Chapter 245: The Route Behind Him

The work Tarin saw from the conditioning-hall walkway had begun three days earlier, with eleven of his matches in the academy’s public archive. Jin watched all eleven over two evenings.

The first evening produced nothing except a headache and a strong sense that the Slateclaw Lynx did whatever it wanted.

The second evening produced something better, because on the second evening Jin stopped watching the Lynx and started watching the floor.

Every burst had to begin somewhere. Once Jin stopped following the Lynx’s body and watched the floor beneath it, the footage showed him the cost of those abrupt changes: a planted rear foot, a transfer of weight, and the launch that followed. All three happened on the ground.

He timed them.

The ordinary movements were light and quick. Circling, repositioning, feinting at an angle — those were shallow contacts, and the Lynx could abandon any of them mid-stride and go somewhere else.

The full attacks were different. The final approach involved a longer ground contact and a deeper one, and once that contact happened the animal was committed to a line for about half a second.

Half a second.

Jin compared four matches and got four different numbers. That was annoying, but useful. Sometimes the contact lasted longer, and sometimes the Lynx feinted a deep plant without following through, exactly the kind of false tell a good handler taught.

So it’s not a rule. It’s a tendency, and the tendency is strongest on one specific approach.

The rear-angle entry. The one it used when the opponent had committed to a turn and could not finish it — the fastest thing in Voss’s repertoire and the one that had won three of the eleven matches.

That one always had the deep contact. Jin found nine examples and every single one of them had it, because there was no other way to generate that much speed from that angle.

He wrote it down and labelled it honestly.

Strong tendency, not a rule. Rear-angle high-speed entry requires a committed ground plant. Other approaches can be abandoned.

He took the observation into the Training Instance the following morning and immediately discovered that recognizing a pattern on a recording was not the same as using it under pressure.

The Instance gave him what it had always provided: generic training targets on connected ground, configurable for speed and approach angle. It did not know Tarin Voss and could not build a Slateclaw Lynx. Jin did not waste time wishing otherwise. The Engine had never handed him knowledge he had not earned, and he had stopped expecting it to start now.

What it could do was run a fast target past Glitch’s shoulder on repeat.

The first session was a failure and it was Glitch’s instinct that caused it.

Every time the target passed him, Glitch turned after it.

He had been doing that his whole life. Something goes past, you rotate to face it, and a Grey Rock Lizard that had become a Bronze 6-Star anchor still had the instincts of an animal that had once been small enough to need to.

The turn took him about a quarter-second longer than the target needed to be somewhere else.

"Stop turning."

The bond came back with a flat refusal that was not disobedience so much as incomprehension.

I know. Something goes past and you want to face it. Jin pushed the shape across as clearly as he could. You can’t. You’re never going to catch it that way. Don’t follow. Wait.

It took four sessions across three days before Glitch would let a target pass without rotating. During the fifth, the drill finally began to work. The target crossed his shoulder, Glitch’s claws tightened against the floor, and his head started to follow before he caught the direction Jin was holding through the bond. He stayed planted while every instinct in him pulled the other way.

The second thing was harder and Jin had to build it himself.

Reading the deep contact through Tremor Sense was not the problem — Glitch could feel the difference between a shallow footfall and a committed plant, and had been able to since the quarry.

The problem was what happened next.

If Glitch waited for the plant, identified it, and then began moving, he was too late. The half-second of commitment was already gone by the time a hundred and forty kilograms began to accelerate.

So he can’t react to it. He has to already be going.

Which meant Jin had to send the direction before the plant, on a prediction, and have Glitch begin moving into a route the target had not taken yet.

The first eleven attempts were wrong in both directions. Six times Jin called it early and Glitch committed to a route the target never used. Five times he called it late and the target was past.

The twelfth attempt worked, and Jin nearly missed it because success did not look impressive. Glitch began moving a beat before the target’s plant. By the time the burst came, he occupied the line and the target hit him instead of passing behind.

Jin ran it another forty times over two days and got it about half.

Half was not good. Half was one chance in two on a single exchange, and there would be several exchanges.

It’s better than none, and none is what I had a week ago.

He kept the real-world load controlled. Doyen had signed a gradual resumption plan, and Jin had spent eleven days waiting to press a button rather than break one.

Glitch trained at moderate load on alternating days and rested between. The bracing calibration continued to improve — the over-braking from the first assessment had mostly gone, and he could now hold a measured force without moving the rig eleven centimeters, which had been faintly embarrassing.

Jin checked on Flicker on the sixth evening.

She walked her eight meters, came back, and needed to lie down afterward, exactly as she had for two weeks. Verrick said "stable" and wrote it in the log. Nothing had improved dramatically and nothing had slipped backward.

Jin sat with her for twenty minutes anyway and did not open the Engine while he was there.

The night before the match, Jin ran the drill one last time and got it right four times out of nine.

He looked at the number and did not adjust anything, because adjusting a plan the night before was how people arrived at a match with two plans and executed neither.

Glitch was lying against the wall with his chin on his forelegs, and the bond had that particular alert quality it got when the animal knew something was happening tomorrow.

"You’re going to want to turn," Jin told him. "The whole match. Every time he goes past you’re going to want to turn and face him."

The bond conveyed that this was correct and reasonable.

"Don’t. He’s counting on it. That’s his entire plan and it’s a good one."

Glitch conveyed skepticism.

"Yeah," said Jin. "We’ll find out."