Chapter 74: This Time, He Looked Up
Chapter 74: This Time, He Looked Up
Jin checked the time once.
Fifteen minutes remained before the transport arrived.
He worked through the numbers without letting himself soften them. How far they had pushed the fight. How much health the Salamander still had. How many seconds he could spend finishing it before stopping stopped meaning anything.
A firm cutoff went into place in his head. A real number, with no room to negotiate afterward.
If the Salamander was still alive when that moment came, Jin would close the phone and walk away with two-thirds of a skill. No excuses. No regret.
Arthur had been right. A limit meant nothing unless Jin obeyed it when quitting actually hurt.
He fixed the deadline in his mind.
Then he went to finish the fight before it reached him.
Glitch created their chance.
There was no luck involved. He took a measured risk, drifting just close enough to make the Salamander believe its neck was exposed. The target looked too good to ignore.
The boss committed.
Acid Breath poured toward him at full strength.
At the final instant, Glitch broke behind the last upright scute. The plate caught the edge of the cone and dissolved completely while shielding him from the worst of it.
More importantly, the Salamander had used the full breath.
Its reserve emptied.
The gills lost their glow.
Regeneration didn’t stop. It never truly stopped while the reservoir still fed it. But the healing fell to its weakest state, a thin, uneven crawl that couldn’t keep pace with the damage already done.
Glitch was moving before the breath ended.
He raced up the tilted platform and reached the Salamander’s neck. With the last of his stamina, he hardened his foreclaws and tore through the ruined gill frills. Then he drove those claws into the same neck wounds they had spent the entire fight opening, each target chosen from what their previous clears had taught them.
The Salamander lunged toward the reservoir.
Its jaws came within inches of the glowing water. Healing fought to recover and failed.
The boss broke apart before it reached the edge.
It died with only a sliver of health left. Glitch remained hooked into its neck with barely any health of his own, no stamina, and a toxin meter burning red.
He was also completely, viciously pleased with himself.
The victory had been close.
It was always close.
But the clear belonged to them. They had done it cleanly, and Elsa’s clock still showed time remaining.
Rewards began resolving across the screen.
Jin forced himself to read each line in order. He started with the ordinary drops, drawing out the final moment instead of jumping straight to what mattered.
Boss core.
Coins.
A venom sac.
Then came the reward he had spent four clears bleeding for.
[Skill Fragment Obtained: Acid Breath — 3/3]
Jin let out a breath that shook on the way free.
The real Glitch stiffened beside him. A second later, satisfaction surged through the bond so strongly that Jin felt it all the way in his teeth.
Three.
Three out of three.
They had done it.
A boy sat on a cot with a lizard pressed against his side, both of them grinning at the same phone while one victory passed between them through a soul-link.
"Yeah," Jin said, though his voice didn’t quite hold steady. "Yeah. We got it."
He combined the fragments.
[Three Matching Skill Fragments Detected]
[Skill Book Created: Acid Breath]
Acid Breath: Condenses corrosive energy into a ranged breath attack. Charge time increases range and potency. Consumes substantial stamina and internal energy. Repeated use is severely limited by the user’s reserves.
A ranged attack.
Glitch had spent his whole existence forcing his way into claw-and-bite distance. Every fight meant chasing enemies down and getting close enough for them to hit him back.
Now the answer to every target he had ever struggled to reach sat folded inside a skill book.
Jin read the description twice.
He liked every careful restriction written into it.
It couldn’t be spammed. It demanded stamina and internal energy. Its use depended on the reserves available.
A genuine skill with a genuine price.
That was how the Engine worked. It gave him power, then made sure the cost mattered.
Jin assigned the skill.
[Compatibility Confirmed]
[Digital Avatar Learned: Acid Breath]
[Real Beast Status: Skill Pending Sync]
Only the avatar received it.
The real Glitch remained tucked against Jin’s side without the new ability. He couldn’t gain it yet. Not without a Sync Jin still couldn’t afford, and not without the food Glitch wouldn’t receive until Jin completed Meridian’s registration.
Acid Breath joined everything else waiting in the bank.
Jin wanted to test it immediately.
He had wanted to see the skill in action since the first fragment dropped. All he had to do was deploy again, point the avatar at a slime, and finally watch a ranged attack leave Glitch’s mouth.
The reset dungeon was full of targets.
One more deployment would be enough.
"Jin," Elsa said. "It’s basically here. I can hear something on the levels."
His eyes stayed on the glowing skill book.
Beyond it waited a dungeon full of things he could test the attack against.
There was also the two-hour respawn timer that would erase the value of this run if he pushed his luck one deployment too far.
Jin closed the interface.
He did not test Acid Breath.
He had allowed himself one run.
That run was finished.
"Did you get it?" Elsa asked. "Whatever you were chasing. Was it worth the last morning?"
"I got it," Jin said. "And I’m done. Phone’s away."
She had no idea what the reward actually meant. To Elsa, it was a fragment becoming a skill inside a game she believed was some kind of puzzle app.
She didn’t pretend to understand.
Relief crossed her face instead. At last, Jin had run out of reasons to keep staring at the screen.
"Good. Because you’re out of time to be weird, we have about zero minutes left."
Glitch was still pouring triumph through the bond, celebrating a reward his real body couldn’t even use yet.
Jin scratched beneath his jaw and let him enjoy it.
"You did the whole thing," he told him softly. "That route, when the acid changed — that was you. I just kept up."
Arthur was already standing.
He performed one final check of the documents, thumb running down the sealed pouch inside Jin’s jacket as he confirmed the papers yet again.
Elena adjusted the collar of the shirt she had repaired. She smoothed the strap of his bag and made him look ready for a world she would never get to watch him enter.
Jin stood between them and looked around the apartment.
Two rooms.
A curtain.
The stain left by water. The crack running through the wall. The lamp that only worked when placed at one exact angle. The blanket folded in the corner.
Sixteen years.
A quiet shift went through him as he took it all in.
The next time Jin stood inside this apartment, he wouldn’t be waking up here.
He would be coming back.
He kept that to himself. There would be time for goodbye, and they hadn’t reached it yet.
A heavy horn sounded from the levels below.
The apartment’s ancient intercom buzzed beneath it, followed by a knock that carried up the entire stairwell.
Meridian’s transport had arrived.
[Digital Avatar Skill Acquired: Acid Breath]
[Sync Available]
The victory screen still shone when someone knocked at the door.
In Jin’s first life, he had kept watching a game until the real world reached in and struck him.
This time, he locked the phone.
Then he raised his head.
"I’m ready," he said.
He didn’t know whether that was true.
Still, the run was over. The fragment belonged to him. His phone had gone dark. Everyone who mattered stood in the room, looking his way.
And for the first time across two lifetimes, when the world came knocking, Jin was already looking back.