Chapter 157: Knowing When to Leave
At 00:03:11 remaining, Jin was lying on his side with the phone propped against a folded jacket, watching a number go down and doing nothing else.
Glitch was asleep on the floor.
That was the part he kept coming back to over the two hours. The animal in the room had not felt anything. His sides went up and down at the same slow rate they had before the descent, one foreleg twitching occasionally in whatever a lizard dreamed about, six days rested and restricted to two-minute intervals and entirely unaware that a copy of him had been erased eleven meters from a tree.
That’s the whole system, Jin thought. That’s the reason any of this works. Nothing that happened down there reached him.
The timer hit zero.
[Avatar Respawned]
[Condition: 100%]
[Location: Shattered Iron Quarry — Surface Entrance]
The avatar came back whole. No flank wound, no missing leg, no lingering trace of whatever had ended the previous run.
Jin’s attention went straight back to the fruit, and the ordinary contract bond carried enough of that fixation to stir the real Glitch on the floor. His head came up, gold eyes finding Jin in the dark.
No avatar memory had crossed over. Jin had not synchronized anything, and Glitch had felt none of the death.
But Jin had sent the shape of what he was thinking before he realized it: something hanging forty meters away, almost reached, combined with the frustration of being stopped just short of it.
The response came back immediately.
Fruit. Close. Want.
Urgency pressed through all three.
"No," Jin said.
The feeling sharpened, with close pushed back at him so insistently that it reminded Jin of a child arguing that they were already almost there.
"We were close. That’s true. We were close and something killed you before you got a step further, and I still don’t know what it was."
Glitch kept looking at him in the dark.
Jin made himself do it properly, out loud, in the flattest voice he could manage, because he had noticed that he lied to himself more easily when he thought quietly.
"Here’s everything I actually saw."
He counted it off.
"You died before entering the main chamber. Tremor Sense showed nothing in the passage and nothing on the tier. There was no strike I could see, no shape, no sound I could isolate. The bond cut out in under a quarter of a second."
Glitch’s tail moved once against the floor.
"Which means whatever killed you happened faster than you could respond to it. Not faster than you can dodge. Faster than you can notice."
That distinction sat in the room for a while.
"And the thing I keep wanting to skip," Jin said, "is that moving the commander off the door was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in that quarry, and it bought me eleven meters."
He turned the phone face-down.
There was a version of the next twelve hours he could see very clearly.
Six more runs. Send the avatar down the same passage, take the same step, die the same way, and watch the last four seconds of footage each time hoping the capture held long enough to show him something.
It would cost nothing except time. The avatar was free. That was the entire point of the avatar.
And I might learn something. Or I might get six identical black screens and a very good understanding of how much of the night I can waste.
That was the honest range of outcomes, and he could not narrow it because he had no idea what he was dying to.
He could not adjust his approach against an unknown. He could only walk into the same place repeatedly and hope whatever was there made a different mistake.
Grinding works when the deaths teach me something. This teaches me nothing, and I want to do it anyway because I can see the prize.
He recognized the feeling.
He had spent nine hours of his previous life mapping a spawn table and had died in the street for a mythic that he had, in fairness, caught.
"We’re not going back down there," he said. "Not to the nest. Not until you’re a lot stronger. Not until I know what killed you."
The response came up the link as immediate outrage.
Fruit. Branch. Close. Uneaten.
Then came a possessive certainty so strong that Jin could reconstruct the rest without needing words: there was food sitting there, nobody else appeared to be eating it, and leaving voluntarily was an offense against the basic order of things.
"It’s still going to be there," Jin said. "It’s been there long enough to be the only one on the tree."
Glitch shoved another wave of indignation at him.
"That’s not an argument. That’s just volume."
The indignation continued.
Eventually it wound down into something grumpier and more settled. Glitch put his chin back on the floor and radiated the injured dignity of a creature who had been overruled by an idiot and fully intended to raise the matter again later.
Jin closed the dungeon.
[Shattered Iron Quarry — Session Ended]
[Status: Incomplete]
The review schedule arrived four days later, and it was less dramatic than he had braced for.
[MERIDIAN ACADEMY — FORMAL CLASS REVIEW CYCLE]
[Astor, J. — Fifth Class]
[Case advanced by accelerated review recommendation. Scheduled for consideration during the standard cycle.]
[Review components:]
[— Academic standing, current and preceding terms]
[— Contract stability assessment]
[— Mission and assessment history]
[— Beast care record, continuous]
[— Feed provision and recovery management]
[— Registered beast physical examination, comparative]
[— Existing comparative-development flag: to be addressed]
No special hearing. No surprise examination arranged for him personally. His file had simply been moved into a queue that had been running since before he arrived, and it would be looked at alongside everyone else’s when the cycle came around.
Which was, Jin thought, exactly what accelerated had always meant, and he had somehow still expected a room with a table in it.
The last line was the one he read four times.
Existing comparative-development flag: to be addressed.
Not noted. Addressed.
That evening he sat on the floor with a slate and did the arithmetic he had been avoiding for two weeks.
[Registered Beast: Glitch]
[Current daily intake requirement: 4.1 kg protein-equivalent]
[Requirement 30 days prior: 3.6 kg]
[Requirement 90 days prior: 2.2 kg]
He plotted it, which he immediately regretted.
The line did not level off. It had never levelled off. Every synchronization he had run since the egg hatched had added something to a body that then wanted to be fed, and the growth curve and the appetite curve were the same curve viewed from different sides.
[Feed Allocation (Tournament + Rift Merit): 31% remaining]
[Projected exhaustion at current intake: 24 days]
Twenty-four days.
He ran it against his Supply Division earnings and got a number that covered roughly two-thirds of the shortfall if he took every shift Bellek would give him, which was not the same as covering it.
And I’m not asking home.
That part did not require a decision.
This family had spent sixteen years with money and food flowing away from them whenever something went wrong. Jin had finally managed to reverse that direction.
Elsa was buying eggs on the third day of the cycle.
Whatever else happened, the money kept going home.
He sat with the slate and looked at the two curves crossing.
The strange part was that his records were good. Genuinely good. He had never once missed a feed, never once trained Glitch through a fatigue reading, never once hidden an injury. He had spent four hundred Credits on protein in a week where he ate dormitory hall food twice a day and did not mention it to anybody.
So the review isn’t going to catch me being negligent. There’s nothing to catch.
He turned the slate around and looked at it from the committee’s side.
A Fifth Class student with a beast whose intake requirement had nearly doubled across the recorded period, an allocation running out in twenty-four days, an income of eleven feed credits an hour, and a file with the phrase above species baseline written on it twice.
They’re not going to ask whether I’ve been feeding him.
They’re going to ask whether I can keep doing it.
[Thank you all for the support up until now; it means a lot to me]