Chapter 98: A Fight Worth Feeding
"You’ll still get your full feed for today. This just gives you extra water and minerals, and maybe you won’t act starving again ten minutes from now." Jin nudged the bowl closer. "And I refuse to carry a beast who passes out from sheer dramatics."
Glitch gave in and ate.
Every bite carried the slow misery of a creature enduring terrible injustice for the sake of an uncaring world. He kept glaring at Jin while he chewed, but the bowl steadily emptied anyway.
Jin used Appraisal again. Nothing suggested an immediate bad reaction, though the expected benefits would remain theoretical until Glitch had digested the ashgrass. He registered the sample for resource-sampling points as well.
[Resource Sample Registered — Common Ashgrass]
[Correct Identification: Confirmed]
[Deployment Points: 6]
A weed, correctly recognized, had earned him six points.
Six points from the same talent everyone had dismissed as desk work.
While Jin packed away the rest of the feed, he noticed an evaluator farther along the shelf watching him. She tapped something into her display, her expression revealing nothing, then continued on without a word.
Once three hours had passed, Jin checked every number again and finally faced the result he had been trying not to see.
Glitch was doing well. More than well. His breathing had barely risen, his hydration remained solid, and he showed no sign of protecting the injured shoulder. Muscular strain was low, and he had consumed far less than Jin’s projection, leaving the emergency portion untouched and the evening recovery meal secure.
Everything Jin had planned to preserve had remained safe.
His score had not.
A few beacons, some samples, one reported hazard, and a minor transport task put them on a slow, comfortable path toward the fifty points required to qualify. They still had plenty of time.
Day Four would be an easy pass.
It would also give them almost nothing.
Jin lowered himself beside a rock, rested his back against it, and opened the leaderboard. The problem had changed its appearance, but underneath, it was familiar.
His plan had been built so failure was nearly impossible, and he had refined every part of it. Somewhere during that process, though, he had started treating survival as victory. Around two hours earlier, those things had stopped meaning the same thing.
A safe Day Four would earn him a note in the assessment report and put nothing useful into the feed bin. Their supply would run low before the assessment ended, forcing Glitch to work one of the remaining days without enough food. Every gram Jin protected today would become worthless when that happened.
For the opening three hours, caution had been exactly what he needed. He had simply kept using it after the situation changed. Worse, he had been proud of how efficiently he was doing so while the day slipped away around him.
That did not mean he should panic and send Glitch charging into the nearest construct pen. He would not answer one mistake by making the opposite one.
Still, the question Jin had been asking himself was gone, replaced by another he could not ignore.
Not how little can we spend.
Which risk is worth feeding?
He got to his feet. From then on, he studied the field for something different: one objective whose reward was large enough to deserve its cost.
Forty minutes later, the field offered one.
Every display across the deployment zone activated together.
[Priority Objective Activated]
[Objective: Recover the Quarry Relay]
[Deployment Value: High]
[Merit Credit Bonus Available]
[Opposition: Active Training Constructs]
[Time Remaining: Limited]
The words Merit Credit Bonus Available made Jin’s pulse jump.
He opened the location data. The quarry lay in the rough southern section, a terraced pit cut through stone and filled with old machinery, and it ranked among the most difficult areas anywhere on the field. Movement had already begun across the deployment zone. Students changed direction, beasts turned south, and half the year reached the same conclusion at once.
This was the objective worth taking.
It would not solve their entire problem. Jin understood that before he finished reading. The possible reward meant several days of feed, not a month. It was breathing room, not a permanent answer.
But when the rest of the supply fit into a handful of containers, several days mattered.
He lacked nearly every detail he would normally demand. The number of constructs was unknown, as were their positions. He had no safe route, no confirmation of additional quarry hazards, and no reliable estimate for what recovering the relay would cost in the only resource he truly cared about.
His old instinct told him to wait. Let another team enter first, watch what happened, and learn from their mistakes.
The countdown had already begun.
The objective would belong to whoever reached it and completed it. Any information gained by waiting might arrive only after the opportunity was gone.
Jin looked at Glitch. The shoulder remained stable, strain was low, and there was no compensation in his movement. He still had fuel to use.
He could do this.
That did not make him safe. The bruise had required three days of careful handling to keep from turning into something worse, and one bad hit could still end the entire assessment.
Glitch had already fixed his attention southward. All morning, he had been waiting for Jin to give him something real to chase, and his whole posture said it had taken long enough.
"We make one clean attempt," Jin told him. "We enter, take the relay, and get out. If that shoulder changes at all, we leave immediately. Not when it’s convenient. The moment it changes. I won’t care what the board says. Deal?"
Glitch answered through the contract with fierce and complete certainty.
He had already started forward.
They joined the rest of the year heading south. When the land opened ahead, Jin finally saw the quarry properly: stone shelves descending into the pit around rusting machinery, with marked constructs moving below and surrounding the relay. There were more than he had wanted, and their positions were far better organized than he had hoped.
He should have started counting them. He should have been checking approach lines and searching the terrain for the least dangerous route down.
Instead, for one useless moment, his mind ignored all of that and converted the quarry into another calculation.
The merit credit it might award, divided by the cost of Iron-grade formulation, multiplied into meals.
No exact bonus appeared in the notice. If the reward landed near the upper end, though, it could pay for several days of Glitch eating properly. Days Jin did not possess and had no other way to obtain.
That morning, for the first time, Jin looked at a fight and measured it in food.