Chapter 212: The Longest Six Metres
Day 3. Glitch’s post-bout check cleared him with the shoulder logged as bruised again and the tendon unchanged. The medic told Jin to give him a week and Jin gave him nine days.
Day 5. The Rank-40 stipend credited after the extension window closed. Jin looked at a hundred and fifty points, priced them against Flicker’s nutrient packs, and saved them.
Day 6. He booked an advanced connected-floor room for the first time in his life and spent two hours running Glitch through anchor-tension drills that nobody at Meridian had a name for, because he had invented them on Thursday afternoon.
Day 8. Third-Class Applied Rift Ecology, which he attended and did not enjoy.
Day 9. Neris submitted her fourth evaluation note. He did not see it.
Verrick ran the light-exercise session on Day 10 in a climate-controlled room with the academy thermal regulator linked to the cradle alarm and a marked circuit on the floor.
He set the terms before Flicker was out of the cradle.
"Walking. Wing spreading for balance. That’s the entire permitted list." He checked the linked monitor. "Stop conditions: temperature out of range, respiration out of range, or she goes down and can’t get herself back up. Any of those and it ends immediately and we don’t negotiate."
"Understood."
"No jumping. No gliding. No flight, and before you tell me she can’t, students say that and then their beast tries." Verrick turned the monitor so Jin could see it. "And nothing that stimulates the elemental pathway. She’s not ready to be interesting."
"How far’s the circuit?"
"Six meters."
Jin looked at the marked line on the floor. It went out along one wall, turned at a cone, and came back.
Six.
He had watched an avatar of this bird bait a Tier 3 boss into a pillar collapse four nights ago.
"That’s the whole session?"
"That’s the whole session," said Verrick, "and if she does it I’ll be pleased, and if she does half of it I’ll still be pleased. Put her down."
Glitch made it complicated inside about twenty seconds.
Flicker came out of the cradle, stood, spread her wings a third of the way for balance, and looked directly at him.
"He can walk the route," Verrick said. "Slowly. He does not crowd her and he does not hold her up. If he props her, the session’s over and it doesn’t count."
"He’ll try to prop her."
"Then don’t let him."
Getting Glitch to walk away from Flicker turned out to be the hardest part of the entire morning. He set off along the marked line at Jin’s pace and then stopped four times in the first two meters, each time turning his head back, and each time Jin had to push at the bond to move him on.
Keep going. That’s the point. She has to come to you.
The resistance that came back had a genuinely aggrieved quality to it, as though Jin had asked him to do something unreasonable, which from Glitch’s position he had.
Flicker followed.
The first two meters were the best. She walked them cleanly, at a slow steady rate, with her claws working on the smooth floor for grip and her wings coming out twice for balance and folding again.
At the cone she over-corrected on the turn and sat down.
Jin’s hand went halfway toward her before he stopped it.
The monitor stayed green. Respiration elevated, temperature climbing but inside range, and Verrick, watching the same numbers, said nothing at all.
Flicker sat for perhaps eleven seconds.
Then she got up.
The return leg was much worse than the outbound, and Jin watched the whole of it with his eyes going between the monitor and the bird.
Her left foot went too far three times. Her wings came out on every second step now, half-open, working. She stopped twice more without sitting, standing with her chest heaving and her head down, and both times she started again before Jin had finished deciding whether to be worried.
The numbers climbed. Respiration well up. Temperature two-thirds of the way toward the stop threshold and rising slowly.
A meter and a half left.
Ahead of her, Glitch had reached the endpoint and stopped, and then done something Jin had not told him to do. He lowered himself — chest to the floor, head down flat, dropping his whole silhouette until it sat at Flicker’s eye level instead of somewhere above her.
She could see him properly. That was all it accomplished and it was the entire reason he had done it.
She covered the last meter and a half in about twenty seconds.
At the end she did not sit. She walked into Glitch’s foreleg, put her head against it, and stayed standing there with her wings out for balance and her whole body going, and only after Jin had crouched and got a hand on her did she fold down.
[Session complete — 6.0m circuit, unassisted]
[Respiration: elevated, returning]
[Thermal: peak within range]
[Stop threshold: not reached]
Jin checked her temperature by hand as well as by monitor, because he did not entirely trust anything that only produced a number.
Warm. Not hot. She’s fine.
He sat back on his heels and did not say anything for a moment.
Her avatar died to a Hawk twice on Tuesday and I sent it straight back in.
This one just fought six meters and there’s no reset on it.
He had known that in the abstract for a month. Watching her sit down at the cone and get back up had made it into something else, and what he felt was mostly pride and partly fear, in a proportion he did not care to examine.
What he did not do was start planning the next distance.
"Continued supervised walking and wing-balancing," said Verrick, writing. "That’s the clearance and it’s the whole clearance. No increase in distance without me, no unsupervised sessions, and nothing that looks like training."
"Understood."
"She did well. Say that to her, she’ll like it." Verrick closed the file. "Don’t say it in a way that makes her think you want more."
The Basin ran whenever both avatars were available, usually every other night until the evaluation schedule compressed the final attempt.
Jin refined it the way he refined everything, which was slowly and with a notebook.
Clear 2, Day 11. Six minutes forty. Flicker died on the second dive because Jin baited from the wrong side of the pillar and the recovery arc came round shorter than he had mapped.
Clear 3, Day 13. Five minutes ten. He moved the pillar-weakening to the start rather than the middle, so Acid Breath was spent before Glitch was tired. Nobody died.
Clear 4, Day 15. Four minutes twenty-eight. He worked out that the Hawk’s rightward compensation appeared within about forty seconds of the wing damage, which meant the whole fight could be structured around producing that damage early and cheaply.
Clear 5, Day 16. Four minutes even.
[Cinderstorm Fragment ×2]
[Cinderstorm Fragment ×3]
[Cinderstorm Fragment ×2]
[Cinderstorm Fragment ×3]
Fragments and nothing else. No second core — first clears gave a first-clear reward and the Engine had been unambiguous about that. No skill, no Star, no evolution.
He stored every one.
[Stored: Dual Fire-Wind Core ×1]
[Stored: Cinderstorm Fragment ×13]
The Sync panel stayed exactly where it had always been, available, unlocked, one press away.
Jin looked at it on Day 15 for slightly longer than usual and then closed it, because five days earlier he had watched a bird sit down at a cone after two meters.
Her avatar can clear a Tier 3 boss in four minutes. Her body can do six meters.
Those are two different animals and I’m the only person alive who could confuse them.
Neris’s message came on Day 16.
[TIDE EVALUATION — SCHEDULED]
[Astor, J. — decisive practical assessment]
[Date: Day 17]
[Assigned team: PELL, L. (Third Class) | ROOK, B. (Fourth Class, sponsored) | 1 additional]
[Sector: two-branch defensive route, unstable]
Lysa’s message arrived four minutes later.
Pell:You took my rank and now I’m in your reports. I want it noted that I find this extremely funny and I am not laughing. Pell:What am I holding? Astor:Don’t know yet. There are two branches. One of them’s probably yours. Pell:Then I want the anchor allowance before Thursday, not on the morning.
Bram’s message said: Confirmed.
Jin sat with the assignment for a while.
Lysa reported in anchor numbers and tension changes because she and her Spider had spent two years building a shared vocabulary for it. Glitch reported in impressions — depth, weight, rhythm — that Jin had to translate into English before anybody else could use them.
Two true sources, two formats, one route with two branches.
They’re not testing whether Glitch can find something.
They’re testing what I do when both of them are right about different things.