Chapter 259: One Last Ordinary Morning
For the first night in thirteen days, Jin had no Coin route running.
The silence should have been restful. Instead, he checked the empty Inventory slot twice, opened his zero-Coin balance once, and looked at Glitch often enough that Glitch eventually lifted his head and stared back.
"I’m checking your condition."
Glitch kept staring.
"Professionally."
That earned him a slow blink and a head returning to the floor.
The fruit was locked in Doyen’s medical storage. Glitch was healthy. His appetite, temperature, gait, throat, and post-exertion readings had remained stable throughout the grind. Jin had followed every condition Doyen placed on his recovery and then waited several days beyond them because the Coin balance had refused to care how ready Glitch was.
There was nothing useful left to do.
Naturally, that made sleep impossible.
Jin opened Glitch’s avatar status instead. Faultline Rush sat there with thirteen more days of practice behind it. The burst was cleaner now, the usable distance longer, and the recovery after a failed line less ugly. He could have transferred all of that development with one press.
He closed the panel.
Tomorrow’s fruit could alter Glitch’s size, proportions, core, or movement. Syncing a committed charge tonight would teach one body how to use it and then hand that experience to a different body in the morning.
Fruit first. Skill later.
He had already decided that on the night he started the grind, and a decision did not become smarter because he reopened it at midnight.
Flicker noticed.
It happened that evening in the rehabilitation room, when Jin came in distracted and found her waiting on the mat.
Flicker walked the length of the mat — properly walked, farther than she had managed a week ago, with her balance holding through the turn — and then stopped and looked at him and did not come the rest of the way.
Jin sat down on the floor. "That’s not fair. He’s the one eating the dangerous mystery fruit tomorrow."
She turned her head away, which from Flicker was an entire argument.
"Fine. Show me the turn again."
She showed him the turn again. Then she did the thing she’d been building toward all week: the balance correction, the wings, one short controlled beat that lifted her a hand off the mat and set her down clean.
"That’s two," Verrick said from the doorway.
"I saw."
"Log it the same way. Don’t get creative."
He logged it the same way.
Glitch, who had been permitted into the room on the condition that he lie down and stay down, put his chin flat on the floor a meter from the mat and watched Flicker the entire time with an intensity he did not aim at anything else. When she wobbled on the landing, his head came up before Jin’s did.
"She’s fine," Jin said.
Glitch kept watching anyway.
Before bed, Jin watched Dell Varro lose.
It was one of only two losses in the recordings, and Jin had gone through it six times because losses taught more than wins. Anvil had done its usual work — the stutter, the false step, the drift — and its opponent had refused to spend anything for two full minutes.
Then the opponent had gotten bored. One committed lunge. Anvil’s countercharge had folded it in half.
Varro had still lost the match, on a later exchange, to a beast that simply out-massed Anvil and refused to be baited.
So he loses to mass and patience.
Jin had mass and patience coming. He wasn’t going to bet on it yet.
He left the challenge unsubmitted and closed the interface.
[Ranking cutoff: 21 days]
Doyen ran the final baseline the next morning and took her time about it.
Puncture sites: closed, plating seated. Throat: clear under load, no renewed strain. Gait: even. Post-exertion recovery: within normal. Temperature: flat.
"He’s stable," she said. "Suite three, two hours."
Two hours was not enough time to return to the dorm, and far too much time to sit outside the suite watching a clock. Jin took Glitch through one slow circuit of the medical courtyard instead.
Glitch objected more to the missed breakfast than to the examination. He checked Jin’s hands twice for food, found none, and walked with the wounded dignity of an animal being starved despite having eaten well the previous night.
Jin let him complain.
At a hundred and forty kilograms, Glitch already looked too large for the species printed on his record. Jin knew the set of his shoulders, the reach of his stride, and the exact amount his tail moved when something caught his interest. By afternoon, some or all of that might be different.
Glitch bumped his hand with the side of his jaw.
"I’m fine," Jin said.
Glitch did it again.
"You’re the one eating the biological weapon. Worry about yourself."
That earned him a quiet huff. They finished the circuit and returned when Doyen called for them.
Evolution suite three had a floor of reinforced composite with drainage channels cut into it, which Jin decided not to think about. Restraints hung folded against one wall — unused, and Doyen said they’d stay that way unless something forced it. Two monitors worked the Astral array. A rack of emergency suppressants sat within arm’s reach of the bench, and the observation barrier was thick enough to distort the light coming through it.
"You’ll wait outside," Doyen said, without much conviction.
"No."
"Jin."
"The contract’s active. If he loses orientation halfway through, I’m the only thing in this building he’ll recognize." He didn’t say the rest of it, which was that he had no intention of watching this through glass and had known that since the moment she’d booked the room.
Doyen looked at him for a moment, then at Glitch, who had positioned himself between Jin and the door in a way that was not accidental.
"Stand there," she said, pointing. "If I tell you to move, you move without discussing it."
The fruit came out of storage in its containment case.
Glitch’s head snapped around before the case was fully open.
His nostrils flared. His whole body came up out of its resting crouch, weight forward, tail stiff — and then he made a low sound that Jin had heard exactly once before, in a quarry, coming out of an avatar’s throat as it closed its jaws around the same object.
You’ve never smelled that. Not with that nose.
Nobody else in the room noticed anything except a beast reacting to food.
Doyen set the fruit on the floor plate. "Slowly."
Glitch did not do it slowly. He crossed the room, took it, and ate it in three motions, and the last one had bone in it.
Then nothing.
Jin stood there. The monitors ran. Glitch swallowed, licked the plate, and looked up expectantly, and for four extremely long seconds Jin experienced the specific sensation of a man realizing he had spent forty-two thousand Coins on the world’s most expensive rock-flavored snack.
Oh no.
Then every instrument in the room screamed at once.
Glitch’s legs locked. His scales lit from beneath with a dull heat Jin could feel on his face from three meters away, and above the ridge of his skull, something hard began pushing outward against the plating from the inside.