Chapter 209: Rank Forty-Four
The placement arena was a flat circle of poured stone with a barrier ring, two referees, and a medical bench, and Jin appreciated all four of those things and mostly the floor.
Connected. Continuous. Good.
Corven Ashe met him at the line and offered a hand, which he had also done last term.
"Rules are standard," he said. "One beast, surrender, incapacitation, or referee stoppage. Neither of us leaves our position."
"Understood."
"I’m not going to pretend I’m not annoyed about last term." Corven’s grin was competitive rather than hostile. "You divided the arena with a stone slab and made Bracken commit his weight in the wrong direction. I’ve been training that out of him for four months."
"Then it probably won’t work twice."
"It definitely won’t work twice."
The Stonehorn Ram came onto the floor and Jin revised his estimate immediately.
[Bracken — Bronze Quality | Rank 1 Novice | 5-Star]
Bracken had put on mass. He was broader through the chest and heavier through the shoulders, and the horn sweep had thickened, and he moved with a settled quality that the animal Jin had beaten last term had not possessed.
He’s trained it. Four months of specifically not overcommitting.
Glitch went out and the arena made a noise, which Jin had expected and did not enjoy. Most of Third Class had last seen Glitch as an Iron-quality Grey Rock Lizard at the bottom of a bracket. He was twelve percent larger now with a scale pattern that ran in ordered rows and a Bronze marker on the board.
"Begin."
Bracken did not charge.
That was the first thing that went wrong, and it went wrong immediately. He came forward at a heavy walk, keeping his armored front toward Glitch, and every time Glitch shifted to a flank the Ram turned with him, presenting the same face.
Jin let him do it for about forty seconds and learned what he needed to.
He’s not going to commit until he’s certain. Which means he’ll commit once, hard, and it’ll be a good one.
He sent Glitch in.
The exchange cost him. Glitch got inside and put his shoulder into Bracken’s flank and Bracken turned into it with all of that weight and drove him back four meters, and Glitch had to bring Harden up mid-contact to keep the horn sweep from opening him.
[Harden — active]
He came out of it with a scrape along the plating and a limp on the right that lasted six or seven steps.
"Acid Breath," Jin said.
He said it flatly, at ordinary volume, the way he had said it in a tunnel two days ago.
Glitch put the stream across the left shoulder plate at four meters.
The arena reacted. Somebody in the second tier said what loudly enough to carry, and there was a general noise, and a referee’s head came around and then went back to the match.
Jin ignored all of it. Nobody was stopping anything. A Bronze beast with three skills was interesting, not impossible, and Glitch’s evolution was already part of the academy record.
Corven adapted inside two seconds, which was the genuinely impressive part of the match.
"Bracken — left back."
The Ram swung the damaged side away and put his intact right shoulder forward, and from that point he never presented the same surface twice. He circled to keep the corroded plate on the outside of every turn, and Jin could not get a second application even if Glitch had one in him.
The match went on for another three minutes and Jin spent most of it losing ground.
Bracken used his armor aggressively — walking Glitch backward, forcing him to hold Harden, spending Glitch’s energy without spending much of his own. Glitch took two more impacts and the second one put him off his feet entirely, and he got up slower than he had gone down.
He’s got maybe one more good exchange.
Jin stopped trying to create an opening and waited for one.
[Tremor Sense — active]
The impressions came through the bond and Jin sorted them the way he had learned to sort them in a corridor full of impact plates: the ordinary weight of a walking animal, the shuffle of a turn, and then, eventually, something different.
Bracken planted.
It came through as a change in how his weight sat — both front feet setting, the rear driving, the whole mass of him loading forward into a line he could not adjust once it started.
There.
Jin did not move Glitch. Not at the plant, not at the first stride, not at the second, because a Stonehorn that saw a dodge starting could still correct.
He waited until the third stride, when the Ram’s full committed weight had nowhere left to go except forward.
"Now."
Glitch came off the line — not far, half a body width, the minimum that took him out of the horn sweep — and as Bracken passed he put his head into the corroded shoulder plate, and the softened section went in.
Then the tail came round.
It was the same sweep he had used on the Windclaw Lynx and the same one he had used on a Ridgeback in a stone passage, and it took Bracken across the planted rear legs at the exact moment all of that forward weight was travelling through them.
The Ram went down hard.
He was not incompetent about it. He got his front end up almost immediately and tried to bring the horns back around, and Glitch put his whole evolved body across the shoulders and pinned him, and the corroded plate meant there was nowhere for Bracken to brace from.
The referee counted, checked the Ram’s condition, and called it.
"Stoppage. Astor."
Corven recalled Bracken and went over him properly before he came across, which Jin respected.
"He’s fine," he said. "Plate’s ruined. That’ll cost me a month of replacement growth."
"Sorry."
"Don’t be, it’s a duel." Corven looked at Glitch. "Since when does he do that?"
"After the evolution."
"Mm." Corven accepted it about as fast as Bram had. "He’s changed more than the board says. The board says Bronze. That’s a different animal to the one that beat me last term, and not just the size."
"He still can’t turn."
"I noticed. I spent four minutes making him turn and it worked." Corven shrugged. "Then you stopped letting me. That’s twice now you’ve won by refusing to do the thing I wanted."
"It’s mostly what I’ve got."
"It’s enough." He offered his hand again. "I’ll take it back at some point."
"Probably."
[Placement match complete]
[Jin Astor — Rank 44 of 64]
Jin looked at that on his slate on the walk back, with a limping Bronze lizard beside him and a bag of feed reserve waiting in a room upstairs.
Forty-fourth. Out of sixty-four.
He did the arithmetic, because he always did the arithmetic. Forty-three students above him. Twenty below. Comfortably inside the bottom half of Third Class.
Two lifetimes. An EX-Rank soul talent nobody knows exists. A dungeon on my phone, a beast that advanced Quality, a second contract, a promotion two years early, and a boss clear last night that would break the world’s economy if I ever mentioned it out loud.
And it’s taken all of that to become officially below average.
He found that he did not mind at all, which surprised him slightly.
Rank 44 came with Managed Rift booking priority over twenty people, which meant he would get the Stonewell morning slots. It came with a training-room queue position. It came with a ladder that went up, and forty-three names on it, and no obligation to climb any faster than he wanted to.
Glitch bumped his hip and conveyed that walking was currently a chore and that some acknowledgement of his suffering would be appropriate.
"You won," said Jin. "You’ve got sixty days of feed upstairs and you’re going to eat all of it."
Glitch conveyed that this was the correct order of priorities and had been all along.