Chapter 254: The Line Keeps Breaking [Bonus]
The real Glitch spent the next day asleep in the sun-lamp corner of the yard with his bandaging checked twice and his food weighed out for him.
The other Glitch spent it getting destroyed by a corridor.
[Hidden Mastery Trial: The Unbroken Line]
[Trial Failed — forward commitment broken at 2.4m]
[Attempts: 2]
The number had been sitting there since the Rank-30 match, which was Jin’s polite way of saying he had lost twice in a row and then gone and done something else for four days.
He set the phone against his knee, sat back against the yard wall where the real Glitch could hear him breathing, and started attempt three.
The Line had opened past its first obstruction now. What lay beyond was worse: a run of nine sections, each with its own moving gate, each closing on its own rhythm, and one rule underneath all of it — once the avatar committed forward, any turn away from the chosen route ended the run.
Attempt three ended at 3.1 meters when Glitch’s avatar picked his line early, the barrier drifted the other way, and he had to swing his shoulder to avoid eating a slab of moving stone.
[Trial Failed — forward commitment broken at 3.1m]
Too early. It hadn’t declared yet.
Attempt four, he waited. Attempt five, he waited too long and the gate shut in his face, which the trial counted as a failure of a different and more humiliating kind.
By attempt nine he was reading the barrier properly, and the trial rewarded him by introducing the second section: a hanging weight on a swing arm that came across the route at chest height with no gap to slip.
Glitch turned away from it. Run over.
Glitch turned away from it again. Run over again.
On the twelfth attempt Jin stopped sending corrections and sent one thing instead — through — and watched the avatar plant, drop his head, sheet his plating over with Harden, and take the weight full on the shoulder.
It flung him two meters sideways. He did not turn. The trial let him keep going.
[Trial Failed — commitment window expired at 6.8m]
"Better," Jin said out loud, to nobody, and the real Glitch cracked one eye open in the sun-lamp corner and closed it again.
The third section was cruel in a way Jin appreciated professionally.
Halfway down the run, a side opening appeared on the left — wider, brighter, obviously easier. Glitch’s avatar angled for it on attempt fifteen and the opening sealed the instant his shoulder turned, dumping him into a wall at speed.
He tried it again on seventeen, because he was stubborn, and Jin let him, because there was no better teacher available and dying cost nothing here.
He did not try it on eighteen.
The fourth section required accelerating into a gap that had not finished opening yet, which went against every instinct a heavy grounded beast possessed. That one took a long time.
Attempts twenty-two through thirty-one blurred together: different distances, different failures, the same corridor. Jin’s notes stopped being sentences.
Gate 1 — commit after second drift, not first.
Gate 2 — Harden early, take it on the shoulder plate not the neck.
Gate 3 — ignore left. Left is never real.
Gate 4 — go before it’s open. Go BEFORE it’s open.
Somewhere in there his instructions got shorter. He stopped narrating each gate and started sending the whole route at once, one shape from start to finish, and letting Glitch handle what his feet could feel that Jin’s eyes could not.
The failures got farther out. They did not stop being failures.
[Trial Failed — forward commitment broken at 14.2m]
[Attempts: 31]
The Engine did not offer partial credit, encouragement, or a discounted version of the reward. It offered the corridor again.
Doyen came for Glitch on the fifth day with her scanner already warmed.
She ran the four puncture sites first — behind the shoulder, behind the right foreleg, the two at the left hip — and made a noise that Jin had learned to interpret as approval.
"Closing clean. Nothing tracking under the plate." She thumbed the scanner over to the throat and went quiet.
Jin waited.
"Still inflamed," she said. "Less than it was. It isn’t ready."
"Two more days."
"Two more days," she agreed, and looked mildly annoyed at being agreed with in advance. "Walking’s fine. Extend it. Add slope if he wants it. No sparring, no charging, no bracing work, and if he so much as clears his throat at another beast I want to hear about it."
"He clears his throat at everything."
"Then you’ll be busy." She rolled the scanner shut. "He’s healing faster than the chart says he should. I’ve stopped asking."
"That’s probably for the best."
Glitch, who had endured the entire examination with the specific dignity of an animal being deeply patronized, got up and walked off toward the sun-lamp corner without waiting to be dismissed.
The corridor stayed in Jin’s head that evening, which is how he ended up thinking about the quarry.
The old quarry had been sitting in his Engine map for weeks with a note attached that said come back with something better. He’d left it there after the first attempt, when he’d learned exactly how little of it he understood.
He opened it.
The place was a stepped bowl of grey stone, three levels down to a floor split by rubble ridges. The colony had taken the lower galleries. The inner chamber sat at the bottom of the western wall behind a short approach, and inside it, on a shelf of pale rock, the fruit was still there — dark, heavy, faintly wet-looking, and unmistakably the same one.
The queen had not moved.
She lay beneath the shelf, enormous and dull-shelled, folded down into the stone like something that had decided the floor was hers. She had not chased him last time. She had not chased anyone, as far as Jin could tell, in a very long time.
She didn’t need to.
Jin sent both avatars in along the northern rim, Glitch grounded on the ridge and Flicker’s avatar running the high ledges ahead of him, quick and low, checking the drops.
Twenty seconds in, Glitch’s head came up.
Through Tremor Sense the quarry was a whole second landscape: worker legs stitching through the galleries, the weight of the heavier guards near the inner approach, and underneath all of it, at intervals, a slow patterned pulse rolling out through the connected stone.
Three beats. A pause. Two.
Fourteen seconds later a worker group on the second level abandoned the route they’d been walking and swung west.
Jin sat up.
He moved the avatars twice more and got the same shape both times — pulse, delay, change. Not the workers deciding. The workers being told.
She’s running all of them from down there.
Flicker’s avatar drew a patrol out of the eastern gallery just to see what would happen, ran it two hundred meters along the rim, and lost it easily. Fast, precise, entirely uninterested in fighting anything. That much hadn’t changed. A limited Sync had moved development one direction only, and her avatar was exactly as strong today as it had been last week.
The colony sealed the eastern approach behind her with a controlled fall of rubble.
Jin pulled both avatars back to the rim and sat there in the yard with the phone against his knee, counting.
From the northern ridge, the fruit was about eleven meters of open floor away, past the guard positions, in full view of the inner chamber.
Eleven meters, in the open, against something that could turn the whole quarry around in fourteen seconds.
So I need to cross that faster than he can cross it. Or I need her looking somewhere else.
He noted two viable approach routes, marked a third as a maybe, and withdrew before the colony closed them.
[Author: Thanks @Arran for the super gift, also thanks to everyone for all the support, including @Miles_reffler, @Carl_Glazik, and everyone else whose name I wasn’t able to mention here; thank you so much.]