Chapter 237: The Sixth Star

Chapter 237: The Sixth Star

The heat came first.

Glitch made a low sound in his chest and rolled onto his front, and within about thirty seconds the whole length of him was giving off warmth Jin could feel from a meter away — not the sharp localized heat of an evolution seam, just a body that had suddenly started running its metabolism at a rate it had never attempted before.

Jin got a hand on him and stayed there.

The bond filled with something he recognized from the awakening and which arrived at a fraction of that intensity: pressure, everywhere, deep in the frame rather than at the surface. Not pain. The sensation of a structure being asked to settle further into itself.

There was no light. Nothing separated, nothing lifted, no seams opened anywhere along the plating. Glitch stayed exactly the shape he had been at eight o’clock.

Good. That’s what it should be. He’s not becoming something, he’s becoming more of what he is.

Twenty minutes in, Glitch tried to stand.

Jin caught it before the legs came under him and pushed back through the bond, flat and unhurried.

No. Lie down.

The resistance was considerable and it was not defiance. Something in the animal wanted to move, in the way a body wants to stretch when it aches, and it took Jin about forty seconds of steady pressure to get him back down.

At the forty-minute mark the thirst arrived and it was enormous.

Jin had two liters ready and Glitch went through all of it and would have gone through more, and Jin gave him another half liter in stages over twenty minutes rather than all at once, because Doyen had said something specific about that during the leg recovery and he had written it down.

The first feed came at ninety minutes and vanished in under three.

The change was visible by about the second hour and it was not dramatic.

Jin only saw it because he had spent four months looking at this animal every day. The plating along the flanks had settled — the hairline gaps between the ordered rows had closed a little further, sitting flush in a way that made the whole surface look more like one object. The muscle over the shoulders was denser rather than larger.

The clearest change was in the recently healed foreleg. It had been the one Glitch favoured for a fortnight, and something in how it sat had corrected. The joint housing looked broader through the top.

At three hours the pressure in the bond eased off and became something else, which took Jin a while to name.

Steadier. The connection had always had a slight noise to it, a background variability he had never noticed because he had nothing to compare it against, and now it did not.

[Consolidation in progress]

[Glitch — Rank 1 Novice, 6-Star | Bronze Quality]

[Nutritional demand: elevated, 10–14 days]

[Reduced training load recommended through consolidation]

Jin sat on the floor of his room at half past one in the morning with his hand on his beast and read that line four times.

Six-star.

He checked for a skill offer, an evolution panel, or any change to Quality because he had learned to check everything. None appeared. That was exactly right: Glitch’s Partial First Bond Awakening had already happened. Stars six through nine would deepen and stabilize what he had before any deliberate Rank 2 breakthrough and the attempt to form a Bond Core.

Not tonight. Not for a long time.

He let himself enjoy the number anyway, for about a minute, alone in a room, which he thought he had earned.

He noticed his own change the next morning and it took him a while to identify.

He was moving Glitch, shifting a hundred-and-forty-kilogram beast who wanted to lie in the doorway, and it was easier than it should have been. Glitch had not suddenly gained another bodyful of weight; he simply settled that weight against the floor more completely than he had two days ago.

His arms felt exactly as they had on Tuesday, so this was not ordinary strength. When Glitch’s weight came against him, Jin no longer had to fight to stay where he was; his stance held and the shove traveled through his frame instead of catching at his shoulders.

He tested it deliberately later by carrying the feed containers up two flights, which had previously been a thing he noticed doing, and arrived at the top not particularly interested in the stairs.

Deeper, not different.

He was still a sixteen-year-old with a support talent. A Rank-1 wild beast would still kill him in about four seconds, and he had watched one nearly do it in a wilderness sector two months ago while somebody threw him clear.

But the last time he had been thrown clear, he had gone about a meter and a half.

Maybe one meter now. Still enough to put me down, but not nothing.

Glitch felt fine by breakfast and had opinions about it.

He ate the morning feed in ninety seconds, walked the length of the room three times to demonstrate that his leg worked, and then went and stood by the door with the unmistakable posture of an animal proposing that they go and do something.

"No."

The bond suggested the resistance hall.

"You advanced six hours ago and you’re on reduced load for ten days."

The bond suggested a short session at the resistance hall.

"Do you remember what I said last week?"

Glitch conveyed that he remembered several things and did not agree with all of them.

"I said properly. This is the properly part. The properly part is boring, that’s the entire nature of it."

Glitch lay down against the door in what was clearly intended as a protest and fell asleep inside four minutes, which Jin considered a decisive victory for the reduced training schedule.

Doyen ran the post-advancement assessment the following afternoon and the scanner did the work.

[MERIDIAN — DEVELOPMENTAL ASSESSMENT]

[Beast: Glitch (Astor, J.)]

[Quality: Bronze]

[Combat Rank: 1 — Novice, 6-Star]

[Contract: stable]

[Advancement: confirmed]

She checked it, then checked the old foreleg for eleven minutes, then the throat, then went back to the file.

"That’s fast," she said.

Jin had been ready for this since before he pressed the button.

"How fast?"

"Your 5-Star and partial evolution registered — " she scrolled " — five weeks ago. Six-Star at five weeks is at the quick end of what I see."

"Is that a problem?"

"It’s a note." She wrote it. "Fast isn’t the same as unhealthy. I’m looking at the animal in front of me, and the animal in front of me has clean joint tracking, good weight, no inflammation anywhere, and a metabolic profile that’s high because he’s consolidating exactly as I’d expect. That’s a beast doing well, not a beast being pushed."

"He’s been on a full Bronze feed schedule since the evolution," Jin said. "Third-Class facilities, the Stonewell Managed Rift, the tournament ladder, and an exterior Tide deployment."

Doyen looked up.

"E-9?"

"Yes."

"That’ll do it, then." She went back to writing. "A beast that recently moved up a Quality tier, on concentrated resources, with real field exposure and an exterior Tide behind it. I’ve seen a Silver do something similar after a bad season. It’s fast and it’s coherent."

She signed it off.

"Reduced load for another ten days. No combat assessment, no sparring, and no maximal use of the corrosive skill — I want the throat tested at low output first and not before the end of the week. Controlled positioning work is fine."

"Understood."

"And book the follow-up now, while you’re standing here and not panicking."

"Already did."

"Of course you did," said Doyen.

Jin walked out with a record that was now real outside his phone.

Somewhere in Meridian’s systems, a line had updated. Glitch’s entry on the class board said Bronze, Rank 1 Novice, 6-Star, where five weeks ago it had said Iron 4-Star and everyone in a lecture hall had been sympathetic about it.

Next class cycle, everybody who looks at the roster knows.