Chapter 97: Every Point Had a Price
Jin chose a pace slow enough to be embarrassing.
Their first target was a navigation beacon with barely any value attached to it. It required the correct route and nothing else—no sprint, no fight, no spectacle.
Glitch hated it immediately.
Rolling frustration flooded the bond. Other beasts were running, already ahead, already winning. Meanwhile, Glitch had spent three straight days being told to restrain himself, lower his output, use half his strength, and now Jin expected him to walk.
"They’re trading stamina for points," Jin said. "Stamina comes from food. At the moment, every point costs us something, and most of these aren’t worth buying."
Glitch’s answer arrived at once as a sharp flare of offended certainty. Points earned by beating someone should not cost anything.
"That isn’t how the world works."
Glitch remained convinced it ought to be.
Jin stopped arguing and focused on the terrain. The beacon rewarded judgment rather than speed, which made it the cheapest kind of objective available. Attention was the only thing they had to spend.
He chose a route that avoided the steepest ground and gave Glitch no reason to drive hard off the injured side. They reached the beacon without changing Glitch’s breathing.
[Navigation Beacon 1 — Registered]
[Deployment Points: 4]
Four points.
The leaderboard continued as though nothing had happened.
While they moved on, Jin used Appraisal on Glitch. It was the one area where his publicly mocked C-rank talent was genuinely excellent, even if there was nothing impressive-looking about it.
[Respiration: Baseline +6%]
[Hydration: Good]
[Muscular Strain: Low]
[Shoulder Compensation: None Detected]
[Projected Consumption vs. Plan: Under]
Under plan.
Good.
That single word covered the whole strategy. Spend less than expected, and whatever remained became an advantage later.
Appraisal couldn’t reveal what waited beyond the next ridge. It wouldn’t warn him about a hazard he hadn’t found or guarantee that the next hour would stay easy.
What it could do was measure Glitch’s current condition far more accurately than Jin could by looking alone. On a day when stamina functioned like currency, a precise estimate of fuel mattered more than most students understood.
Calculating beast diets at a desk job.
That was how the examiners had described his future.
Suited for logistics.
Jin collected the next beacon and kept his mouth shut.
The first serious temptation appeared ninety minutes into the assessment, placed so perfectly that the field designers had probably expected exactly this reaction.
[Optional Controlled Encounter — Available]
[Deployment Value: Moderate-High]
A construct pen stood thirty meters off their route. Two mobile units waited inside, both the same general type Glitch had already defeated twice during the week.
Glitch saw them and stopped thinking about everything else. His whole body turned toward the pen, attention narrowing until the route, the assessment, and every other concern might as well have vanished.
Yes.
Every muscle said yes.
Jin worked through the exchange in silence. They could win, almost certainly. Glitch had handled more difficult opponents on Day Two, and that had been immediately after receiving the bruise.
But the fight would demand explosive movement, sudden changes of direction, and impacts travelling through a body with one side already being protected. Afterward, Glitch would need a real portion of the first field ration to replace what he burned.
The reward was moderate-high. Good points, but bad value.
"No," Jin said.
The outrage that hit him through the bond was complete and highly dramatic.
"It costs too much. We take that fight now, and the third-hour ration gets eaten at ninety minutes. Then we spend the second half of the assessment rationing what’s left."
He turned down the lower route, taking them away from the pen.
"We’ll find a better one."
Glitch answered with a long surge of disbelief, irritation, and absolute rejection of the possibility that any better opportunity would appear.
He followed anyway.
Every step carried resentment.
Jin walked away from points he knew they could earn and felt the weakness in his plan settle beside him. It refused to leave.
At the two-hour mark, they stopped beneath a shelf of rock for shade. That was when Jin noticed the weeds.
At first, there was no better word for them. Low plants with grey-green leaves and thick stems grew from the broken soil in scattered patches. Scrubby field growth, the sort of thing a hundred students had passed throughout the morning without giving it a second look.
But resource sampling was one of the listed point categories, and foraging had also been specifically allowed.
Ever since Jin’s Awakening became public, people had treated his talent as something useful for planning diets at a desk. He crouched beside the nearest clump and activated Appraisal.
[Field Sample — Common Ashgrass]
[Classification: Low-Grade Emergency Fodder]
[Common Use: Field-Tamer supplementary ration]
[Energy Density: Very Low]
[Trace Minerals: Present — Moderate]
[Moisture Content: High]
Jin read the result once, then again.
Ashgrass.
He remembered the name from a training manual he had skimmed during transport. At the time, he had filed it under information that would never become relevant.
He still didn’t trust the readout by itself.
Jin examined the plant directly. Its colour matched throughout, none of the stems were broken, and there was no discoloration around the base. Then he checked the nearby plants and the soil, looking for the contamination signs listed in field manuals.
A second clump grew six meters away. He collected another sample and compared the two.
[Contamination Indicators: None Detected in Sampled Material]
[Compatibility — Grey Rock Lizard: Acceptable in Limited Quantity]
[Note: Not a substitute for formulated feed.]
Limited quantity.
Not a replacement.
Appraisal made the restriction clear, and Jin accepted it. The other option was pretending a common weed could properly fuel a 3-Star combat beast, which was exactly the sort of stupidity that ended with a penalty at extraction.
Still, ashgrass had value.
Its moisture content was high, the trace minerals were useful, and its bulk could make a ration more filling while supporting both hydration and digestion. What it could not do was replace even one measure of the formulated feed Glitch needed for energy.
Jin mixed a small amount into part of the third-hour ration, then sealed the rest away for later. The total formulated feed requirement had not changed. Ashgrass only helped this serving do more.
Glitch looked into the bowl.
Then he looked at Jin as though the foundation of their contract had just been personally betrayed.
"It’s nutritionally suitable."
Glitch’s posture made his position clear.
Nutrition had not been consulted, and its opinion was not welcome.