Chapter 262: Two Places Higher
Glitch spent the next three days learning to be a different size.
His mind was intact. That was clear from the beginning, and it was also the problem: he knew exactly how to do everything, and his body kept doing all of it about eighty percent too hard.
He took a familiar turn at the end of the yard and slid two meters past it.
He put his shoulder into a training dummy at what he plainly considered a polite introductory pressure and removed it from its mounting.
He stepped up onto the retaining wall he used during ordinary training, and the wall developed a crack.
"That’s coming out of my account," Jin said.
Glitch looked at the crack, then at Jin, and had the decency to seem briefly embarrassed before deciding it wasn’t his fault.
By the third day the recalibration was mostly done. He stopped overshooting turns. He learned to set his feet before applying force instead of after. The old techniques came back one at a time with twice the mass behind them, and watching him drag the graded sled across the yard without visible effort was the first moment Jin genuinely understood the scale of what forty-two thousand Coins had bought.
The Flicker introduction went worse than expected for about nine seconds.
Jin brought Glitch to the rehabilitation room slowly, with Verrick warned in advance and the door left open behind them.
Flicker saw the shape in the doorway and went rigid on her mat. Her wings came up and her whole body rotated to face it, and the sound she made was one Jin had never heard from her — thin and sharp and entirely instinctive, the noise a small thing makes at something with a predator’s outline.
Glitch had not consciously activated Draconic Dread, but a faint trace of the pressure had begun leaking from him since the evolution. Flicker was reacting to that and to the much larger predator filling the doorway.
Glitch stopped in the doorway.
Then he did something Jin didn’t expect.
He lowered himself. Not lying down — deliberately dropping his chest and head until his horns were angled down and away and his eye was closer to her level than to Jin’s. And Jin felt, through the bond, the effort of it: something being deliberately held in, pressed down and kept there, the way a person holds a breath.
The pressure in the room, which Jin hadn’t consciously registered, eased.
Flicker’s wings stayed up. She held her ground, shaking slightly, staring at him.
Then she took one step forward. And another. She walked the length of the mat with her head cocked, stopped a foot from his lowered snout, and struck him once on the nose with her beak.
Glitch endured this.
She did it again, harder.
He huffed, and the huff was the same huff, and something in Flicker’s whole posture came down. She hopped up onto his lowered foreleg, which was now wide enough to be furniture, and settled there.
"Well," Verrick said from the doorway. "That’s the first useful thing that pressure’s done."
Jin didn’t answer. Glitch had just held Draconic Dread down through the entire introduction on purpose, which was more control than he’d managed in three days of trying.
So he can do it. He just needs a reason.
The bill arrived that evening in the form of Doyen’s updated care schedule.
Feed volume: increased by a factor Jin had to read twice. Protein-density requirement: up. Mineral supplementation for a body carrying a hundred and twenty additional kilograms of new bone and plating: mandatory, ongoing. Recommended veterinary review interval: halved.
He opened his real Credit budget and ran the monthly total. The academy’s feed allowance softened part of the increase, but it did nothing for all the extra mineral supplements or the shorter interval between veterinary reviews. The remaining gap was ugly enough that he would need more appraisal shifts or another material sale.
Zero Coins remained inside the Engine, where they would have been completely useless to a supplier asking for Credits anyway. Meanwhile, Glitch had begun eating like a small vehicle.
I spent forty-two thousand Coins upgrading him and rewarded myself with a larger bill in a different currency.
It was, he decided, extremely on-brand.
Doyen ran the progressive tests herself and did not rush them.
Load work. Directional changes. After three days of recalibration, she put Glitch through a harder supervised session, hard enough that Jin watched the throat readings the entire time. The following morning was the part that mattered. Glitch woke up loose, ate everything in front of him, and went to the door.
"Limited clearance," Doyen said, closing the file. "One academy ranked match. No full-power Acid Breath. Rending Dragon Claw once, and I mean once. If he uses it twice in that arena I’ll hear about it from the strain log and you’ll be explaining yourself to me for an hour."
"Once."
"And he’s not allowed to solve his problems by being large. He’s Rank 1, six-Star, against students who’ve been fighting all season. Quality is not a tactic."
"I’d worked that out."
"Then go and be insufferable somewhere else."
The academy registry updated Glitch’s physical profile that afternoon, because it updated automatically and Jin had no say in it.
He found out from the reactions.
A Second-Class student he’d never spoken to stopped dead in the corridor, looked from the profile board to Glitch and back, and walked off without saying anything at all.
A boy from Jin’s own year—one of the ones who had once offered to buy Glitch for scrap value as a joke—read the Quality line three times and then said, to nobody, "That’s a typo."
It was not a typo. He checked. He came back and checked again.
Jin let the whole thing happen around him and went to a bench to watch Varro’s recordings for the ninth time.
Peak Silver made the matchup better. It did not make it a formality. Anvil was more developed than Glitch, better trained than Glitch, and specifically built to punish an opponent who committed first — and Glitch was now a very large animal whose instinct was to solve problems by going through them.
So he doesn’t commit first. That’s the whole match.
Bait the feints. Read the heavy step through the floor before the horns move. And keep two things Varro had never seen in any footage: a fear effect nobody knew Glitch had, and one strike that opened armor.
He also did not open the Sync panel.
Faultline Rush was still sitting in the avatar, ready, and it was a committed forward burst that could not be turned after launch, and the real Glitch had spent three days rediscovering how to take a corner. Putting that skill into that body this week would have been a very fast way to break a leg he could not replace.
Later. After the match.
Jin opened the ranking interface.
Rank 30, his own name, unimpressive. Two rows up, Dell Varro.
Sixteen days.
He submitted it.
[Challenge submitted.]
[Challenger: Jin Astor — Rank 30]
[Target: Third-Class Rank 28]
[The targeted student has been notified.]
Across the yard, Glitch lifted his head—horns catching the late light, two hundred and sixty-one kilograms of animal that everyone had once dismissed as a worthless lizard—and looked at Jin like he already knew.
Varro would be watching the profile board within the hour. He’d see the Quality line and the mass, then start building a plan around a heavy grounded opponent.
He could plan around the public profile all he wanted. Jin had begun building his own plan the moment he chose Varro, and Varro still knew nothing about the fear in Glitch’s voice or the claws that could tear armor apart.