Divine Milking System

Chapter 368: 368 | What the River Gives, and What It Takes

For approximately ninety seconds, neither of us did anything except cough. Not polite, cover-your-mouth coughing. The violent, full-body, expelling-water-from-places-water-should-never-reach kind of coughing that leaves your throat raw and your abs cramping and your dignity somewhere at the bottom of a hundred-foot gorge.

Blair rolled onto her side and produced sounds that I associated more with dying cats than with the heiress of a multibillion-dollar gate-clearing conglomerate. The kind of wet, desperate hacking that comes from lungs that had been convinced, just moments ago, that they’d never see air again. Her fingers dug into the stone beneath her, knuckles white, body curling inward with each spasm.

I lay on my back staring at the strip of sky visible between the canyon walls. Above us, the orange glow of the forest fire Blair had started painted the clouds in colors that belonged in a painting rather than a survival scenario. It looked almost beautiful, which felt deeply inappropriate given the circumstances. My chest rose and fell in ragged, uneven rhythms, and each breath tasted like river water and copper.

My throat felt like someone had dragged sandpaper down it, and my lungs were making these little clicking sounds that couldn’t possibly be good. Every cough sent fresh pain radiating from the claw marks across my chest, a reminder that the river had saved me from one death while leaving me well-positioned for several others.

"Fuck."

That was me. It came out wet and raspy and entirely inadequate as a summary of our situation, but it was the best I had. My vocabulary had apparently decided to take a vacation somewhere less life-threatening, leaving me with monosyllabic profanity as my sole form of expression.

Blair coughed three more times in rapid succession, each one sounding progressively worse than the last. She spat water onto the rock beside her head, leaving a dark stain that spread slowly across the volcanic stone. Then she made a sound somewhere between a groan and a sob that she would absolutely deny making if I ever brought it up, assuming we both lived long enough for me to have that conversation.

Her red hair was plastered to her skull, darker now from the water, and her shoulders shook in a way that might have been residual coughing or might have been something else entirely. Hard to tell. Didn’t particularly care to analyze it.

"Fuck," she agreed.

We lay there without moving. The river continued its business approximately ten feet away, roaring through the narrows with the kind of aggressive indifference that comes from having absolutely no opinion on whether specific humans live or die. The canyon walls boxed us in on all sides, dark volcanic rock faces that climbed straight up for fifty or sixty feet before opening into that strip of sky.

The distant firelight from Blair’s little apocalypse painted the stone surfaces in shades of orange that pulsed like a slow heartbeat. The rock didn’t care. Geography never does.

My chest wounds had stopped actively bleeding. The river’s temperature, which had felt like liquid hypothermia when I’d hit it, had at least done what my hands hadn’t managed during the fall.

Cold constricts blood vessels. I’d learned that in some high school biology class that I’d barely paid attention to, and now that useless fact had probably saved me from bleeding out on wet stone.

But the four parallel claw marks still ran from just below my collarbone down across my ribs, tearing through the remains of my tactical suit and leaving exposed muscle that throbbed in time with my pulse.

Each beat reminded me that something built by a dimension that genuinely hated human existence had gotten within inches of my throat.

I needed to get up.

I needed to inventory our injuries with something resembling medical competence.

I needed to establish a defensive perimeter in case the leopards could track us down here.

I needed to locate Gong, Naomi, Cross, and Winters, confirm they weren’t dead or dying somewhere upstream.

I needed to execute approximately seven hundred critical tasks in the exact correct sequence or this would transition from "miraculous survival" to "spectacular failure" inside the next hour.

Instead I rolled my head sideways and looked at Blair Davenport.

She was a disaster. Her tactical suit had melted along the left side where her own flames had backwashed against the composite material, fusing synthetic fabric to burned skin in a patchwork of angry red and blistered white that made my stomach turn.

Her left leg bore a gash from thigh to calf that still oozed blood mixed with river water. Her red hair hung in wet ropes across a face smeared with soot, blood, and the particular expression of someone who has very recently confronted the possibility that they might actually die and found the experience profoundly offensive. Her ice-blue eyes stared at the canyon wall without focus.

But she was breathing. And she was alive. And she was here because I’d grabbed her and jumped instead of leaving her for the leopards, a decision that my rational brain was still sending strongly worded complaints about.

The System blinked into existence at the edge of my vision.

Lifespan: 13D 22H.

Points: 8,480.

Active Abilities: Wave Motion [Bronze], Sensory Hijack [Bronze], Reaper’s Edge [Copper].

Stored Essence: 4/6 Cups (Silver-tier).

Health Status: CRITICAL. Multiple lacerations (chest), blunt trauma (spine, ribs), moderate blood loss, mana reserves at 31%.

My eyes caught on that last word and stopped moving. CRITICAL. The System had thrown warnings at me before about fatigue, stamina depletion, mana burn. Never that word.

Those four claw marks across my chest weren’t just torn flesh. They were a problem that required immediate attention, and I happened to have a solution sitting in my dimensional storage. Belle’s Silver-tier milk sat in my Essence Vault, four cups of twenty-five points each banked against exactly this kind of emergency. I hadn’t planned to drink it for healing purposes. The plan had been to save it for Overclock fuel if we hit a boss that required the temporary power boost. But the System’s health notification changed the calculus entirely, because a dead Jace Monroe couldn’t Overclock anything.

I reached into the inventory with a mental command. The glass bottle materialized in my hand, cool and heavy, Belle’s Silver essence preserved at perfect temperature by the Vault’s dimensional storage. The contents caught the firelight filtering down from the burning canopy above the gorge. The milk inside was a pale, luminous white with the faintest honey-gold undertone that I’d learned to associate specifically with Belle. It glowed faintly in the dim light, almost like it was lit from within.

"What is that?"

Blair’s voice came from my right, hoarse and raw. She’d pushed herself into a sitting position against the canyon wall, her good arm pressed against the rock while her burned side faced away from me.

Her eyes tracked the bottle with the focused intensity of someone trying to make sense of something that shouldn’t exist in the middle of a survival situation. Her brow furrowed slightly, confusion mixing with exhaustion and pain across her soot-streaked features.

"Medicine."