Chapter 76: Beyond Shelter 7
Chapter 76: Beyond Shelter 7
As the shuttle climbed through Shelter 7, Jin watched the place he had lived all his life move past the window. This time, he was seeing it as someone leaving.
Residential corridors packed too tightly. Laundry hanging from pipe to pipe. Doors set so close together a person could almost touch both sides at once. At one junction, a shift change spilled grey-uniformed factory workers into the passage in a tired flood beneath aging lights. Steam rose from synthetic-food stalls beside the lines. People stood under recycled-water ration signs with empty jugs in hand. Pipes crawled along the walls beneath strips of neon that flickered weakly, details Jin had stopped paying attention to years ago.
A school transport passed them on the way up. Several children glanced over, and one boy spotted Glitch perched on Jin’s shoulder through the glass. He pointed with open excitement.
To that child, the sight was probably incredible. An Outer Ring boy watching a Tamer’s beast leave for a real school.
Jin found that mildly funny. Back here, Glitch looked impressive. At Meridian, the same lizard would probably be judged as trash before Jin even got off the vehicle.
The shelter changed as they rose. Traffic lanes grew wider. The lighting lost its yellow flicker and became steady white. Less dirt clung to the walls. These were levels Jin had almost never needed to visit, and the shuttle continued toward the official departure sector.
The class divide was hard to miss when it carried him upward through it. Below was the part of Shelter 7 that did the work. Above was the part built to be served.
Strangely, Jin did not feel hatred toward the shelter.
It was poor, crowded, and cruel in quiet ways. Sixteen years there had worn both his parents down. But it was also home. Home was the lamp that only worked when tilted properly, the repaired seams in his mother’s clothes, and the absurd checklists Elsa kept making.
For weeks, Jin had called Shelter 7 a scam. Watching it sink farther below the shuttle still left an ache in him.
The people outside did not all look miserable, either. Most ignored the passing vehicle. A few noticed the glowing Meridian authorization on its side and watched with ordinary curiosity. There was no obvious jealousy in their faces. Something unusual was passing, so they looked.
Shelter 7 was not a hole filled only with suffering people. It was simply a difficult place where people continued living.
Leaving that felt worse than leaving misery might have.
At a mid-level landing pad, the shuttle stopped for another passenger. A boy near Jin’s age came aboard holding a bag that looked as though an anxious parent had packed it for him. Beside his feet walked a broad, four-legged beast.
Jin appraised it immediately.
[Ridgeback Pup]
[Quality: Bronze]
[Combat Level: 2-Star]
It was built for work. Useful, solid, and not meant to impress anyone.
The boy sat across the aisle from Jin. One look in Jin’s direction was enough to start him talking, fast and nearly without gaps.
"You’re a scholarship student too, right? Going to Meridian? I’m Marek Venn. I’ve never left my district before. Or Shelter 7, actually. Have you ever gone outside? I haven’t. Not once." He drew a quick breath and continued. "That’s Bristle. Ridgeback pup, Bronze-quality. Nothing fancy, but he’s hard to put down."
His eyes moved to Glitch on Jin’s shoulder.
"Is he a Grey Rock Lizard? So are you joining the support program, or—"
"Combat," Jin said. "Provisional placement. I still have an assessment."
Marek stared. "You’re doing combat with a Rock Lizard?"
The unfinished part remained on his face. He had attempted to make the idea fit together and gotten nowhere.
Then he corrected himself. "That is pretty impressive, though. Combat placements aren’t easy to get."
Jin only shrugged. He let Marek keep talking until the nerves worked themselves out.
Listening cost nothing, and Arthur had told him to do more of it.
Jin paid attention to other things while Marek spoke. Bristle had a proper carrier crate packed with the luggage. One level later, two more scholarship students boarded. One had a sleek beast carrier. The other already wore a uniform that looked both new and expensive.
Jin looked down at his own worn bag, then at the repaired stitching in his shirt.
Back on his residential level, Glitch’s 2-Star strength had turned him into a monster. Nothing else living there had been stronger.
They had not even reached Meridian yet, and Jin was already beginning to understand that 2-Star might be completely ordinary where they were going.
He showed nothing on his face. The information went into the same quiet place where he kept everything useful.
Security filled the departure sector.
They went through another identity check, more thorough than the earlier ones. Pale scanning light swept across Glitch during the beast-registration verification. The system returned exactly what his official records said he was, correct and harmless.
Blast doors several meters thick blocked the way beyond. Armed Association personnel stood nearby with the relaxed attention of people who were ready without needing to show it. Past them, defensive barriers rose one after another. Jin did not need anyone to explain their purpose. Their size alone told him what they were meant to stop.
The inter-shelter vehicle waiting beyond security had none of the shuttle’s sleek shape. It was thick, blunt, and heavily reinforced, covered in armor plating with narrow windows cut into the sides. Ranked Tamers escorted it, accompanied by beasts Jin could not properly read with appraisal.
This machine existed because the ground outside wanted to eat everyone inside it.
Jin had never gone beyond Shelter 7.
He chose a window seat and settled Glitch across his lap. Ahead of them, the last gates began to grind apart.
Then Jin saw the outside world for the first time.
He had imagined a desert. Empty land. Maybe ruins with nothing around them.
The world outside was not empty.
It had been taken away from humanity.
Old buildings stood broken across the landscape, remnants from before the shelters. Vegetation had swallowed much of them, growing in colors that looked wrong. Deep blues, violets, and pale greens that gave off a sickly light. Some of the plants were far larger than anything should have been.
Roots had ripped through highways and forced the cracked sections apart. Crystalline growths pushed up beside them, catching light along sharp edges. Defensive towers covered the middle distance, every weapon turned outward toward the horizon.
Farther away, parts of the land seemed to bend under Jin’s gaze. The air shimmered above them, hazy and distorted where old mana had entered the ground and never left.
Huge shapes moved across the ruined plain in the distance. The vehicle was already traveling quickly, yet Jin could still see them clearly. That meant they were enormous.
They moved slowly, almost like weather passing over the land.
None of them attacked. They were simply alive out there, occupying the open world where humans no longer could.
Behind the vehicle, the sealed grey mass of Shelter 7 grew smaller. From the wasteland, it looked like the final door in the world that had not yet been forced open.
The sight hit Jin harder than he had prepared for.
In his first life, outside had meant roads and stores. Sidewalks. Grass that people stepped on without thinking. The most dangerous thing he had realistically expected to encounter was a delivery truck.
Going outside had once been so harmless that Jin had made avoiding it part of his personality for no reason at all.
Here, outside meant this.
Humanity had lost the planet and locked itself inside fortified shelters. Travel between them required armored transports guarded by Tamers and their beasts. The outside was no longer somewhere people casually went. It was a patient place that would kill them simply because human bodies were soft enough to break.
Jin had spent weeks calling the outside world a scam.
Apparently, he had not given the scam nearly enough credit.
The joke did little to touch what sat beneath it. As distant creatures crossed the poisoned horizon, cold awe settled deep in his chest. Fear arrived almost beside it.
This was the world where his father had bled.
This was what Glitch was being raised to fight.
Jin had understood those things as facts for weeks. Seeing the land made them real in a way information never had.
Glitch pushed his nose against the window and stared out with pure interest. His tail flicked eagerly, as if the wasteland’s greatest appeal was the sheer number of things large enough to bother.
"Don’t," Jin murmured. "Whatever idea you just had, don’t."
They had traveled well beyond Shelter 7 when Jin’s phone gave a faint reaction inside his pocket.
[Regional Boundary Crossed]
[Rustwater Drain: Out of Range]
[Stored Growth, Skills, Loot, and Combat Records Retained]
Jin read the notification twice and felt an unexpectedly small pain at the sight of it.
Rustwater Drain had been foul. Poison ran through it. The water was black. Acid waited everywhere. Its boss had killed Glitch’s avatar once before they finally managed to win.
Jin had hated that place.
It was also where Glitch gained Corrosion Resistance. Where he brought a filtration platform down on his first real 4-Star boss. They had cleared it four times, suffered one failed fragment drop, and earned Acid Breath there.
More than any other place, the drain was where they had stopped being only a boy and his beast.
That was where they had become a team.
Jin could not enter Rustwater Drain again unless he returned to Shelter 7.
He had no idea when that would happen.