Chapter 194: Built to Stay Standing
Chapter 194: Built to Stay Standing
Jin went into the scheduled benchmark testing assuming it would be a formality.
"Platform one," said the instructor, a bored woman with a slate. "Stand in the middle. It’ll move. Try to stay on."
The platform was a two-meter disc on a gimbal that could be driven to twenty-two degrees in any direction, and Jin had watched an ordinary student fail it at fourteen the week before during a general class.
It went to eleven and he was still standing.
He noticed it at fifteen, because his feet had done something he had not told them to do — settled, spread, dropped his weight into his heels — and the platform kept going and his body simply adjusted underneath him.
At twenty-two degrees he was leaning at an angle that should have been physically impossible to hold and was holding it.
"Huh," said the instructor.
"Is that—"
"Get off. Station two."
Station two was a padded ram on a rail that delivered a controlled horizontal shove.
"Brace. It won’t hurt you. Most people go about a meter."
It hit him and Jin’s shoes squealed across the floor.
He looked down. He had moved perhaps thirty centimeters, and every bit of that had been his feet sliding on the surface, and his body had not folded or rocked or lost its line at any point.
"Again, harder," said the instructor, writing.
The second one moved him further, on the same principle. His body was no longer the weak point. The floor was.
Station three was the one that told him what he actually had.
A weighted padded arm on a pivot, swung at a measured speed into the ribs and hip.
He had braced for it because everything in his memory said that getting hit by something heavy meant being folded around it. The impact arrived and it hurt — he felt every bit of it, a broad hard shock across his whole side — and then it was over and he was still standing in the same place with his feet where he had put them.
It had not gone through him. It had spread out across him and stopped.
"That’s the profile," the instructor said, and turned the slate around. "You’re not stronger. Not much. Your press is up about eighteen percent and your grip’s up twelve, which is a decent year of training and nothing more."
"And the rest?"
"Displacement resistance is off the Fourth Class scale. Impact distribution is roughly triple the unenhanced baseline. Balance recovery, same story." She tapped the sheet. "This is a durability physique. It’s what you’d expect off a heavy grounded beast and it’s a good one."
Then she looked at him properly.
"So I’m going to say the next part clearly, because students with this profile are the ones we lose. You are not a combat Tamer."
"I’m aware."
"You are superhuman compared with an ordinary person in the Outer Ring, and a Rank-1 wild beast would still kill you in about four seconds, because it doesn’t matter how well you absorb the first hit if you can’t do anything about the second one." She wrote something. "What this gets you is: you survive an accident. You stay standing when the ground goes. You carry equipment. You can operate closer to danger than you could last week."
It buys me the second step, Jin thought, and did not say.
He had been thrown out of the path of a Tunnelmaw by Bram Rook nine days ago and had spent a hundred meters afterward thinking about it, and this was the exact answer to that specific problem.
Not enough to fight. Enough to move.
"Movement drills," said the instructor. "Let’s see if we made you slow."
They had not, particularly. His sprint was down about two percent and his change-of-direction was actually slightly better, which she attributed to the balance and which Jin filed as the most useful thing he had learned all morning.
Fourth Class reacted over the next few days, and the response was mixed in a way Jin found more interesting than hostility.
About half went respectful. Not warm — respectful, in the specific way students become when somebody has done a thing they were told was unlikely. Three separate people asked him about his feed scheduling and one of them took notes.
About half decided it was luck.
"That’s an outlier," he heard, at a distance, in the dining hall. "That’s a one-in-a-thousand roll on a partial evolution. The beast’s still a Grey Rock Lizard."
Halvor Cray said it more politely and to his face, which Jin preferred.
Cray was Fourth Class, well-dressed in a way that Meridian’s uniform made difficult, and had a reputation for being neither cruel nor especially warm. He came over with a cup of something Jin was fairly sure had not come out of the academy dispenser.
"Astor. Congratulations, sincerely. Bronze is Bronze and the scan’s the scan."
"Thanks."
"I do want to say the other thing, because someone will." Cray sat down across from him. "Quality is a foundation number. It tells you what a body can eventually support. It doesn’t tell you what that body can do this month."
"That’s true."
"You have a beast that got denser and heavier, which is what everyone said would happen, except it got denser and heavier past the Iron line." He shrugged. "That’s an excellent foundation. I’d still want to see it fight something that doesn’t stand still, because a Grey Rock Lizard is a Grey Rock Lizard, and the thing they’ve never been able to do is deal with anything fast."
That, Jin thought, is a completely reasonable objection, and I don’t have an answer for it yet.
"Probably fair," he said.
Cray looked mildly surprised that he had agreed, finished his drink, and left.
Bram found him after the last training session of the day.
He looked at Glitch for about six seconds, the way somebody looks at a load they might have to lift.
"That’s Bronze."
"It is."
"You said he was close." Bram’s expression did not change. "You left out the rest."
"I didn’t know the rest."
"Mm." Bram accepted that. "Train with me. My beast holds ground and yours holds ground and we’re both useless against anything that goes sideways. Two of us working on it is faster than one."
"That’s it?"
"What else is there?"
Jin considered the offer briefly and took it. Bram Rook did exactly what he said he would do and required no reassurance about any of it, and Jin had learned quickly how rare that was.
Flicker had held steady for three full days.
Respiration normal. Cradle settings unchanged, which was the reading Jin cared about most, because it meant her own regulation was doing more of the work. Feeding acceptable — she took most of every meal now, and had started being annoyed about being fed rather than exhausted by it.
No decline events.
He ran the Sync at 22:00 with the transfer set low, the same way he had done it for Glitch, because there was no version of this where a hatchling under a discharge plan should improve overnight in a measurable way.
[Limited Synchronization]
[Vitality: 38% → 41%]
[Postural strength: improved]
[Status: cannot walk. Cannot fly.]
She was asleep when he did it and woke up about forty minutes later.
Then she stood up.
She did it inside the cradle, on a padded floor, with the panel open, and she got both legs under her in about four seconds instead of eleven and came up shaking and stayed up.
Nine seconds. Ten.
Glitch had come over the moment she stirred and was watching her with an intensity that Jin found faintly absurd on a beast that now weighed as much as he did.
At twelve seconds her legs went and she sat down, hard, and was immediately indignant about it.
"You can’t walk yet," Jin told her.
She conveyed, in the flat wordless way she had, that this was a matter of opinion.