Divine Milking System

Chapter 364: 364 | Copper Corruption

The leopard that killed Misato’s clones didn’t wait for us to form a plan.

It lunged.

The thing covered thirty feet in a single bound, paws the size of dinner plates leaving craters in the soft earth, and the only reason it didn’t bisect Charles Leone on the first pass was because Hikaru’s Phantom Edge carved a line through the air that forced it to twist mid-leap. The invisible slash opened a cut along its flank that would have gutted a normal animal, but this creature’s hide split and sealed almost immediately, dark blood welling up and then stopping like the wound had decided to close itself out of spite.

"SCATTER! FORMATION BREAK!" Misato’s voice hit a register I’d never heard from her before. Not anger. Not command. Raw survival instinct translated into words.

The jungle exploded into violence.

Three more leopards came out of the dark at angles that made a diamond formation completely pointless, their bodies flowing through gaps in the undergrowth that shouldn’t have accommodated anything larger than a housecat. Jordan’s shadows lashed out and caught one by the hind leg, but the creature simply pivoted, sank its claws into the shadow tendril, and ripped through the construct like it was wet paper. Jordan screamed and grabbed his head as the feedback hit.

Naomi launched skyward on a pillar of blue-white energy, her Gold buff turning her into a flying artillery platform that lit the canopy in strobing flashes. Each blast connected with something, and wet thumps echoed through the trees as bodies fell, but the swarm of mosquitoes had come back to life the second the leopards engaged, creating a secondary threat layer that forced Naomi to split her attention between the canopy and the ground.

I grabbed Belle by the back of her tactical suit and pulled her behind me as a leopard the size of a Volkswagen sailed through the space she’d occupied half a second earlier. Its claws raked the air close enough that I felt the wind on my face, and the stink of its breath washed over me in a wave of rotting meat and something sharper, something chemical and wrong.

Belle fired her crossbow into its open mouth as it passed. The bolt punched through the roof of its mouth and the creature screamed, a sound like steel cables snapping under tension, before crashing into the undergrowth and thrashing through a stand of ferns the size of beach umbrellas.

"JACE!" Misato’s remaining clones were fighting back to back near a massive root structure, each one engaging a separate leopard with the kind of desperate efficiency that comes from knowing you’re operating at sixteen percent durability and a single clean hit ends you. "I need your offensive output NOW!"

I looked down at my hands.

Wave Motion would work. Bronze-tier spiral shots would hurt these things, slow them down, maybe kill a smaller one if I got lucky with placement. But Vale’s words from this morning kept circling in my skull like a song I couldn’t stop humming. The monster I want to build fights with everything at once.

I reached into the ability library and made the swap.

Treasure Sense dropped out of my active slots. Reaper’s Edge filled the vacancy with a cold rush that traveled from my chest to my fingertips, death-aspected mana settling into my channels like ice water pouring into warm veins. The sensation was nothing like Wave Motion’s clean spiral energy. This felt hungry. This felt like holding a loaded gun that wanted to fire.

The kama materialized in my right hand.

Eighteen inches of dark leather wrapped around a handle that fit my palm as though it had been forged from a mold of my grip, connected to a curved blade that looked like someone had crystallized a shadow and sharpened it until reality itself couldn’t quite agree on where the edge ended. The blade didn’t reflect Blair’s firelight. It ate the light whole and gave nothing back.

Charles saw the weapon first. His eyes went wide and his mouth opened, probably to ask what the fuck that was, but the leopard coming at him from the left didn’t care about his questions. I crossed the distance between us on instinct, the Reaping Dash carrying me five meters in a blur of afterimages that left dark smears in the air, and I brought the kama down in a vicious arc that caught the leopard across the bridge of its nose.

The blade sank through hide and bone like they were suggestions rather than physical barriers.

Dark ichor sprayed in a fan pattern as the creature’s head snapped sideways, and where the kama had passed, the wound didn’t bleed normally. The edges turned black. The flesh around the cut withered and crumbled like burned paper, the decay spreading outward in visible tendrils that crawled across the leopard’s face in branching patterns. The creature screamed and tore away from me, shaking its head so violently that drops of corrupted blood splattered across the leaf litter and killed the vegetation they touched.

Death Mark. The wound wouldn’t heal. The damage would keep spreading until the creature’s regeneration managed to overwhelm the effect, and at Copper rank that might take seconds rather than minutes, but seconds mattered when you were fighting six things that wanted to eat your entire squad.

"Monroe!" Charles stared at the dying vegetation where the corrupted blood had landed. "What the hell kind of ability is that?"

"The kind that works."

I didn’t have time to explain. Another leopard burst from the undergrowth to my right, and I pivoted to meet it with the kama leading, the blade singing through humid air with a sound like paper tearing. The creature was faster than me, faster than anything at C-rank had a right to be, and its claws caught the front of my tactical suit before I could complete the slash.

Four parallel lines of white-hot pain opened across my chest from left shoulder to right hip.

The suit absorbed some of the force. The reinforced composite material did what it was designed to do and prevented the claws from reaching bone. But the suit’s structural integrity was already compromised from the swamp gate, and the claws bit through weakened panels and drew blood that soaked the inner lining in seconds. I felt the warmth spreading across my stomach and chest, felt the specific sting of shallow wounds that hurt worse than deep ones because every nerve ending in the area was screaming at full volume.

My kama completed its arc and buried itself in the leopard’s shoulder joint.