Divine Milking System-Chapter 6 | A Calculated Investment

"Nothing. Just eating."

"You were staring."

"I was thinking."

"About what?"

I speared a piece of mango from the fruit cup. "Wondering if the chicken here is always this good or if they put in extra effort for orientation day."

She blinked. That wasn’t what she’d expected.

"It’s probably orientation day," she said. "Schools always do that. Show you the best version of everything first."

"Makes sense. Lower the guard before they start charging you twelve dollars for a granola bar."

Something in her face shifted. She put her phone face-down on the table. Not all the way engaged. But the phone was down.

"The Vault is insane," she said. "I looked at the prices earlier. A basic combat knife is six hundred points."

"Six hundred points is six days of life if you’re running the system currency."

She looked at me differently then. Just for a second. Like she was recalculating something.

"You’ve already looked at the system stuff?"

"I’ve been reading since the ceremony ended."

"Me too." She picked up her HunterAde and drank some of it and made a face. "This tastes like blue Gatorade."

"I know."

"Why does it say mana recovery formula if it just tastes like Gatorade?"

"Marketing. The hunter industry figured out that if you put mana recovery on the label, you can charge four times as much."

She actually laughed at that. Short, quick, a little surprised. Like she hadn’t planned on laughing.

I filed that away.

Belle Fox, gold digger, materialistic to the bone, genuinely funny when she let herself be. The novel hadn’t mentioned that part.

The novel’s version of her was a flat character who existed to provide the original Javier with a rejection scene and then show up later as a minor antagonist. The actual person in front of me was more complicated than that.

She was funny and she was strategic and she was running scared underneath all the careful presentation, same as everyone else in this building.

"What’s your ability?" I asked.

The openness closed up fast. Not dramatically. Just a small tightening around the eyes.

"Support type," she said. "Not combat."

"Same general category as mine."

She looked at me. "What’s yours?"

"Also support." I drank some HunterAde. "Non-combat oriented."

We were both lying to each other and we both knew it and neither of us called it out, which felt like the most honest conversation I’d had all day. 𝑓𝓇𝘦ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝓃𝑜𝘷ℯ𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝓂

"Support gets you killed in Obsidian," she said quietly.

"Only if you let them define your value by combat output."

"Easy to say."

"Is it?"

Belle picked up her phone again. But she put it back down almost immediately.

"Jace Monroe," she said, like she was testing the name.

"That’s the one."

"What floor are you on?"

"Fifth."

Her expression did something small. "Me too. Room 5C."

"5E."

She looked at the window for a moment. "I haven’t met my roommate yet."

"Neither have I."

Outside, the ocean was going dark at the edges where the light was pulling back toward the horizon. The dining hall was filling up fast around us, the noise level climbing as more students came in from the ceremony dispersal and found their social groups and settled into their respective sections of the room.

The lottery tables near the kitchen were filling in. I could see six, seven, eight students from the orientation packet photos I’d memorized. All of them lottery. All of them doing that same low-key assessment of everyone around them, trying to figure out the social map before anyone else did.

Belle was doing it too, I realized. Even while she was talking to me. Her eyes moved around the room in quick, regular sweeps. Checking who was sitting with who. Checking which guild kids had the expensive uniform variations. Checking where the money was.

It was almost impressive.

"You’re cataloging," I said.

She didn’t deny it. "So are you."

"I’m a little more obvious about it."

"Yeah." She almost smiled. "You are."

The timer in the corner of my vision updated.

69 hours. 47 minutes.

I looked at Belle Fox across the table. Blue hair, full mouth, bronze-tier essence, and a survival instinct sharp enough to cut glass. She wasn’t going to be easy. She’d already done the math on me and decided I came up short on the balance sheet.

But she was still sitting here. Phone face-down. Talking.

That was something.

I wasn’t here to play the original Jace Monroe’s story. That guy had come in without a plan and gotten rejected and stayed rejected and eventually faded into the background of someone else’s protagonist arc.

I had a system, a skill that was literally designed to manufacture attraction, and sixty-nine hours of very specific motivation.

I ate the last of my chicken and drank the rest of my blue HunterAde and watched Belle Fox decide whether I was worth the investment of continued conversation.

She picked up her phone.

Put it back down.

"Is the chicken actually that good," she said, "or are you just really hungry?"

"Both," I said. "But mostly the chicken."

She pulled her half-eaten salad toward her and started eating properly for the first time since I’d sat down.

Progress.