Chapter 143: Say It Uncertain
At 0600 on the day before departure, the Beast Development Center took Glitch with the brisk indifference of a place that processed two hundred animals a week.
Fifth Class allocation. A weighing plate, a measurement frame, a joint articulation check, a general health panel, and a low-intensity output test against a padded resistance block.
No bloodline profiling. No evolution pathing. Jin had confirmed that at the desk twice and a third time on the way in, and the technician had given him the look people give nervous students.
He was not nervous about the test. He was nervous about one line on the intake form.
Declared skills:
Jin wrote Harden.
Then he wrote Tremor Sense.
He had gone back and forth on it for most of the night and had come down on the side of declaring, for the same reason he had come down on the side of syncing.
He was going into an underground Rift with a team, on a recorded assessment, and he was going to use it. He would use it in the first hour. There was no version of that mission where Glitch felt something through the floor, and Jin said nothing, and there was no version where he said something four times, and nobody asked how.
An undeclared skill discovered on a mission recording was a discipline matter. A declared skill was a line on a form.
Acid Breath stayed off the form, because Acid Breath was not going to come out of Glitch’s throat in front of anybody. Jin had run that decision to the end, and it held. Tremor Sense was information. Acid Breath was a corrosive attack from an Iron-quality lizard with a public file that said Harden, and no cover story in the world survived a scorch mark on a wall.
The examiner was a thin man named Pell who read the form, looked up, and read it again.
"Tremor Sense."
"Yeah."
"On a Grey Rock Lizard."
"They’re earth-aligned," Jin said. "They den in rock. The sensory pathway’s already there; it just isn’t developed because nobody bothers."
Pell put the form down.
"And you bothered."
"I’ve got C-Rank Data Appraisal," Jin said. "Most people use it for diet calculations. I noticed unusual vibration responses during terrain training and kept reinforcing them. Took more than a week."
That was, technically, true in every individual clause.
Pell looked at him with the specific expression of a man deciding how much of his day to spend on this.
"That’s not a standard conditioning path."
"No."
"It’s not in any of the manuals."
"I know. I checked."
Pell exhaled and made a note, and Jin let his shoulders stay exactly where they were.
The examination itself took forty minutes.
Glitch behaved, which was to say he lay on the weighing plate like a sandbag and had to be lifted onto the measurement frame by two technicians, one of whom said something under his breath about lizards.
Pell checked every joint, tested Glitch’s weight on each limb, and spent extra time on the last traces of his tournament bruising. The tissue had recovered cleanly—no instability, no restricted movement, and nothing that would keep him out of the Rift.
Then the numbers came out, and the room got slower.
Pell went through them once. Then he pulled up Glitch’s Meridian intake record and put the two sets side by side on the display.
He did not say anything for a while.
"Mass gain’s inside range," he said finally. "Barely. Density isn’t."
"Is that bad?"
"It’s not bad." Pell tapped the older record. "It’s fast. Muscle attachment, bone density, joint tolerance. This is what I’d expect from a well-fed Bronze at eight or nine months."
"He eats a lot."
"Everything eats a lot," Pell said, not unkindly. "Most of it doesn’t do this."
He worked for another minute. Jin stood and looked at the far wall and thought about nothing in particular, which was a skill he had spent two lifetimes developing.
"I’m not escalating this," Pell said eventually. "There’s nothing here that suggests illegal treatment. Iron-quality beasts have a range, and yours is at the top of it, and the top of the range is where all the interesting ones live."
"Okay."
"I am recording it for comparison." He turned the display so Jin could see, which Jin appreciated and did not enjoy. "Pre-deployment and post-deployment, and again at class review. If the curve keeps doing this, somebody upstairs is going to want a proper workup, and at Fourth Class you’d be eligible for one."
Jin looked at the two columns of numbers.
"Right," he said.
[MERIDIAN — BEAST FILE UPDATED: Glitch (Astor, J.)][Quality: Iron — Grey Rock Lizard][Combat Rank: 1 — Novice, 3-Star][Declared Skills: Harden; Tremor Sense][Note: Physical development rate above species baseline. Flagged for comparative review.]
He walked out with his beast, his file, and a permanent line on it in somebody else’s handwriting.
Fourteen percent of his feed allocation, one honest declaration, and a flag. That was the price of being able to hear the floor.
He decided it had been worth it, and then spent the entire walk back to the dormitory rechecking that decision, which was how he knew he was not certain.
By the time the formation check began at 1000, Jin had completed his own baseline medical scan and the emergency-protocol certification. The first confirmed that he was fit for deployment. The second confirmed that he could activate a beacon, repeat an extraction code, and follow instructions Meridian had already made him read twice.
The formation check was in a bare training hall, and it took eleven minutes and went badly for him in a small way.
Wren ran it plainly. Tally out front, twenty meters. Anvil on the line behind her, feet planted, that low boar body doing the one thing it was extremely good at. Ash pacing at the back with heat coming off its shoulders. Glitch and Jin in the middle.
"Movement drill," Wren said. "Instructors are going to walk the perimeter at random intervals. Astor, you report anything Glitch picks up."
The first three were easy. Somebody walked the north wall, and Jin said north, and somebody crossed behind them, and Jin said behind. Ren Colby said, "Oh, that’s useful," with such open enthusiasm that Dolan snorted.
The fourth one Jin got wrong by not saying it.
Glitch caught something to the east. It was faint and smeared, and it might have been the ventilation plant under the floor, and Jin waited to see if it resolved, because he did not want to point at a fan.
It took him about five seconds to decide.
By then the instructor was already at the east wall and had been for three of those seconds.
Wren stopped the drill.
"You had that."
"I wasn’t sure."
"I know." She walked over. She was not angry, which somehow made it worse. "Say it anyway."
"It might’ve been machinery."
"Then say possible movement east, low confidence, might be machinery." She held up a hand before he could answer. "That’s a sentence. It takes two seconds. I can do something with that. I can turn Tally, I can hold the line, I can do nothing and keep it in my head."
"And if it’s a fan?"
"Then it’s a fan, and we lost nothing." Wren looked at him steadily. "What I can’t do is act on information that arrives after the thing does. You waiting until you’re certain means I get perfect data one second too late, every time, forever."
Dolan, from the back: "She’s right, you know."
"I know she’s right," Jin said.
He did know. That was the annoying part. He had spent nine days in a quarry making certain of every single thing before committing, because in the quarry being wrong cost him a respawn timer and being right cost him nothing.
He had built a habit inside a system where hesitation was free.
"Say it uncertain," Wren said. "Label it. That’s the whole job."
"Understood."
She ran the drill four more times, and Jin called two of them wrong out loud, at low confidence, immediately.
Nobody died of it.
They collected equipment at 1200. Tier 5 allocation: standardized field suit, emergency beacon, ration packs, first-aid, recovery kit, tracking tag.
Ren Colby packed his in a specific order and then unpacked and repacked it.
"You’ve done that twice," Dolan said.
"I know."
"Why?"
"Because I don’t know what I’m doing," Ren said, "and this is the part I can do."
Dolan opened his mouth, looked at him, and closed it again.
Jin put his tag on, clipped his beacon, and went back to his room to lie down early, because tomorrow he had to walk somewhere and he intended to arrive at that with as much stored energy as physically possible.
Glitch lay next to the bunk with his chin on the floor and the sense on, listening to a building, learning it.