Chapter 334 | MOOOOOOO
Chapter 334: 334 | MOOOOOOO
Naomi’s face turned approximately the color of her hair. "He does do that."
"I’m a connoisseur."
"You’re a pervert with an ability that turned being thorough into a survival mechanic." Belle stood and brushed stray grass from her skirt, then reached down to pull me to my feet. Her grip surprised me—strong fingers, callused palm, the kind of hand strength you didn’t expect from someone whose combat role began and ended with a crossbow and pointing at shiny things. "Tonight. Your room. Nine o’clock. Hikaru’s got his pre-gate medical clearance, so the apartment’s empty."
"You memorized Hikaru’s appointment schedule?"
"I memorize everything useful." Belle held eye contact just long enough to make sure I understood the subtext, then let her hand drop. "Bring the bottles. I want full vault storage before we set foot in that gate tomorrow."
Naomi gathered her binder slowly, pressing it against her chest like armor. Her shell necklace caught the fading afternoon sun, glinting once, and when she looked at me over the top edge of those perfectly organized tabs and color-coded notes, I saw something I hadn’t expected. Not tactical assessment. Not operational anxiety. Something quieter, something that lived in the gap between necessity and actual desire.
"Naomi?" I asked.
"I need the Gold buff." She said it simply, without embarrassment, though the color in her cheeks told a different story. "Wave Motion at Gold tier for forty-eight hours means I can fire sustained beams instead of single shots. I can provide aerial suppression for the entire squad during the initial engagement instead of burning out after three blasts. That’s the difference between controlling the battlefield and just participating in it."
She had the math right on all of it. Silver-tier Wave Motion let her punch above her weight class for maybe fifteen, twenty minutes before she’d be doubled over, gasping for breath, hands on her knees while the rest of us held the line. Gold-tier Wave Motion?
That turned her into something else entirely. She could sit thirty feet up, hover there like some kind of attack helicopter, and just rain spiral energy on anything that moved below while the ground team carved through the stragglers.
No breaks. No recovery periods. Just forty-eight straight hours of sustained firepower that would make Blair’s flashy S-rank pyrotechnics look wasteful and inefficient by comparison.
The transformation wasn’t subtle. It was the difference between a rifle and a mounted machine gun. Between contributing to a fight and controlling it.
"And the buff requires..." I started.
"I know." Naomi’s voice went somewhere quiet, somewhere that lived just above the rustle of maple leaves overhead. She looked at Belle first. Then me. Then the concrete between us like it held answers she couldn’t find anywhere else. Then back to me again, and this time her eyes stayed there.
"I know exactly what it requires, and I’m asking. Not because your ability says you have to. Not because you’re standing here looking at me with those amber eyes running calculations. Because when we walked into that last gate, I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t enough. My arm snapped and you had to waste your emergency reserve pulling Gold-tier power out of storage just to keep us breathing."
The memory of that fight sat between us like a physical thing. The Reaper’s red eyes. Naomi’s bone snapping. My desperate grab for the essence bottle and four minutes of Gold-tier power that barely proved sufficient.
"Tonight," I said.
Belle’s lips pulled back from her teeth. The expression wasn’t quite a smile. Predators didn’t smile before they fed.
Naomi’s fingers found mine. Warm. Calloused from training. She squeezed once, then let go before anyone could see.
The California sun dropped toward the Pacific. Light broke across the campus buildings in amber and rose, turning concrete to gold and glass to fire. I stood between two women who’d just calmly explained that they needed my cock, my abilities, and approximately six uninterrupted hours tonight to prepare their bodies for combat against hostile entities in an unstable dimensional fracture tomorrow morning.
Belle had mentioned the cow-print lingerie in the group chat during lunch. Black and white. Thigh-high stockings with little bells attached. Matching chokers. I’d spent four hours pretending the messages didn’t exist while my brain systematically catalogued every detail.
The cosmic irony wasn’t lost on me. Somewhere in whatever divine bureaucracy handled transmigration paperwork, some bearded asshole in a white robe was probably laughing so hard his chair had tipped over.
"Nine o’clock," Belle repeated, walking backward across the grass with her blazer swinging open and her hips doing that thing she did when she knew I was watching. "Don’t be late. Don’t eat too much dinner. And for the love of God, Monroe, trim your nails."
She turned and walked toward Building C without waiting for a response. Naomi lingered for three more seconds, her pink eyes holding mine with an intensity that had nothing to do with tactical preparation and everything to do with the fact that we were eighteen years old, alive, probably about to die tomorrow, and standing in sunlight that made her dark skin glow like she’d been lit from the inside.
"Jace?"
"Yeah?"
"Bring the chocolate body oil that Aurora got you. The one in the brown bottle."
She left before I could respond, walking in the same direction as Belle with her binder pressed to her chest and her pink and black hair swaying against her shoulders.
I stood alone beneath the maple tree. The chip bags were empty. The sandwich was gone. The sun was halfway behind the horizon.
Five hours until nine o’clock. Five hours until I walked into my own apartment and activated Private Sanctum with two women who expected me to drink their milk, bring them to multiple orgasms, steal enough essence to fill the vault, and activate Gold-tier buffs that would keep them alive during a C-rank gate that even Vale considered genuinely dangerous.
Also Naomi wanted the chocolate body oil.
My phone buzzed. Group chat. Belle had sent a single message.
"Cow print or regular?"
Naomi responded immediately.
"Cow print."
Addison’s response appeared two seconds later.
"WAIT YOU GUYS HAVE COW PRINT? WHERE THE FUCK IS MINE?"
Aurora: "Addison we talked about this"
Addison: "WE DID NOT TALK ABOUT COW PRINT LINGERIE AURORA"
Aurora: "We absolutely did. Tuesday. You said cows were beneath your aesthetic."
Addison: "THAT WAS BEFORE I KNEW IT WAS A GROUP ACTIVITY"
Belle: "It’s not a group activity. It’s a tactical buff session."
Addison: "IT’S A GROUP ACTIVITY IN COW PRINT AND I WANT IN"
Aurora: "Addison."
Addison: "MOOOOOOO"