Chapter 343: What He Can Carry

Chapter 343: What He Can Carry

"Brace," Jin said.

Glitch dropped his shoulder into the padded front of the sled and set his feet.

The sled was a low steel frame on runners, loaded with sandbags, chained to a ring in the floor so it could only travel two meters before the chain pulled tight. Glitch had moved far heavier things in battle. Since Highmarch, he’d mostly been asked to turn between markers. Jin had checked the chain himself before they began.

The runners scraped. The sled slid half a meter and stopped as Glitch’s weight settled behind it.

"Hold."

He held. His back legs were spread wide, his tail out stiff behind him for balance. The monitoring strap around his chest ticked numbers onto the technician’s tablet. Dr. Alcott stood beside her with her arms folded, watching the screen, not the lizard.

Five seconds. Eight. Ten.

"Release."

Glitch stepped back from the sled, breathing harder, and looked around at Jin with his head up.

"Heart’s up," the technician said. "Core flux rising. Still in range."

"Next part," Alcott said.

The protocol was a single sequence, run twice with a long rest between.

A twenty-meter approach at a steady trot. Two direction changes around cones set at angles, one left and one right, to make him shift weight across both shoulders. Then the sled: brace, hold for ten seconds, release. Then the one item on the sheet that Jin had read more times than all the rest.

One application of an established defensive skill. Low intensity. Three seconds maximum. Under monitoring.

"Harden," Jin said. "Gently."

He didn’t need to say gently. He said it anyway.

Glitch’s hide darkened. The change crept over his shoulders and down his flanks like a shadow, his scales tightening until they caught the lane lights with a dull mineral gleam. It wasn’t the full armor-plate Harden that had taken a direct strike in the arena. The reading stayed near a third of his measured full intensity. Glitch held it evenly while Jin watched the seconds.

The technician’s screen jumped. Alcott leaned in.

"Three," Jin counted aloud. "And off."

The darkness drained out of Glitch’s hide. He shook himself, a long ripple from head to tail, and stood waiting.

Jin thought of the demonstrator’s gray forearms. There had been enough energy for each good use, until there hadn’t. Here, the question was whether Glitch could move it through the recovering channels without hurting himself again.

"Core spiked and settled," the technician said. "No irregularity."

Alcott said nothing. She was watching the shoulder channel readout, which climbed, plateaued, and then started to come down.

Glitch was eager throughout the sequence. Jin felt him anticipate the next command, particularly when he faced the sled. He wanted another push.

Jin reset him at the start line and kept the commands short. Glitch’s cooperation let him watch the turns properly: the foot that landed first, the shoulder taking the load, the moment he was balanced enough for the next instruction. He no longer had to stand beside him and worry about whether he would stop.

Between repetitions, Glitch came over and pressed his nose against Jin’s sleeve. Jin rubbed the plating above it, then sent him back to the marker. The sled would still be there when the rest period ended.

The second run of the sequence was cleaner than the first. The turns were tighter. The sled moved a fraction further. The Harden came up evenly and went down on the count of three.

Then it was over, and Glitch lay down in the white square of his own accord, satisfied, and Jin let himself breathe.

The imaging after the first check showed the shoulder channels brighter than they’d been after the gentle drills. That was expected. The real number was how long they took to settle.

Seventy minutes.

"Acceptable," Alcott said, studying the three images. "Not remarkable. Acceptable. Wednesday."

On Wednesday, they settled in fifty.

On Thursday, Glitch completed the final check. The chain pulled tight during the brace, and his Harden stayed inside the permitted range until Jin called it off. He finished breathing deeply but steadily. The images an hour later were already close to baseline.

"Better," Alcott said, which from her was nearly a speech.

In between, Jin farmed.

Twenty minutes on Tuesday evening, twenty on Wednesday. The quarry rim again, the same worker patrols, the same easy routes. The avatars went through them almost without slowing.

[Session complete.]

[Coins banked.]

[Accumulated development: banked]

On Wednesday, he watched avatar Flicker’s last run more closely than usual. She came in high over the quarry rim, folded her wings, dropped through a gap between two worker columns, and pulled up out of the dive so fast she was gone before either column had finished turning. Then she did it again from the other side.

The real Flicker was asleep on Glitch’s horn ridge four meters below him.

Jin looked at the bank. There was more development stored there than he’d ever held at once. He felt healthy now, properly healthy, for the first time since Highmarch. The old part of him pointed out that a single Sync could carry some of what was in that bank across, tonight, if he chose to.

Alcott was still measuring how those channels handled the work. Changing Glitch’s development between checks would mean testing a different body from the one she’d assessed.

Jin left the growth banked. He had waited this long; he could manage a few more days.

Flicker, as it turned out, had her own progress to show off.

The stall had a square-cut crossbeam about two and a half meters above the floor. For weeks, Flicker had looked up at it, shifted her feet, and chosen the lower rail instead.

On Thursday evening, while Jin was measuring out Glitch’s feed, she flew up to it.

She went straight there in four quick wingbeats and landed cleanly on the first try. She settled her feathers and turned around to look down at the whole stall from above, with the air of a bird surveying her property.

"Look at you," Jin said.

Flicker ignored him. She was busy. She had found a spider web in the corner of the beam and was investigating it with great seriousness.

When Jin carried the feed bucket over to Glitch, she dropped down from the beam and landed on the bucket’s rim. She rode it the last two meters, then hopped across to Glitch’s head and supervised his dinner from between his horns.

Jin set down the empty bucket and looked up at the beam. He would have to clean that now too.

He didn’t mind. He’d watched her consider that perch often enough to know what the flight had cost her in courage.

The final instruction on the revised plan was the one that mattered most.

[Imaging: 48 hours after the final session.]

Jin marked Saturday morning on the care log. The immediate results were good; delayed strain was the remaining thing Alcott needed to rule out.

Friday was ordinary, which was its own kind of strange. Jin went to Crowe’s class and worked a defensive layout with Rowan that ended with both their tamer markers still standing. At the end, she asked how Glitch was doing, in the offhand way of someone who had obviously been wondering for a while.

"Waiting on pictures," Jin said. "The checks went well."

"Good." Rowan hesitated. "Are you still thinking about Thornwatch?"

"Eventually. Hollowmere first. We wrote a whole plan."

"With no feed costs," she reminded him.

That evening, Jin took the feed records up to the ramp. His beasts slept below while he worked out what one week’s food and transport would cost. The answer was less pleasant than the bounty multiplier had been, but it still left something worth earning.

He added a separate line for Flicker. He didn’t know what her needs would be by then, so he left the amount blank instead of guessing.

At the bottom of the plan, he wrote the next requirement after Rank 2: Practical license assessment.

He’d spent the last lesson learning how much he couldn’t yet do. Once he could begin, he wanted to know exactly what the assessors would ask of him.

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