Chapter 243: Fifth of Six

Neris ran the debrief on the walkway with the district still being reset below them.

"Result first. Full column extracted. One sled damaged at fifty-eight minutes and one at ninety-one. That’s a strong pass."

"Understood."

"Now the useful part." She had her slate. "You held your reserve through an hour of ordinary pressure. At fifty-eight minutes you had two aggressors on the column’s rear and a beast eleven meters away who could have solved it in four seconds, and you took a scored sled instead."

"It wasn’t a trigger."

"It wasn’t, and most students in this practicum deploy there. That’s the specific thing I was watching for." She made a mark. "And when the withdrawal route was genuinely threatened you released him in — " she checked " — under three seconds. No hesitation, no request for confirmation. That’s the other half and you got it."

"There’s a third half."

"There is." Neris looked up. "Ruiz. Tell him."

Sela Ruiz had come up the stairs behind them and did not look particularly bothered about any of it.

"Zone Three handoff," she said. "I’d called the eastern wall line. You gave me the western passage."

"It was faster."

"It was faster and I’d already committed a beast to a line. Redirecting cost me about ten seconds of managing her instead of watching the column, and my next report went out late." She shrugged. "It didn’t cost anything. It could have."

"Was the western passage wrong?"

"No. It was probably better." Ruiz met his eyes. "That’s what’s annoying about it. You saw a better answer and you were right, and I’d already picked a working one with information from inside my zone. If you’re going to give me the zone, give me the zone."

Jin thought about it for a second and did not defend himself, because there was nothing there to defend.

"That’s fair," he said. "It won’t happen again."

"It’ll happen again," said Neris. "It’ll happen less."

She closed the slate.

"Practicum’s complete. You’ll get the written assessment tomorrow. Go and feed your beast, he’s earned it."

The assembly notice went out at seven the following morning and required attendance from every class, which Meridian did approximately twice a year.

Jin found a seat in the Third-Class block beside Lysa, who had arrived early enough to get an end-of-row position and was writing something in her notebook.

"Any idea?" he asked.

"Allocation cycle." She did not look up. "It’s the right month for it and the upper years have been strange for a week."

The hall filled around them. First-years crowded the rear blocks in knots of speculation, while the upper-year students filed into the seats nearer the stage and settled with considerably less talking. Whatever had made the older students strange for a week, most of them appeared to have guessed before the notice arrived.

Deputy Principal Aldren took the floor.

"The Shelter Seven Regional Academy League will be held three months from today. Six academies from the surrounding defense region will compete. Meridian is one of them."

The reaction split cleanly across the hall. Somewhere behind Jin, a first-year repeated "three months" in a delighted whisper. In the upper-year blocks, nobody said anything at all, but dozens of students leaned forward.

"Two divisions," Aldren continued. "First-Year Division contributes forty percent of an academy’s total score. Upper-Year Division contributes sixty. The senior weighting reflects proximity to service. The first-year result is not decoration — in the last League it moved two academies’ final placement."

He let that sit.

"I’ll say the part you’re actually here for. Final standings inform the Association and government allocation for the following cycle. Managed Rift access. Beast-feed quotas. Evolution and development material distribution. Medical and rehabilitation allocation. Beast-development support."

The hall had gone very quiet.

"Meridian finished fifth of six at the last League."

Jin did the arithmetic during the silence and arrived somewhere unpleasant.

Fifth of six. And I’ve spent four months finding out what our Rift access and feed quotas actually are.

He had assumed the booking queues and tier restrictions were simply how academies worked. It had never occurred to him that Third Class reserved the variable-surface hall two weeks in advance because students from a previous year had placed fifth in a competition he had not known existed. The same result sat behind feed limits, restricted development materials, and every facility schedule students complained about as though the academy had designed the inconvenience personally.

Aldren did not oversell it.

"We are a respected academy and we remain one. Fifth place cost us quota, not standing. But it cost us quota in a year where every academy in this region is short, and I would rather not explain to another intake why the aerial chambers are booked to capacity."

Medical and rehabilitation allocation caught Jin harder than the rest. For about four seconds, Aldren continued speaking while Jin saw Verrick’s ward instead of the stage: its controlled rooms, specialist hours, monitoring equipment, and the staff who recorded an eight-meter walk as both progress and warning.

That’s Verrick’s line. That’s ward capacity and specialist hours and neonatal support.

He made himself finish the thought properly. Half a thought was how people turned useful resources into miracle cures they had never been promised.

Better allocation doesn’t cure Flicker. It doesn’t make an unsafe transfer safe and it doesn’t shorten a list of five conditions I can’t rush.

It meant the ward could have more of everything for longer. That was not a cure, but it was not nothing.

Aldren moved from academy allocations to the students themselves. Strong individual performances carried contribution points, competition awards, regional recognition, and the attention of Association evaluators. He gave no figures and promised nobody a career. The older students still began taking notes.

That part was easier for Jin to understand. Academy quota affected thousands of training hours over the following year. Personal rewards affected whoever earned them. Both mattered, but only one of them explained why the entire faculty had spent a week preparing an announcement.

The eligibility rules came at the end and were considerably shorter than the stakes.

"Meridian will take eight First-Year students to the League. Five primary representatives and three reserves."

"Entry to the internal qualifiers is restricted to students ranked in the Third-Class Top Twenty at the ranking cutoff. The cutoff is eight weeks from today. Qualifiers and squad training occupy the month following."

Aldren looked out at the hall.

"Reaching the Top Twenty makes you eligible. It does not select you. We will take eight of twenty."

Aldren remained at the lectern long enough to clarify the ladder procedure. A student could challenge anyone up to five positions above their current standing, and victory exchanged the two positions. The rank recorded at the eight-week cutoff determined eligibility, not the highest place anyone touched along the way.

That produced more noise than the League announcement had. Slates came out across the First-Year blocks as students opened the same ladder at once and began measuring the distance between themselves and twentieth place.

[MERIDIAN ACADEMY — REGIONAL LEAGUE ELIGIBILITY]

[First-Year qualifier requirement: Third-Class Top 20]

[Ranking cutoff: 8 weeks]

[Astor, J. — Current rank: 40]

Jin looked at his own line on the slate and did the only calculation that mattered.

Forty to twenty. Twenty places.

The ladder allowed a challenge five positions above. Best case meant four wins, and that assumed nobody above him moved. Everyone in the hall had just heard the same announcement, so they would.

Four wins if he was perfect and lucky. Six or seven if the ladder moved against him, all inside eight weeks, with Glitch still returning to full training load under a written plan.

Four wins minimum. Probably more. Eight weeks.