Chapter 205: The Second Turn
The alarm ran its self-check at 2140 and came back green, which meant Jin could stop looking at it.
He looked at it anyway, then at the cradle readings, then at Flicker, who was asleep on her side with one wing not quite folded. Thermal within range. Respiration steady. Six hours since her supervised period and nothing on the log.
Glitch was on the floor near the door with his chin on his forelegs, awake and pretending not to be.
Fine. She’s fine.
He opened the Engine.
[Cinderstorm Ember Basin — Tier 3]
[Status: incomplete]
[Boss: Cinderstorm Hawk]
[Attempts: 2]
[Compatible developmental materials detected: Ashwing Sparrow]
That last line had been sitting there since the first attempt and Jin had spent four days deciding how much weight to put on it.
It did not mean the Hawk was what Flicker would become. Whatever the Sunpiercer Roc bloodline eventually did to her, it went a long way past a Tier 3 basin boss, and Jin had stopped speculating about the far end of that months ago. What the line meant was narrower and more useful: the Hawk’s materials were fire and wind, and so was she, and the Engine had decided the two were compatible.
Early step. Compatible, not destined.
He deployed both avatars.
The basin was the same black stone and standing pillars, the same heat distortion coming off the floor. The Hawk was circling before either avatar had cleared the entry.
Glitch went left along the pillar line, low and unhurried, and stopped at the patch of ground Jin had mapped out of the last replay — the recovery point, in open floor, well away from where anything interesting was going to happen.
Flicker went out into the middle.
She moved differently in here. That was the thing Jin had never entirely got used to. Her avatar had kept the progress it earned inside the Engine, progress Jin had not dared Sync into the real body sleeping behind him. In the basin, Flicker could cross forty meters without weak legs failing beneath her. She moved at a steady, deliberate pace, picked her pillar, and waited beside it.
The Hawk dived.
It came down trailing fire with the air folding behind it, straight through the gap between the two standing pillars, and Jin felt Glitch move.
Not much. A shift of weight, the first quarter-second of a body deciding to cross the basin, and Jin caught it and pushed back through the bond as hard as he could.
Stay. She’s meant to be there.
The resistance that came back was enormous and did not last. Glitch held.
Flicker broke behind the near pillar a fraction before the dive arrived. The strike hit stone and the wash of it knocked her sideways, and she rolled and got up, which was more than she had managed on the first attempt.
Then the Hawk pulled up into its arc.
It went wide, exactly as it had gone wide twice before, out across the basin and around the far pillars, committed to four seconds of turn it could not shorten.
Glitch was standing at the end of it.
He hit the Hawk near the finish of the arc, when it was low and slow and thinking about its next heading, and Glitch’s dense Bronze body going upward into something built out of hollow bones produced a noise Jin heard through the phone speaker.
The Hawk went into a pillar and off it and down, and got airborne again immediately, dragging its left wing.
[Cinderstorm Hawk — wing damaged]
Flicker came back across the floor and put herself at Glitch’s flank, and Glitch did the thing he did in the dormitory, which was to move about eleven centimeters so that she was on the side away from the enemy.
Right, Jin thought. That worked once.
It did not work twice.
The Hawk stopped diving. It came in shorter and lower, at maybe half the speed, and turned tight enough that there was no arc to stand at the end of. It threw gusts ahead of itself, fire-laced, that scattered grit off the basin floor and forced Flicker to break early into a strike that never came.
Twice Jin sent Glitch to the recovery point and twice there was no recovery to be at.
It’s not making the mistake anymore. Stop asking it to.
That took him longer to accept than it should have, which he noticed and filed. He had built the entire plan around one condition, and the condition had been true right up until the moment the Hawk had a damaged wing and a reason to stop trusting its own speed.
He pulled both avatars back to the pillar line and made himself look at what had actually changed.
The Hawk was slower now. It was also turning tighter, which meant it was flying more carefully, which meant it was compensating — and something with a hurt left wing compensated in one direction.
He watched it circle three more times to be sure.
Every turn it made, it made to the right.
The pillar he wanted was one of the fallen ones, or nearly fallen — a broken column leaning against its neighbor with a cracked base and about four meters of unsupported stone above it.
"Acid," Jin said, out loud, to a phone, in a room where nobody could hear him.
He could do that here. That was the entire point of here.
Glitch put a controlled stream into the cracked base of the leaning pillar, low, where the fracture already ran, and worked it back and forth while Flicker kept the Hawk’s attention on the far side of the basin. The stone did not dissolve. It pitted and softened and began weeping, and the crack widened by a hand’s breadth, and that was all Jin needed.
Then he did the part he disliked.
"Flicker. Close bait."
She went out again, past the leaning pillar, into open ground where a thing with fire could reach her.
The Hawk took it.
It came in on a short approach and Flicker held for longer than Jin wanted, and then broke left, deliberately, trying to force the Hawk to turn after her toward its damaged side.
It refused. It compensated the way it had compensated every time in the last four minutes, swinging its healthy wing through and coming around to the right instead, which took it in a wide flat curve past the base of the leaning pillar.
There.
Glitch hit the weakened base with his shoulder and everything he had.
The column came down across the Hawk’s line. It was not a clean kill and Jin had not expected one — the falling stone clipped the damaged wing and drove the Hawk into the basin floor, and it hit hard and skidded and immediately tried to get its wings under it.
Flicker was already there.
She could not hurt it. She weighed nothing and had nothing to hurt it with, and Jin did not send her to hurt it. She went for its face, harrying, staying inside the arc where a wing could not swing at her, and every time the Hawk got a wing partly open she was in front of its eyes again and it flinched and lost the extension.
Four seconds. That was all she bought.
Glitch crossed the basin in four seconds.
He struck before the Hawk could force its damaged wing open, drove it back into the fallen stone, and planted one foreclaw across the healthy wing. His jaws closed at the base of its neck. The fire running through the Hawk’s feathers guttered once and went out.
[Cinderstorm Hawk — defeated]
[First clear: Cinderstorm Ember Basin]
[Item acquired: Dual Fire-Wind Core]
[Item acquired: Cinderstorm Fragment ×3]
[Basin unlocked for repeat clears after reset]
Jin sat back against the bench and let himself have about eleven seconds of it.
Solved. Not brute-forced, not out-leveled — solved, four days after a nine-second death, on a boss that had adapted mid-fight and forced him to throw the plan away halfway through.
He inspected the drops before anything else, because that was the reflex.
The core was the thing. Dual-aspect, fire and wind, and the Engine’s description was short and clear about what it was for: a developmental resource for a compatible fire-and-wind beast. Not a skill. Not an evolution. A material that would eventually make a body better at being what it already was.
Then he looked over at the cradle.
Flicker had not moved. Her wing was still not quite folded and the thermal readout was still inside range and the linked alarm was still green, and she weighed less than a boot and could not walk four meters without sitting down.
The Sync button was where it always was.
Her body can’t take it.
He knew that the way he knew the room’s power rating. Verrick’s discharge plan was two pages long and every line of it assumed a hatchling who was recovering slowly from a developmental collapse, and there was no version of dual-aspect developmental core that fitted inside frequent checks and no strenuous training.
He put everything in storage.
[Stored: Dual Fire-Wind Core]
[Stored: Cinderstorm Fragment ×3]
The Engine did not object, or warn him, or offer an opinion. It never had. It let him keep the prize in a box and it would have let him spend it tonight, and the only thing standing between those two outcomes was Jin.
It’ll still be a core in three months.
He closed the panel.
His academy account had updated while he was in the basin.
He noticed the marker on the way to shutting the slate down — a section of the student portal that had been greyed out since the day he registered and was now, apparently, his.