Chapter 261: Peak Silver
Glitch woke up four hours later and immediately tried to stand the way he had always stood.
The result was catastrophic in a small way. His forelimbs came up faster and harder than he’d asked them to, his shoulders followed with far more mass behind them than his brain had budgeted for, and he ended up lurching two full steps forward into the bench Doyen had thankfully already moved.
Then he stood there, head low, plainly recalculating.
Jin walked over. He had to look up now, which was new.
"Take it slower."
Glitch looked at him — the same look, the exact same look, the one that meant I know and don’t tell me at the same time — and took it slower.
The bond was unchanged. That was the part Jin kept returning to over the next hour, while Doyen ran the full profile twice. The animal in front of him weighed nearly twice what it had that morning and had horns, and everything Jin used to recognize him by was still there: the way he shifted his weight off his left hip when he was thinking, the huff, the way he checked the door.
Doyen brought the profile up on the wall.
[Beast Profile — Glitch]
[Species classification: Grey Rock Lizard — atavistic draconic variant]
[Quality: Silver (Peak)]
[Combat Rank: Rank 1 Novice]
[Star Level: 6-Star]
[Mass: 261 kg]
"Read the second and third lines again," Doyen said.
"Rank 1. Six-Star."
"Correct. Nothing about today advanced his Rank. He has not gained a Star, and he has not completed anything in your bond." She tapped the Quality line. "This is foundation. Ceiling, capacity, growth potential, what he can hold. He has one of the best foundations in Third-Class and the combat development of a six-Star novice, and if you confuse those two things you’ll walk him into a match he cannot win and I’ll have to reattach parts of him."
"Understood."
"I’d like to believe you." She sat down on the corner of the bench, which was the first time Jin had ever seen her sit in a working room. "Bronze to Peak Silver. In one consumption. I’ve read about atavistic reversion — a dormant ancestral line surfacing under a compatible trigger — and I have never seen it, and neither has anyone I could name. His base species didn’t produce this. Something further back did."
"Can you identify it?"
"No. It’s draconic-adjacent and that’s as far as the classification goes." She glanced at him. "Which brings me to my actual question. Why did you buy that fruit?"
Here it was.
"Compatibility," Jin said. "My Appraisal reads compatibility values. His came back high enough that I stopped looking at anything else."
"How high."
"High enough to spend everything I had."
Doyen studied him for a long moment. "Your talent’s rated C."
"It is."
"Then either the rating’s wrong or you’re using it better than the people who wrote the rating expected." She stood. "I’d genuinely like to see how you run a compatibility read sometime."
"It’s mostly staring at a screen."
"That’s what everyone with a useful talent says."
Privately, the Engine had already told him the rest.
[Quality advanced: Bronze → Silver (Peak).]
[Dormant Sub-Dragon bloodline partially awakened.]
[New skill acquired: Draconic Dread]
[Draconic Dread: releases concentrated predatory pressure. Effective against weaker or low-courage targets. Mastery: Basic — range and intensity poorly controlled.]
[New skill acquired: Rending Dragon Claw]
[Rending Dragon Claw: concentrates bloodline energy into one forelimb for a close-range tearing strike. High effectiveness against armor, hardened hide, shell, and defensive skills. Requires stable footing. Repeated use strains the forelimb and Astral Core.]
Two skills. Neither of them subtle.
Bronze capacity was six. Silver’s eight. He’d been quietly worried about that, and now he wasn’t.
They found out about Draconic Dread by accident, roughly twenty minutes later.
One of the monitors moved a diagnostic beast into the suite doorway — a small, placid scanning-hound of the sort that lived its whole life being walked past sedated patients — and Glitch, who had been half-asleep and was startled by the door, lifted his head.
Something came off him.
Jin felt it as a change in the room’s air pressure. The scanning-hound folded flat to the floor and did not move. Down the corridor, two more beasts started making noise at once, high and panicked, and the noise spread three rooms deep before anyone could get to them.
"Out," Doyen snapped at the monitor. "Now. Jin — stop him."
"Glitch."
Glitch’s head turned.
"Off."
It cut out. Not smoothly; more like a valve slamming rather than closing. The scanning-hound got up, shook itself, and had to be led away by a handler who did not look at Glitch again.
The corridor stayed loud for another full minute.
Doyen let out a breath. "That was not aimed."
"No."
"He didn’t decide to do it. He got startled and it happened." She rubbed the bridge of her nose. "You have a beast who leaks a fear effect when he’s surprised, on a campus with two hundred contracted animals. Fix that before you fix anything else."
Glitch spent the night under observation. His temperature, core pressure, and forelimb readings remained stable through the following morning, and Doyen finally allowed one controlled test that afternoon. Jin suspected medical curiosity had influenced the decision, but only after caution had run out of reasons to object.
Reinforced target block. Standard academy issue, rated for repeated Rank-1 impact, the kind Jin had watched students hit for entire semesters without leaving more than scuffing.
Glitch set his feet. Jin felt the energy gather down one forelimb and concentrate at the claws.
The strike took a fraction of a second. The sound was wrong — not an impact, a tearing — and the block came apart in four long pieces that peeled outward from the point of contact.
One of the monitors said something under his breath.
"Strain," Doyen said immediately.
The reading came up sharply on the forelimb and stayed up on the core for a good while after.
"Once a day," she said. "That’s my number, and I want it lower once I understand it. Whatever that is, it’s paid for out of him."
"And Acid Breath?"
"Still nothing at full power, and I don’t care how impressive his new arms are." She shut the display down. "One more thing before you go and enjoy yourself. Registered physical profiles are inspected. Quality is on the profile. You can hide a skill if you’re careful, and people do, and I don’t ask. You cannot hide two hundred and sixty kilograms and a set of horns."
Jin looked over at Glitch, who had draped himself across most of the suite floor and was currently trying to fit his chin onto a resting pad built for a beast one third his size.
"Yeah," he said. "I think that career’s over."