Divine Milking System

Chapter 362: 362 | Blue Fire, Black Pulp

The spiral took shape in my palm. I’d drilled this under Vale’s supervision for three weeks now, learning the exact threshold where stamina converted to destructive force, the specific angle that maximized concussive spread, the way the bronze-tier energy twisted inward on itself before erupting outward. Basketball-sized and spinning fast enough to generate its own wind current, the compressed sphere hummed with potential violence.

The first mosquito reached me.

I released.

The creature didn’t explode so much as cease to exist as a coherent entity. One moment it was an airborne threat with a proboscis like a spear. The next it was component parts distributed across a ten-foot radius, chitin fragments and tissue spray painting the undergrowth in a pattern that probably revealed more about my mental state than I cared to examine. The shockwave knocked three more insects tumbling through the air, wings crumpled and flight paths interrupted.

Belle’s crossbow spoke three times in rapid succession. Each bolt found purchase before the stunned mosquitoes could right themselves. One through a compound eye. One through a thorax joint. One clean through the abdomen, pinning the creature to a tree trunk where it twitched twice before going still.

"Stay behind me." I was already forming another spiral, the familiar drain on my stamina starting to register as a dull ache in my muscles.

"Wasn’t planning on going anywhere else." Another bolt slid into the groove, her movements smooth despite the chaos. The Silver-rank boost to her perception showed in the way she tracked targets through the swarm, picking out individual threats from the mass of beating wings and segmented bodies. "These things are disgusting, by the way. Just wanted that on record."

Another one dropped toward us from the canopy, its buzz cutting through the chaos like a serrated blade through wet paper.

I released the spiral. The projectile obliterated the mosquito mid-descent, chitin and viscera exploding outward in a cone of organic shrapnel. Belle ducked fast, the fragments screaming past where her head had been a heartbeat before. Most of the debris scattered harmlessly into the undergrowth, but a few pieces hit the ground with wet thuds that punctuated the ongoing battle around us.

"How many bolts left?" I kept my eyes on the swarm, already forming another sphere of compressed energy in my palm.

"Enough." She yanked a fresh bolt from her quiver, movements practiced and economical. "Probably. Unless they decide to breed mid-fight."

"Just keep shooting. Anything that gets close is mine."

The swarm learned fast.

Single-target attacks stopped. Instead they began coordinating, three or four mosquitoes peeling off from the main cloud to hit from different vectors at once. The first synchronized assault almost breached my defenses entirely. One of the bastards scraped past my hasty spiral and dragged its proboscis across my shoulder, tearing through fabric and scratching skin before I point-blanked it with a follow-up shot. The detonation rang through my skull, leaving my ears humming with feedback.

Belle’s scream cut through the ringing.

I rotated on pure reflex.

A mosquito had flanked us somehow, circling wide through the chaos to attack from our blind spot. Its proboscis extended like a lance, angling straight for Belle’s exposed throat. The strike would punch through soft tissue and probably hit something critical, major artery or windpipe or both.

My hand closed around the proboscis before conscious thought caught up.

I dragged downward with enough force to redirect the creature’s momentum, pulling its head well below the trajectory it needed. My other palm slapped against its thorax, skin contact triggering Wave Motion’s activation sequence.

The mosquito came apart from the inside.

Viscera painted everything within arm’s reach. My clothes, my face, my hair. Belle got a comparable coating, blue strands turned dark with organic matter. The forest floor around our position looked like someone had detonated a blood grenade. The stench hit my nose immediately, a nauseating cocktail of copper and ammonia mixed with something that might have been half-digested prey from whatever meal this thing had interrupted to come after us.

"Thanks," Belle managed.

"Don’t mention it."

"I’m definitely mentioning it. In detail. To everyone."

Another wave descended.

Naomi’s barrage didn’t let up, the sky above us crisscrossing with brilliant blue spirals that lit the canopy like lightning caught in a bottle. Each pass cut through dozens of bodies, wings and legs and thoraxes disintegrating mid-flight, but they just kept coming. More mosquitoes poured from the depths of the zone, replacing losses faster than we could create them. The Gold-tier boost kept her output at levels that would’ve drained most Silver hunters bone-dry inside two minutes, transforming the airspace above our squad into something no living thing could survive intact.

Blair’s fire grew.

She’d abandoned precision entirely. The tight blue-white flames that usually danced along her hands and forearms had consumed her whole frame now, wrapping her in a corona that made looking directly at her physically painful. Her red hair lifted in thermal currents generated by her own body, floating around her head like she’d been photographed mid-explosion.

Nothing within twenty feet survived.

The heat alone killed them. Mosquitoes diving toward her position simply dropped from the air, their bodies flash-cooked before they closed half the distance.

"Formation!" Misato’s shout cut through the bedlam with surgical precision. "Tighten! Move toward Davenport!"

We pushed forward.

Belle and I carved a path toward Blair’s blue-white aura, my spirals punching holes through the swarm while Belle’s crossbow dropped anything my attacks missed. Jordan’s shadows stretched to guard our flanks, dark ropes snapping out to grab stragglers and crush them into pulp before they could threaten the group’s edges.

Javier materialized at my right, ichor dripping from both daggers, his combat notebook still somehow tucked safely in his chest pocket despite ninety straight seconds of absolute mayhem.

"Fascinating pattern work," he said, and the bastard actually sounded thrilled. "Their coordination’s deliberate, you notice that? Not random swarming. There’s tactical intelligence driving this behavior."

"Not now, Javi."

"But this is exactly when we should be documenting! Enemy analysis forms the foundation of effective countermeasures. They’re definitely communicating. Chemical signals, probably. Or they’ve got some kind of collective consciousness structure comparable to—"

A mosquito dropped toward his skull. One dagger flicked up and back, the motion so casual it looked bored. The creature fell in two pieces.

"—comparable to terrestrial hive insects, except scaled up to supernatural dimensions and complexity levels that suggest—"

"Javier."

"Right, right. Combat focus. We can discuss the academic implications later."