Chapter 142: The Cost of a Button
[Bound Beast: Glitch]
[Pending Transfer]
[— Skill: Tremor Sense]
[— Accumulated Physical Development: Stored]
[— Accumulated Combat Experience: Stored]
[Sync: All pending values. Partial transfer unavailable.]
[Confirm? Y/N]
Glitch’s pre-deployment scan in thirty-one hours.
Rift in two days.
Jin sat in the dark with his thumb over the letter and tried to work out which one of them was more likely to get his beast killed: a room full of instruments, or a hole in the world he was walking into half deaf.
Jin pressed Y at 2314, leaving him thirty and a half hours before the scan.
He had spent forty minutes not pressing it, and his reasoning had not changed once during that time. It had only become clearer.
Meridian already had Glitch’s intake measurements. What it was about to take was his first pre-deployment baseline: height, mass, density, output, joint condition—everything written down, dated, and handed to whoever read files at this school.
If Jin synced afterward, the academy would have one set of numbers from before the Rift and a very different set from two days later. Eventually, somebody would place them side by side.
If he synced now, the growth would fall somewhere inside the broader interval between Glitch’s intake examination and the pre-deployment scan. Fast, perhaps. Suspicious, possibly. But it would not look like a transformation that had occurred across two documented days.
The other half of the decision was simpler. Jin was walking into an underground Rift in two days. He had spent nine days earning a skill that told him what was moving inside stone, and leaving it trapped inside his phone would be the kind of decision that ended up printed in a casualty analysis he lacked the clearance to read.
[Sync — Complete.]
[Skill Transferred: Tremor Sense]
[Physical Development: Applied]
[Combat Experience: Applied]
[Rank: 1 — Novice, 3-Star. No threshold reached.]
Jin read the final line twice and felt relieved.
He had half expected Glitch to gain a star. Nine days of grinding had produced a denser body, better instincts, and nothing visible on his official rank. Under the circumstances, that was the best outcome available.
A Fifth Class student whose beast advanced a star two days before a monitored deployment would have to explain that star.
Glitch woke on the floor.
He did not stretch. He lifted his head, looked at Jin with an expression Jin had never seen before, and made a low sound containing no dignity whatsoever.
Then he stood and shoved his nose into the ration cabinet.
"That’s tomorrow’s tin."
Glitch hooked it out, broke the seal, and ate everything inside.
Jin remained where he was while his beast worked through the cabinet in ascending order of edibility. By the third tin, he understood the bill.
The Engine could accelerate development, but it could not manufacture the physical materials required to build a body. Nine days of stored growth had landed inside Glitch in roughly four seconds, and now that body wanted raw materials.
Jin opened the dispensary interface and ordered protein at 2340, which was inconvenient for everyone involved.
[Feed Allocation (Tournament): 61% → 47%]
Fourteen percent of a tournament reward had vanished in one night.
Jin looked at the number, then at Glitch, who had managed to get his entire head inside the cabinet and could no longer see anything.
"That was three weeks of your food."
Glitch’s tail moved once, expressing complete satisfaction with the arrangement.
Tremor Sense in the real world was a disaster for the first hour.
Jin had expected some difficulty. The avatar had learned the skill through repeated deaths and battles inside a quarry, and that experience had transferred with the Sync. Glitch’s body understood what the sense was meant to do.
It did not understand what a building was.
The dormitory floor was a slab of poured composite resting on structural members that ran the length of the block, and every one of them carried vibrations. Somebody two floors above dropped something. A door closed at the far end of the corridor. The circulation plant in the basement began another cycle. A tram passed beneath the district on a line Jin had not known existed.
All of it arrived at once.
Glitch flattened himself against the floor with his claws splayed and made a sound like a kettle.
"Off," Jin said. "Turn it off."
It took a while.
When Glitch finally managed it, he remained on the floor breathing hard. What came through the bond was mostly a wall of grey noise pierced by a single sharp point, which was as close as he could get to conveying that there was too much.
"Yeah. I know."
Jin took a bottle of water from the shelf and sat down beside him. Lowering himself required more effort than he wanted to admit, and he regretted it immediately because he would eventually have to stand again.
"In the quarry, it was quiet," Jin said. "Stone with nothing inside it. This is a building. Buildings are full of things."
Flat resentment flowed through the bond, directed at architecture in general.
They started small.
Jin walked to the far end of the room and back while Glitch kept his chin against the floor and his eyes closed. By the fourth pass, Glitch could separate Jin’s steps from the background.
Then Jin added the corridor traffic outside. That took twenty minutes. Students passed in ones and twos throughout the evening, and at first every one of them registered as the same weight, the same distance, and equally important.
The breakthrough came from a direction Jin had not planned.
"Which one is me?"
Glitch tapped the floor once with the tip of his tail at the exact moment Jin’s foot came down.
He had not identified Jin by measuring his mass. He knew Jin’s walk. He had heard that rhythm through floors in a wasteland shelter, a dormitory, and a warehouse, and it was already familiar.
That was the trick. Not greater sensitivity, but recognition. Tremor Sense provided a shape, and Glitch needed experience to understand what that shape meant.
Jin built the rest of the tests around that discovery.
He placed a ration tin on different parts of the floor while Glitch kept his eyes shut. Glitch found the correct direction eleven times out of twelve, though his distance estimate was usually wrong by half a meter.
Jin then lifted the tin and held it two centimeters above the floor.
Glitch reported nothing.
Jin was glad to confirm that limitation here rather than inside a Rift.
He placed one leg of a chair on a rug, and the resulting vibration became faint and muffled. When he knocked on the wall instead of the floor, Glitch detected nothing because the wall panel did not connect directly to the slab.
By 0300, Glitch could keep the sense active for roughly ninety seconds before the noise accumulated enough to force him to stop. He could distinguish a person walking from a door closing, but two people moving close together still blurred into something resembling one person with an irregular gait.
The skill was useful, but nowhere near reliable enough to trust without confirmation.
Jin fixed that distinction in his mind because he intended to say it aloud to someone in about thirty hours.
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