Chapter 256: Faultline Rush
Attempt forty-seven was clean.
Jin didn’t know it was going to be clean when it started. Forty-five had ended at the fourth gate and forty-six had ended two meters in, because Glitch had gotten impatient, and Jin had made him sit through a full respawn cycle before starting again, which the avatar registered as an insult and which was entirely the point.
Then forty-seven.
The first barrier drifted. Glitch held. It drifted again — the real one — and he went, on the second drift, exactly late enough.
The hanging weight came across at chest height and he did not slow down. Harden came up over the shoulder plate a half-second before contact, he took it where he could afford to take it, and the impact threw him sideways two meters without turning him a single degree off his route.
The left opening appeared, bright and wide and generous.
He didn’t look at it.
Gate four opened a hand’s width and he was already accelerating into it, going before it was ready, trusting a gap that did not exist yet — and it existed by the time he arrived.
Jin sent one shape down the bond. The whole route, start to finish, no corrections.
The final stretch came at them like a closing throat. Nine gates, converging, no room to adjust. Glitch put his head down and took the line and did not deviate for any of it, through the seventh, through the eighth, and out.
[Hidden Mastery Trial Complete: The Unbroken Line]
[Attempts: 47]
[Compatible Astral Skill Developed: Faultline Rush]
[Faultline Rush: converts anchored earth-aspected force into explosive forward acceleration along one committed route]
[Restriction: direction cannot be corrected after final commitment]
[Cost: heavy leg and stamina strain; cost increases with distance, load, and impact]
[Mastery: Basic]
Jin read it twice.
In the yard, the real Glitch lifted his head off his forelegs, because the bond was leaking, and Jin had not noticed how much.
"Not you," Jin told him. "Sorry. Him."
The real Glitch put his head back down with an aggrieved noise and did not believe him.
He tested it in an empty training space first, because he was not going to find out what it did for the first time with a colony on top of him.
Flat ground. A marked line at twenty meters. Nothing to hit.
Glitch’s avatar planted, dug his claws in, and Jin felt the skill gather — the whole beast anchoring down into the ground and then converting that anchor into something forward.
He crossed twenty meters in a little under two seconds.
It was not a run. It was closer to being fired. The stone under his launch point cracked in a rough fan behind him, his body stayed dead flat and dead straight through the entire distance, and then he arrived at the far end travelling far faster than a hundred and forty kilograms of lizard had any business travelling, and discovered that the skill did not include brakes.
He went into the boundary wall shoulder-first, bounced, skidded, and lay there.
Right.
Jin ran it eleven more times. He learned that the launch was violent enough to be frightening even watching it from a bedroom, that the avatar’s legs registered the cost immediately and unmistakably, and that a second consecutive use came out noticeably shorter than the first.
Mostly he learned that stopping was a separate problem, and that Glitch would happily solve it by hitting something, which was not a solution so much as a preference.
He did not Sync it.
The real Glitch was five days out from four puncture wounds and had been cleared for walking on a slope. Putting a skill into him whose entire cost landed on the legs would have been an act of confident stupidity, and Jin had built his whole life around never being confident about anything.
Jin reopened the quarry the next morning. The board had not changed, but his plan had.
Jin had confirmed that the rear service crack reached the second level and marked its half-blocking slab as breakable with Glitch’s remaining momentum.
Flicker started east again, loud and obvious, and drew the guard detachment off the inner approach exactly as before. The queen answered the familiar disturbance with the same movement she had used the first time.
Glitch waited on the northern ridge with his belly flat to the stone and did not move when the approach opened.
That was the hard part. The opening looked real. It was real. It was also the one Jin had taken last time, and last time it had nearly killed the avatar.
Not yet.
Flicker crossed to the fractured pillar on the second level — the one she’d dropped in the escape — and put the remaining half of it down into the lower gallery.
The collapse was loud and structural and impossible to ignore, and it landed on the opposite side of the quarry from where she had just been making noise.
The pulse came four seconds later.
Doubled. Long. Sent twice, the same shape as the reversal that had trapped Glitch on the open floor — and this time it was going to the western group, because the western group was the only one left to send.
Glitch felt it arrive through the rock and held.
Jin watched the western gallery mouth and counted. One. The mouth stayed still. Two. Three — the first worker legs beginning to turn, the group reorienting, a hundred meters of quarry and a hundred bodies of inertia between the order and the answer.
Now.
Glitch anchored and fired.
Eleven meters of open floor went underneath him in a little over a second. He did not dodge, because he could not dodge; a worker came out of a side crack directly into his line and he went through it without slowing, and the impact was ugly enough that Jin felt the cost register through the bond.
He hit the chamber mouth still moving.
The queen was three meters to his left, folded beneath the shelf, and did not rise. A new pulse rolled through the stone. Nearby workers turned first; farther out, formations began reorienting as the command reached them.
Glitch did not stop to appreciate it. He came up the shelf, closed his jaws around the fruit — dark, heavy, absurdly ordinary-looking for something guarded like this — and kept going.
Not back. Through.
The chamber’s rear wall held the service crack. Glitch drove his remaining momentum and a hundred and forty kilograms of shoulder into the half-blocking slab, and it went.
Then he was in the rear gallery and running on nothing but his own legs, which were shaking.
Flicker met him at the second level. She did not fight anything. She went ahead of him, took the pursuit’s attention twice, put herself between him and the gallery mouth the colony was trying to close, and got out of his way at exactly the right moment.
The colony did not stop. They chased both avatars to the rim and past it, and the last thing Jin saw before the extraction threshold was the guard detachment coming up the eastern slope in perfect order, still answering, still obeying, still exactly as dangerous as they had been an hour ago.
The queen never moved.
[Item Secured: unidentified evolution-related resource]
[Item transferred to Inventory.]
[Extraction complete.]
Jin sat back against the yard wall and let out a breath he’d apparently been holding for some time.
Beside him, the real Glitch was already awake and staring at him with an intensity that suggested he wanted a full explanation, immediately, in a language he did not have.
"Later," Jin said.