Chapter 246: Thirty-Five
The ladder arena was the standard one: poured connected floor, barrier ring, adjudicator, and medical bench. About eighty people occupied the seats, more than a Rank 35 challenge usually drew.
Jin recognized the reason. Half were Third Class students working out what a Bronze 6-Star could do, while the rest had attended the assembly eight days ago and begun paying attention to a ladder that suddenly mattered.
"Standard ladder rules," said the adjudicator. "One beast each. Victory by surrender, incapacitation, ring-out, or referee stoppage. Handlers remain in command positions. Begin."
Tarin Voss did not say anything before it started and neither did Jin, which they had both apparently decided independently.
The Slateclaw Lynx came onto the floor and it was smaller than Jin had expected from the footage — long-bodied, grey, built out of shoulder and haunch, with a way of putting its feet down that made Jin want to check the floor’s connectivity.
Glitch walked to the middle and stopped.
Voss’s plan worked for four minutes and it worked well.
The Lynx did not contest the middle for a second. It came in at an angle, checked before it reached Glitch’s forward range, and went around — circling the outer edge of his reach at a distance Jin could measure and could not close.
Then it came back the other way and got behind him.
Glitch turned after it, because Jin had not stopped him and because he wanted to see what happened, and the turn finished a quarter-second late and the Lynx opened a line across his left hindquarter.
There it is. That’s the whole match if I let it be.
It did it three more times over the next two minutes. Not the same way — Voss varied the approach every time, coming high once and low twice and once from directly behind after a feint that pulled Glitch’s weight the wrong way.
Glitch’s plating held. The cuts remained shallow, and each impact spread through a body that had spent a fortnight becoming better at receiving force.
But shallow cuts accumulated, and turning cost stamina, and Glitch was spending both.
Jin tested the tendency twice before he committed to it.
The first test was passive. He watched a circling pass and had Glitch stay still, and read the contact through the bond.
Light. Shallow. The Lynx could have abandoned that approach at any point and did, breaking off nine meters out.
That’s a feint. That matches.
The second test cost him.
He let Glitch begin a turn — a real one, committed — and the Lynx took the opening exactly as the footage said it would, coming in on the rear angle at full speed.
And the contact came through the floor the way Jin had spent a week learning to expect. Longer. Deeper. A plant.
Glitch could not do anything about it. He was mid-rotation and he took a cut across the flank for the information.
Confirmed. It’s there on the real animal, not just on video.
[Glitch — visible lacerations, left flank and hindquarter]
Voss was watching him from the far command position and Jin could see him recalculating.
He knows I did that on purpose. He doesn’t know why yet.
Then Jin stopped letting Glitch turn.
The Lynx went past on the left and Glitch stayed facing forward, and the animal was in his rear quarter for a full second and a half with nothing stopping it.
It took the opening. Of course it did.
Another cut, deeper than the previous ones, and Voss’s voice on the far side saying something short.
The Lynx went past again on the right and Glitch did not turn. It came in, withdrew, and repeated the attack twice more.
From the seats it looked like Glitch had given up on defending his back. Jin heard somebody two rows up say something about it. Four exchanges in a row where a large slow beast simply stood in the middle of an arena and let a faster one work him over from behind.
He’s got a free route and it’s the fastest thing he owns. He’ll take the best version of it.
The best version came at seven minutes and Jin felt it start.
The Lynx broke wide right, further than it had gone all match, and came back along the arena’s edge to build speed — a longer approach than the previous four, which meant more velocity, which meant the rear-angle entry at its absolute maximum.
Glitch was standing in the middle facing the wrong way and did not move.
Now.
Not on the plant. Before it.
Jin sent one compressed direction down the bond — not a sequence, not a correction, a single thing shaped like left and back and now — while the Lynx was still four strides out and had not yet committed.
Glitch began moving.
He did not turn to face it. He backed and rotated at the same time, using the ugliest movement in his entire repertoire to carry his mass across the line the Lynx needed. They had spent three days practicing precisely that.
The plant came a half-second later.
Jin felt it through the bond — the deep contact and full commitment, just as it had appeared nine times across the recordings and once already in this match — and by then Glitch was occupying the route.
The Lynx could not abandon it.
The trap closed in about a second. Before the plant, the Lynx could have broken away and chosen another angle. After it, the beast had a line and a velocity, and both ended at a hundred and forty kilograms of anchored Bronze beast that had arrived early.
[Harden]
It hit him at full speed.
The collision was the loudest thing that had happened all match. The Lynx came off him sideways with all its momentum turned into the wrong direction, hit the floor, and skidded — and Glitch was moving before it stopped, not fast, just inevitable, closing a distance that had shrunk to nothing.
He put his weight across it before it got its feet under it and pinned it against the arena floor.
The Lynx twisted once, hard, and could not shift him.
"Stoppage," said the adjudicator. "Astor."
Voss recalled his beast and checked it over thoroughly before he came across the floor, which Jin was starting to recognize as the mark of everybody worth fighting.
"She’s fine. Bruised." He straightened up. "You left your back open."
"Yes."
"Deliberately. For four exchanges."
"Five, counting the one where I let him turn."
Voss nodded slowly.
"So the cuts were the price."
"They were the price. He can take shallow cuts and he can’t take being out-turned all afternoon, so I paid in the one I could afford." Jin shrugged. "You’d have got there eventually either way. I needed you to use the fastest version rather than the safe ones, and the fastest version’s the only one that has to commit."
"The ground plant."
"The ground plant."
Voss thought about that for a moment, and to his credit did not look particularly bitter about it.
"I knew he couldn’t turn," he said. "I built the whole match on it. It didn’t occur to me that not being able to turn was something you could sell me."
"It’s most of what I’ve got."
"Mm." Voss offered a hand. "I’ll want it back. Not at forty — I’ll have to climb past you, same as everyone else, and now there’s a queue."
"There’s going to be a queue for everything for eight weeks."
"Seven," said Voss.
[MERIDIAN THIRD-CLASS LADDER]
[Astor, J.: Rank 40 → Rank 35]
[Voss, T.: Rank 35 → Rank 40]
[Regional League qualifier requirement: Top 20]
[Ranking cutoff: 7 weeks]
Jin read it on the walk back with Glitch beside him, favouring the left hindquarter slightly and radiating enormous satisfaction with himself.
Five places.
Fifteen to go. Seven weeks. And everyone I beat goes back into the pool below me and starts climbing again.
He opened the ladder and looked at the new range above him — Ranks 34 through 30, five names he had not read yet — and then closed it, because Glitch needed his flank cleaned and there was a feed schedule to keep and none of the next five were happening tonight.
"You didn’t turn," he said.
The bond conveyed that this had been extremely difficult and that some form of compensation was in order.
"There’s a whole tin waiting for you."
Glitch accelerated noticeably.