Chapter 119: Two Hours Is Not Downtime
Two hours was not downtime.
Two hours was homework.
[Avatar Respawn: 01:59:47]
Jin sat cross-legged on the floor with his phone propped against one knee, the recording already moving backward. He had worked a feed-inspection shift, had academy obligations in the morning, and his body—which he had spent sixteen years training to do as little as possible—was honestly tired and wanted sleep.
It wasn’t getting any.
A new dungeon mechanic had just walked into his life, and that was one of the few things capable of overpowering Jin Astor’s commitment to rest. He understood how absurd that was. Walking across campus exhausted him, and a single push-up was, in his considered opinion, a trap, but staying awake for two hours to examine the exact moment a digital mantis murdered his beast was perfectly reasonable.
That was fun. That was the useful part of his brain waking up and cracking its knuckles.
Jin rewound to the killing strike and played it again.
Beside him, the real Glitch lifted his head. His body remained whole and unharmed, with only the fading bruise on his shoulder left from the previous week, while the screen replayed the exact moment of his humiliation.
Offense flooded the bond.
"Stop looking at me like that," Jin said without glancing away. "I’m studying the mantis. I’m not enjoying the part where it kills you."
He rewound the killing strike again.
Glitch’s suspicious glare intensified.
"This is research."
Glitch appeared to consider research a word criminals used to excuse their behavior.
Jin reviewed the first run six times, and each replay gave him something new.
The mantis hadn’t moved until Glitch entered the disturbed patch of dust. It hadn’t been wandering through the tunnel at all; it had been waiting beneath a place it had already prepared. Its reaction also became much stronger when Glitch ran, those frantic footsteps drawing a clear path across the mineral floor that let the creature follow him with disturbing accuracy.
When Jin slowed the recording after the first strike, though, he caught something else. The blow sent Glitch staggering across the passage, and his claws struck the floor in one sudden, uncontrolled impact. The mantis hesitated for a fraction of a second afterward.
Then Glitch moved again, and it immediately recovered his position.
A single impact caught its attention. Repeated movement gave it a trail.
The grooves along the walls were established travel routes as well. The creature had used them often enough to carve shallow channels through the dust, which meant crossing one carelessly was practically volunteering to enter terrain it already knew.
Its upper carapace had endured Acid Breath exactly as the warning predicted. Whenever the mantis extended one of its bladed forelimbs, however, the joint beneath the armor briefly separated, opening a thin gap that exposed softer tissue underneath.
Its back was a wall.
The joints might be doors.
Harden had also allowed Glitch to survive one anticipated strike. One was useful, especially now that Jin knew what the first hit looked like, but it wasn’t enough to carry an entire fight.
The least flattering lesson came last.
Glitch had lost the moment he became angry. Acid Breath failed, frustration surged through the bond, and he charged directly into terrain controlled by the enemy. The mantis hadn’t defeated him through superior strength; it had waited for him to stop thinking.
Jin opened his private notes.
Most of what he had was still theory, which meant the next run needed to answer specific questions rather than simply repeat the fight. Slow movement and pauses mattered. Stones might create false vibrations. The visible grooves were routes to avoid, the forelimb joint was the opening worth testing, and if Acid Breath could reach the soft tissue there, Glitch still needed to finish the creature physically before it burrowed again.
He added one final line beneath the rest.
Standing still forever wouldn’t clear the dungeon.
Avoiding detection alone would only leave Glitch trapped in one place. What mattered was controlling where and when the mantis detected him—making the floor notice what Jin wanted it to notice.
Then Jin turned toward the more difficult part of the plan.
The lizard.
"You didn’t lose because you were weak," he said.
Glitch’s attention sharpened immediately. His strength was a subject he took very seriously.
"You lost because you got angry and charged into ground the mantis controlled. Acid Breath failed, and instead of waiting, you ran straight at it. That’s why your avatar is respawning."
Glitch radiated the firm belief that Acid Breath should have worked and that the defeat was therefore the skill’s fault.
"Sure. But it didn’t work, and it won’t work against the shell next time either." Jin raised his fingers as he listed the rules, even though Glitch had no use for the gesture. "When I say stop, you stop. You don’t charge because the acid fails. You wait until I create an opening."
Glitch disliked every part of the lecture.
"And then you get revenge."
That part improved his mood considerably.
"But revenge comes after we understand the opponent. Not before."
Pride and impatience churned through the bond, but neither felt quite the same as before. Glitch remembered the loss. He wasn’t stupid, and the hard gold stare he aimed at the phone made it clear enough that he understood he’d made a mistake, even if admitting it was beyond his current emotional capabilities.
This time, even with revenge directly in front of him, he would wait for Jin’s command.
"Good," Jin said. "Then we do it properly."
[Bound Avatar Respawn Complete]
[Avatar Condition: Fully Restored]
[Deploy Avatar to Shattered Iron Quarry?]
The timer reached zero sometime in the small hours.
The avatar returned fully restored. No injuries had carried over to Glitch’s real body, and bringing the digital copy back required neither a Sync nor additional feed. The real Glitch remained beside Jin, awake and intensely focused as he sensed his avatar waiting to return to the quarry.
Jin confirmed the deployment.
The avatar appeared at the dungeon entrance, not beside the previous ambush site and not anywhere deeper inside the quarry. There were no shortcuts waiting for them.
They would have to retrace the entire route.
Fine.
This time, they would walk it differently.
Glitch moved slowly.
Painfully slowly.
One careful step, then a pause before the next. He hated every second of it, and Jin could feel the indignation pouring through the bond. A proud predator shouldn’t have to creep through a quarry like something afraid of its own shadow; Glitch wanted to stride through the tunnels as though every stone already belonged to him.
"Dignified got you zero kills," Jin reminded him. "Remember zero kills? This is how we reach one."
That number crushed most of Glitch’s objections.
He swallowed his pride and continued creeping.
Before they reached the first ambush site, Jin began his experiments. He wasn’t walking blindly into the same death twice.
For the first test, Glitch nudged a small pebble into the passage ahead. It skittered across the floor and stopped.
Something shifted beneath the dust, turning toward the impact. Once the pebble went still, the buried movement hesitated, then settled again.
The creature had noticed the stone.
It hadn’t attacked.
"It feels the impact," Jin murmured. "But it won’t commit when the target immediately goes quiet."
For the second test, Glitch pushed a rounded piece of rubble down a slight slope. The stone bounced and rolled along the passage, and this time the buried creature followed.
A faint trail moved beneath the dust, tracking the rubble’s uneven path for far longer than it had followed the first pebble. Continued movement created a trail.
For the third test, Glitch took one controlled step and froze.
The vibration beneath the floor turned toward him.
He waited.
The buried creature lost the thread.
Glitch took another step. It adjusted again, but during the next pause, its response became uncertain.
The mantis could detect each footfall. What it couldn’t do was predict where Glitch was going when those steps didn’t connect, and that gave Jin something he could actually use.
They couldn’t become invisible. They could interrupt the creature’s tracking, breaking Glitch’s movement into separate impacts while feeding it false trails to follow.
It wouldn’t be a perfect answer forever. Something stronger, deeper in the quarry, might possess senses too sharp to fool with a rolling stone. For an Iron-Shell Tunnel Mantis, however, it might be enough.
The open cut appeared ahead, with the disturbed groove from the first run still visible in the dust. Jin couldn’t tell whether the same mantis had returned to its route or another creature had taken its place; the Engine wouldn’t identify anything until it emerged.
Glitch recognized the location.
His anger surged.
This was where he had died. The debt was somewhere under that dust, waiting.
"Still," Jin ordered. "Not yet."
Every instinct in Glitch demanded that he charge into the passage.
He stopped anyway.
The first death had already changed something. Now they only needed to prove it had changed enough.