Chapter 210: The Price of Forty
The academy medic spent eleven minutes on Glitch’s right foreleg and then said the word Jin had been waiting for.
"Nothing’s broken."
"And the limp?"
"Deep bruising through the shoulder and a strained tendon that isn’t torn." She worked the joint through its range while Glitch endured it with enormous dignity. "He’s also flat. Whatever he did in that match, he did all of it."
"He held Harden through two committed charges and used Acid Breath at four meters."
"That’ll do it." She straightened up and started writing. "Rest. No combat. Controlled feeding, and I mean controlled — he’ll want to eat like he’s dying and that’s the wrong answer with a strained tendon. Reassessment before he fights anything again."
Jin did the arithmetic before he asked the question.
Newcomer extension closes seventy-two hours after Ranking Day. That’s Thursday morning.
"Can he be cleared by Thursday?"
The medic looked up.
"Maybe."
"That’s not a yes."
"It isn’t, and I’m not giving you one." She turned the slate around so he could see the entry. "If he walks clean on the third morning and passes a movement test, I’ll clear him conditionally. If he doesn’t, I won’t, and you can be as annoyed about that as you like."
"I won’t be annoyed about it."
"Everyone says that on the first day," said the medic, and went to write it up.
The Acid Breath thing lasted about a day and a half, which was less than Jin had budgeted for.
Students looked twice at Glitch in the corridor. The combat replay from the placement bout picked up views. Somebody in his Rift Theory class asked, in the tone of a person settling a bet, whether it was true that his lizard had three skills, and Jin said yes, and that was the end of that conversation.
The version that mattered came back to him secondhand from Bram, who had been standing near it.
"Someone asked Corven if the acid decided it."
"What’d he say?"
"He said it ruined one plate." Bram shrugged. "Then he said you still needed Tremor Sense to catch the plant, Harden to survive the second charge, and the tail to put Bracken down, and that if a corroded shoulder was all it took he’d have lost in forty seconds instead of four minutes."
"That’s generous."
"It’s accurate," said Bram. "He’s not generous. He just doesn’t lie about fights."
Nobody summoned Jin or treated the skill as suspicious. Skills sometimes surfaced during evolution; on a Bronze beast, it was uncommon enough to draw interest and ordinary enough that interest was all it drew. The monitoring system had added Acid Breath (corrosive, ranged, short duration) to Glitch’s observed combat profile after Stonewell as a single line in a summary, and the only practical consequence was that everyone in Third Class now knew about it before they fought him.
Which is the actual cost, Jin thought. Not an investigation. Preparation.
He spent the recovery days reading the ladder rules properly, because he had a fight coming and no beast to train.
Sixty-four ranked students. Meaningful reward thresholds at Ranks 40, 32, 16, and 8. Ordinary meals, instruction, housing, and medical care were never tied to any of them, which the policy page stated twice in language that suggested somebody had once had to explain it to a parent.
What the thresholds distributed was scarce.
[Rank 40 threshold — monthly package]
[Contribution stipend: 150 points]
[Managed Rift booking: early access window]
[Advanced training rooms: 2 sessions per monthly cycle]
Jin read that and immediately converted it into things he actually bought.
A hundred and fifty points is about twenty days of Flicker’s nutrient packs. Or a third of a Bronze feed reserve.
The early booking window is the difference between the Stonewell morning slot and whatever’s left at fifteen hundred.
Two advanced rooms is two sessions on connected flooring I currently can’t reserve at all.
Rank 41 got none of it and could still progress perfectly well. That was the part that kept the whole system from being grotesque and also the part that made everyone care: the student one place above you had a slightly easier month, every month, and easier months compounded.
Four positions. That’s what four positions cost.
He checked the newcomer rule twice, because it was narrow enough to misread.
A newly placed student could schedule one upward challenge within seventy-two hours of Ranking Day, subject to medical clearance for the contracted beast. One. Results from newcomer extensions were folded in before that month’s threshold rewards finalized.
So it’s now or it’s four weeks.
He opened the permitted challenge range.
Rank 40 was Lysa Pell, Bronze Mireweb Spider.
Jin watched two of her public replays before he did anything else, and by the end of the first he had a fairly clear idea of how bad the matchup was.
The Mireweb Spider did not fight. It built.
It ran radial strands from floor anchors to wall posts, adhesive on some lines and bare tension on others, and it moved between them with its weight distributed across four or five contact points at once. Its opponents spent the first two minutes finding out which lanes were free and the next four finding out that the free lanes were the ones Lysa wanted them in.
The second replay ended with a Silver-quality courser immobilized against a wall in a nest of strands, entirely unhurt, with the referee calling a stoppage.
It wins by narrowing the space until the other beast makes the mistake it was always going to make.
He watched the Spider’s feet on the replay and saw the second problem.
Glitch can’t read it. Half its weight’s in the web at any given moment.
Every opponent Glitch had beaten in the last month had been beaten the same way: stand still, read commitment through the floor, punish the charge. A Windclaw Lynx, a Ridgeback, a broodguard, a Stonehorn Ram. All of them had eventually put their full weight into an approach.
A Mireweb Spider never put its full weight anywhere.
Jin sat with that for a while and then priced it, the way he would have priced a repair.
Bad matchup. Costs at least one Acid Breath, probably two, on a beast with a strained tendon three days out from a stoppage. And she’ll have watched the Corven replay, so she knows about all three skills.
Against a hundred and fifty points a month, the morning Rift slots, and two rooms.
He thought about the feed reserve running down at a rate he could calculate to the day, and about forty nutrient packs that would become thirty-one by the end of the month.
Forty’s the nearest threshold. There isn’t an easier one.
He sent the challenge.
Lysa Pell replied in nine minutes and her first three messages were all questions.
Pell:Is your beast medically cleared or pending? Pell:What’s your exact extension deadline? Mine says Thursday 1000 but I want yours confirmed. Pell:If he’s still limping on the morning, are you going ahead anyway?
Jin answered all three in order.
Astor:Pending. Reassessment third morning, conditional clearance if he passes a movement test. Astor:Thursday 1000. Same as yours. Astor:No. If the medic refuses clearance I withdraw and you keep the rank.
There was a pause of about two minutes.
Pell:Good. I’ve had two challengers this year turn up with beasts that shouldn’t have been on the floor. One of them cost me a week of my own repair budget when it panicked. Pell:I’ll accept. It’s a valid challenge and holding 40 means taking them. Pell:You should know I’ve already marked your three skills and I’ve watched the Ashe match four times. Astor:That’s fair. I’ve watched two of yours. Pell:Only two? Astor:The second one told me everything the first one didn’t.
Glitch walked clean on the third morning.
The medic ran him through a movement test — turns in both directions, a controlled charge into a padded block, four minutes of continuous movement — and watched the right foreleg the whole way through.
"Conditional clearance," she said. "One bout. If he takes a bad landing on that shoulder, I want him back here the same day, and I’ll be watching the replay."
"Understood."
"Also, the acid." She made a note. "That’s a throat-and-gland load and he did it three days ago on a tired body. I’ll clear it for use. I won’t clear it for repeated use, so don’t build a plan that needs four."
Jin had not been planning to build a plan that needed four. He had been planning one that needed one.
The arena booking confirmed at 0912 for Thursday 0930, thirty minutes inside the window.
Lysa’s message arrived a minute later.
Pell:Confirmed. 0930, Arena 3. It has wall posts, which I assume you noticed. Pell:For transparency: if you win, I lose 150 points a month and my booking access drops into the later twenty-four-student window. That’s already allocated in my budget. I’m telling you so you know I’m not going to be polite about it.
Jin read that twice.
She didn’t include the number to guilt me. She included it so I’d know exactly how hard she’s going to try.
Astor:Understood. See you Thursday.