Chapter 141: Fifth-Class Access
He had been to five places at Meridian. His room, his classes, Incoming Supply, the assigned training halls, and the arena. That was it. He had built a route between them the way he built a route through anything, which was the shortest one, and had never deviated from it.
The Rift Preparation Centre had two floors.
Fifth Class got the first one. Survival briefings, general Rift-creature records, emergency extraction procedure, standard tracking tags, communication gear, and a mandatory safety exercise with a queue of forty students in it.
The stairs to the second floor had a reader panel. Jin held his card to it out of curiosity.
[Access Denied — Class 4 or above]
[Restricted: Mission recordings, unstable-Rift incident reports, advanced creature files, casualty analysis archive]
He stood there for a second.
The first-floor safety course included simplified failure examples. The complete records—what had gone wrong, what the teams had missed, and what the dead had done in their final minutes—were reserved for students already trusted with broader field access.
Knowledge was another resource Meridian rationed by class.
The Equipment Lending Hall was worse in a quieter way. Tier 5 allocation was a standardized field suit in three sizes, a basic emergency beacon, ration packs, first-aid, and a recovery kit.
Through the counter grille he could see the Tier 4 racks. Fitted armor on individual stands with name cards. Emergency barrier units, the real ones, not the single-use kind. Larger allowances. Specialized rigs built around specific beast types, one of them clearly made for something with wings.
At the Environmental Training Complex he got into the shared basic terrain rooms during his assigned hours, along with about sixty other people.
The reader panel refused him at six other doors.
[Aerial Current Chamber — Class 4]
[Subterranean Arena — Class 4]
[Extreme Temperature Range — Class 3]
[Low-Visibility Simulation — Class 4]
[Aquatic Combat — Class 4]
[Urban Ruin Course — Class 3]
Jin stood in front of the aerial current chamber for a while, listening to the wind system cycle behind the door.
That explained part of Mira.
He had spent an entire match thinking she was simply better than him at reading a flying beast’s approach, and she was, but she had also had access to a room. She had walked into a chamber that generated the exact conditions she needed and practiced in it for hours at a time, on a schedule, with an instructor.
The classes did not just get better beasts. They got to improve faster, and the improvement was what earned the next class, which got you a better room.
He thought about that the whole way to the Beast Development Centre, and then he stopped thinking about anything else at all.
Fifth Class access covered basic health scans, weight and muscle tracking, joint checks, and general nutrition advice.
Behind the far partition, past another reader panel, were the things he actually wanted.
[Skill capacity analysis — Class 4]
[Evolution path consultation — Class 4]
[Bloodline profiling — Class 4]
[Personalized development planning — Class 4]
Jin looked at the fourth line for a long moment.
Everything Jin wanted for Glitch was on the other side of that door. And on the other side of that door was a specialist whose entire job was noticing when an Iron-quality Grey Rock Lizard was developing in a direction its species did not have.
He turned around and went back to his room.
The pre-deployment beast scan would record Glitch’s general condition, current combat output, declared public skills, physical measurements, and injury state. The mission system would record Jin’s discipline, command decisions, and team performance separately.
Fifth Class, so no full bloodline workup and no evolution analysis. He had confirmed that at the desk.
But it would establish a baseline. A clean, dated, official one, with numbers in it, that every future scan would be compared against.
Which brought him back to the problem he had been walking away from all evening.
He sat down on the bunk and opened the Engine.
[Bound Beast: Glitch]
[Pending Transfer]
[— Skill: Tremor Sense]
[— Accumulated Physical Development: Stored]
[— Accumulated Combat Experience: Stored]
[Sync: All pending values. Partial transfer unavailable.]
There it was.
The avatar had Tremor Sense. The real Glitch, asleep on the floor with one foreleg over his nose, did not, and would not, until Jin pressed a button.
And the button did not do one thing. It never had. Every quarry run since the previous Sync was sitting inside that panel as one accumulated transfer. The skill was welded to the growth, and the Engine had never offered him the option of taking only part.
Meridian’s public file listed Harden.
Acid Breath already existed in Glitch’s real body, but Jin had never registered or used it in front of the academy. The basic scan would compare declared abilities and combat output; it would not politely solve his secrecy problem for him.
He could enter the Rift with the file unchanged, leave Tremor Sense inside the avatar, and continue pretending Harden was Glitch’s only combat skill.
That would keep the ledger balanced.
It would also place him inside a pocket dimension whose terrain he had never personally experienced, without the one new sense that could warn Glitch about movement beyond his line of sight.
Or he could Sync.
He could probably even explain the skill. Terrain and vibration training, an earth-aligned lizard, an unusual sensory development. Thin, but not impossible, and he had sold thinner.
The physical growth was the part that would not survive contact with a measuring tape.
Jin looked at the panel.
Then he closed it, because there was a briefing in an hour and he had never in either of his lives made a decision well while it was still avoidable.
Unit 12-C met in a small side room with a floor map already lit.
There were three other people in it, and Jin knew none of them, which he had expected. Meridian was enormous, the classes ran on different schedules, and the students he had spent the tournament with belonged to brackets and assignments that had nothing to do with this.
The girl standing at the map had a fennec-shaped beast sitting on the table beside her, sand-colored, ears like open hands, absolutely motionless except that the ears kept moving.
"Wren Halloway," she said. "Fourth Class. Provisional lead. This is Tally, a Bronze-quality Dust Fennec. Tracking and scouting."
She did not shake anyone’s hand.
"I’ve done one supervised beginner-Rift deployment. That’s one more than anybody else in this room, which is the only reason I’m running it, so nobody gets creative about it."
The big one leaning against the wall snorted. Fourth Class insignia, and something like a lynx at his feet, ash-grey, with heat visibly rippling off its shoulders.
"Dolan Reyes. Ash is a Silver-quality Ember Lynx." He looked at Jin for exactly as long as it took to find the Fifth Class marker on his sleeve, and then stopped looking. "I hit things. You point."
The last one had already laid out a printed checklist on the table, which nobody had asked for.
"Ren Colby, Fifth Class." He said it fast. "This is Anvil, a Bronze-quality Bristleback Boar. He braces. He’s a brace beast. If something’s coming and you need it to not get past a spot, that’s — that’s the spot he stands in."
"Good," said Wren, without irony. "That’s most of the job."
She turned to Jin.
"Astor. Fifth Class, Iron-quality Grey Rock Lizard, appraisal and tactical support." A short pause. "I watched two of your tournament matches."
"Okay."
"You read terrain well. You beat a Bronze-quality Stonehorn by making it commit its own weight in the wrong direction, which most Fourth Class students couldn’t do." She said it like a line from a file. "You also have no completed Rift record, no field discipline score, and no evaluation from anybody who’s watched you work under somebody else’s command."
"That’s accurate," said Jin.
"Then we’re fine." She turned back to the map. "Formation. Tally takes point, twenty meters, no further. Anvil holds the line behind her. Ash stays back until we know what we’re hitting, because the last thing anybody needs in a Rift is fire before somebody’s checked what the air is doing."
Dolan made a noise but did not argue.
"Astor and I run the middle. You call anything you appraise, out loud, every time, even if you think it’s obvious. Especially then." Her finger moved across the map. "Reporting every two minutes. If you can’t report, that’s a retreat condition and I don’t need to hear a reason."
"What are the other retreat conditions?" Jin asked.
She looked up. It was the first thing he had said that was not one word long.
"Any unregistered creature class. Any structural instability. Any injury to a beast that stops it moving under its own power. Any of us losing contact for more than four minutes." She held his eyes. "And me saying so."
"Even if we’re winning."
"Especially if we’re winning. That’s when people don’t hear it." She straightened. "Final calls are mine. You can break formation without asking for exactly one reason, which is that somebody is about to die and there’s no time to say so. Anything else, you say it first. I’d rather argue for ten seconds than write a report."
Jin looked at the map, and at the fennec’s ears, and at the checklist Ren Colby had made without being asked.
She had prepared more for this than he had.
That was a genuinely unfamiliar sensation, and he examined it for a second before putting it away.
"Understood," he said.
Wren nodded once and moved on to extraction protocol.
He got back to his room at 2300.
Glitch was where he had left him, on his side, one foreleg folded beneath him at an angle that would leave him stiff in the morning, sleeping the sleep of a creature who believed he had personally funded his family’s grocery budget.
Jin sat on the edge of the bunk without turning the light on and opened the Engine.