Chapter 96: Six Hours Is a Long Time
Morning began with Jin checking the shoulder.
A good night’s sleep had helped, but calling it healed would be a stretch. The bruise had lost its sharp edge, settling into a steady ache under the skin instead. The tenderness had eased a little, and the joint could move through its full range without catching.
Good enough to deploy.
It was also bad enough that neither of them could pretend not to notice.
Jin squatted in front of Glitch. "We need rules for today. You’re going to hate every one."
The lizard looked back at him with clear suspicion.
"If the joint feels unstable at all, we stop. I don’t mean we slow down. We stop." Jin held his gaze. "If you start putting extra weight on the other side to protect it, we switch to easy objectives and stay with them. If that shoulder takes another proper hit, we withdraw immediately. Same hour. You don’t get to argue."
Refusal flared through the bond before Jin had even finished.
Glitch wanted nothing to do with withdrawal. For three days, he had been proving himself, and leaving the field early would turn all of that into an insult, at least in his mind.
Jin didn’t try to force the feeling down. He sent back the steady need to protect him instead, threaded through with the fear Glitch’s injury had left behind.
"We came here to show that you belong in combat," Jin said. "We didn’t come here to feed you to it."
He placed a hand against Glitch’s neck and felt the warmth beneath the scales.
"Getting accepted into the program won’t matter if we destroy your shoulder along the way."
Glitch sat with that for a while.
Agreement never came through the contract. The anger faded, though, and after a few quiet seconds, he leaned forward and pressed his head against Jin’s knee.
That was probably the closest either of them would get to a deal.
The assembly yard contained two types of students, and Jin could tell them apart by the size of their packs.
Milo Venn belonged firmly to the second group.
He entered beneath a pack so large it seemed to generate its own gravity, his upper body bent nearly in half under the weight. Bristle paced beside him with a smaller pack that appeared to contain the same mistake at a reduced scale.
Milo was still fighting with one of the straps when he noticed Jin. His eyes dropped to Jin’s provision pack.
Small.
Painfully small.
"That’s everything you brought?"
Jin studied the huge load threatening to fold Milo in two. "Did you pack your entire dorm?"
"It’s six hours!" Milo sounded cheerful and defensive at the same time. "Six hours is a long time! I’ve got feed, backup feed, water, a spare harness, a med kit, and—"
"You’ll be carrying it for all six hours."
Milo opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He looked down at the pack as though its weight had only now become part of the calculation.
"...I’m putting some of this back."
Bristle had no interest in his handler’s logistical crisis. The Bronze pup was happily inspecting Glitch, who allowed the attention with the patient dignity of royalty tolerating a friendly peasant.
Despite himself, Jin’s eyes drifted toward Bristle’s feed pouch.
Bronze-grade feed.
It was richer and more concentrated, designed for a completely different metabolism. His mind checked compatibility before he could stop it: wrong mineral balance, too dense, poorly suited to a Grey Rock Lizard’s digestion.
Giving Glitch a Bronze Ridgeback’s ration wouldn’t count as sharing supplies. It would create a stomach problem by the third hour and probably earn them a penalty at extraction.
No easy solution there, though Jin hadn’t expected one.
Across the assembly yard, Lucian adjusted the harness on his Falcon. He looked over, met Jin’s eyes, and held the contact for a second before giving one short nod.
Professional acknowledgment. Nothing else.
Jin returned it, and neither of them made any attempt to cross the yard.
That was exactly the right amount of interaction.
Kade Marrow appeared beside Jin soon after, and Jin straightened before consciously deciding to.
Kade inspected the registered provisions with the calm thoroughness of someone who had already seen every stupid method students used to injure their beasts. He checked the quantities first, then the water. After reading Glitch’s condition, he told Jin to walk him ten paces away and back.
His attention remained fixed on the injured shoulder for the entire trip.
"Adequate," Kade said when they returned. "For six hours, the provisions are medically sufficient. He’s cleared to deploy."
He didn’t mention how little Jin had packed.
There was no need. Jin saw him register the pack’s size and choose not to comment. At least today’s supplies met the minimum medical standard. Whether Kade had noticed that Jin’s shortage went beyond a single assessment was impossible to tell.
Kade turned toward the assembled students and raised his voice.
"One warning before you enter. Every year, someone returns with a beast that earned a strong score and finished the field wrecked."
He paused, letting the yard quiet enough for everyone to hear what came next.
"If your beast reaches extraction injured, dehydrated, or dangerously exhausted, that condition will erase points you earned getting there. Extraction condition carries heavy weight. Spend your partner to climb the board, and the board will remove those gains."
The students around the yard did not look particularly corrected.
Jin suspected that happened every year too.
The official notice appeared.
[Assessment Day Four]
[Component: Sustained Field Deployment]
[Duration: Six Hours]
[Minimum Qualification: 50 Deployment Points]
[Extraction Window: Hour Five to Hour Six]
[Premature extraction will reduce the final score.]
[Emergency withdrawal remains available.]
[Point Categories: Navigation Beacons | Hazard Identification | Resource Sampling | Recovery & Transport | Optional Controlled Encounters | Time-Limited Priority Objectives]
[Beast condition at extraction is heavily weighted.]
[Foraging from the controlled field environment is permitted.]
[Any material consumed remains the handler’s responsibility.]
[Misidentification, contamination, or dietary incompatibility will be penalized.]
[Performance above the qualification threshold may award Meridian Resource Credit.]
Jin went through the categories once and understood the structure. It was a menu, and every item carried a price.
Navigation beacons offered cheap points and usually cost little to reach. Controlled encounters and priority objectives paid far better, but the payment came out of a beast’s body.
Fifty points secured qualification. Anything beyond fifty was where Meridian Resource Credit became possible.
Six hours changed the real question.
This assessment wasn’t testing whether a team could remain alive until the end. It was testing whether they could still accomplish anything during hour five after behaving like idiots in hour one.
The field opened, and most of the year immediately broke into a sprint.
It was honestly impressive.
Beasts poured into the broken landscape, charging toward the nearest controlled encounters and recovery markers while handlers shouted directions and ran after them. Names began filling the leaderboard almost at once.
None of them belonged to Jin.
Jin walked.