Divine Milking System

Chapter 367: 367 | A Landing Pad of Stone

The fall lasted forever and no time at all.

Wind ripped the scream from Blair’s throat and scattered it across the gorge walls. My arms locked around her waist on pure reflex, tucking her head against my chest and rotating us so my back would hit first because some suicidal part of my brain decided that shielding an heiress who wanted me dead was more important than protecting my own spine. The mist from the waterfall soaked through my ruined tactical suit in the first second. The roar of the river swallowed every other sound in the second after that.

Then we hit.

The impact was a full-body car crash. Water that moved this fast didn’t behave like water. It behaved like concrete poured over a trampoline, with just enough give to keep your skeleton intact but more than enough force to scramble every organ in your torso like eggs in a blender. My back took the brunt. The river punched the air from my lungs in one massive, brutal exhalation that left my diaphragm spasming and my vision whiting out at the edges. Blair’s weight drove us deeper. Ten feet. Fifteen. Twenty. The current grabbed us like a fist and spun us downstream, tumbling through water so cold it felt like electricity and so dark that I couldn’t tell which direction led to air.

My chest burned. The claw wounds from the leopard stung with a specific venom that salt water and mineral-heavy river runoff intensified into something almost artistic in its cruelty. Four parallel lines of fire from left shoulder to right hip, each one screaming at a slightly different frequency of agony as the river forced contaminated water into exposed tissue. Blair’s body pressed against mine, limp in a way that terrified me until I felt her fingers clenching the front of my suit with the grip strength of someone too stubborn to lose consciousness.

I kicked. C-rank legs against a current that wanted to drag us into whatever nightmare rapids waited downstream. The first kick barely moved us. The second found something, a rock or the riverbed itself, and I pushed off hard enough to change our trajectory from straight down to diagonal. The water fought me every inch. My lungs were two collapsed bags of nothing, demanding air that didn’t exist in this direction, and the darkness pressed against my eyes with the kind of intimate malice that suggested the river had opinions about uninvited guests.

Focus. Lock in. You’ve survived seventy-two hours with no abilities and no allies. You’ve killed alphas and Reapers and giant goddamn snakes. You are not drowning in a river because a cat scared you off a cliff.

I found the surface with my free hand, punched through the boundary between water and air, and hauled Blair up with me.

The first breath was violence. My throat seized, my lungs convulsed, and I coughed up river water that tasted like pennies and moss and the particular mineral signature of a dimension that shouldn’t exist. Blair surfaced beside me, gasping in ragged bursts that sounded like someone trying to start a flooded engine. Her red hair was plastered flat against her skull and her ice-blue eyes were wild, unfocused, and her good hand clawed at the water like she’d forgotten how to swim despite those country club lessons she’d mentioned approximately four seconds before I threw her off a cliff.

"KICK!" I screamed it against the current because we were still moving, the river dragging us along its centerline where the flow was strongest and the rocks were closest to the surface. "Blair, KICK YOUR LEGS!"

She kicked. Badly, desperately, with the kind of form that would have gotten her expelled from any reasonable swim class. Her burned leg barely functioned, the movements uncoordinated and weak. But Blair Davenport possessed one quality that transcended talent and training and technique and everything else the academy tried to measure. She refused to quit. The same pathological need to win that made her set fire to an ancient forest rather than retreat now kept her legs churning through water that wanted her dead.

Her left foot connected with something beneath the surface. A submerged rock, maybe, or a piece of driftwood lodged against the riverbed. She gasped, the sound half surprise and half pain, but the impact gave her enough purchase to push against the flow. Her right leg followed, weaker but stubborn, and together they managed something approximating propulsion.

I kept pulling, kept kicking, kept my arm locked under her chin even when my shoulder threatened to dislocate from the strain. The current fought us with relentless persistence, trying to peel us apart and carry us downstream toward whatever the river’s endgame was. Probably rocks. Probably very sharp rocks.

But we were moving. Slowly, agonizingly, but moving.

I got my arm under her chin and rolled onto my back, pulling her against my chest in the most aggressive lifeguard carry I could manage with four open wounds and lungs that kept trying to fill themselves with river water. The shore. I could see it through the spray, a strip of dark rock about thirty feet to our right where the current eddied into something almost calm behind a cluster of boulders.

I kicked toward it with everything I had. C-rank Endurance burned through the fatigue like fuel through an engine, converting oxygen and desperation into forward momentum. My free arm pulled water in long, clawing strokes that sent bolts of pain through my shoulder where the leopard had connected. Blair’s weight dragged on me with every stroke, her body heavy with soaked combat gear and the dead weight of exhaustion. The current pushed back. The shore stayed thirty feet away. Then twenty-five. Then twenty.

My hand hit rock.

I grabbed it with fingers that locked like steel hooks and pulled us sideways out of the main current and into the eddy behind the boulders, where the water slowed to something merely unpleasant instead of homicidal. My boots found purchase on the riverbed, gravel and smooth stone that shifted under my weight, and I dragged Blair the last ten feet through thigh-deep water onto a shelf of flat rock that extended from the canyon wall like a natural landing pad.

I dropped Blair onto the stone and collapsed beside her.