Chapter 333 | A Sommelier at a Dairy Farm
Chapter 333: 333 | A Sommelier at a Dairy Farm
"You’re doing the thing again." Belle’s voice pulled me back. She’d moved closer without me noticing, sitting on the grass in front of me with her legs folded to the side and the chip bag now in her lap. Her Obsidian skirt rode high on her thighs and her tights caught the afternoon light in a way that made the fabric look painted on. "The quiet scheming face. You get this look like you’re building a bomb in your head and you haven’t decided who to throw it at yet."
"That’s my resting face."
"Your resting face is dangerous." Belle ate another chip. "Naomi, tell him his resting face is dangerous."
Naomi leaned forward to look at me, her pink eyes searching my expression with the careful attention she gave to everything. Her gaze dropped to my mouth for half a second before she caught herself and looked away. "It’s not dangerous. It’s just... concentrated."
"Concentrated is a nice word for terrifying."
"You think everything’s terrifying, Belle."
"Everything involving him is terrifying. He killed an alpha with a stick last week."
"A spear."
"Same energy."
I opened my eyes fully and found both of them watching me. Belle with her head tilted and her blue hair falling across one eye, the corner of her mouth curled in that specific half-smile that meant she was calculating something. Naomi with her hands wrapped around her thermos of green tea, her shoulder pressing into mine with the comfortable weight of someone who’d decided I was hers and wasn’t interested in negotiating.
Two beautiful women sitting in the grass on a perfect California afternoon, eating chips and arguing about nothing while the world’s most dangerous first-year hunter training program waited to potentially kill us all in approximately twenty-six hours.
If someone had told the old Jace Monroe that this would be his life, the old Jace Monroe would have assumed it was a fever dream induced by bad gas station sushi.
"I’m thinking about tomorrow," I said.
Belle’s expression shifted from playful to focused in under a second. That was the thing about Belle Fox that most people missed. They saw the blue hair, the tight uniform, the gold digger reputation and the way she wielded flirtation like a lockpick. They didn’t see the girl underneath who processed information faster than Jordan’s shadow manipulation and who turned every conversation into a tactical assessment without conscious effort.
"What about tomorrow specifically?"
"The combined squad dynamics. Blair’s team fights as five individuals who happen to occupy the same space. Our team fights as a unit. Vale thinks putting us together will produce something greater than either approach alone."
"Vale also thinks getting lost for an hour constitutes a teaching moment," Belle said.
"Fair point."
Naomi set her thermos down and pulled out the color-coded binder she’d been assembling since Tuesday, flipping to a section marked with a pink tab. "I went through the FGRA’s historical data on C-rank forest biomes during lunch. The entity density projections for tomorrow’s gate suggest between forty and sixty hostiles, primarily territorial pack hunters with a confirmed core entity in the deep interior. Nishimura’s lecture on environmental hazards applies directly here because the forest floor composition in fracture spaces supports ambush predators that burrow and attack from below."
Belle and I both stared at her.
"What?" Naomi’s cheeks flushed. "I take notes."
"You built a tactical operations manual during lunch."
"I organized my existing notes into a more accessible format. That’s different."
"It’s beautiful is what it is." Belle reached over and turned a page, scanning the contents with genuine interest. "You mapped the probable encounter zones based on entity density gradients? Naomi, this is better than what Misato put together."
"Misato’s analysis focused on team coordination and formation protocols. Mine focuses on environmental threats and resource distribution. They’re complementary."
I watched Naomi explain her research with growing confidence, her hands moving over the pages as she pointed out danger zones and optimal approach vectors. The shy girl who’d apologized for sitting next to me in Cross’s class three weeks ago was still in there somewhere, but she’d been joined by someone who understood that knowledge saves lives and preparation prevents the kind of desperate improvisation that had nearly gotten us killed during the Reaper fight.
"The gate’s sensor data showed areas of low visibility in the projected interior," Naomi continued. "Which means the canopy is probably dense enough to block most natural light. Belle’s detection range becomes critical in those conditions because visual confirmation of threats won’t be reliable."
Belle absorbed this information and nodded slowly. "My base range is fifteen meters. With the Silver buff active, I can push that to fifty. But if the canopy really blocks light the way you’re suggesting, I’ll need to maintain constant concentration to distinguish between environmental signatures and actual hostile entities."
"Which means you’ll burn through your mental stamina faster than usual."
"Which means I need the buff running hot when we enter. Not fading or degraded. Full Silver-tier detection from minute one."
The conversation had shifted without me noticing. What started as a chip debate had become operational planning, and both women were now looking at me with expressions that communicated the same message through completely different channels.
Belle’s amber-brown eyes held that specific sharpness she got when money was on the table. Not greed, exactly. More like the focus of someone who’d grown up counting every dollar and learned to recognize moments where investment and return intersected perfectly. Her gaze dropped to my mouth, then lower, then back up with a directness that would’ve made a weaker man choke on his sandwich.
Naomi’s approach was quieter but no less intense. Her pink eyes held mine with the steady warmth of someone who’d already decided what she wanted and was simply waiting for the right moment to ask for it. She’d stopped pressing her knee against my thigh and instead placed her entire palm flat against my leg, her thumb making a slow circle against the fabric of my pants.
"The buff lasts forty-eight hours from activation," I said carefully. "If we want it running at peak for tomorrow’s eighteen-hundred deployment, the session needs to happen tonight."
"Obviously," Belle said.
"Both of us," Naomi added.
"Both of you."
"At the same time." Belle’s voice carried the casual confidence of someone who’d already considered every variable and concluded that this was the optimal solution. "Your Sanctum holds two targets at Bronze rank. Forty-five minutes. That’s enough time for full extraction and buff activation for both of us if you don’t waste half the session on foreplay."
"Excuse me, the foreplay is what makes the buff stronger."
"The foreplay is what makes you take forever. Last time we ran a dual session it took you twenty minutes just to get both of us producing because you kept getting distracted."
"I was not distracted."
"You literally stopped mid-extraction to comment on how my milk tasted different from Naomi’s. You gave us tasting notes. Like a sommelier at a dairy farm."