I leaned against the shower wall and ran the numbers while the hot water ran down my back.
One more extraction session with Naomi. I’d missed the three-orgasm threshold last ti, which ant Wave Motion was still unstealed and sitting there like an unlocked achievent I hadn’t claid. Tonight I needed three. The first two had happened organically, so the third shouldn’t require a dramatic change in strategy. I just needed to not cut the session short.
Also, Private Sanctum.
Twenty-eight minutes used last night out of thirty. I had the full thirty tonight, reset at midnight. I needed to use the space properly this ti. No rushing the finish because the tir made anxious.
I turned off the water and toweled off.
My reflection looked back at from the bathroom mirror. Sa round face, sa brown hair that was starting to get slightly less disheveled now that I’d started actually washing it properly. The body was still soft, still carrying more weight than I wanted, but my arms looked different than they had on day one. Barely. But it was there. The beginning of actual muscle definition under the surface, like sothing waking up.
The Limit Breaker trait was doing its job.
The sexual training multiplier was definitely doing its job.
I dried off, changed into clean clothes, and spent thirty seconds staring at the room one more ti to confirm it still looked acceptable.
It did.
I checked the ti. 7:22 PM.
Naomi would be here in thirty-eight minutes.
I sat down on the bed and opened the system interface, running through everything I knew about tonight. The extraction would add more days to my lifespan. The third orgasm would unlock Wave Motion at Copper rank. Two hundred fifty stored points from last night’s session ant I could potentially upgrade sothing useful, though I needed to think about priority before spending anything.
The Midnight Foxes quest hovered in the background. Top five squads. Ten weeks. Twenty-five thousand points and a Private Sanctum upgrade to Bronze rank if we pulled it off.
Bronze Private Sanctum ant two targets, forty-five minutes per day, and granular ability control inside the space. That was a aningful upgrade. Having Naomi and Belle in the sanctum simultaneously would compress the ti required for extraction considerably.
My phone buzzed.
Naomi: "is 7:55 okay?"
: "Perfect."
Naomi: "okay"
Then, thirty seconds later:
Naomi: "jace"
: "yeah"
Naomi: "I keep thinking about last night"
I read that twice.
: "Good thoughts or the kind where you’re deciding whether to throw off the building?"
Naomi: "good thoughts mostly. the last part you said was hard though"
She ant the conversation at the elevator. The part where I confird being her boyfriend and then imdiately explained that I’d need to extract from other won to survive, in the sa sentence, essentially in the sa breath.
Yeah. That part.
: "I know. We can talk about it tonight too if you want."
Naomi: "okay. see you soon"
I set the phone face-down on the desk.
The "I know" was the honest response. I wasn’t going to pretend that conversation had been smooth or that what I’d asked her to accept was reasonable by any conventional standard. She deserved to actually process it rather than just swallow the weird and move on because the alternative involved dying.
But the practical reality hadn’t changed.
Six days. Multiple targets to secure. Naomi was established and willing, which made her the foundation, but foundations alone don’t build a building.
Belle was the next logical step. Twenty-four percent attraction after two days of casual conversation and one lunch. Bronze tier, which was lower point value than Silver, but the first extraction bonus would still give aningful lifespan. More importantly, Belle’s Treasure Sense ability was worth having at Copper rank. Having a passive loot detection ability cost nothing in terms of active slots but gave a practical advantage in actual gate clearing, where the rest of the academy would be focused on fighting while I already knew where everything valuable was before we’d taken ten steps inside.
I needed to move on Belle in the next forty-eight hours.
The thought sat in my chest with a specific texture. Not guilt exactly. More like the awareness of what I was doing placed right next to the awareness that I had no alternative. The Divine Milking System had handed the most invasive survival chanism in recorded fiction and then set a countdown tir on it. Sitting around feeling bad about the thod wasn’t going to add a single minute to my life.
The knock at my door ca at 7:53.
Two minutes early. I’d told her 7:55. Naomi being slightly early was so consistent with everything I already knew about her that I wasn’t even surprised.
I crossed the room and opened the door.
She was standing in the hallway in a black hoodie that swallowed her fra and athletic shorts below it, her long legs bare from mid-thigh down. Her pink and black striped hair was pulled into a loose braid over one shoulder. No makeup, just her pink eyes and that expression she got when she was trying to look calm and was mostly succeeding.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi," I said. "You’re early."
"I know. Is that bad?"
"No." I stepped back to let her in. "I was ready."
She stepped inside and paused for a second, looking at my room through the open bedroom door before glancing toward Hikaru’s closed door down the hall.
"Your roommate is ho?" she said quietly.
"Doesn’t matter." I closed the apartnt door behind her. "We’ll be using Private Sanctum. She won’t hear anything."
Naomi absorbed this. Her cheeks had already gone pink, which ant she’d been thinking about tonight the whole walk over here and the casual ntion of the sanctum brought all of it to the surface at once.
"Okay," she said.
"You said you wanted to talk first."
"I did." She turned to face . "But now that I’m here I keep forgetting what I was going to say."
"Then sit down," I said, "and take your ti."
She sat on the edge of my bed. I pulled the desk chair around to face her and sat down, giving her space instead of crowding in imdiately, because Naomi is the kind of person who needs to arrive at things rather than be pushed into them.
She looked at her hands for a mont.
"The other girls," she said. "Do I get to know who they are?"
I considered this.
"Probably yes, eventually," I said. "Not because I’m planning to keep secrets, but because it hasn’t happened yet and I don’t want to sell you a situation before it’s real."
She nodded slowly. "That’s fair."
She finally looked up. "I’m not angry. I just needed to hear you say it again with actually in the room."
That was a distinctly Naomi thing to say. She’d processed it alone overnight and ca back to verify it against the source.
"It’s real," I said. "And what happened between us last night was also real. Both things are true at the sa ti."
She held my gaze for a long beat.
"Okay," she said again, softer this ti. Different weight to it.
She reached up and tugged the end of her braid loose, letting the pink and black hair fall around her shoulders.
"So," she said, and her voice had shifted sowhere warr, "are we going to study?"
I stood up from the chair.
"Absolutely," I said. "Very educational evening planned."
I held out my hand, and when she took it, I activated Private Sanctum.
The room disappeared.
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