Chapter 200: Third of Six
The breach drill ran on a two-hundred-meter constructed field with six squads staggered across it and a construct system that fed attackers through shifting lanes.
Squad Four started well.
Neris ran it the way she had run the induction: short instructions, long silences, and complete indifference to whether anyone was comfortable. The Kite worked the airspace above the lanes and reported changes, and Neris relayed the ones that mattered and let the squad handle its own positioning.
For six minutes, Jin did nothing beyond holding the western route with Glitch. Resisting the urge to improve on that was harder than the job.
Anchor. That’s the job. Do the job.
What kept drawing Jin’s attention was the squad’s competence. Every one of them was better than the Fourth-Class students he had been working with—faster, more decisive, and more willing to act without asking. Corin on the north had a beast that could genuinely fight. Yusa’s talent let her displace herself two meters instantly, and she used it constantly and correctly.
At the eleven-minute mark, an instructor walked onto the field, touched Neris on the shoulder, and walked her off.
The Galecrest Kite folded out of its scouting circuit and followed her beyond the boundary under the exercise’s removal rule. Its last lane report remained on the squad display, already aging by the second.
There was no pause in the construct feed.
It came apart in about twenty seconds, and it came apart because everyone was competent.
The last aerial report was still good — the Kite had called a lane shift eight seconds before Neris was removed, so nobody was blind. That was not the problem.
The problem was that three people had solutions.
"Collapse in — everyone to the marker, tighten up—" That was Corin, and it was a reasonable answer, because a tight formation around the objective was hard to break.
"No, don’t collapse, they’ll bracket us — widen out and intercept them in the lanes—" That was Yusa, and it was also a reasonable answer, because meeting constructs before they arrived kept the marker clean.
Both instructions went out at once and the squad split down the middle trying to obey both.
And Renner, on the southern flank, had seen a construct disengage and had gone after it, because a retreating construct was a free score and he was three points behind on the individual board.
His lane emptied.
Jin registered all of that in about four seconds and then felt something worse: Glitch had come up off his anchor and started to drift after the same retreating construct, because a thing had turned its back and every instinct in a predator says that is an opportunity.
"Glitch. Hold."
He came back.
That cost about a second and a half and Jin did not enjoy it, and afterward he thought about the fact that a partial evolution had not changed that particular argument at all.
He waited another two seconds.
He was aware of doing it. He stood at the mouth of the western route and watched Corin and Yusa shout past each other, and part of his brain said somebody else will sort this out and another part said nobody is going to, and the second part was correct and took two seconds to win.
Then he stopped diagnosing and started talking, and he did not try to sound like Neris.
"Yusa — south lane’s open, Renner’s gone. Take it and hold it."
She was in the south lane a second later, which was the entire value of her talent.
"Corin — marker. Stay on it and stop giving pursuit orders. Anything that reaches you is yours and nothing else is."
Corin, to his credit, did not argue. He went to the marker.
"Renner." Louder, because Renner was forty meters out and moving away. "Come back to the line. Boundary’s the second rank marker. Anything that crosses it is yours — you don’t leave to find things."
Renner came back. He was visibly annoyed about it and he came back.
"I’ve got the west," Jin said. "Nothing’s coming through here."
Which is the only sentence I can say that’s actually true.
Glitch made it true for four minutes.
The western route was two constructs wide and he stood in the middle of it and Jin fed him what the floor gave them.
That was the working system now, rebuilt since the evolution: Glitch could not intercept anything laterally, so he did not try. He read commitment through the composite—a construct probing came in light, while a construct attacking came in heavy about a third of a second early—and he braced for the heavy ones and ignored the rest.
Three came in fully committed. All three hit a dense body of Bronze plating that had set its feet in advance and had not been anywhere else in four minutes. All three ended up on the floor with Glitch’s tail across their legs.
One came in laterally, fast, along the wall.
Glitch did not get it. He started the turn, and finished it late, and the construct went past him into the second rank where Corin dealt with it, and Jin logged that as exactly what he had told Neris would happen.
Jin himself moved twice through the disordered middle of the formation, once through a gap that closed while he was in it, and took a glancing training impact from a construct’s arm that would have put him on the ground before the awakening.
It hurt across his whole side. He stayed upright and kept walking, and did not think much about it until afterward, when he did.
That’s what it’s for. Not fighting. Not falling over.
The formation reconnected at fourteen minutes and held for the remaining six.
[BREACH DEFENCE — ROTATING COMMAND]
[Squad Four — Result: PASS, strong]
[Marker integrity: maintained]
[Placement: 3 of 6]
[Note: command transition delay 00:19. Objective coherence restored, time cost significant]
Third of six.
Two squads had been faster through the transition, and one of them had simply had a deputy already designated who had taken over in about four seconds, which Jin noted as a solution he had not considered and which was obvious in retrospect.
Neris came back for the debrief and did it in four sentences.
"You restored common objectives and you did it with objectives instead of movements, which is why it held." She was looking at her slate. "You used your beast correctly. You gave up his lateral coverage instead of pretending he had it, and the construct that got past you was contained where you’d said it would be."
"And the nineteen seconds?"
"You spent about two of those confirming that nobody else was going to fix it." She looked up. "That’s an understandable instinct and it cost us placement. Corin and Yusa were never going to stop, because they were both right."
"That’s fair."
"It’s what happened." Neris put the slate away. "You’re useful. I don’t know yet whether you’re consistent, and one drill doesn’t tell me. We’ll see over the term."
She walked off, and Jin found that he minded the assessment less than he would have minded praise, because the assessment was accurate.
Two seconds.
He turned the delay over on the walk back. Corin’s answer had been sound. Yusa’s answer had also been sound. Renner had correctly seen a scoring opportunity, but leaving his lane to take it had turned an individual gain into a squad failure.
The problem had not been a lack of ideas. It had been several reasonable actions consuming one another because nobody had forced them back under one objective.