The third run agreed with the first two.
So did the fourth, which they did anyway, on a different machine, the following morning.
Jin was not in the room for the discussion afterward, and he never saw the working, and what came out of it eleven days later was four lines in a file.
[COMPARATIVE DEVELOPMENT ASSESSMENT — Glitch (Astor, J.)]
[Finding: Development rate and physical profile fall at the extreme upper boundary of documented Grey Rock Lizard variation. All individual measurements remain within natural species range.]
[No evidence of artificial enhancement, prohibited treatment, growth accelerant, forced mutation, or biological rejection.]
[Assessment: rare natural variation, amplified by exceptional training precision, nutritional accuracy, recovery management, and unusually stable contract conditions.]
[Comparative flag: MAINTAINED for routine observation. No further action required at this time.]
Jin read it about six times, mostly the last line.
The flag stayed. He had expected that, and he was fine with it, because a flag that meant check this again next year was a completely different object from a flag that meant find out what this is.
The sentence in front of it was the one that made him uncomfortable in a way he could not entirely enjoy.
Amplified by exceptional training precision, nutritional accuracy, recovery management.
They had looked at Glitch’s entire impossible growth curve and concluded that Jin was extremely good at taking care of a lizard.
Which is also true, he thought. That’s the annoying part. That part’s completely true, and it isn’t why.
The decision came through the following week, and there was no ceremony attached to it.
[MERIDIAN ACADEMY — CLASS REVIEW COMPLETE]
[Student: Jin Astor]
[Previous Placement: Fifth Class]
[Review Result: APPROVED]
[New Placement: Fourth Class]
[Basis: sustained academic standing; exceptional contract stability; documented beast care under constrained resources; responsible resource management; bracket tournament performance; controlled Rift deployment, exceptional merit; sustained conduct following accelerated review recommendation.]
[Note: placement reflects cumulative record. Continued assessment applies.]
He read it standing in a corridor between Nutrition and Conditioning, and he did not feel much of anything for about four seconds.
Then he opened the second attachment, which was the one he actually cared about.
[FOURTH CLASS — SUPPORT ALLOCATION]
[Feed support: base allocation ×2.4]
[Equipment: fitted allocation, individual assessment]
[Facility access: environmental training complex, tiers 1–4; Rift Preparation Centre, second floor; Beast Development Centre, extended]
[Assignment banding: revised, Fourth Class rates]
Two point four.
He did the arithmetic against Glitch’s intake curve right there in the corridor, on a wall, with his thumb.
The base allocation at 2.4 covered the current requirement with room, and it covered the projected requirement in three months with less room, and it did not cover the requirement in a year unless the curve finally flattened.
So it isn’t solved. It’s just not urgent for a while.
He stood there a moment longer.
That’s the first time since his feed allocation started losing ground that sentence has been true.
He called home that evening.
Elsa answered and he told her, and she made a sound that took the terminal a second to process, and then Arthur got on and said "Fourth Class" once in a completely flat voice, which from Arthur was roughly equivalent to a parade.
"What does it mean?" Elena asked. "For you. What changes?"
"Feed support goes up. I stop putting my shift money into protein."
There was a pause.
"That’s what changes?" said Elsa.
"That’s the main one."
"Jin, you got promoted."
"Yeah, and the promotion is mostly a bigger number in the feed column," Jin said. "Everything else is rooms I couldn’t get into and armour that fits."
He heard Elena say something away from the pickup, doing the thing she did where she talked around a figure rather than at it, and then she came back.
"So we could—"
"Yes."
"I hadn’t said it yet."
"You were going to say the fund," said Jin. "Buy food. Buy the eggs and the vegetables and whatever the fourth level has that isn’t tinned. I’m not sending less."
Arthur said, quietly, "You don’t have to keep sending it."
"I know."
Nobody said anything for a second.
"Fourth Class," Arthur said again, and hung up before his voice did anything embarrassing.
Glitch had a firm position on the whole matter.
He arrived at it approximately twelve seconds after the dispensary confirmed the new allocation, and it did not change afterward regardless of what Jin said to him.
The reasoning, as far as Jin could reconstruct it from the impressions, went: the household’s food had improved; Glitch had fought in the tournament; Glitch had been in the Rift; therefore Glitch was responsible for the food. It was tidy. It had a beginning and an end.
"You didn’t get promoted," Jin said. "I did. You lay on a weighing plate and had to be lifted onto a frame by two technicians."
Glitch conveyed that lying on a weighing plate had been the difficult part.
"They promoted me for records. Feed logs. Attendance. Three weeks of me sorting herbs in a basement."
Glitch conveyed that the herbs had also, in a broader sense, been his achievement.
Jin opened his mouth to argue that one and found, on inspection, that the herbs had come out of a quarry that an avatar of Glitch had cleared, which made the accounting genuinely more difficult than he wanted it to be.
"Fine," he said. "Partial credit."
Glitch accepted partial credit as a total victory and went to sleep.
That night Jin sat on the floor with his back against the bunk and the updated file open on the slate.
Access to the aerial chamber, the underground arena, the low-visibility rooms. The second floor of the Rift Preparation Centre, with the casualty analysis archive on it. Extended Beast Development access, which meant skill-capacity analysis and evolution pathing and a bloodline workup he was now eligible to request and would be requesting exactly never.
And a maintained flag, in a file that more qualified people could now open, attached to a beast whose growth had already been described in writing as sitting at the extreme upper boundary of what his species could do.
Better rooms. Better food. Better equipment. And every single person who looks at him from now on will be better at looking.
He thought about the quarry, four hundred meters down and eleven meters short, where a fruit that strengthened a beast’s physical foundation was still hanging on a branch in a chamber with something in it that could erase an avatar in a quarter of a second.
He was not going back for it. Not yet. The thing that had killed Glitch was still there and still unidentified, and the honest position had not changed since the night he turned the phone face-down.
He gets stronger the slow way first. And when I do go back, I’d better be able to explain whatever comes out of it.
He turned the slate off and sat in the dark for a while with his hand resting on a sleeping lizard who believed, with total confidence, that he had personally bought his family’s groceries.
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