Divine Milking System

Chapter 373: 373 | A Blanket of Bad Intentions

Faint. Intermittent. Like a heartbeat at the bottom of a well, barely audible but definitely present. The direction felt like upstream, back toward the fire and the chaos we’d left behind. Which made sense, actually. Void Gates sealed when you entered and unsealed when the core died. If the core was smart, and the coordinated leopard behavior suggested it was, it would position itself in the most defensible location available.

Like, say, the center of a burning forest full of evolved predators that answered to its will.

Wonderful.

I let the information settle, filing it away for when we could actually act on it. Tomorrow, when the fire had burned itself out and Blair could move without agony painting every step. Tomorrow, when I’d recovered enough mana to swap abilities again without leaving myself vulnerable. Tomorrow, when we had a chance of finding the others and regrouping into something approaching a functional squad.

Tonight was for survival. Nothing more.

The canyon settled into its nighttime patterns around me. The fire glow faded to a dull ember light on the horizon, the worst of the blaze apparently contained by whatever passed for natural firebreaks in a mana-saturated jungle. The river continued its endless song, water over stone in rhythms that almost sounded like words if you listened too long. The air cooled slightly, though the humidity remained oppressive, clinging to skin and lungs with the persistence of something that had opinions about visitors.

Behind me, Blair shifted in her sleep. A soft sound escaped her lips, not quite a whimper but close. Probably dreaming about the fire. About her team scattered and possibly hurt because she’d panicked and chosen destruction over strategy.

I understood the impulse better than I wanted to admit. When the leopards had closed in, when everything had gone sideways and the careful formations collapsed into chaos, the temptation to just burn it all had been overwhelming. Wave Motion at full power, Reaper’s Edge carving through anything that moved, consequences be damned as long as I survived.

The difference was I’d held back. Barely, but I’d held.

Blair hadn’t. And now she was sleeping in a cave with a lottery winner who’d thrown her off a cliff, trying not to think about whether her choices had killed people she was responsible for.

Fun times.

An hour passed. Then two. The fire glow continued to fade, the fracture space’s equivalent of night settling over the canyon like a blanket made of shadows and bad intentions. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, picking out details in the rock face that would have been invisible in brighter conditions. C-rank perception apparently came with low-light vision as a bonus feature.

Useful. I filed that away for later.

The third hour brought the first sign of trouble. Movement on the canyon rim, barely visible against the purple-orange sky. Something large, prowling along the edge with the patience of a predator that knew its prey couldn’t run forever.

I went still. Not frozen, just... quiet. The kind of quiet that Vale had beaten into me during three weeks of training sessions that felt more like torture designed by a sadist with a PhD in human suffering. The kind of quiet that made you part of the environment instead of something that disturbed it.

The shape on the rim paused. Turned its massive head toward the canyon. Yellow eyes caught the distant fire glow and reflected it back like coins at the bottom of a wishing well.

One of the leopards. Probably the one I’d marked with Death corruption, given the way it favored its front left leg.

It stood there for a long moment, looking down into the darkness where Blair and I hid in our alcove. I didn’t breathe. Didn’t blink. Just watched it watch the canyon, waiting to see if it would make the climb down or decide the prey wasn’t worth the effort.

The leopard made a sound. Low, rumbling, the kind of vocalization that traveled through stone and settled in your bones like a warning written in frequencies older than language. Then it turned and padded away, disappearing over the rim and into the burned forest beyond.

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.

Not safe. We weren’t safe. The leopards were still hunting, still coordinating, still serving whatever intelligence controlled them through the gate’s corrupted ecosystem. Tomorrow would bring more of them, probably more of the mosquito swarms, possibly things we hadn’t seen yet because the Void Gate’s population density meant there were always more things to see.

But for now, for the next few hours, we had a cave and a hidden position and the knowledge that our enemies couldn’t find us in the dark.

I’d take it.

The fourth hour brought Blair awake with a gasp that she immediately tried to suppress. I heard her sit up, heard the sharp intake of breath as her burns reminded her they existed, heard the moment when she oriented herself and remembered where she was.

"It’s been four hours," I said without turning around. "Your turn."

"You should have woken me."

"You needed the sleep more than I needed the rest." I shifted back from the edge, making room for her to take my position. "One of the leopards checked the canyon about an hour ago. Didn’t come down. Probably couldn’t see us in the dark, or decided the climb wasn’t worth the effort."

Blair crawled to the alcove’s edge, her movements stiff but more controlled than before. The sleep had helped, even if she’d never admit it. Her eyes scanned the canyon with the intensity of someone who’d spent her whole life learning to identify threats before they identified her.

"The fire’s dying down," she observed. "By morning we should be able to move upstream without getting cooked."

"That’s where the core is. Upstream, toward the center of the forest."

She turned to look at me. "How do you know that?"

"I have an ability that detects valuable signatures. The gate’s core registered at the edge of my range, somewhere in that direction." I jerked my chin toward the fading glow. "We find it, we kill it, the gate unseals. Simple plan."

"Simple plans never survive contact with Void Gates."

"Then we’ll improvise. It’s what we’re good at."

Blair made a sound that might have been agreement or might have been contempt. With her it was hard to tell. She settled into the watch position I’d vacated, her good arm braced against the stone and her eyes fixed on the canyon below.

"Sleep, Monroe. You’ve got four hours before I wake you up by kicking you in the ribs."