Divine Milking System

Chapter 361: 361 | The Swarm from God’s Blind Spot

The silence stretched for exactly three seconds.

Three seconds where nobody breathed and the jungle held its weird pressurized quiet and the vibration under our feet hummed at frequencies that made my molars ache.

Then something came out of the canopy like a missile fired from God’s personal arsenal.

I didn’t see it clearly. Nobody did. The thing moved too fast for human eyes to track, a dark smear against the green twilight that resolved into motion without ever becoming shape. It came from above and to the left, angled directly at Belle’s exposed flank where she stood with her hand still pressed against my arm and her Treasure Sense pointed in entirely the wrong direction.

Hikaru moved.

Not moved. Teleported. One instant she stood at the edge of our formation with her red eyes fixed on the canopy and her body coiled in that ready-for-anything stance. The next instant she occupied the space between Belle and the incoming blur, her arm extended in a horizontal slash that looked almost lazy, almost casual, like she was swatting a fly rather than intercepting something traveling at highway speeds.

The blur split in half.

Both halves tumbled past Belle’s shoulder and hit the ground with wet sounds that didn’t belong to anything small. The momentum carried the pieces another six feet before they finally stopped rolling, leaving dark smears across the leaf litter that looked black in the dim light.

Hikaru lowered her arm.

"Sever," she said, like she was announcing her order at a drive-through.

I looked down at the thing she’d killed.

A mosquito. A mosquito the size of a golden retriever, with a proboscis as long as my forearm and compound eyes that still twitched with residual nerve activity despite being separated from the rest of its nervous system. Its wings had collapsed in death, but spread out they would’ve measured maybe four feet tip to tip. The exoskeleton looked wrong, too thick and too dark, with ridges and spines that normal mosquitoes definitely did not possess.

The two halves leaked something that wasn’t quite blood and wasn’t quite ichor but occupied some uncomfortable middle ground between the two. The smell hit me a second later, copper and rot and something chemical that burned the inside of my nose.

Hikaru bent down and pulled something from the larger half. A core, small and dark, pulsing with residual mana that hadn’t quite figured out its host was dead. She pocketed it without comment and straightened up, her red eyes already scanning the canopy for the next threat.

"The hell is that supposed to be," Jordan said flatly.

"Mosquito," Belle answered, her voice shaking slightly. "Giant monster mosquito. That tried to drink me like a juice box."

"I can see it’s a mosquito. I’m asking why it’s the size of my ex-girlfriend’s emotional baggage."

"Void Gate," Dante said. He’d gone pale, his dark energy flickering in unstable patterns around his fingers. "Entity evolution. The mana density in here is high enough to support accelerated growth patterns. Given enough time, even mundane species can reach."

He trailed off because the canopy above us had started moving.

Not wind. Not natural sway. The branches and leaves shifted in patterns that resolved into shapes when you looked at them too long, dark bodies crawling across dark wood, hundreds of them repositioning themselves for better attack angles. The silence that had seemed oppressive before now felt like the held breath before a scream.

Belle’s grip on my arm became painful.

"Jace." Her voice had dropped to a whisper. "There are a lot of them. A lot a lot. My range is full of signatures. They’re in every direction."

"How many?"

"I lost count at two hundred."

The canopy exploded.

They came down like rain made of chitin and wings and hunger, dark shapes descending in a swarm that blocked out what little light filtered through the trees. The noise they made should’ve been buzzing but came out wrong, deeper and more resonant, a drone that vibrated in my chest cavity and made my vision blur at the edges.

Misato’s voice cut through the chaos.

"Formation break! Defensive clusters! Love, airborne now!"

Naomi launched.

The Gold-tier Wave Motion that hummed through her body translated into lift that looked effortless, blue-white energy spiraling from her palms and feet as she rose above the formation like a goddess ascending to judge the unworthy. Her staff came up and her first shot carved a line through the descending swarm that must have killed twenty of them in a single sweep.

Bodies fell. Wings detached from thoraxes. The things screamed in frequencies that hurt to hear.

But more came to replace them.

Blair’s flames erupted outward in a dome of blue-white heat that incinerated everything within fifteen feet of her position. The mosquitoes that hit her kill zone simply ceased to exist, their bodies converting to ash and carbon and nothing in the span of heartbeats. The smell of burning chitin joined the existing cocktail of jungle rot and monster ichor.

Jordan’s shadows expanded from his position like oil spreading across water, dark tendrils that grabbed and crushed and pulled the creatures down into something that looked like drowning in solid darkness. His face had gone blank in that way people’s faces go blank when they’re processing too much sensory data to maintain expressions.

Charles activated Frame Perfect.

The change was immediate and obvious. His body stopped moving like a human being moved and started moving like a program executing attack sequences. Step forward, slash, step diagonal, thrust, rotate, slash slash slash. His sword carved through the swarm with mechanical rhythm, each movement perfectly spaced and perfectly timed and perfectly lethal.

Dante stood in the center of his own clear zone, dark energy pulsing outward in waves that absorbed mana from everything they touched. The mosquitoes that flew into his range seemed to deflate, their magical enhanced bodies reverting to something closer to normal biology before dropping dead from the sudden change in internal pressure.

Javier’s daggers moved almost too fast to see, his close-combat skills turning the space immediately around his body into a blender that processed anything stupid enough to get close.

Hikaru’s invisible blades carved paths through the air that only became visible when things died along them. Sever operated on principles I didn’t fully understand, but the results spoke for themselves. Anything that crossed an invisible line simply fell apart.

I pulled Belle behind me and raised my hand.

Wave Motion.