Chapter 124: The Academy Had Its Own Food Chain
Jin did not go back to the quarry that night, and it took actual willpower.
Glitch lobbied hard.
His position came through the bond as a steady pressure of impatient certainty. Underground mantises were dangerous. The Stonehorn Ram was dangerous. Fighting one dangerous thing was obviously excellent preparation for fighting another.
"A mantis hides under the floor and stabs you when you move," Jin said, lying on his back with the phone resting dark against his chest. "The Ram is a wall with legs that runs at you. Tell me what those two things have in common besides wanting me dead."
Glitch considered this.
They both wanted Jin dead.
Surely that was enough of a connection to justify more fighting.
"That’s not a fighting style. That’s a personality trait."
The temptation was real. Tremor Sense still sat at 2/10, and the grinder inside Jin wanted the next fragment the way it always wanted the next reward—badly, immediately, and at the expense of everything sensible.
He forced himself to remember the coordination course instead: the two beats his exhaustion had stolen, and the half-second his tired mind had needed to recognize the wrong junction. That had been an artificial course filled with padded targets. Tomorrow would involve the real Glitch, real horns, and real impact.
A delayed command could injure a body that did not respawn two hours later.
Endless grinding wasn’t always optimal. Sometimes the optimal choice was sleep.
Jin ran one short timing drill instead. Stop, move, redirect—nothing that demanded strength or stamina, just enough to keep their responses sharp without pushing either of them into fatigue. When the timing stayed clean, he closed the Engine and actually slept.
It felt, distantly, like growth. The old Jin would have ground until his eyes bled; this one had finally learned that sometimes the numbers weren’t worth it.
The mandatory combat-theory briefing began six hours before the practical inside Meridian’s Hall of Records.
It was where Jin finally understood what Fifth Class meant.
He had seen the designation on his schedule for days, but until now it had registered as little more than a room number.
[Meridian Beast High School — First-Year Combat Division]
[Program: Regular Combat]
[Class Placement: Fifth Class]
[First-Year Combat Ladder: Unranked]
[First Placement Review: 53 Days]
Then the instructor placed the class structure on the hall’s main display.
Six tiers appeared side by side, with the resources assigned to each one arranged in neat columns. Jin read across the rows, then went back to the top and read them again as the floor of his understanding quietly dropped beneath him.
First Class stood at the top.
Its students received apartment-sized quarters, separate beast enclosures, premium feed, simulated sunlight, real-protein meal credits, specialist instructors, private training access, and first priority for controlled Rift opportunities.
Fifth Class—his class—received basic housing, standard meals, partial feed support, shared facilities, and the minimum combat resources required by the program.
Sixth Class stood beneath them.
Probationary.
One sufficiently poor review away from removal from the Combat Program.
Formal class placement was reviewed every eight weeks. The Combat Ladder changed constantly, but a student couldn’t earn a better room after winning a single match; ladder results mattered alongside academic performance, command ability, beast care, practical examinations, and mission records.
Jin remembered his dorm room.
The locking door. The private bed. The desk. Running water that didn’t require waiting in a queue.
After the Outer Ring, it had felt like unimaginable luxury.
And it belonged to Fifth Class.
Second from the bottom.
Jin didn’t become angry. Anger was a luxury too, and it didn’t purchase anything. His mind went directly to the part of the display that mattered.
Higher class means better feed support.
Which meant Glitch became cheaper to feed.
That was the entire system as far as Jin was concerned. The same problem he had been solving through warehouse shifts, academy work, and quarry grinding now had an official ladder attached to it, and every step upward loosened the knot that had been tightening around his finances since the Sync.
Glitch couldn’t read the display, but he followed Jin’s attention well enough. The bond filled with interest as his gaze tracked upward through the class tiers, then toward the stronger-beast examples beside them.
Higher classes contained stronger beasts.
As far as Glitch appeared concerned, Meridian had thoughtfully arranged progressively better opponents for him to fight.
Glitch found this to be an excellent and thoughtful system.
The Hall of Records contained boards far larger than the class display. Enormous illuminated lists covered the walls while holographic models of renowned Tamers and their beasts rotated slowly overhead, each name and placement hanging in the air beneath them.
The instructor introduced four major rankings.
The Meridian Combat Ladder was the academy’s internal student ranking. It affected training access, rewards, and priority for limited resources.
That was the list Jin cared about today.
The Mortal List recorded Meridian Shelter’s hundred most promising Tamers below the age of twenty.
The Earth List ranked the shelter’s strongest active Tamers—veteran Rift raiders, wall commanders, guild leaders, and the people responsible for holding back the wasteland.
Above them stood the Heaven List.
The greatest living Tamers across all of humanity.
Combat Rank measured current power, the instructor explained. Beast Quality represented the biological grade of a beast’s current form—its natural advantages, base capacity, and the strength it could express at a given Combat Rank.
The public lists measured something else entirely: confirmed victories, mission accomplishments, Rift clears, Astral Tide contributions, and the reputation built from what a Tamer had actually achieved.
A high Combat Rank could make someone powerful. It did not automatically grant them a place on one of the lists.
The complete Quality ladder appeared once.
Iron → Bronze → Silver → Gold → Platinum → Diamond → Epic → Legendary
Above Legendary, ancient records named one final theoretical grade: Mythic.
Jin’s attention went first to the lowest rung, where Glitch officially belonged, before following the ladder upward.
The highest tiers felt like weather on another planet. Most students in the hall would never contract a beast above Silver-quality. Legendary was something most people would live their entire lives without witnessing, while Mythic belonged to ancient records, disputed remains, and stories modern humanity could no longer verify.
Jin had no immediate desire to see his name on the Heaven List.
He cared about the Meridian ladder and the feed credits attached to it. That was the current extent of his ambition.
Glitch regarded the ranking boards the way another beast might regard a menu—a long, thoughtful, hungry survey of the many future opponents the academy had conveniently arranged in order.
The combat-theory lesson was the part Jin actually needed, and within minutes it quietly dismantled half his plan.
The instructor used moving beast models and a short recording of an old arena battle to explain combat counters. The principle itself was simple.
Combat Rank represented present strength.
Quality represented the strength and natural advantages of a beast’s current evolutionary form.
Neither automatically decided every fight.
Body structure, skill compatibility, terrain, sensory ability, command quality, and tactical discipline could overturn an expected result. However, the instructor was firm about one point: cleverness did not erase a genuine power difference.
A weaker beast couldn’t simply think its way through a stronger opponent. It had to create a real advantage and then successfully exploit it.
Intelligence wasn’t a replacement for strength.
It was how someone discovered where strength could be applied.
Then the instructor summoned a holographic charging beast and demonstrated that defeating one was not as simple as standing beside a wall and dodging at the last moment.
Jin watched the model shorten its charge, stopping early to disrupt the timing of an expected dodge. On the next run it altered direction in the middle of its approach, then refused an obvious lure entirely.
Rather than pursuing its opponent into open ground, it slowed, turned, and planted itself in front of its tamer’s marker.
Several of Jin’s ideas for fighting the Ram quietly died.
He had been thinking about the Stonehorn like one of the quarry mantises: bait the commitment, then punish the overextension.
A properly trained charging beast did not have to give him that opening. It could feint, refuse the bait, change direction, or simply defend rather than pursue.
If Corven had trained his Ram properly, Jin’s plan to let it charge past Glitch and attack its flank was worth exactly nothing.
The matchup display updated as the lesson ended, and Jin noticed a line he had missed before.
[Corven Ashe]
[Fourth Class]
[Contracted Beast: Stonehorn Ram]
[Quality: Bronze]
[Combat Rank: Rank 1 Novice, 3-Star]
Fourth Class.
One tier above Jin.
That meant better feed, better training access, and more resources. Corven and his Ram had simply received more investment than Jin and Glitch.
They possessed the same Combat Rank on paper.
That did not mean they had received the same preparation.
Jin studied the panel for another few seconds, but there was nowhere else for his eyes to go. He couldn’t peek behind the public information.
Data Appraisal could examine another Tamer’s beast, but only at the surface level. It gave Jin the Ram’s registered species, Quality, Combat Rank, visible condition, and the physical details he could observe well enough for the talent to measure. That alone was a powerful advantage for a supposedly unimpressive C-Rank support talent.
The Engine was different.
It could register and scan only a beast Jin legitimately owned and personally contracted. Corven’s Ram could never become a playable profile or avatar, and Jin could not see its hidden bloodline, complete skill set, optimization potential, or private combat records.
He had the public panel, basic appraisal data, his own eyes, and ordinary analysis.
That was his entire toolkit.
For this fight, he would have to win like everyone else.