Divine Milking System

Chapter 370: 370 | Kill Me Later [PS BONUS]

She glanced down at the wound running from her thigh to her calf like she’d forgotten it existed. When she raised her left hand, blue-white flame cupped in her palm, the light made her wet tactical suit shimmer. She ran the flame along the soaked fabric, starting at her collar. Steam lifted off in controlled bursts as the water evaporated under the precise application of heat.

The temperature had to be dropping and rising by fractions of a degree, because the material wasn’t scorching, wasn’t even discoloring. She moved the flame down her sleeve, across her chest, down the other arm. More steam. The suit began to dry in patches, darkening from waterlogged black to the matte finish of dry tactical fiber.

This was Hellflame. The same ability that could turn a practice dummy into molten slag. The same ability that could incinerate a training room if she sneezed wrong. And here she was using it like a goddamn hairdryer, burning water off synthetic fabric without so much as singeing a thread.

I’d never seen this. Every public demonstration I’d watched in my crash course on academy power players, Blair’s default setting was "scorched earth." She didn’t do subtle. She did overwhelming force and collateral damage.

But this? This was surgical. This was her treating her own body heat like a scalpel instead of a flamethrower, and the precision required to pull that off was legitimately impressive.

She moved the flame down to her boots, steam rising from the reinforced leather as the last of the river water turned to vapor and vanished into the cold air.

"Useful party trick."

"It’s not a party trick." She dried her right sleeve and moved to the left, hissing through her teeth when the heat passed too close to the burned tissue along her side. "It’s temperature manipulation at the molecular level. I can heat anything I touch to any temperature I choose, including the exact degree required to evaporate water without damaging synthetic fiber."

"So a party trick with a PhD."

Her eyes snapped to mine. The blue of them caught the distant firelight and turned almost violet at the edges, which I filed under information that was useless for survival but impossible to ignore.

"You threw me off a cliff."

"I saved your life."

"You THREW me off a CLIFF."

"And then I swam you to shore while bleeding from four open wounds, so maybe we call it even."

"Even?" Blair stepped toward me, and even with the steam still rising from her half-dried suit and the burned side making the movement cost more than she wanted to show, she closed the distance between us. "You grabbed me without permission, launched us both into a gorge, and now we’re separated from both squads in a Void Gate with no communications and no extraction point. In what universe is that even?"

"The universe where the alternative was getting eaten by leopards." I kept my voice flat. "Those five leopards. Remember the leopards? Big cats? Yellow eyes? The ones you herded toward us by setting the entire forest on fire?"

Blair’s face went white. Then red. Then a very specific shade that I’d come to associate with the moment before she lost control of her ability and scorched everything within twenty meters. Her breathing got shallow and fast. Her hands balled into fists at her sides. The air around her started to shimmer with heat that had nothing to do with drying her clothes.

"I was trying to protect my team."

"You were panicking."

The word landed like a slap. Blair’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. No sound came out, which was a first. I’d never seen her at a loss for words before. She always had something to say, usually cutting and delivered with the kind of precision that made her flames look merciful by comparison.

"You’re a glass cannon," I continued, because apparently surviving a hundred-foot fall gave me the kind of reckless honesty that usually required alcohol. "Your ability is devastating at range and useless in close quarters. When those leopards closed the gap, you had two options: controlled retreat or nuclear option. You picked the nuclear option because you were scared, and now the jungle is burning, the squad is scattered, and you and I are stuck in a canyon with no way to reach anyone."

"I am NOT scared of—"

"You’re scared of everything, Blair." I said it without heat because heat wouldn’t help. "You’re scared of your father, you’re scared of your sister, you’re scared of losing first place, and right now you’re scared that the fire you started is going to kill someone on your team. That’s why you asked where they were before you asked about yourself. That’s why you’re standing there arguing with me instead of sitting down and letting me look at your burns."

The canyon wall pressed cold against my back. The river roared past us. Above the gorge, the sky pulsed with the orange glow of burning trees.

Blair Davenport stared at me with those blue eyes full of something she refused to name.

"I’m going to kill you," she said quietly. "When we get out of this gate, and we will get out, I am going to make your life so miserable that you’ll wish the leopards had finished the job."

"Fine. Kill me later. Right now sit down and let me look at that burn before it gets infected."

She sat. Not because I told her to, obviously. Blair Davenport would never admit to doing something because someone told her to. She sat because gravity suggested it and her legs agreed and the rock happened to be at the appropriate height, none of which had anything to do with the lottery winner standing three feet away who had just insulted her combat instincts after saving her life.

I knelt beside her. The burns along her left side were worse up close, the skin blistered and weeping where the composite material had fused to flesh. She’d need a healer. A real one, not the field-kit variety.

"Don’t touch it."

"I’m not going to touch it. I’m looking."

"You’re looking too close."

"Your burn extends from your ribcage to your hip. There is no appropriate viewing distance."

Her jaw worked. Something was happening behind those eyes, something complicated and angry and afraid, and she was fighting to keep it buried beneath six inches of Davenport steel and a lifetime of training in the art of never showing weakness.

"Thank you," she whispered. "For the cliff."

I almost didn’t hear it over the river.

"Don’t mention it."

"I won’t."

"I know."