Chapter 106: The Best Thing That Happened All Week
The construct activated ninety seconds later, and Glitch beat it by about a quarter of a second.
Watching through the glass, Jin caught the tell only in the replay inside his own head: dust shifting under one foot as the thing loaded its weight, the low change in its running vibration. Glitch had already moved.
He took the center angle instead of circling, cutting down the distance the construct’s swing had to work with, and turned his good side into the contact line without appearing to think about it. His claws hardened. Rather than block the first strike, he redirected it past his flank, slipped underneath, and drove a foreclaw into the scoring joint at the construct’s hip.
Too hard. Jin saw it and winced as the joint crunched instead of merely disabling, the excess force obvious to anyone with an eye for it.
Glitch felt it too. He pulled the second strike, took the leg out with something far more measured, and left the construct crippled but functional instead of reduced to scrap.
Corrected. Not clean. The evaluators would write it down, and they would be right to, but Glitch had fought Meridian constructs on Days Two and Four. A promising 3-Star beast learning their movements over a week was publicly explainable.
Then the construct dragged itself into a side passage, and Glitch went after it.
Jin’s whole chest tightened. He knew where the habit came from; in Rustwater, wounded enemies left alive came back, and consequences had hammered finish it into Glitch.
But the extraction beacon lay the other way. The construct was crippled, and this course was not Rustwater.
Glitch was already three strides down the wrong passage when Jin opened his first window.
"Objective. Leave it."
Glitch took one more step. Even from across the field, Jin could see the reluctance in it. Then he stopped, turned his head toward the retreating construct for a beat, and came back onto the route.
Jin closed the window. The command had been necessary. Glitch knew how to win a fight; he did not yet reliably know when the fight had stopped being the point.
[Command Windows Remaining: 2]
The short route into the final section crossed a damaged platform, and Jin saw the danger before Glitch did.
He could not Appraise it properly from this angle. They were too far apart, with too much between them, but four days of habit had taught him enough to read the visible signs even at a distance: loose debris trickling from underneath and one support sitting at a slightly wrong angle.
Glitch reached the edge at speed.
Jin’s thumb moved to the second window and stopped there, hovering, because Glitch had slowed.
He placed one foreclaw on the platform’s edge and pressed with deliberate care. The surface shifted under him. He backed off a full step, then spent two or three seconds studying the crossing with the same fixed attention Jin had given a drainage channel on Day Four, while a big student and a heavy beast waited behind him.
Glitch had been there. He had watched the retaining wall give way eleven seconds after Jin refused to cross it.
Now he turned away from the platform and took the long way around.
Jin lifted his thumb from the window. The unstable crossing had happened only two days ago, and it had been entirely real. Glitch had learned from watching his handler stop and be careful in front of him.
The beacon was in sight when he found the casualty.
An articulated rescue mannequin lay beneath a blue Meridian marker, its legs pinned under a light collapsed framework. Down a separate approach, moving without hurry, came a second active construct.
Glitch stopped.
Through the glass, Jin stood with both hands flat on the rail and felt only the broad shape of the conflict through the bond. There were no words and nothing resembling a sentence, just a snarl of competing pulls.
The beacon was right there. Walking past the casualty would complete the primary objective, but it would not prove Glitch understood everything else the course was testing.
Glitch looked at the blue marker, then moved between it and the construct.
Jin received no reason through the bond. He got the action and the posture: low, planted, angled to cover the thing behind him. It pulled his mind back to Day Three, when Glitch had put his own hardened flank between a simulated casualty and a strike he could have ignored.
Blue marker meant this one was his to keep alive. Glitch had learned that with his body three days ago, and he had not needed telling twice.
Then he tried to move the framework, and Jin nearly lost his nerve.
Glitch forced himself under the collapsed edge and heaved, putting the load straight through his bruised side. Appraisal caught it during the half-second Jin had a clear line of sight.
[Protective Tension: Rising]
[Weight Distribution: Loading Bruised Shoulder]
[Joint Stability: Normal]
[Continued loading likely to aggravate existing contusion]
Jin’s thumb landed on the second window. He had the command formed and ready—stop, other side—and his mouth was already open.
Glitch stopped first.
He had felt it himself. Jin watched him check his stance, shift the weight off the shoulder, and rebuild his approach from the ground up. He repositioned until his healthy flank was under the frame, hardened his claws into the floor for traction, then dropped lower so the force ran through his hips instead of his back.
After that, he moved the framework only as far as the casualty’s upper body. There was no heroic full extraction and no attempt to lift the whole structure, only enough movement to clear the marker’s head and chest before he stopped.
Jin closed the window without using it.
His hand shook slightly where it rested on the rail. On Day Five, he had needed to order Glitch to release a pin that was twisting that shoulder. Today, Glitch had recognized the same danger and worked around it without being told.
There was no notification. Nothing on Jin’s display acknowledged it at all.
It was still the best thing that happened all week.
The construct arrived, and Glitch fought it the way Jin had taught him yesterday.
He did not try to win. He simply refused to lose ground, keeping himself between the threat and the blue marker while making every step toward the casualty expensive. His movements stayed small, his turns short, and his tail lay across the best approach line as a barrier instead of a weapon. He redirected two attacks and never once chased.
Then the construct did the smart thing. It broke away and backed down the open approach, offering its damaged side and a clean pursuit.
Glitch’s entire body wanted it. Jin felt the pull surge up the bond like heat.
Glitch looked at the retreating construct, then back at the casualty marker.
He stayed.