Chapter 231: The Road That Splits

Jin woke at half past five after roughly eight and a half hours of uninterrupted sleep. It was more than he had managed in three days, and the immediate difference in how his head worked felt slightly insulting.

He checked Glitch before he checked anything else.

The improvement was visible from the mat. The swelling along the outside of the joint had gone down enough to change the shape of the limb, and Glitch had turned over during the night. He lay on the other side now, something he had not managed once yesterday.

He also woke up the instant Jin moved, and immediately tried to stand.

"Wait for the medic."

The bond conveyed that the medic was unnecessary.

"You’ve said that every day since Tuesday."

The medic came at seven and took the immobilization off, which improved Glitch’s opinion of her enormously.

"Inflammation’s down about seventy percent and the tendon’s tracking properly." She had him walk eleven meters and back, watching the leg. "That’s a good recovery. Faster than I’d have guessed."

"So what can he do?"

"Ordinary controlled walking. Level ground, his own pace, no more than about twenty minutes at a time." She was already writing. "And a full day with no combat and no training load."

"Understood."

"I want to be specific, because students hear ’walking’ and invent things." She looked up. "No sprinting. No jumping. No contact drills, no resistance work, no weighted anything. If it looks like it would raise his heart rate for more than a minute, don’t."

"Understood."

"Reassessment tomorrow morning. If it’s still tracking like this, I’ll clear him for progressive load."

Glitch, having been given permission to walk, walked around the entire treatment bay twice and then attempted to demonstrate his readiness for everything by dropping into a play crouch.

"No," said Jin, and the medic laughed at both of them.

Flicker’s ward lines were green in the same four places they had been green in for two days.

"Stable," said Verrick, when Jin asked. "Not improving. I want you to hear the distinction because I think you keep hoping I’ll change the second word."

"I wasn’t hoping."

"You were. That’s fine, everybody does." He closed the file. "She’s holding her own regulation, she’s eating, her respiration’s clean. That’s a hatchling who is not deteriorating, which is the entire objective for now."

Flicker had noticed the conversation happening near her and had come to the panel to lean on Jin’s fingers. She looked past him twice while he stood there, toward the door, checking.

"He’s fine," Jin told her. "He’s downstairs. He got the strap off this morning and he’s been unbearable about it."

She settled.

He stood there a while longer than he needed to, mostly because of the thing he was about to go and do.

In about forty minutes, I’m going to deploy an avatar of you that can cross a broken ruin at speed and take a jackal through the eye.

The real Flicker could walk six meters and needed to rest afterward. Jin had stopped being at risk of confusing the two around the time he watched her sit down at a marked cone, but the gap remained, and refusing to look at it did not make it smaller.

The Route Map was the first thing he opened when he got back.

[Tide Tokens: 225]

[Evolution Workshop Access — 1,000 Tide Tokens]

Four sealed objectives, showing only position. Two elite nodes, one sitting almost on the line toward Wave 30 and one well off to the side. The Wave 30 marker with its two hundred tokens and its unknown relic.

And an availability estimate that had dropped again.

[Estimated remaining window: 13–19 hours]

Jin checked the wall clock and ran the subtraction twice. This time the numbers held.

One serious run. Maybe a second if the first one dies early enough. There isn’t time for a third, and there isn’t time to be careless.

The elite nodes were the decision.

The far one might have been anything and he could not afford to find out, because reaching it meant a detour off the Wave 30 line and then a detour back. The near one sat between the Wave 20 checkpoint and the Wave 30 approach, which meant it cost him time and stamina rather than an entire branch.

Elite nodes carried rare boon caches. Jin knew nothing about Wave 30 and would be entering blind either way; he preferred to do it with something rare in hand.

He selected the near node and started the run.

Waves One through Ten went past in about thirty minutes and Jin barely narrated them to himself, because he had run them four times and the only interesting thing was the build.

He had stopped trying to build both avatars into weaker versions of the same thing. Watching Flicker die at Wave 20 to a Raptor she should never have been near had settled that, so when the boon offers appeared, he sorted them by the job each avatar actually needed to perform.

[Steady Footing: reduced stamina cost when bracing or redirecting]

Glitch’s job. Taken.

[Kindling: increasing damage per consecutive kill without taking a hit]

General damage, attractive, and useful on a fast, clean run. It did not solve the problem Jin expected later, so he refused it.

[Light Step: reduced stamina cost when changing direction]

Flicker’s job. Taken.

The third offer gave him nothing he wanted at all — two damage effects and a defensive one keyed to standing still, which was actively wrong for a bird — and he took the standing-still one because it was better than nothing on an avatar who had to hold ground occasionally.

You don’t get the build you designed. You get the build the pool hands you.

At the Wave 10 clear, Jin checked the current numbers against his logs. His previous best at this point had been sixty-two percent for Glitch and fifty-seven for Flicker.

[Glitch — stamina 71%]

[Flicker — stamina 74%]

Seventy-one and seventy-four.

Light Step was doing more than Jin had expected. Flicker was spending less stamina simply moving through the run.

Wave 20 was the Raptor and the Tortoise again and it was not free.

Jin knew the rule now, which meant he did not waste four minutes attacking a shielded target, and that alone changed the fight. He put Flicker on the anchors from the first second, with Glitch reading and calling, and they took the first two in under ninety seconds.

The Raptor was still faster than anything else in the run. The Tortoise still walled off approaches and rerouted and drove force through the ground at Flicker’s feet, and she still had to cross the arena with an aerial predator overhead, and twice Glitch had to leave his reading position to put himself under a dive.

[Glitch — stamina 44%]

[Flicker — stamina 51%]

Better. Not cheap.

The checkpoint posted its standard repeat reward, small and unremarkable, with no first-clear cache anywhere in it. Jin checked, because he always checked now.

Then the route opened toward the elite node and gave him a warning he had not seen before.

[ELITE NODE — SPLIT APPROACH]

[Deployed avatars will enter separate linked routes.]

[Avatars cannot reunite until the central lock opens.]

[Proceed?]

Jin read it twice.

Separate. Not adjacent — separate.

Every single thing he had built across five runs assumed the two of them could reach each other. Bulwark had needed eight meters. Shared Tremor had needed eleven. Every linked finish in his notes required one avatar to be at the place the other one had made.

And this is the node with the rare cache in it.

He pressed proceed.

The floor took Glitch about four seconds later.

It was not a trap so much as a stairwell — a reinforced service lane that opened downward out of the arena’s edge, and Glitch went into it because Jin sent him and because there was nowhere else the route led. Behind him, two sections of the upper floor came down in a rolling collapse that sealed the way he had come.

Flicker’s route went the other way, up a broken ramp into open ruins under charged sky, and Jin could see movement out there before she had cleared the first span. Fast, low, several of them, already coming.

Then a barrier came down across the middle of the display and split it into two panels.

Two lanes. Two avatars. One of them underground in a reinforced tunnel with something heavy already moving toward him, and one of them alone on broken spans she could not fly across.

Jin looked at both halves of his screen and understood exactly what the node was going to be about.