Chapter 350: Licensed

Chapter 350: Licensed

The field-safety module had forty-one sections, and Jin finished the last of them at eleven o’clock on Wednesday night with Glitch snoring behind him.

Most of it was the kind of thing he’d assumed hunters just knew. Check the zone rating before leaving. Learn the closure signals: three flares meant withdraw, one long horn meant shelter in place. Report kills within a day, with photographs and carcass tags. Keep civilians behind you, not beside you.

The final quiz asked him what to do if a farmer insisted on helping.

Thank them, Jin typed, and give them a job behind the line.

[Field-Safety Module — complete]

He closed the laptop and sat back on the feed crate. Two days until the assessment, and he still had equipment to buy.

Glitch shifted in his sleep and knocked an empty bowl against the wall. Jin caught it before it rolled under the next stall. Flicker opened one eye from her perch, then tucked her head away again.

She would be staying here for the hunt. He’d already checked that her care visits could continue while he was away, though he suspected he would spend half the journey wanting to ask whether she’d eaten.

One thing at a time. Pass first.

He spent Thursday on equipment, because the module had frightened him slightly about how little he owned.

The academy store sold a standard field kit. It came with a signal flare pack, a locator beacon, a compact trauma kit, a coil of rope, carcass tags, and a waterproof case for his phone. He checked the price twice, then added two days of ration blocks for Glitch, who ate considerably more than he used to, and a flask of water for himself, which he’d nearly forgotten. He packed everything beside the door, trying not to think about how much he’d spent.

Then he took Glitch out to the sand lane behind the cultivation wing and practiced the thing he was most worried about.

They had two Gravity Presses now. Glitch’s was stronger, with more reach; Jin’s required closer, precise placement. During practice since the breakthrough, Jin had caught Glitch’s foot more than once, and twice they’d cast on the same piece of ground. Remembering Glitch’s reproachful look was enough to make him check their positions again.

So Jin had made a rule. Before he cast, he said mine and paired the word with a brief warning through the bond. If Glitch was about to cast, Jin felt the gathering weight of it and held his own. They practiced with Pell’s training hound, resting between sets while Pell repositioned the markers.

Their last set passed without either catching the other. Jin stopped there, pleased enough that he had to resist asking Pell for one more run.

Friday’s practical assessment took place at the Tamer Association’s range: rough ground with scrub, a dry stream bed, and broken fencing. Two weighted dummies sat on a bench outside a wooden hut.

The assessor was a lean, gray-bearded man named Tolland, with a clipboard and a whistle on a cord round his neck.

"The scenario is simple," he said. "A smallholding has reported a single grazing beast damaging its fence. Those two on the bench are the farmer and his wife. Your job is to find the beast, identify it, and deal with it without anyone on that bench getting hurt." He looked at Glitch, then at Jin. "Finding it is half the mark. Don’t just stand here waiting for it to come to you."

"Understood," Jin said, checking the positions of the hut and bench.

Tolland stepped out of their way. "Begin when you like."

Jin started at the broken fence.

There were tracks everywhere, which he suspected was the point. Jin crouched beside the stream bed to separate the heavy cloven prints from smaller padded ones and a long drag mark.

The cloven prints near the fence were deep and sharp-edged, the soil inside them still dark and damp. In places, those fresh hoofprints cut through padded tracks whose edges had dried and crumbled. The padded tracks were older and belonged to a dog-sized animal, not something that could break a fence post. The drag mark ran away from the fence toward the scrub and looked very convincing until Jin noticed that the grass along it was bent the wrong way. Whatever had made it had been dragged toward the fence, not away.

Planted, he thought. Someone pulled a sack along there.

He followed the cloven prints instead. They went along the stream bed, not into the scrub, and stopped beside a stand of bushes where the bark had been rubbed raw at about knee height. A few coarse brown hairs were caught in it.

Glitch, beside him, had gone still. Jin felt it through the bond: a low, steady hum in the ground, the familiar sensation of Tremor Sense picking something up. The heavier movement came from farther along the bed. Something smaller and quicker was moving behind the hut. Jin marked both directions before advancing.

Two, Jin thought. The scenario said one.

Keeping the bench in sight, he edged along the near bank until he could see the heavy one, roughly forty meters ahead. It was a big, low-slung training boar with blunted tusks, standing in the stream bed and rooting at the bank. His appraisal confirmed it as soon as he had a clear look.

[Drill Boar — training stock]

[Combat Rank: 1 — 7-Star]

It matched the fence damage and prints. As Jin watched, the boar lifted its head and saw them.

Glitch could end this in one charge. Jin felt his eagerness through the bond and nearly gave the command.

But the smaller thing behind the hut had stopped moving. That was what bothered him.

He looked back at the bench. The two dummies sat there in the open, ten meters from the hut’s corner. If Glitch charged down the stream bed, he’d be forty meters from them, with his back turned.

"Hold," Jin said.

Glitch held, unhappy about it.

"Bench," Jin said, and pointed.

Glitch swung around and climbed back up the bank, setting himself squarely between the hut and the bench just as a lean gray hound burst round the corner of the hut and ran straight at the dummies.

It met a wall of armored drake and stopped so suddenly that it sat down.

Behind them, the drill boar had made up its mind and was charging up the stream bed toward the bench as well.

Jin moved to the bank’s near edge. The boar would have to climb through a narrow, muddy gap between two rocks, comfortably within reach. "Mine," he said, and set the patch.

The boar’s front feet hit the bank and sank. Its momentum carried it into the slope, and it lost its footing and slid half a meter back down into the stream bed, grunting with surprise. By the time it scrambled up again, Glitch had turned, the hound was cowering, and there was nowhere for the boar to go that didn’t go through Glitch.

After a long look at Glitch, it backed down the stream bed.

Tolland blew his whistle.

"The scenario said one," Jin said, walking back. He could feel what the brief cast had taken from his Core, though he had plenty left. The slope had done most of the work once the boar lost its footing.

"It did," Tolland said, writing. "Farmers miscount. Reports are wrong. You’d be surprised how many candidates find the boar, see the opening, and send their beast straight down that stream bed while the hound eats the farmer." He glanced up. "You read the tracks properly, too. Most people follow the drag."

"The grass bent toward the fence," Jin said. "Whatever made that mark came in, not out."

"Exactly." Tolland finished writing and tore off the sheet. "Pass."

Jin accepted the paper, then read the last word to make sure. Glitch nudged his elbow before he could read it a second time. He rubbed the drake’s jaw with his free hand.

"Yes. You too."

The license came through that afternoon.

[Tamer Association — Independent Hunting License]

[Holder: Astor, Jin — Combat Rank 2]

[Class: I — managed interior zones, posted targets within license rating]

[Conditions: kill reports within 24 hours; zone rating checks mandatory; frontier sectors not included]

[Academy-authorized activities: unaffected]

Jin read it on the bench outside the range, with Glitch lying beside him eating a ration block Jin had brought for after the test.

Then he opened his saved notes and found the Hollowmere posting.

[Hollowmere — Interior Bounty]

[Target: Stonejaw boars, crop-fence damage, eastern farm margin]

[Status: Open]

It was still there.

He pressed the button that had been grayed out when he saved the posting.

[Contract accepted: Astor, Jin]

[Client: Pask smallholding, eastern margin]

[Report on arrival.]

"Tomorrow," Jin told Glitch.

Glitch looked up from the empty packet, checked Jin’s hands for another, and sighed. Jin tucked the folded assessment sheet safely into his kit. For once, the wait until morning felt longer than the work ahead.