I woke up sitting down.
That wouldn't be accurate. I didn't wake up, it was more like my life was a movie and someone finally decided to hit the play button.
A man's voice echoed across open air, amplified by speakers I couldn't see. "—and it is with great pride that the International Hunter Coalition welcomes the Class of 2044 to San Nicolas Academy."
Hold on...
Where the fuck was I?
My eyes focused on rows of folding chairs in front of me. Hundreds of them. Filled with teenagers in identical uniforms with color-coded trim on the shoulders. Red. Blue. Gold. Silver. Bronze.
Beyond the chairs was a stage. Podium. Flags from a dozen different countries hanging limp in the ocean breeze.
Ocean breeze.
I turned my head slowly and took in my surroundings.
Were were outside in a massive amphitheater that was carved into a hillside overlooking the Ocean. The sun was beginning to set behind us, casting long shadows across the amphitheater.
I could smell the salt from the sea breeze and there were seagulls crying in the distance.
"What the—"
My voice came out alto instead of tenor with a certain rasp to it. That wasn't my fucking voice.
I looked down.
My hands were on my thighs and they were pale with fingers that looked like sausages.
No calluses. No tan lines from my watch. No tattoo on my left wrist.
These weren't my hands.
The speaker droned on. "—represent not just your nations, but humanity's collective will to survive in this new era of—"
I lifted my hands. Turned them over. Flexed the fingers.
Fat. These hands were fat.
I looked down at my body.
Holy shit.
I was wearing the same black uniform as everyone else, but it fit wrong. Too tight across the stomach. The fabric pulled and bunched at the sides where it couldn't quite contain the gut underneath. My thighs pressed together, filling the chair.
I could feel the weight. The heaviness. The way my stomach pushed against the waistband of my pants.
This wasn't my body.
My body was lean. Cut. I'd put in hours at the gym five days a week for the past three years specifically so I wouldn't look like—
Like this.
"—those who have earned their place through skill and dedication, and those who have been granted the extraordinary opportunity through our lottery program—"
Lottery program.
The words cut through the fog in my brain.
I knew this. I'd read this.
Or skimmed it. Yeah. Skimmed it while taking a shit one afternoon when I was bored and my phone was at 12% battery.
Hunter Academy: America's Elite.
Some nobody author's crack at the hunter academy genre. Progression fantasy bullshit set in the States instead of Korea for once. The protagonist was a lottery winner. Underdog with a hidden talent. Worked hard, made friends, fell in love with some pure-hearted girl who believed in him.
The book was the definition of mid. You could tell the author had spent most of his adolescent life reading fantasy light novels and manhwas. You could also tell the author hadn't lived life enough to make any of the romantic scenes fell real.
Especially the sex scenes.
I remembered that specifically. There'd been this one chapter where the main character finally got together with the girl and the author had written it like he'd never touched a woman in his life.
"Her petals bloomed beneath his touch."
Who the fuck said that? Nobody. Nobody who'd actually made a woman cum said shit like that.
I'd left a comment. Something like: "Author-nim clearly doesn't know where the clit is."
Got downvoted to hell. Banned from the comment section.
Worth it.
And now I was—
A window materialized in front of my face.
Not a window. A glowing screen. Transparent. Floating in midair like someone had ripped a UI element out of a mobile game and copy-pasted it into reality.
[WELCOME, USER!]
You have successfully transmigrated into the body of JACE MONROE in the world of
Analyzing host compatibility…
Analyzing soul structure…
ANALYSIS COMPLETE!
Congratulations!You have been granted the DIVINE MILKING SYSTEM!
"You've got to be fucking kidding me."
The girl sitting two seats to my left glanced over. Skinny. Asian. Nervous looking. She gave me a weird look and then went back to staring at the stage.
DIVINE MILKING SYSTEM - INTERFACE
◆ SYSTEM STATUS ◆
Level: 1
Experience: 0/1000
Remaining Lifespan: 71 Hours 53 Minutes
Points: 0
◆ CORE ABILITIES ◆
⟨ ESSENCE EXTRACTION ⟩
Rank: MAX
Type: Passive
Physical contact with designated targets triggers lactation regardless of biological state. Extracted essence can be harvested and stored. Quality and quantity determined by target's rank and emotional state.
Required: Skin contact with breasts
⟨ ABILITY THEFT ⟩ Rank: MAX | Passive
By consuming a target's essence this grants the user access to their primary ability at Copper rank. Permanent until overwritten. Upgradeable via points.
⟨ SNAKE EYES ⟩ Rank: MAX | Active
Direct eye contact reveals target's bust size and rank, and creates compulsion scaling with existing attraction. Ineffective on targets 2+ ranks above user.
⟨ EUPHORIC FEEDBACK ⟩ Rank: MAX | Active
Channeled touch transmits pleasure directly to target's nervous system. Intensity ranges from subtle warmth to overwhelming ecstasy. Builds tolerance with repeated use.
⟨ PRIVATE SANCTUM ⟩ Rank: Copper | Active
A Pocket dimension fully customizable by the user. Current capacity: 1 target. Current duration: 30 minutes/day. Resets midnight PST. Upgrade: 500 Points.
⟨ OVERCLOCK ⟩ Rank: Copper | Active
Consume 1 stored cup to elevate one stolen ability up two tiers for 4 minutes.
Cooldown: 6 hours.
⟨ ESSENCE VAULT ⟩ Rank: 1 | Passive
Dimensional storage. Capacity: 3 cups, indefinite freshness. Upgrade: +3 slots per 300 Points.
◆ CURRENT ABILITIES: None.
◆ SYSTEM MECHANICS ◆
10 pts/cup consumed | 20 pts first extraction | 100 pts = +1 day lifespan
Ability upgrades:
Copper → Bronze 500pts
Bronze → Silver 1,500pts
Silver → Gold 5,000pts
Gold → Platinum 20,000pts
Platinum → Diamond 50,000pts
I read the entire thing three times just to make sure I wasn't hallucinating.
Divine Milking System.
Lifespan: 71 hours 53 minutes.
I was going to die in three days unless I convinced women to let me milk them like dairy cows.
"This is the most degenerate incel bullshit I have ever seen in my entire life."
I said it out loud. A few heads turned in my section. I didn't care.
On stage, the speaker had been replaced by a beautiful woman in a white suit.
She was saying something about international cooperation and the future of humanity but I couldn't focus on her words because there was a fucking death timer floating in front of my face.
...
I needed 100 points to buy one day of life.
10 points per cup of milk. 20 if it was their first time lactating.
And I was in the body of an overweight lottery winner at an elite hunter academy surrounded by teenagers who probably thought I was human garbage.
"Okay. Okay. Think."
I leaned back in my chair. Felt the metal creak under my weight.
The last thing I even remembered was walking out of Melissa's apartment after fucking her until she passed out. I went to the Day n Nite to grab a Calypso Ocean Blue Lemonade and a blue powerade to get some hydration in my system.
And then—
Shit, I don't remember.
All that mattered was I'm now here in this new world in a fat suit.
The world from that shitty web novel written by some virgin who definitely didn't know the difference between a G-spot and a Clit.
I glanced around the amphitheater again. Really looked this time.
The stadium was divided into sections. Guild affiliations, probably. The front rows near the stage had students with gold trim on their shoulders. They sat straight. Confident. Some of them were on their phones. Bored.
Behind them were the silver and bronze sections. More attentive. Less expensive clothes visible under the uniforms.
And then there was my section. The back. Lottery admissions. Maybe thirty of us total scattered across a hundred empty seats like we were contagious.
Nobody was sitting close to anyone else.
Nobody was talking.
We were the rejects. The charity cases. The "Scratch-Offs" who'd somehow won a ticket into a world we didn't belong in.
And I had less than 72 hours to seduce someone before I died.
"—which brings us to our newest students," the woman on stage was saying. "Will our lottery admissions please stand?"
Oh hell no.
But my body was already moving. Muscle memory. Conditioning. I stood up along with the other lottery winners around me.
Five hundred heads turned to look at us.
I felt the weight of their stares. Dismissive. Curious. Amused.
From the front row, a guy with platinum-blond hair and a jawline that could cut glass glanced back at us and smirked. He said something to the girl sitting next to him. She laughed.
The woman on stage continued. "The International Hunter Coalition is proud to offer opportunities to those who might not otherwise have access to this level of training. We believe that talent can emerge from anywhere, and—"
Bullshit.
This was a PR stunt. I could see it in the way the guild-affiliated students weren't even pretending to pay attention anymore.
With the rich kids in the front rows.
With the guild heirs who'd been training their abilities since they could walk.
With everyone except us.
"You may be seated."
I took my seat and the chair creaked again.The welcome ceremony kept going with different speakers coming out.I tuned out most of what was being said because if I didn't lock in I would be dead in three days.
The system interface was still hovering at the edge of my consciousness so I focused on a skill.
Skills: Snake Eyes Lv.Max (Active)
Time for a little taste.
My vision sharpened. Colors became more vivid. And suddenly, overlaid on every woman in my field of view, was a small tag displaying—
Bust size.
32B. 34C. 36D. 30A.
The measurements floated above their heads like nameplates in an MMO.
"Jesus Christ."
This was insane. This was genuinely the most degenerate power system I'd ever encountered and I'd read cultivation novels where the protagonist absorbed women's "yin essence" to level up.
But it worked.
I could see exactly who had what. And more than that—when I focused on someone for more than a second, I could feel something shift. A pull. Like invisible threads connecting me to them.
The charm effect.
So Snake Eyes didn't just identify measurements but made women notice me.I focused on a girl three rows ahead with red trim on her shoulders and brown hair that was pulled back in a ponytail.
34C.
She shifted in her seat. Scratched her neck. Glanced back over her shoulder like she'd felt someone watching her.
Our eyes met.
She froze.
I held her gaze. Didn't smile. Didn't look away.
Her cheeks flushed. She turned back around quickly, shoulders hunched.
It worked.
Even in this body—this soft, overweight, lottery-winner body that had no business getting a second glance from anyone—the skill made them look.
"Okay," I muttered. "Okay. I can work with this."
The ceremony was blissfully winding down and someone made a comment about dorm assignments and orientation schedules.
I had 71 hours and 48 minutes to live.
I needed targets.
I reactivated Snake Eyes and started scanning the crowd systematically.
Looking for women who were:
Isolated (no friend group hovering around them)Low-status (lottery winners or low-tier guild affiliations—more likely to be receptive)High-yield (the better their superpower, the better the milk, probably)
My gaze swept across the lottery section first.
The skinny Asian girl two seats away: 32A. She was hunched over, arms wrapped around herself like she was trying to disappear.
Three rows down: Latina girl, athletic build, 36C. She was staring at her phone with a bored expression.
Further back: Black girl with box braids and glasses, 34B who was taking notes on the speech.
None of them screamed "easy target."
But I had to start somewhere.
The woman on stage finished her speech. "Please collect your orientation packets from the tables at the south entrance. Your dorm assignments and class schedules are inside. Welcome to San Nicolas Academy. Dismissed."
The stadium erupted into movement. Five hundred students standing, talking, heading toward the exits in clumps and groups.
The guild sections moved together. Organized. Already divided into their social hierarchies.
The lottery section scattered like roaches when the lights came on.
I stood slowly. Felt the weight in my legs. The tightness of the uniform.
This body was wrong in every way that mattered. But I still had my mind. My experience. My knowledge of exactly how to read people and give them what they wanted.
And I had a system that turned my biggest weakness—being a shameless piece of shit—into my only advantage.
71 hours. 45 minutes.
The clock was ticking.
...
I got lost four times finding the south entrance.
Not metaphorically. Not "turned the wrong way once" lost. Genuinely, completely, embarrassingly lost in a venue that had about six signs pointing the same direction.
The first time, I followed a cluster of Ruby students down a ramp that looped back to the upper amphitheater. I stood there for thirty seconds staring at the empty seats before accepting what had happened.
The second time, I found a staircase that went down one level and deposited me directly in front of a maintenance closet. The sign on the door said ELECTRICAL. I read it twice like it might change.
The third time, I ended up at the north entrance somehow. I don't know how. I'm not proud of it.
The fourth time, I followed a girl with a 36DD chest and forgot I was supposed to be navigating.
She turned left into a bathroom. I kept walking and found the south entrance by accident.
There it was. Four long folding tables staffed by upperclassmen in academy uniforms, each table representing a house. Long lines in front of each one. Students collecting their orientation packets with the practiced efficiency of people who knew exactly where they were going and had probably reviewed the campus map three times already.
People like that were insufferable.
I joined the shortest line, which happened to be House Obsidian's table. The upperclassman running it was a broad-shouldered guy with a jaw like a brick and zero interest in being here. He had a clipboard and the expression of someone counting down the minutes to literally anywhere else.
The line moved fast. These were mostly guild kids who already knew their assignments.
My turn came.
"Name."
"Jace Monroe."
He didn't look up. Just scrolled down his tablet, finger moving through the list. Then it stopped.
He looked up.
The look wasn't hostile exactly. It was the specific look you give a parking ticket. Like, I'm not surprised this exists, but I'm definitely annoyed about it.
"Lottery," he said.
Not a question.
"Yeah."
He went back to the tablet. Tapped something. Scrolled. His expression did a thing where it got very careful and neutral in the way that people get when they're trying not to say the thing they're thinking.
"Monroe, Jace." He pulled a thick envelope from the Obsidian pile. Held it out. "House Obsidian. Welcome."
The words came out flat. Like two syllables away from "I'm sorry for your loss."
I took the envelope.
"Building C, fifth floor," he added. "Room 5E." He paused. Then, quieter, almost to himself: "Obsidian. Good luck, man."
He was already looking past me to the next person in line.
I stepped away from the table and tore open the envelope.
House Obsidian. Room 5E. Class schedule tucked behind a campus map that was going to be completely useless to me based on established evidence. A welcome letter from someone called Dominic Vale, Homeroom Instructor.
I stared at the house assignment for a second.
Obsidian.
House Obsidian.
Of course.
I thought back to the novel. Tried to remember the important parts. "Hunter Academy: America's Elite" had been a solid enough story. Generic protagonist with a hidden overpowered ability. Lottery winner who shocked everyone. Standard underdog arc. The author had decent worldbuilding instincts but wrote emotional scenes like a robot learning to cry from YouTube tutorials.
But I remembered the houses.
Sapphire was the prestige house. The champion house. Where Katerina Volkov lived like royalty and ran everything with an iron fist wrapped in platinum hair and ice-blue eyes that probably made lesser men forget their names.
Ruby was chaos energy. Loud. Competitive. Good fights and better drama.
Emerald was the nerd house. Smart kids who died in simulations because they overthought everything.
Amber was...
I almost groaned out loud.
Amber was the chill house. The support house. The house where Dr. Vivienne Cross was the homeroom teacher. I'd read her description in the novel and the author, for once, had not undersold anything. 34FF. Purple hair. That outfit she wore where the blazer was basically decorative. The character existed in the story mostly as background flavor but the author had dedicated an entire paragraph to describing the way she crossed her legs during class like it was load-bearing plot information.
It wasn't load-bearing plot information.
But I would have appreciated being in her house for about nine different System-related reasons.
Instead, I got Obsidian.
The Gryffindor of this world, if Gryffindor was split down the middle between the brave kids with something to prove and the legacy-obsessed sociopaths who'd push those kids into traffic if it helped their rankings.
Half the house genuinely wanted to be the best hunters alive. The other half wanted to be the best because their families had been the best and anything less was a personal insult to three generations of combat achievement.
The original protagonist, Javier Mendoza, had been sorted here. Which meant this was where the story happened. The drama. The fights. The rivalries that defined the whole novel.
Also this was where Marcus Steele lived. The Rank #2 Elite Ten member who was all jaw and guild money and an ability that amounted to "I built a room where I'm God, come inside so I can demonstrate."
And Dante Pope. Rank #10. The desperate first-year clinging to his Elite Ten spot by his fingernails.
And Bella Cortez, Rank #5, who the novel had described with the kind of detail usually reserved for religious iconography.
I looked at my campus map.
Building C.
I looked around the south entrance area. There were four visible buildings from where I stood. None of them had letters on them. Or if they did, I couldn't see from here.
Great.
I picked a direction.
Building C was behind the Apex Dining Hall, which was behind the Recreation Center, which was not in the direction I'd initially walked.
It took me eleven minutes to find it.
The Obsidian residence hall looked like every other building on campus from the outside. Glass, steel, clean modern lines. But someone had hung a banner above the entrance with the house insignia. Black raven on a purple crystal. The silver thread on the banner caught the afternoon sun.
It was kind of a nice building.
The lobby smelled like expensive cleaning product and low-grade institutional anxiety. A few students were already moving through, dragging bags, checking phones. Everyone had that same tightly controlled expression of people trying to project that they absolutely belonged here and were not at all terrified.
I took the elevator to the fifth floor.
Room 5E was at the end of the hall on the right.
I used the code from my packet. The door clicked open.
The apartment was bigger than I expected.
I'd read the description in the novel. The academy provided good housing. But reading it and standing in 1,050 square feet of clean, modern living space were two different things. Big windows looking out at the Pacific. A kitchen with actual appliances. A couch that looked like it wouldn't destroy your lower back.
Two bedrooms. Two bathrooms.
No roommate yet.
I dropped my duffel bag on the floor in the living room and walked to the window.
...
The Pacific Ocean was out there. Big and grey-green in the afternoon light. I could see the edge of the mainland from here, just a dark line on the horizon. Fourteen miles of water between me and a world that had no idea this island existed.
The system timer was visible in the corner of my vision. I'd learned to check it the same way you check a clock. Not obsessively. Just regularly.
70 hours. 12 minutes.
Three days, give or take.
To seduce a woman. To convince her to let me touch her. To extract essence and start banking points.
In a body that currently looked like I'd spent the last year exclusively eating fast food and avoiding sunlight.
I turned away from the window.
The bedroom on the left had the better view. I took it. My future roommate could deal with it. Whoever they turned out to be.
I sat on the edge of the bed and opened my orientation packet again. Class schedule. Campus rules. A list of monthly evaluation dates. A single page labeled "House Code of Conduct" that I skimmed and immediately forgot.
The map of the campus was printed on one side of a folded card. I studied it seriously this time because clearly I could not trust my own sense of direction to get me anywhere I needed to be.
Academic buildings were in Zone 2. Residential was Zone 3. Dining and recreation in Zone 4.
Snake Eyes was going to be most useful in Zone 4. The dining hall. High concentration of female students, casual environment, no urgent social context to navigate.
I needed to get there soon. Start identifying targets. Start working.
I had a system designed by something divine, or deranged, or both. I had a skill that made women look at me regardless of what I looked like. I had technique stats at C-rank from a past life of knowing exactly what to do with my hands and my mouth and my general presence.
What I didn't have was time to feel sorry about my current physical situation.
I stood up. Found the bathroom. Looked at myself in the mirror for the first time since waking up in that amphitheater seat.
The face looking back at me was eighteen. Round. Softer than it should've been. Brown hair that needed a cut, growing past my ears in a way that wasn't stylish, just neglected. Amber eyes, which was at least interesting. The kind of color that reads warm in sunlight.
The body was what I expected. Soft in the middle. Broad but not muscled. The uniform shirt pulled across the stomach in a way that communicated "wrong size" to anyone paying attention.
The system's Limit Breaker ability was theoretically fixing this. Sexual activity trained physical stats at 3x the rate of conventional methods. Which meant every extraction session was also a workout.
The problem was I needed to have an extraction session first.
I looked at my own reflection for another few seconds.
"You've worked with worse," I told myself.
I hadn't, actually. But the sentiment was useful.
I splashed water on my face, fixed the collar of my uniform, and went back out into the hallway.
The dining hall was a fifteen-minute walk that I completed in twenty-two minutes because I went the wrong way once. Just once. I was improving.
But when I finally got there, I stopped in the entrance and actually appreciated the space for a second.
Three floors of glass and ocean view. The ceiling was high enough to make the whole room feel like standing inside something important. Chef stations along the back wall. The smell of actual food, not cafeteria food. Something with garlic and butter that immediately reminded me I hadn't eaten since before I died and woke up in someone else's body.
The social geography was already establishing itself.
Front by the windows: the guild kids. Clean uniforms. Easy posture. Tables full before the food was even out.
Middle section: the general population. A mix of houses, affiliations, year years.
Near the kitchen, by the back wall: lottery admissions. Not explicitly assigned. But when everyone with family connections or guild backing was already moving toward the better spots, you ended up with the same segregation every single time, everywhere in the world.
I activated Snake Eyes.
The overlay came up immediately. Measurements floating above every woman in my field of view like a heads-up display in a video game designed by someone with very specific priorities.
I scanned systematically. Not desperately. Like I was browsing a menu.
34C, third-year. Ruby trim. Already in conversation with two other students, comfortable. Low priority.
32B, first-year. Amber trim. Sitting alone, staring at her food. Interesting, but Amber was across campus.
38DD, first-year. Obsidian trim.
I stopped.
She was sitting at a table near the edge of the lottery section. Light blue hair, which was distinctive enough to notice before Snake Eyes put up her measurement. Long, loose waves. A face that was made for getting whatever she wanted from whoever she was talking to. She had that particular bone structure where the features were arranged for maximum effect, sharp brows, full lips in a near-pout, a tiny beauty mark below the corner of her right eye.
The Obsidian uniform on her was doing something genuinely illegal. The blazer buttons were managing their job by a margin. The micro skirt sat high on her waist and ended a distance above the knee that the dress code had strong opinions about.
She was looking at her phone with a bored, beautiful expression while stabbing at a piece of fruit with her fork.
Lottery section. Obsidian trim. First-year.
Same house as me.
I checked my packet's class schedule against the name I remembered from the novel's cast.
Belle Fox.
Treasure sense ability. Bronze-tier essence at best. Not the highest yield, but she qualified for the first extraction bonus. Double points. And she was in my house which meant proximity. Regular access.
She looked up from her phone and caught me looking.
I held Snake Eyes active for three seconds.
She looked back down. Then up again. A small furrow between her brows like she was trying to figure out something she couldn't quite name.
Her cheeks were the faintest shade warmer than they'd been a second ago.
The charm effect. Working in a body I actively found inconvenient. Still working.
The system timer updated in the corner of my vision.
70 hours. 3 minutes.
I walked to the food line.
I had a dorm assignment, a house placement, and one potential target already looking at me from across a room without knowing why.
Obsidian. The house where everything happened.
Well. Let it happen, then.
...
The food line moved fast. Good sign. The chef stations ran like they'd done this a thousand times, which they probably had.
I grabbed a tray and started down the line.
The salad station had a market salad that looked like it was designed by someone who actually understood nutrition. Mixed greens, cherry tomatoes, cucumber, a handful of dried cranberries, spicy chicken breast sliced clean across the top. I added the granola instead of croutons because I'd spent enough years in my past life eating right to know that croutons were decorative at best. Low-fat balsamic vinaigrette on the side. Mixed fruit cup.
The drink station had a row of branded bottles I didn't recognize. I picked one up. Blue. The label said "HunterAde: Mana Recovery Formula, Electrolyte Blend, 350ml."
I stared at it for a second.
It was blue Gatorade.
This world had blue Gatorade and called it a hunter sports drink.
Heh.
I grabbed two.
The tray was heavier than I expected. My arms registered the complaint immediately, which was a useful reminder that E-rank strength was not a metaphor. I carried it carefully across the dining hall and did another sweep with Snake Eyes while I walked.
Belle Fox was still at the same table near the lottery section. Still on her phone. The fruit on her plate was half-eaten. Her free hand rested on the table next to a bottle of the same blue HunterAde I was holding, which I found unreasonably funny.
I ran through the math one more time.
Bronze-tier essence. Ten points per mouthful, doubled to twenty on first extraction. One cup was eight mouthfuls. First session bonus applied to every mouthful during the first session. So a full cup from Belle was 160 points. That was one day and fourteen hours of life added to the clock.
Not enough to solve the problem long-term. But it was a start. A foundation.
She was also in my house, which meant I'd be seeing her regularly whether I made a move now or not. Better to establish something early before social hierarchies got calcified and everyone decided who they were and weren't going to talk to.
The other thing I remembered about Belle Fox from the novel was the money thing.
She was a gold digger. Textbook, unapologetic, survival-grade gold digger.
She'd grown up poor in rural Oregon, won the lottery slot, and arrived at this academy with one objective: attach herself to power and money and never be broke again.
In the novel, the original protagonist had tried to talk to her in the first week and she'd shut him down in about forty seconds flat because he was a lottery kid with zero resources and she was playing a completely different game.
I was also a lottery kid with zero resources.
Fuck it. I was already walking toward her table.
She didn't look up when I stopped next to her.
"Anyone sitting here?"
She looked up from her phone then. Took me in from the tray to the face to the Obsidian shoulder trim. Something shifted in her expression. Not warm exactly. More like a recalibration.
"You're in Obsidian?"
"Looks like it."
She sat up slightly straighter. The blazer did something dramatic in response to this. I kept my eyes on her face with the focused intensity of a man who was absolutely not going to make this weird in the first thirty seconds.
"Jace Monroe."
She considered me for another moment. The amber-brown eyes were doing a little math I recognized. Lottery or guild. Worth talking to or not.
"Belle Fox." A pause. "Nice to meet you."
She went back to her phone.
I sat down.
She didn't tell me to leave, which was technically a win.
I opened my balsamic vinaigrette and poured it over the salad and cut into the spicy chicken and started eating. It was good. Actually good.
The chicken had a proper sear on it and the spice was real, not the cafeteria approximation of spice where someone waved a chili flake at the pan from a safe distance.
Belle scrolled something on her phone. Her thumb moved fast, the way people do when they're not actually reading, just moving to have something to do with their hands.
I drank some of the HunterAde. It tasted exactly like blue Gatorade.
I decided to try again.
"So. Lottery or guild?"
She didn't look up. "Lottery."
"Same."
Nothing. Her thumb kept scrolling.
I ate another bite of chicken and looked out at the ocean through the wall of glass. The light was doing something good out there, that particular late afternoon gold that made the water look almost warm even though it definitely wasn't.
"Where are you from?" I tried.
"Oregon." She answered before I finished the sentence, still looking at the phone. "You?"
"Not here."
That got her to glance up for exactly one second. "That's not an answer."
"I know."
She went back to her phone.
Okay. So this was how it was going to be.
Belle Fox was here, she was technically talking to me, and she was also very clearly not interested in talking to me.
Not because I'd done anything wrong. Just because I was a lottery kid with a food tray and no visible resources and she was running a cost-benefit analysis on every social interaction she had.
I'd known girls like this in my past life. Not gold diggers specifically, but the underlying psychology was identical. Every conversation was an investment. They were always calculating return.
The problem wasn't getting them to talk. The problem was making yourself look like a worthwhile place to put their time.
The issue was that I had nothing to offer her right now. No money, no connections, no status. I hadn't acquired a single stolen ability yet. My physical stats were embarrassing.
My Charisma was E-rank, which the system had been very honest about and described as "actively off-putting due to fat body penalty," which, okay, that was just rude, but it was also accurate.
Snake Eyes was the only real card I had.
I looked at her.
She was still looking at her phone but she'd stopped scrolling. Her thumb was resting on the screen now, not moving.
Three seconds of sustained eye contact from my side even without her looking back was apparently enough to do something. Because she looked up.
I let Snake Eyes run.
The overlay confirmed 38DD. Unranked. Current attraction from baseline: 8%.
She looked at me with an expression that was 60% suspicious and 40% something she hadn't decided to acknowledge yet.
The charm effect ran its numbers. 8% became 18%.
Not much. Enough.
"What?" she said.
...
"Nothing. Just eating."
"You were staring."
"I was thinking."
"About what?"
I speared a piece of mango from the fruit cup. "Wondering if the chicken here is always this good or if they put in extra effort for orientation day."
She blinked. That wasn't what she'd expected.
"It's probably orientation day," she said. "Schools always do that. Show you the best version of everything first."
"Makes sense. Lower the guard before they start charging you twelve dollars for a granola bar."
Something in her face shifted. She put her phone face-down on the table. Not all the way engaged. But the phone was down.
"The Vault is insane," she said. "I looked at the prices earlier. A basic combat knife is six hundred points."
"Six hundred points is six days of life if you're running the system currency."
She looked at me differently then. Just for a second. Like she was recalculating something.
"You've already looked at the system stuff?"
"I've been reading since the ceremony ended."
"Me too." She picked up her HunterAde and drank some of it and made a face. "This tastes like blue Gatorade."
"I know."
"Why does it say mana recovery formula if it just tastes like Gatorade?"
"Marketing. The hunter industry figured out that if you put mana recovery on the label, you can charge four times as much."
She actually laughed at that. Short, quick, a little surprised. Like she hadn't planned on laughing.
I filed that away.
Belle Fox, gold digger, materialistic to the bone, genuinely funny when she let herself be. The novel hadn't mentioned that part.
The novel's version of her was a flat character who existed to provide the original Javier with a rejection scene and then show up later as a minor antagonist. The actual person in front of me was more complicated than that.
She was funny and she was strategic and she was running scared underneath all the careful presentation, same as everyone else in this building.
"What's your ability?" I asked.
The openness closed up fast. Not dramatically. Just a small tightening around the eyes.
"Support type," she said. "Not combat."
"Same general category as mine."
She looked at me. "What's yours?"
"Also support." I drank some HunterAde. "Non-combat oriented."
We were both lying to each other and we both knew it and neither of us called it out, which felt like the most honest conversation I'd had all day.
"Support gets you killed in Obsidian," she said quietly.
"Only if you let them define your value by combat output."
"Easy to say."
"Is it?"
Belle picked up her phone again. But she put it back down almost immediately.
"Jace Monroe," she said, like she was testing the name.
"That's the one."
"What floor are you on?"
"Fifth."
Her expression did something small. "Me too. Room 5C."
"5E."
She looked at the window for a moment. "I haven't met my roommate yet."
"Neither have I."
Outside, the ocean was going dark at the edges where the light was pulling back toward the horizon. The dining hall was filling up fast around us, the noise level climbing as more students came in from the ceremony dispersal and found their social groups and settled into their respective sections of the room.
The lottery tables near the kitchen were filling in. I could see six, seven, eight students from the orientation packet photos I'd memorized. All of them lottery. All of them doing that same low-key assessment of everyone around them, trying to figure out the social map before anyone else did.
Belle was doing it too, I realized. Even while she was talking to me. Her eyes moved around the room in quick, regular sweeps. Checking who was sitting with who. Checking which guild kids had the expensive uniform variations. Checking where the money was.
It was almost impressive.
"You're cataloging," I said.
She didn't deny it. "So are you."
"I'm a little more obvious about it."
"Yeah." She almost smiled. "You are."
The timer in the corner of my vision updated.
69 hours. 47 minutes.
I looked at Belle Fox across the table. Blue hair, full mouth, bronze-tier essence, and a survival instinct sharp enough to cut glass. She wasn't going to be easy. She'd already done the math on me and decided I came up short on the balance sheet.
But she was still sitting here. Phone face-down. Talking.
That was something.
I wasn't here to play the original Jace Monroe's story. That guy had come in without a plan and gotten rejected and stayed rejected and eventually faded into the background of someone else's protagonist arc.
I had a system, a skill that was literally designed to manufacture attraction, and sixty-nine hours of very specific motivation.
I ate the last of my chicken and drank the rest of my blue HunterAde and watched Belle Fox decide whether I was worth the investment of continued conversation.
She picked up her phone.
Put it back down.
"Is the chicken actually that good," she said, "or are you just really hungry?"
"Both," I said. "But mostly the chicken."
She pulled her half-eaten salad toward her and started eating properly for the first time since I'd sat down.
Progress.
...
I stabbed a tomato from the salad. "So. Where in Oregon?"
"Burns." She said it like she was daring me to not know where that was.
I didn't. But I nodded anyway.
"Small town?"
"Four thousand people. Maybe." She pushed lettuce around her plate without eating it. "Middle of nowhere. You could drive an hour and not see another car."
"Sounds peaceful."
She laughed. Actually laughed this time, the kind that wasn't planned. "Peaceful is a nice word for boring as hell."
I grinned. "Fair enough."
"What about you?" She looked at me directly. "Where'd you come from before this?"
I took a drink of the second HunterAde and considered my answer. The truth was complicated and involved a transmigration I couldn't explain. The lie needed to be simple.
"Couple places," I said. "Moved around a lot."
"Military family?"
"Something like that."
She waited for more. I didn't give it.
"You're good at that," she said.
"Good at what?"
"Answering questions without actually answering them."
I ate the tomato. "Learned from the best."
"Who?"
"You."
She blinked. Then she actually smiled, which changed her entire face from calculated to genuinely pretty. "Touché."
The dining hall was getting louder. More students flooding in from wherever orientation packets had sent them after the ceremony. The guild tables were filling up with second and third years showing the first years how things worked. The Ruby section was already loud as hell. I could hear someone laughing from three tables over.
Obsidian's section was quieter. More controlled. People at those tables sat with better posture and talked at reasonable volumes like they were already being evaluated.
Belle noticed me looking.
"Obsidian's weird," she said.
"Yeah?"
"I read about the houses before coming here. The forums online, student reviews, all that." She leaned forward slightly. The blazer pulled tighter across her chest. I kept my eyes on her face through sheer willpower and the knowledge that getting caught staring thirty seconds into a productive conversation would be the dumbest thing I'd done today.
"What'd the forums say?"
"Obsidian used to be the best house. Won everything. Then something happened last year and now they're desperate."
I already knew this from the novel. The Gate Incident. Two third years dead, four second years permanently injured, Obsidian's reputation shattered in one training exercise gone catastrophically wrong.
Marcus Steele's predecessor as Rank #2 had made a tactical error chasing personal glory instead of following protocol. He'd led his team deeper into a live C-rank gate than authorized. The gate breached. The fallout was bad enough that the IHC investigated and shut down house activities for two weeks.
Obsidian had lost the championship to Sapphire for the first time in twelve years.
The house was still recovering.
"They're going to expect a lot from us," Belle said quietly. "The third years. They want to win the championship back."
"And we're lottery kids."
"Exactly."
She wasn't wrong. Obsidian house culture was brutal on a good day. Post-incident Obsidian house culture was going to be a special kind of hell for anyone who didn't perform immediately.
I ate another bite of chicken and decided to change the subject before Belle got too deep in her own anxiety spiral.
"This school is wild," I said. "I got lost six times already. I need a guide or something. These maps are confusing as hell."
Belle stared at me. Just stared.
"Six times?"
"Yeah."
"How?"
"I don't know. I followed the signs. The signs lied."
She was doing this thing where her mouth was open but no sound was coming out. Like I'd just told her I'd never heard of oxygen.
"The signs don't lie," she finally said. "They're directional markers."
"They pointed me to a maintenance closet."
"That's not possible."
"It happened."
"You must have misread them."
"Belle. I followed a group of Ruby students down a ramp that looped back to the amphitheater. I went into a hallway marked South Entrance and came out at the North Entrance. I discovered this dining hall by accident while following someone to the bathroom."
She was looking at me like I'd grown a second head.
"Are you serious right now?"
"Completely."
"You mean you need something other than the interactive map on your phone that shows you where you are and what's surrounding you?"
I blinked.
"The what?"
Belle pulled out her phone. Tapped the screen twice. Turned it toward me.
There was a map. A live map. With a blue dot labeled BELLE FOX - CURRENT LOCATION sitting right in the middle of Zone 4, Dining Hall, Table 14.
The entire campus was laid out in clean lines and labeled zones. Buildings were highlighted in different colors by function. I could see the residence halls in Zone 3, the academic sector in Zone 2, the restricted areas in Zone 5 grayed out with ACCESS DENIED overlays.
It was perfect.
It was exactly what I needed.
I looked at her phone. Then at her face. Then back at the phone.
"That's a thing?"
"You didn't set up your academy app?"
"What academy app?"
Belle's expression went from confused to something approaching genuine concern. "The app they sent you the download link for. In your orientation packet."
I thought back to the orientation packet. The thick envelope the upperclassman had handed me at the registration table. I'd read the house assignment, the room code, the welcome letter from Dominic Vale.
I hadn't read the last three pages.
"I might have missed that part," I said.
"How do you miss the app download instructions?"
"I was distracted."
"By what?"
"The death timer."
Belle's eyes went wide. "What?"
"Nothing. Forget I said that."
"You said death timer."
"I said I was distracted by the dining hall timer. For food service hours."
She did not look convinced.
I pulled out my phone before she could ask more questions. "Can you send me the link?"
Belle looked at me for a long moment. "Fine, give me your number."
Message from Belle Fox: academy app download
I opened the link. The app store page loaded. San Nicolas Academy - Official Student Portal. 4.2 stars, 847 reviews. I hit download and watched the progress bar fill.
"Thank you," I said.
"You're welcome." She was still looking at me like I was a fascinating disaster. "How did you survive this long without the app?"
...
"Resourcefulness."
"You got lost six times."
"I found my way eventually."
"By accident."
"Still counts."
The app finished downloading. I opened it and the login screen came up asking for my student ID number and birthdate. I found both on the orientation packet and typed them in.
The interface loaded.
Holy shit.
It was everything. Class schedules automatically synced to a calendar. Building maps with real-time navigation. A meal plan tracker. A point balance display showing my current total at zero. A messaging system for student-to-student communication. A simulation chamber reservation portal.
There was even a section labeled MONTHLY EVALUATION RANKINGS that was currently grayed out with AVAILABLE AFTER FIRST EVALUATION written across it.
"This is incredible," I said.
"It's basic student infrastructure." Belle had gone back to eating her salad. "Every school has something like this."
"Not where I'm from."
"Where are you from that doesn't have student apps?"
"Nowhere worth talking about."
She gave me that look again. The one that said she knew I was being evasive and she was deciding whether or not to care.
I opened the map feature. The blue dot appeared. JACE MONROE - CURRENT LOCATION. Zone 4, Dining Hall, Table 14, right next to where Belle's dot had been on her screen.
I zoomed out. The whole campus spread across my phone screen in perfect detail. I could see everything. The residence halls. The academic buildings. The simulation complex. The restricted zones at the north end of the island.
There was even a legend in the corner explaining what all the different colored zones meant.
"This is going to change my entire experience here," I said.
Belle snorted. "Dramatic much?"
"You don't understand. I have a terrible sense of direction."
"Clearly."
"This app is going to save my life."
She rolled her eyes but she was smiling a little. "You're welcome for showing you something you should have known about six hours ago."
"I owe you."
"You do."
I zoomed in on Zone 3 and found Building C. Fifth floor. I could see my room marked as 5E. Belle's room was four doors down at 5C. The entire floor plan was visible if I tapped the building.
Two master bedrooms per apartment. Shared living space. Kitchen. Bathrooms.
"What's your schedule look like?" I asked.
Belle pulled up her app and tapped through to the calendar view. "Hunter Theory at eight. Physical Conditioning at ten. Mana Control at one. Guild Economics at three."
"Same first two," I said. I checked my own schedule. "I've got Dungeon Ecology instead of Guild Economics."
"Lucky. I hate economics."
"Then why'd you pick it?"
"I didn't pick it. The system assigned it based on my ability classification."
That tracked. Support-type abilities got funneled into economics and logistics courses because the academy assumed anyone without combat potential would end up in administrative roles at guilds.
"You could petition to change it," I said.
"To what?"
"Something you'd actually want to take."
Belle looked at me like I'd suggested she could fly. "Lottery students don't petition for schedule changes."
"Why not?"
"Because it draws attention. And attention means scrutiny. And scrutiny means they look harder at whether you deserve to be here."
She said it matter-of-factly. Like this was obvious. Like she'd already run the cost-benefit analysis and decided that suffering through a class she hated was worth avoiding the risk of administrative review.
The survival instinct again.
I got it. I didn't agree with it, but I got it.
"Fair enough," I said.
She finished her salad and pushed the plate aside. Checked her phone. Put it down. Picked it up again.
Nervous habit.
"You have somewhere to be?" I asked.
"No. Just. Orientation is technically still happening until six. There's a house meeting in the common room at seven."
I checked the time on my phone. 5:47 PM.
"We should probably head back soon then," I said.
"Yeah."
Neither of us moved.
The dining hall was at capacity now. Every table full. The noise level had gone from loud to actually overwhelming. Someone dropped a tray two tables over and the crash made half the room turn and look.
Belle flinched at the sound.
I stood up and grabbed my tray. "Come on. I'll walk with you."
She looked surprised. "You don't have to."
"I know. But I have the app now and I want to test it."
That got a small laugh. She stood and picked up her own tray and we walked to the dish return station near the kitchen entrance.
The walk back to Building C took eight minutes according to the app's navigation. I didn't get lost once.
Belle noticed.
"See?" she said. "Not complicated."
"It's literally pointing me exactly where to go. That's different from reading signs."
"Signs also point you exactly where to go."
"Agree to disagree."
We reached Building C and took the elevator to the fifth floor. The hallway was empty. Most students were probably still at dinner or exploring campus or doing whatever first day orientation activities involved.
Belle stopped at her door. 5C.
I stopped at mine. 5E.
She looked at me for a second. Like she was deciding something.
"Thanks for sitting with me," she said.
"Thanks for showing me the app."
"You really would have just wandered around lost all semester, wouldn't you?"
"Probably."
She shook her head but she was smiling. "Good luck with your roommate."
"You too."
She went into her room and the door clicked shut behind her.
I stood in the hallway for a moment. Timer in the corner of my vision updating.
69 hours. 14 minutes.
I'd spent thirty-three minutes with Belle Fox and accomplished exactly what I needed to accomplish. Established contact. Started building rapport. Made her laugh twice. Got her to smile multiple times.
The charm effect from Snake Eyes was cumulative. Every interaction built on the last. 18% attraction wasn't enough to get me an extraction session. But it was a foundation.
I'd see her at Hunter Theory tomorrow morning at eight. I'd see her at Physical Conditioning at ten. I'd see her in the hallway, at meals, in the common room during house meetings.
Proximity was half the game.
I unlocked my door and went inside.
The apartment was still empty. No roommate yet.
I walked to the window and looked out at the ocean again. The sun was lower now. The light was doing something orange and gold across the water.
Somewhere on this island there were women with Silver-tier essence, Gold-tier essence, abilities worth stealing, stats worth training against.
But I had to start somewhere.
The Divine Milking System was degenerate as hell and I hated everything about how it worked.
But it worked.
I pulled out my phone and opened the academy app. Checked the map. Checked my schedule. Checked the meal plan balance.
Then I opened the messaging system clicked on the top selection of Belle Fox.
I typed: thanks again for the app. you saved me from a semester of getting lost and accidentally ending up in janitorial closets.
Three dots appeared. Then disappeared. Then appeared again.
Belle Fox: you're welcome. try not to die before classes start.
I grinned.
Jace Monroe: no promises.
The dots appeared one more time. Then stopped.
I put my phone down and sat on the couch and looked around the apartment that was supposed to be home for the next year.
Clean. Modern. Comfortable.
A prison disguised as luxury housing on an island I couldn't leave without permission.
Sixty-nine hours left before the system killed me.
I had a target. I had a plan. I had an app that would prevent me from getting catastrophically lost.
It wasn't much.
But it was a start.
...
I heard the door open at 6:42 PM.
I was lying on my bed scrolling through the academy app, specifically the section labeled STUDENT DIRECTORY that let you look up anyone in your house if you knew their name. Useful for stalking. Less useful when you didn't know who you were looking for yet.
The sound of the lock disengaging made me sit up.
Roommate time.
I got off the bed and walked out into the living area just as the door swung open.
The person who walked in made me stop breathing for about three full seconds.
Holy shit.
Androgynous didn't begin to cover it. This person looked like someone had taken the concept of beautiful and sharpened it until it could cut. Chin-length black hair. Sharp features. High cheekbones. A jawline that could have belonged to either gender depending on the lighting.
And the eyes.
Red. Actually red. Not brown with reddish tones. Not hazel. Bright, vivid, arterial red that looked like someone had photoshopped the irises in post.
The uniform fit perfectly. Tailored blazer. Crisp shirt buttoned all the way to the collar. Black tie with the Obsidian trim. Everything about the presentation screamed control.
The person looked at me.
I looked back.
"You're my roommate," the person said.
The voice was low. Quiet. Carefully neutral in a way that felt practiced.
Male, then.
Except.
Oh.
Oh.
My brain made the connection in about half a second and I had to physically resist the urge to smile.
Hikaru Tanaka.
The character from the novel. The one with the secret. The one who was actually a girl pretending to be a guy to escape an arranged marriage back in Japan and claim her birthright from a family that didn't think women could inherit.
The one who in the original story eventually gets found out by Javier, the main character, and slowly becomes comfortable enough in her own skin that she drops the act and reveals a body that the novel described in absolutely obscene detail across multiple chapters.
Top five sexiest bodies in the entire story.
36E bust that she bound flat every single day with compression bandages.
I was looking at a lottery ticket and a death trap at the same time.
Because her ability was Phantom Edge. Invisible cutting force. Silent. Instant. Deadly.
She could bisect me before I finished a sentence if I fucked this up.
"Yeah," I said. "Jace Monroe."
Hikaru walked further into the room and set down a single black duffel bag by the couch. Everything about the movement was economical. No wasted motion.
"Hikaru Tanaka."
"Cool. Which room do you want?"
"The one you didn't take."
Fair.
Hikaru walked past me toward the bedrooms. Looked into the one I'd claimed. Then walked to the other one and disappeared inside.
The door shut.
Not slammed. Just shut. Quietly. With finality.
I stood in the living room processing.
Okay.
First: jackpot. Absolute jackpot. This was the kind of lucky break that didn't happen in real life.
Second: extremely dangerous jackpot. Hikaru hated men. The novel made that very clear. Years of being dismissed and controlled by her grandfather and male cousins had left her with exactly zero patience for anything that smelled like masculine bullshit.
Third: I had sixty-eight hours left to live and my roommate was secretly a Gold-tier extraction target with one of the best abilities in the entire academy.
But she thought I was just some random lottery kid. And she clearly wanted nothing to do with me.
Which was fine.
I didn't need her to like me.
I just needed proximity.
I walked back to my room and shut my own door. Sat on the bed. Pulled up the system interface.
Snake Eyes worked on everyone. Gender didn't matter for the identification part. The charm effect only triggered on people who could be attracted to me, but the information display was universal.
If I made eye contact with Hikaru, I'd see the measurements.
Which would confirm what I already knew.
But I couldn't do it yet. Too obvious. Too soon. She'd just walked in the door and she was already radiating fuck off energy so intense it was practically visible.
Pushing now would be stupid.
I checked the time. 6:48 PM.
House meeting at seven.
I opened my phone and scrolled through the student directory again. Typed in Hikaru Tanaka.
The profile came up.
Year: First
House: Obsidian
Ability Classification: Offensive
Nationality: Japan
Emergency Contact: [REDACTED]
That was it. Bare minimum information. No social media links. No profile picture beyond the default academy logo.
Ghost mode.
Smart.
If you were trying to disappear from a powerful family, you didn't leave a digital trail.
I put my phone down and looked at the door to my room. Then at the wall that separated my space from Hikaru's.
Somewhere on the other side of that wall was a girl who'd cut her hair, stolen documents, forged identification, and crossed an ocean to escape an arranged marriage.
A girl who trained harder than everyone. Who was better than her male cousins. Who got told it didn't matter because tradition said women couldn't lead.
A girl who was now trapped in a performance she couldn't drop for three years because getting caught meant expulsion and deportation and a life she'd already rejected once.
I understood that.
Not the gender thing. But the performance. The lie you had to maintain because the truth would destroy you.
I was doing the same thing.
Just with a death timer and a system that required me to convince women to let me drink from their tits.
We were both fucked.
Just in different ways.
I heard movement from the other room. Footsteps. A door opening and closing. The bathroom, probably.
The apartment had two bathrooms. One attached to each bedroom. Hikaru wouldn't have to worry about me walking in on anything.
Good for her.
Bad for me.
Because that meant fewer opportunities for accidental discovery.
I checked the time again. 6:53 PM.
I got up and walked out into the living area. Grabbed a glass from the kitchen and filled it with water from the tap. Drank it. Refilled it.
The door to Hikaru's room opened.
She walked out.
Still in uniform. Still perfectly composed. Hair still immaculate.
She looked at me.
I looked at her.
"House meeting starts in seven minutes," I said.
"I know."
"You going?"
"Yes."
"Cool. I'll walk down with you."
Her eyes narrowed. "You don't need to."
"I know. But I don't know where the common room is yet and I'd rather not get lost again."
"There are signs."
"I'm bad with signs."
She stared at me for a long moment. Like she was trying to figure out if I was serious or if this was some kind of play.
I kept my expression neutral.
Finally she turned toward the door. "Fine. Let's go."
