spread out in every direction. She was warm. Heavier than expected. Her breathing was slow and even, lips parted slightly.

I stared at the ceiling for a second.

Then I looked at her.

She was objectively beautiful. I knew that. Tall, brown skin, big pink eyes that were currently closed, a body that made the academy uniform look like a crime of underselling. Naomi Love was genuinely pretty in the soft, effortless way that sneaks up on you.

But she wasn’t the prettiest girl in my class.

She wasn’t even the prettiest girl on our floor.

That’s the honest version. I could dress it up, could let the devotion percentage and the way she held my hand in the dark make me feel like a better person than I am, but I have never been the type to lie to myself. It wastes time.

The truth is: if you lined up every woman at San Nicolas Academy and told me I could have any one of them, I wouldn’t pick based on who was funniest.

I wouldn’t pick based on who sent me the most genuine thank you text at eleven PM or who looked at me like I was worth something when I was sweating through my gym uniform in last place.

I’d pick the one who made my brain short circuit when she walked into a room.

I’d go for Blair Davenport’s otherworldly red-hair-ice-queen thing over half the women in this school. I’d absolutely lose my mind over Hikaru if she ever dropped the full armor and showed me what was underneath all those compression bandages.

And there were heiresses at this academy I hadn’t even met yet who probably had abilities and bloodlines and faces that would make everything I knew about beauty feel like a rough draft.

Belle knew this. Belle operated entirely on this understanding. She dressed the way she dressed and smiled the way she smiled because she understood that the world sorted on surface value and she had learned to maximize what she had. No judgment. Respect, actually. She and I spoke the same language.

But Naomi.

Naomi had looked at me when I was a 240-pound stranger who got lost six times on a campus with a navigation app. She’d sat next to me in theory class and apologized for taking the seat. She’d agreed to practice on the field at seven PM when she didn’t know what I was or what I wanted. She’d cried a little when I explained the death timer, and then she’d helped me anyway.

She fell for this.

Not the version I was working toward. Not the guy I’d be in three months. By then, Limit Breaker would have carved out a respectable stat block and a face that matched the man I used to be.

But she didn’t wait for that.

She fell for the current build. The bloated starter save file. The guy who stole her roommate’s string cheese and tried to eat it before realizing which apartment he was in.

That does something to a person’s math.

I’m not going to become a better man over it. I’m not going to suddenly care about personality over physical ranking or stop using Snake Eyes to run assessments on every woman who walks past.

That’s not who I am and pretending otherwise would be insulting to both of us.

But I could do something with what she gave me.

I could make sure that whatever happened with Belle or Hikaru or the twenty other names I was going to add to this extraction list over the next three years, Naomi never had a reason to regret choosing me when I was nobody. I could make sure her brothers got everything she came here for. Make sure her parents got to stop working so hard.

Make sure that whenever she needed something, she had it, because she was mine before I was worth anything and that counted.

It was the least I could do.

Which wasn’t nothing.

I pulled up the system interface quietly, careful not to move the arm she was using as a pillow.

The screen materialized in the dark above me.

◆ DIVINE MILKING SYSTEM ◆

JACE MONROE

Height: 5’9" | Weight: 235 lbs

Age: 18 | House: Obsidian

SYSTEM STATUS

Level: 2

Experience: 480/2000

Lifespan: 9D 9H 22M

Points: 1,200

PHYSICAL STATS

Strength [E] ▰▰▰▰▰▰▱▱▱▱ (6/10)

Endurance [E] ▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▱ (9/10)

Agility [E] ▰▰▰▰▱▱▱▱▱▱ (4/10)

Perception [D] ▰▰▰▰▰▱▱▱▱▱ (5/10)

Magic [D] ▰▰▰▰▰▱▱▱▱▱ (5/10)

SOCIAL STATS

Charisma [E] ▰▰▰▰▱▱▱▱▱▱ (4/10)

Technique [B] ▰▰▰▱▱▱▱▱▱▱ (3/10)

STOLEN ABILITIES

Wave Motion [Copper]

STORED ESSENCE

0/3 Cups

Five pounds down since transmigration. Endurance one tick from D-rank. Strength moving faster than I expected. Technique dropped from where it was because the system recalibrated after last night, apparently having actual sex counts for more than just Euphoric Feedback drills. Made sense.

Level 2. I’d ticked past 1somewhere in the session and not noticed.

Over a week of life span.

I closed the interface.

Naomi made a small sound in her sleep and pressed closer, her nose against the side of my throat. Her arm tightened across my stomach. Like she knew, even asleep, that I was thinking about leaving.

I looked at her for a while.

Her lashes were long. Her lips were full and slightly parted and there was a faint crease on her cheek from the pillow. Her hair was going to be a complete disaster when she woke up. The shell necklace her mother gave her had gotten twisted sideways during the night and was resting against her collarbone.

She looked nothing like the polished women I was going to spend the next three years extracting from.

She looked like a girl who drove four states from home because she made a promise to two little boys who thought she was a superhero.

I leaned down.

Pressed my mouth to her forehead, soft and slow.

She stirred.

Her eyes didn’t open, but she made a soft hm sound, the kind that meant barely awake, conscious enough to register warmth and not much else. Her fingers flexed against my stomach.

"Five more," she murmured.

I almost let her.

"You need to get back to your room."

"Five minutes."

"We have Misato’s training in an hour."

Nothing. She had already descended back into unconsciousness, her body a total deadweight across my side.

I put my hand on her shoulder.

"Naomi."

"Mm."

"You need clothes. Your clothes are in your room. Your room is four doors away."

"Five minutes," she said, into my neck this time, more insistent.

"That’s what you said thirty seconds ago."

"It’s still five minutes."