Divine Milking System

Chapter 365: 365 | A Ceiling of Flame

The Death Mark took hold immediately. Black tendrils spread from the point of impact and the creature’s front leg buckled, the muscles and tendons degrading so fast that the limb simply stopped working.

The leopard crashed to the ground and slid past me, its remaining legs scrabbling at the dirt in a desperate attempt to keep fighting with a limb that was rotting off its body.

Javier appeared from nowhere and put both daggers through the creature’s skull before it could recover. His face was splattered with ichor and he was breathing hard, but the notebook still sat safely in his chest pocket, probably already containing mental annotations about leopard anatomy and attack patterns that he’d transcribe later if we survived this.

"FALL BACK! FALL BACK TO THE RIDGE!" Misato was pulling the squads toward higher ground, her remaining three clones forming a retreating screen while the originals on both teams moved in whatever direction seemed least likely to contain more leopards.

The plan was collapsing, formations forgotten, tactical doctrine replaced by the oldest military strategy in human history: run away from the things trying to kill you.

Blair wasn’t running.

Blair stood in the center of the clearing with her arms spread and her head tilted back, and the flames that normally danced around her knuckles had consumed her entire body.

She burned like a star in the jungle darkness, blue-white fire climbing her arms and torso and wrapping her in a cocoon of heat so intense that the humidity in the air within twenty feet of her position flash-evaporated into steam.

The nearest leopard had stopped its charge and was circling at the edge of the fire’s reach, yellow eyes narrowed against the brightness, its spotted coat singeing from proximity alone.

Blair’s mouth was moving. I couldn’t hear what she was saying over the roar of her own flames and the sounds of combat behind me, but her expression told me everything I needed to know. She was angry, she was scared, and she was about to do something catastrophic.

"BLAIR, DON’T—"

The Davenport Inferno hit the forest like a bomb.

The pillar of blue-white fire that erupted from Blair’s body wasn’t aimed at anything specific.

It expanded outward in a dome of destruction that consumed everything within fifty meters, and the ancient trees that had survived thousands of years of mana-saturated growth ignited like matchsticks soaked in gasoline.

The heat wave knocked me off my feet and sent me tumbling backward through a stand of ferns that immediately caught fire, and the noise was so overwhelming that my eardrums simply gave up processing sound and replaced everything with a high-pitched whine.

The canopy above us became a ceiling of flame.

Burning branches the size of telephone poles crashed down through the undergrowth, creating new hazards that the leopards scrambled to avoid alongside us.

The mosquito swarm vanished, either incinerated or fled, and for three seconds the entire jungle was illuminated in blue-white light bright enough to see individual leaves on trees a hundred meters away.

Then the fire spread.

Ancient wood saturated with decades of mana burned differently than normal trees. The flames jumped from trunk to trunk with supernatural speed, carried by mana channels in the bark that acted like accelerant lines, and within thirty seconds the entire area around us was an inferno that didn’t care about distinctions between friendly and hostile.

"GO! GO GO GO!"

I couldn’t tell who was screaming. The forest was chaos in its purest form, fire and darkness and massive shapes moving through the smoke, and the formation that Misato had spent twelve hours drilling into us shattered into individual survival decisions made by ten people who could barely see or hear each other.

I ran.

Belle’s hand was in mine for about four seconds before a burning branch crashed between us and tore our grip apart. I spun and saw her blue hair disappearing into the smoke in the opposite direction, Jordan’s shadow wrapping around her waist and pulling her away from a tree that was collapsing toward them.

Naomi’s blue-white spirals were visible above the canopy, which meant she was still airborne, still fighting. Hikaru’s phantom cuts carved burning branches apart in the distance, the invisible blades operating on principles that fire couldn’t interrupt.

A leopard came out of the smoke directly in front of me, its fur charred and its left eye destroyed by a stray flame, and it was limping badly from a wound on its haunch that still carried the black tendrils of my Death Mark. The creature I’d hit earlier. Still alive. Still hungry. Still very, very angry.

Misato’s clone materialized beside me, already moving, already fighting, and her weighted fist connected with the leopard’s jaw hard enough to snap its head sideways.

The creature retaliated with a swipe that caught the clone across the torso, and at sixteen percent durability the blow was enough to crack ribs that weren’t technically real.

The clone staggered but kept fighting, placing herself between me and the leopard with the kind of selfless positioning that only someone operating at clone-consciousness could manage, because the real Misato was somewhere in the fire with three other clones trying to keep eight people alive.

Blair appeared from the smoke.

Her tactical suit was scorched down the left side, the composite material melted and fused to what was clearly burned skin beneath. She was limping, favoring her right leg where something had torn through the suit’s knee reinforcement and opened a gash that ran from mid-thigh to calf.

The flames around her body had died down to intermittent flickers, her mana depleted from the Inferno that had started the forest fire. Without her usual corona of destruction, she looked small and scared and eighteen years old.

"Monroe." Her voice cracked on my name. "My team. I can’t find my team."

"We’re going." I grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the ridge that Misato had identified as our fallback point. Behind us, Misato’s clone continued engaging the injured leopard, buying seconds we couldn’t afford to waste. "Move."

Blair stumbled. Her burned leg buckled on a root and she went down hard on one knee, a sound escaping her throat that was half pain and half fury. I got my arm under her shoulders and hauled her upright, her weight settling against my side in a way that would have been interesting under literally any other circumstances but currently registered only as additional biomass I needed to transport at speed through a burning forest.

The leopard screamed behind us. Misato’s clone screamed back.

Then silence from the clone.