Chapter 136: Standing Still Was the Harder Half
Jin did not invent a new trick for the final attempt. He crouched before Glitch and explained the problem plainly.
"It doesn’t need you to defeat everything. It needs to know you’ll still be standing in that spot when things get loud. That’s it. That’s the whole job. You hold even when something walks away and you want to chase it."
Glitch stared at him, and a flat wave of boredom answered through the bond.
"Extremely," Jin agreed. "Do it anyway."
Lucian went down. Glitch took the marker without glancing at the Falcon, turned outward, settled his weight, and became furniture.
The Falcon watched him for four seconds.
Then it flew.
The first construct approached the casualty zone forty seconds later. Glitch shifted to block its route and angled his body across the lane, doing it entirely through posture and controlled movement—no lunge, no contact, nothing that violated the medical clearance.
The construct probed, found no opening, and withdrew.
Glitch did not follow, though every line of his body wanted to. Jin could feel the hot pull through the bond: the urge to finish the thing, prove the point, and chase.
"Hold," Jin said.
Glitch held.
He stayed exactly where he was beside a boy he didn’t particularly like because that was the responsibility he had accepted.
Ninety metres away, a second signal flared near the extraction mechanism, and the Falcon stopped during its approach. It looked back.
Jin watched a Silver-quality beast hang in the air and think. Its head turned as it measured the distance, the construct, the boundary line the machine had failed to cross, and the small black shape standing in the guard marker exactly where it had been left.
The Falcon turned around and finished the job.
The extraction mechanism lit. The release engaged, and the bird returned to Lucian eight seconds later, faster than strictly necessary, wings spread wide.
"Time," Kade said.
Lucian removed the casualty band and went to his Falcon before doing anything else—before he stood completely, before he looked at Kade, the board, or the timer. He placed one hand flat against its breast feathers.
"You finished it," he said softly.
The bird pressed its head into his shoulder.
Jin looked away at a wall.
"Once is not a habit," Kade said.
"Yes, sir."
"It hesitated. It lost time. It returned sooner than necessary, and the little one needed his handler’s command to keep him from chasing something he would have enjoyed chasing." Kade closed his slate. "But it deliberately left you with another beast and completed the objective. That’s a beginning."
Lucian nodded. He didn’t ask for more than that.
Then he turned to Glitch.
"Thank you," he said seriously. "You did the harder half."
Glitch inflated.
There was no other word for it. The lizard rose approximately two centimetres, lifted his head, and became so profoundly pleased with himself that Jin felt it in his teeth.
Great. I’ve spent a morning teaching another beast independence, and mine has come out of it more dependent on compliments.
"I watched your matches," Lucian said as they left the annex.
"Mm."
"You read opponents better than anyone in Fifth Class. You adapt faster than your ladder position suggests." He paused. "You lost to Voss because he decided what you would find."
Jin glanced sideways.
"You noticed the weak section of his web. You correctly suspected it was bait. You were right about all of it." Lucian shrugged slightly. "But he’d arranged everything else so the suspicious opening remained your best route. You were reading the battlefield well. He’d started building the battlefield you were reading."
Jin thought of a wide, clear, beautifully convenient passage in a quarry late the previous night.
"You’re good at finding useful information," Lucian said. "Elian won by deciding which information would be useful to you."
"Yeah," Jin said.
He did not say the rest. The rest involved a dungeon that didn’t exist and an avatar that had died inside it.
He couldn’t out-signal the commander. He had proven that several different ways. Jin didn’t speak its language, and every vibration or disturbance he noticed was suspect now because the creature had learned how to feed him information.
But the Falcon had completed the objective for one reason, and it wasn’t because Jin had outsmarted it.
Lucian’s guidance had stopped being available.
The commander’s control only mattered while its orders could actually reach the mantises.
Jin already knew exactly how vibration moved through the quarry. He had catalogued it without considering it a weapon: solid stone carried clear signals, while rails carried them far along narrow routes. Loose rubble scattered them. Cracks and separated shelves weakened them, and collapsed debris could interrupt a connected path entirely.
He wasn’t going to silence an entire colony. That was a fantasy, and fantasies got avatars killed.
One section, though?
One small group of hunters cut off from the voice telling them what to do?
He wanted to know what an Iron-Shell Tunnel Mantis did when nobody was speaking to it.
"Astor."
"Hm?"
"You stopped walking."
"Yeah," Jin said, starting again. "Thinking about dinner."
He returned to his room at six. The respawn timer had expired hours earlier.
The real Glitch curled on the end of the bed with the same minor tournament injuries he had started the day with. He had spent the entire exercise standing still and receiving praise—the most successful day of his life, by his own evaluation.
Jin lay down and opened the Engine.
[Shattered Iron Quarry—Incomplete]
[Tremor Sense Fragment: 5/10]
[Fragments Required: 5]
The digital avatar materialized at the quarry entrance, whole and unmarked, every scale intact.
Anticipation came through the bond so hot it was almost a growl. A sharp image followed: the scarred commander somewhere in the quarry, waiting to be hunted. Glitch wanted to begin immediately.
"We’re not fighting it," Jin said.
The bond went abruptly still.
"We’re not. Not tonight."
He reviewed his own notes and the routes he had personally charted: cracked shelves, rubble fields, long rusted stretches of hauling rail, narrow junctions, and old supports still holding ceilings they had supported for a century.
"It won every exchange yesterday because it decided what I got to see and what the others got to do," Jin said. "Fine. So we take one of those away."
He selected a promising section of terrain with two narrow approaches, a rail running through it, and a weakened support near one junction. The area would still need searching, and he would need to draw only a small number of mantises inside before trying anything.
"We find a few of them," he said. "Then we cut that piece of the quarry off from whatever is talking to them."
A questioning pulse came back through the bond, Glitch’s attention fixed on what would happen after that connection disappeared.
"Then we find out what they do when nobody’s telling them."
The previous night, Jin had tried to speak through the floor and discovered that something down there spoke more convincingly than he ever would.
Tonight, he wasn’t going to imitate it.
Jin sent Glitch back into the dark.
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