Chapter 230: Two Hundred at Thirty

The fight was not over and Jin had known it would not be.

They were at twenty-one percent and thirty-something and there were two bosses left, and neither of them had become weaker — they had simply stopped protecting each other.

"Raptor first. It’s the one that can leave."

Glitch had one thing left that could reach an aerial and Jin spent it.

He put the avatar under the next descent, took the impact, and forced the Raptor to ground level — and then produced three seconds of Acid Breath into the wing joint, which the avatar’s throat delivered with no strain at all while a real Glitch two floors down slept with a hydration line in his leg.

It did not kill it. It ruined the joint.

"Flicker — wing. Now."

She came in low across the arena and hit the corroded joint at full commitment, and the Raptor’s left wing stopped working, and after that it was a large fast animal on the ground with two things that were much better at the ground than it was.

It took them ninety seconds and Glitch finished it.

The Tortoise tried to rebuild.

Jin saw the two surviving pylons start to warm and understood immediately what was about to happen, and there was no version of the last four minutes he wanted to repeat.

"Both of you. On it. Before it gets the network back."

They went together — Glitch into the shell’s front to hold its head down and stop it driving power into the floor, Flicker onto the exposed flank where the plating met the leg — and the Tortoise fought hard for nearly two minutes and could not do both things at once.

It went down at eleven percent stamina on Glitch and eighteen on Flicker.

Jin made a noise in an empty processing bay that he was very glad nobody heard.

Then he read the panels.

[Wave 20 Checkpoint Cleared]

[Wave 20 First-Clear Reward: 75 Tide Tokens]

[Danger Route Completed: Predator’s Tempo]

[Route Bonus: 25 Tide Tokens]

[Event Route Map unlocked]

[Current Tide Tokens: 225]

[Run closed — temporary boons expired: Steady Footing, Tithe, Bulwark, Shared Tremor]

Two hundred and twenty-five.

From twenty-five this morning.

The Route Map changed what Jin thought the Event was.

He had assumed the Event was a ladder — ten, twenty, thirty, each one further along the same line. It was not. It opened into a branching structure with route stages between checkpoints, side nodes marked with symbols he did not recognize, at least four locked objectives that showed only as sealed markers, and two nodes flagged as elite that sat off the main line entirely.

For the first time, repeating the Event did not look like replaying the same twenty waves more efficiently. It looked like choosing what to learn, what to risk, and which rewards to leave untouched until he had a build capable of reaching them.

And at the far end of what he could currently see:

[Wave 30 First-Clear Reward: 200 Tide Tokens + Unknown Event Relic]

He opened the relic entry and got nothing. No name, no category, no compatibility note, no image. Just Unknown Event Relic and a locked description field.

Jin looked at that for a while and did the arithmetic he had been doing all day.

Two hundred more at Wave Thirty would put him at four hundred and twenty-five against a Workshop price of one thousand.

Even a perfect deep clear leaves me more than halfway short.

The gap did not disappoint him. It made the Workshop a real long-term objective instead of something this Tide would hand him for one good night, and Jin knew how to work with long-term objectives.

He checked both real beasts before he did anything else.

Glitch: asleep, stable, foreleg still immobilized, board unchanged, twenty-four-hour restriction still running with about nine hours left on it. Nothing that had happened in an arena had touched him.

Flicker: green on all four lines. Verrick had logged an evening feed at eighty-five percent.

He did not open the Sync panel.

They just fought a checkpoint boss under four stages of a speed modifier and respawned clean, and neither of those animals moved.

The next few hours passed over the Route Map and the unchanged medical boards. At nine in the evening, an Association forecast came through, and Jin read it twice before he let himself believe it.

[ASTRAL TIDE — SHELTER 7 — REVISED FORECAST]

[Tide intensity declining faster than modelled]

[Projected duration reduced]

[Exterior sectors: sustained defense holding]

The relief arrived before anything else, and it was enormous and physical and slightly embarrassing. Somewhere out past the secondary wall there were people standing in reinforced service cuts with two approaches and finite web reserves, and there were going to be fewer hours of that than anybody had planned for.

Then the Engine caught up.

[Astral Tide Event availability updated]

[Estimated remaining window: 24–30 hours]

Jin looked at the new window. Relief stayed where it was; the calculation came second.

Good. It should end early. That’s people not dying. And I’ve got a day.

He laid it out on his notes page.

Two hundred and twenty-five tokens. A route map with four locked objectives, two elite nodes, and a Wave 30 checkpoint worth two hundred and an unknown relic. Twenty-four to thirty hours, minus sleep he could not skip, minus a run time he estimated at three hours for a Wave 30 attempt if it did not kill him at twenty-four.

One serious attempt. Maybe two if the first one dies early. The question is which route to take and which locked objective is worth finding out about.

He opened the four sealed markers one at a time and got nothing from any of them except position, which told him they were somewhere on the map and not what they wanted.

Then he closed the phone. It was nine at night, he had slept six hours since leaving E-9, and he had spent most of the day inside consecutive Event runs. The last time he made a build decision while exhausted, it had cost him an entire run.

Downstairs a beast with a strained foreleg was asleep on a treatment mat. Two floors up a bird who could walk six meters was green on four lines with a folded shirt beside her.

Jin set an alarm, lay down on the floor mat, and spent several minutes thinking about which of the two elite nodes was closer to the main line before he stopped being awake.