Chapter 101: Winning Was the Easy Part
The points were already his.
Until they weren’t.
Jin pulled up the extraction map and plotted the least interesting route on it: no objectives, no marked encounters, nothing between them and the extraction zone but flat ground and forty-seven minutes of not being clever.
Beside him, Glitch made his position known with considerable determination. They had recovered a relay. Recovering one relay strongly implied the existence of other relays, so it followed, logically, that they should go and get those too.
"No."
Glitch pointed out that he felt fine.
"You feel fine because you ate, and because I stopped you from chasing that construct." As they walked, Jin ran an Appraisal scan over him, his screen tilted away out of habit.
[Joint Stability: Normal]
[Shoulder — Protective Tension: Mild]
[Respiration: Settling]
[Hydration: Acceptable]
[Energy Reserves: Reduced — Non-Critical]
[Estimate: Controlled travel sustainable. Further combat inadvisable.]
Estimate. Appraisal never promised him anything. It read the body in front of him, made an educated guess about the next hour, and the guess said Glitch could walk a long way at an easy pace but should not hit anything else today.
Good enough. Jin had built a whole strategy on good enough.
The condition weighting stayed live until they crossed the extraction line, so every minute between here and there was still being graded. The last forty-seven minutes weren’t a victory lap. They were where people gave everything back.
Marek caught up with them half a kilometre out, Bristle padding beside him with the loose-limbed satisfaction of a beast who had worked hard and was pleased about it.
"That was insane," Marek said. "That was genuinely insane. I’ve never—" He stopped to check his own display, and his eyebrows rose. "There’s a moderate marker off the east track. Recovery objective. It’s right there."
Jin followed his gesture. Twenty minutes’ detour, maybe, with no quarry and no construct nest—the sort of objective two students in decent shape could take apart without anyone getting hurt.
Marek’s score was lower than his. Bristle was tired but nowhere near spent, and Marek was still carrying half a dorm’s worth of provisions he hadn’t touched.
"You should take it," Jin said.
"You’re really stopping?"
"I’m stopping." Jin shrugged. "You still have something worth spending."
Marek hesitated. It was the specific hesitation of someone who had grown used to standing beside a person who seemed to know what he was doing and wasn’t sure about walking away from him.
Then he squared his shoulders. "Right. Yeah. I need the placement more than you do."
"You do."
"Meet at the extraction sector? If there’s time."
"If there’s time."
Marek and Bristle headed east. Jin watched them go without a flicker of doubt, because Marek wasn’t being reckless. Marek was being correct for Marek, and the two of them simply had different bins at home.
The marked route toward the extraction zone had plenty of company. Jin passed a girl walking her Silver hunting cat at a deliberate, unhurried pace, both of them relaxed—a handler who had read the six hours properly from the start. A boy trudged past beneath an untouched equipment pack, sweating after carrying the solution to problems he’d never had.
Farther along, someone’s Bronze quadruped laboured badly with its head low while its handler spoke to it in a tight, anxious voice. They had spent too early and were paying for it now, and the beast condition weighting was going to say so.
One student well ahead of them slowed, checked his beast, and let two teams overtake rather than push it. Nobody applauded. He had simply done the arithmetic and accepted the answer.
Then the route dropped toward an old drainage crossing, and Jin stopped walking.
He couldn’t have said immediately what was wrong. The crossing simply sat badly in his vision, like a corridor after someone had moved one of the walls.
He crouched at the lip and made himself actually look. Fresh cracks webbed the concrete apron, pale along the edges where the surface had spalled recently. Loose stone had been shoved into a heap on the low side by the boots and claws of everyone who had already crossed, while a dark seam of water and mud pressed out beneath one of the retaining sections. At the mouth of the crossing, the route marker stood perhaps four degrees out of true.
Appraisal took a moment with the visible structure.
[Retaining Section — Load Distribution Uneven]
[Observed Displacement: Recent]
[Moisture Intrusion: Present]
[Structural Confidence: Low]
[Note: Subsurface condition not assessable.]
Low confidence did not mean this would fail. Appraisal couldn’t see beneath the concrete any more than Jin could; all it could tell him was that the section was carrying its weight badly and that something had shifted recently.
That was enough.
Glitch nosed forward, impatient, with the extraction zone practically visible beyond the crossing.
"Hold."
The complaint rose through the bond immediately. Jin held him anyway, and Glitch stopped. Jin logged that too; yesterday, it might have needed saying twice.
Boots crunched behind them. A big student approached with a heavy armoured beast at his heel, both of them moving well and following a line straight toward the crossing.
"Wouldn’t," Jin said.
The student pulled up, more puzzled than aggressive. "It’s a marked route."
"Yeah." Jin pointed instead of arguing. "Cracks are fresh, look at the colour on the edges. That’s water coming through the seam under the retaining block, which means it’s been washing out underneath for a while. Everyone who’s crossed already shoved that gravel downslope, so the load’s sitting wrong now." He nodded toward the post. "And the marker’s leaning. Those aren’t installed at an angle."
The student looked, then looked properly. Jin watched him pick out the seep, the tilt, and the pale new cracks.
"...Huh," he said, putting out a hand to hold his beast.
A few seconds later, the retaining section let go.
It wasn’t dramatic. That was the thing about real structural failure: a low grinding crunch, a slab of concrete slumping half a metre, then a slow slide of wet gravel pouring into the channel with a noise like rain on a roof. Dust rose, the route marker toppled, and the near half of the crossing became a mud-slicked trench beneath a broken lip.
Nobody was on it.
Jin released a breath he hadn’t noticed holding. The first thing he felt wasn’t vindication at all, only the cold, unglamorous relief of a boy staring at the place where a beast’s leg could have gone.
"That would have gone through," the big student said. He sounded slightly ill. "That would have gone through with Torv on it."
"Yeah."
"...Thanks."
Jin flagged it. He would have flagged it whether or not it scored.
[Field Hazard Verified]
[Route Instability Reported Before Failure]
[Preventive Contribution Recorded]
Modest points. He’d take them. But the real return stood right beside him with a mildly tender shoulder and all four legs, and that was worth considerably more than the number.