Divine Milking System-Chapter 7 | Calculated Questions

I stabbed a tomato from the salad. "So. Where in Oregon?"

"Burns." She said it like she was daring me to not know where that was.

I didn’t. But I nodded anyway.

"Small town?"

"Four thousand people. Maybe." She pushed lettuce around her plate without eating it. "Middle of nowhere. You could drive an hour and not see another car."

"Sounds peaceful."

She laughed. Actually laughed this time, the kind that wasn’t planned. "Peaceful is a nice word for boring as hell."

I grinned. "Fair enough."

"What about you?" She looked at me directly. "Where’d you come from before this?"

I took a drink of the second HunterAde and considered my answer. The truth was complicated and involved a transmigration I couldn’t explain. The lie needed to be simple.

"Couple places," I said. "Moved around a lot."

"Military family?"

"Something like that."

She waited for more. I didn’t give it.

"You’re good at that," she said.

"Good at what?"

"Answering questions without actually answering them."

I ate the tomato. "Learned from the best."

"Who?"

"You."

She blinked. Then she actually smiled, which changed her entire face from calculated to genuinely pretty. "Touché."

The dining hall was getting louder. More students flooding in from wherever orientation packets had sent them after the ceremony. The guild tables were filling up with second and third years showing the first years how things worked. The Ruby section was already loud as hell. I could hear someone laughing from three tables over.

Obsidian’s section was quieter. More controlled. People at those tables sat with better posture and talked at reasonable volumes like they were already being evaluated.

Belle noticed me looking.

"Obsidian’s weird," she said.

"Yeah?"

"I read about the houses before coming here. The forums online, student reviews, all that." She leaned forward slightly. The blazer pulled tighter across her chest. I kept my eyes on her face through sheer willpower and the knowledge that getting caught staring thirty seconds into a productive conversation would be the dumbest thing I’d done today.

"What’d the forums say?"

"Obsidian used to be the best house. Won everything. Then something happened last year and now they’re desperate."

I already knew this from the novel. The Gate Incident. Two third years dead, four second years permanently injured, Obsidian’s reputation shattered in one training exercise gone catastrophically wrong.

Marcus Steele’s predecessor as Rank #2 had made a tactical error chasing personal glory instead of following protocol. He’d led his team deeper into a live C-rank gate than authorized. The gate breached. The fallout was bad enough that the IHC investigated and shut down house activities for two weeks.

Obsidian had lost the championship to Sapphire for the first time in twelve years.

The house was still recovering.

"They’re going to expect a lot from us," Belle said quietly. "The third years. They want to win the championship back."

"And we’re lottery kids."

"Exactly."

She wasn’t wrong. Obsidian house culture was brutal on a good day. Post-incident Obsidian house culture was going to be a special kind of hell for anyone who didn’t perform immediately.

I ate another bite of chicken and decided to change the subject before Belle got too deep in her own anxiety spiral.

"This school is wild," I said. "I got lost six times already. I need a guide or something. These maps are confusing as hell."

Belle stared at me. Just stared.

"Six times?"

"Yeah."

"How?"

"I don’t know. I followed the signs. The signs lied."

She was doing this thing where her mouth was open but no sound was coming out. Like I’d just told her I’d never heard of oxygen.

"The signs don’t lie," she finally said. "They’re directional markers."

"They pointed me to a maintenance closet."

"That’s not possible."

"It happened."

"You must have misread them."

"Belle. I followed a group of Ruby students down a ramp that looped back to the amphitheater. I went into a hallway marked South Entrance and came out at the North Entrance. I discovered this dining hall by accident while following someone to the bathroom."

She was looking at me like I’d grown a second head.

"Are you serious right now?"

"Completely."

"You mean you need something other than the interactive map on your phone that shows you where you are and what’s surrounding you?"

I blinked.

"The what?"

Belle pulled out her phone. Tapped the screen twice. Turned it toward me.

There was a map. A live map. With a blue dot labeled BELLE FOX - CURRENT LOCATION sitting right in the middle of Zone 4, Dining Hall, Table 14.

The entire campus was laid out in clean lines and labeled zones. Buildings were highlighted in different colors by function. I could see the residence halls in Zone 3, the academic sector in Zone 2, the restricted areas in Zone 5 grayed out with ACCESS DENIED overlays.

It was perfect.

It was exactly what I needed.

I looked at her phone. Then at her face. Then back at the phone.

"That’s a thing?"

"You didn’t set up your academy app?"

"What academy app?"

Belle’s expression went from confused to something approaching genuine concern. "The app they sent you the download link for. In your orientation packet."

I thought back to the orientation packet. The thick envelope the upperclassman had handed me at the registration table. I’d read the house assignment, the room code, the welcome letter from Dominic Vale.

I hadn’t read the last three pages.

"I might have missed that part," I said.

"How do you miss the app download instructions?"

"I was distracted."

"By what?"

"The death timer."

Belle’s eyes went wide. "What?"

"Nothing. Forget I said that."

"You said death timer."

"I said I was distracted by the dining hall timer. For food service hours."

She did not look convinced.

I pulled out my phone before she could ask more questions. "Can you send me the link?"

Belle looked at me for a long moment. "Fine, give me your number."

Message from Belle Fox: academy app download

I opened the link. The app store page loaded. San Nicolas Academy - Official Student Portal. 4.2 stars, 847 reviews. I hit download and watched the progress bar fill.

"Thank you," I said.

"You’re welcome." She was still looking at me like I was a fascinating disaster. "How did you survive this long without the app?"