Chapter 208: The Academy Takes Its Cut
The problem was that Jin could not confirm any of it.
Glitch had four contacts and they were all moving and the passages down there were connected in ways the map only half described. Two of them were converging on the narrow section. One was drifting east. The fourth had gone quiet, which meant it had either stopped or dropped below the depth where the stone carried.
Nine days ago he would have spent eleven seconds asking Glitch to resolve the fourth one.
Probable. That’s what I’ve got. Say it and move.
"Bram — the narrow section, now. Two of them are coming to it, probable, I can’t confirm and I’m not going to be able to. There’s a third going east and a fourth I’ve lost."
Bram was already moving.
"Which side?"
"Left wall as we face down. If I’m wrong it’s the right and you’ll have three seconds’ warning."
"Understood."
He did not ask anything else. That was the part Jin noticed afterward and did not mention at the time: Bram had taken a labelled guess and put his body behind it inside two seconds, because Jin had spent four months being the person whose labels meant something.
They took the narrow section eleven seconds before the first Ridgeback came out of the left wall.
Brunt planted. Bram’s talent came up. The Ridgeback hit the badger’s plating at the speed of something that had expected to arrive in an empty passage, and the whole line moved perhaps a hand’s width and held.
The second came out four seconds later, on the left, where Jin had said.
The third came from the east and arrived at the wrong end of a formation that had already closed, and Glitch met it there.
Right on every approach I called. Still nothing on the fourth.
The fourth surfaced behind them a minute later, which was the cost of information Jin had admitted he did not have. Glitch had to break position to deal with it. He did, and it took time they did not have much of, and the whole exchange was messier than the first eight had been.
Nobody was surrounded. That was the entire measure of whether the call had been good.
The broodguard came up through the floor of the narrow section itself.
It was half again the size of the others with plating that ran deeper and overlapped further, and it did not close up when it saw them. It struck the stone twice with a forelimb — two weighted impacts, spaced — and something answered from the eastern passage.
"It’s still calling," Jin said.
"How many left?"
"Two, maybe three. Coming."
Bram set his feet. "Then be quick."
Jin looked at the broodguard’s plating and did the arithmetic he did not enjoy.
Glitch had used Acid Breath three times already. The bond had that scraped quality and it had been getting worse for twenty minutes, and holding Harden while producing the stream was visibly costing him — Jin could see it in how long he took to reset between movements.
One more. Maybe. And if I waste it on the back plates it does nothing.
He picked the hip joint on the left side, where the deep plating had to leave a gap for the limb to work.
"Bram, I need it turned. Left side toward us and held for about six seconds."
"Then get behind me."
Brunt went in low and took the broodguard’s forward strike across the shoulder plating. The impact went through Bram’s talent and into the floor, and Bram slid perhaps thirty centimeters and stopped. The broodguard turned to bring its bulk against the pressure, which put its left side toward the passage wall.
Glitch put the stream into the hip seam.
It was shorter this time and Jin could feel the effort in it. The plating sagged and pitted and did not fail, and the broodguard immediately tucked the damaged side toward the wall, protecting it, which told Jin two things: it understood what had happened, and it was going to keep understanding.
It struck the stone again. Two more replies came back, closer.
"It’s calling harder," said Bram, through his teeth.
"I know."
Glitch went for the weakened hip with his body instead of his mouth — the full evolved weight of him at a short charge, into a seam that had already lost its integrity — and the joint gave.
The broodguard came down onto three limbs and could not turn fast enough after that, and the rest of it was Glitch’s Bronze body doing what a Bronze body did to something that could no longer keep its armor between them.
The two remaining Ridgebacks arrived to find the broodguard down and a formation that had not broken, and they behaved like Ridgebacks again, independently and badly, and it took four minutes.
The collection took longer than the fighting.
They tagged eleven cores, twenty-three intact armor plates, two intact hip assemblies from the broodguard, and a bag of smaller material Jin appraised and sorted on the passage floor with his kit lamp propped on a rock.
Glitch lay down while they did it and did not get up, which Jin allowed.
He checked both beasts properly before anything else. Bram’s had a cracked shoulder plate and nothing under it. Glitch had a shallow gash along the left flank, a great deal of fatigue, and a rawness in the throat that he conveyed by declining to open his mouth when Jin asked.
"Two days," Jin told him. "No acid. Nothing."
Glitch conveyed that this was acceptable, which was how Jin knew he was genuinely tired.
Bram carried most of it out. Jin carried the rest and found that he could, which was a small thing that had not been true three weeks ago.
The appraisal at the exit was done by the same technician, at a bench, against a published table, and took twenty minutes.
[Managed Rift 2 — Stonewell | Population cull]
[Result: complete — 14 Ridgeback burrowers, 1 broodguard]
[Contribution — Astor, J.: 940 points]
[Contribution — Rook, B.: 610 points]
[First-claim rights: broodguard core, 2 armor assemblies — 30 days]
Bram looked at his own total and grunted, which Jin had learned was satisfaction.
"That’s four weeks of my own equipment bookings," he said. "I’d have got half that on a Fourth-Class route."
"Are you saving it?"
"Some. There’s a resistance hall my class can’t book that I can pay into." He shouldered his kit. "You?"
Jin was already on the exchange page.
The catalogue was genuinely attractive and he went through the whole thing once out of diligence. Processed cores. Training access. Equipment bookings. A skill-resource category with three items in it that would have made most Third-Class students stop breathing.
He looked at the skill category for about eleven seconds and closed it.
I have a machine that gives me skills. It doesn’t give me anything to feed them with.
That was the actual shape of his life and he had understood it for a while without saying it in one sentence. The Engine could hand Glitch abilities and hand Flicker a dual-aspect core, and every single thing it handed him landed in a body that then had to be fed, rested, medicated, and kept alive in a shelter where protein was rationed and a hatchling’s nutrient packs were priced individually.
He bought feed.
[Redeemed: Bronze-tier high-density feed — 60 day reserve — 620 points]
[Redeemed: Thermal nutrient pack, medical grade ×40 — 280 points]
[Remaining: 40 points]
The nutrient packs were inside Flicker’s approved category, which he checked twice against Verrick’s plan before confirming, because there was no version of this where he improvised with her diet.
Sixty days held against Glitch’s next growth spike. Forty packs of hers I don’t have to buy.
It did not produce a single Credit. It did not touch the nine hundred. It bought two months of not having to think about the thing he thought about most.
Good enough.
The notice was waiting when he got back to the room.
[MERIDIAN — THIRD CLASS MONTHLY RANKING DAY]
[Ladder positions: 64]
[Newly promoted students: placement bout required]
[Ranked students: voluntary challenges within permitted range]
[Ladder privileges: Managed Rift booking priority; training-room reservation priority; advanced elective access]
[Jin Astor — Unranked: Newly Promoted]
He was still reading it when the message came in.
Corven Ashe:Heard you got promoted. I’m at 44. I’ll put it up as your placement bout if you want it.
Corven Ashe:Not doing you a favour. You beat me on a slab of rock last term and I’ve thought about it since.
Jin read it twice.
He’s risking his own rank to get a rematch.
Jin Astor:Fine.