Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Chapter 11: The Perfect Disguise

Chapter 11: The Perfect Disguise

Elsa looked at her brother as though he had turned into someone else while she wasn’t watching.

"You..." She hesitated. "Jin, that inspector was impressed. By you. Since when do you know how to do any of that?"

"I read."

"You never read. You spend eleven hours a day on that puzzle game."

"I read between matches."

Her stare didn’t ease. But beneath the suspicion, another feeling had begun to show, one she almost never allowed herself when it came to her younger brother.

Pride.

"...Dad’s going to be really happy," she said under her breath.

She turned back to the battered manual before Jin could get a proper look at her expression.

For a while, Jin kept his eyes on the closed door.

Then the answer fell into place.

All of it. His whole life suddenly had a clear shape.

My talent is trash.

That wasn’t a problem.

That was the advantage.

It had been there from the beginning. He simply hadn’t understood what it meant until now.

C-Rank Data Appraisal had no combat value. It couldn’t kill anything. It couldn’t fight. All it was good for was sitting behind a desk and looking at numbers. On the Association’s chart, it was about as disappointing as an Awakening could get.

Which meant no one would bother paying attention to him.

A genius beast appearing in a slum would raise questions.

A genius beast in a slum being raised by a kid with some unknown powerful talent would bring an investigation.

But a genius beast being handled by a useless C-Rank who had supposedly "optimized the diet"?

Nothing to see. Report closed. Enjoy your safe future in logistics.

Whatever impossible thing the Engine created, Jin would already have a simple explanation ready. He didn’t need to conceal the miracle itself.

He only had to give people a dull lie and let them do the hiding for him.

A slow breath left him.

"...Best disguise in the world," he murmured. "Didn’t even cost me anything."

Then he went back to grinding.

By that evening, the slimes had no chance.

Jin stretched out on his cot with the phone angled above him and ran the tutorial dungeon like someone repeating a level for the two-hundredth time.

He no longer had to think through each step. The slime began its telegraph, and he was already moving. Slide aside, take the new position, guide the next slime into the opening. No wasted inputs. No frantic tapping.

Bait. Dodge. Reset.

He wasn’t really fighting them anymore.

He was directing traffic.

Somewhere around his fourth flawless clear, something changed.

The lizard moved first.

Only by a fraction of a second. The slime launched itself forward, and before Jin’s thumb touched the screen, the avatar had already shifted its balance toward the dodge.

It had repeated the drill enough times that part of the response belonged to it now, not only to Jin.

He stopped playing.

The lizard wasn’t taking control of the fight. Jin still had to remain connected, and every meaningful choice still came from him.

But it had learned how to recoil in the correct direction without being told.

[Combat Instinct Synchronization: 11%]

Clean performance produced clean numbers.

The Engine had made that clear days ago. Jin hadn’t completely believed it then.

He did now.

One flawless run added more than ten messy clears.

"Okay," he said, almost pleased. "So you are learning."

As if it had understood him, the lizard dodged absolutely nothing and stood there looking proud of itself.

Jin was flipping back through the menus when a flicker appeared at the edge of his vision.

It wasn’t one of the locked options. Those remained gray and lifeless, exactly as usual.

This sat farther down the list, in a place he was nearly certain had been empty the day before.

For less than a second, a row of solid black blocks flashed across the screen.

■■■■■■

Static broke beneath it, then formed two readable words.

Synchronization Archive

Jin’s thumb stopped.

He tapped the line.

Nothing happened.

It had already disappeared. No window opened. No notification appeared. There wasn’t even an error message.

The space was blank again, as though nothing had ever occupied it.

He scrolled upward.

Then down.

Then back up once more.

Still nothing.

It hadn’t been an unlock. He knew how those worked now. Unlocks came with a sound, a visual flourish, some little bit of ceremony.

This had been something else.

A hidden door had shifted in a wall he hadn’t known was there. Just enough for light to show through the edge before it closed again.

Jin watched the empty spot for a long time.

The Engine gave him no answer.

It never gave him answers.

"...Fine," he said at last. "That’s a Lv.11 problem."

The apartment door opened shortly after ten.

Arthur came inside looking pale and exhausted. Warehouse grease still clung to the smell of his field jacket. He eased himself into the chair with a low grunt and remained there without speaking.

"Dad, eat something," Elsa said.

"In a minute."

He rubbed at his bad leg. Then, in the same flat tone someone might use to mention the weather, he spoke to the room.

"A scout team didn’t return today. East lock team. Six people."

Elsa froze.

"Danger Zone 4," Arthur continued. "It was only a mapping run. Two days going out, two coming back." He gave a small shake of his head. "The tides aren’t due yet. Sometimes the zone just... takes people."

He talked about it as if a shipment had missed its delivery time.

That was what chilled the apartment.

There was no visible horror in him. No fresh grief. Only habit.

Six people had walked beyond the blast doors, and the outside world had swallowed them. Inside the walls, that counted as an ordinary Tuesday.

Elsa gripped her pencil until her knuckles lost their colour.

"I would’ve come back," she said, quiet but fierce. "Once I’m a Tamer, I’ll map the zones no one else can. I’ll make sure the teams return."

"I know you will, sweetheart."

Arthur said it gently.

He didn’t believe her.

Once, he had believed the same thing about himself.

Jin stayed on his cot, looking up at the ceiling.

He said nothing.

His thumb had stopped over the phone. For once, there were no numbers in his head.

That’s why.

That was the entire game beyond the walls.

Walk outside. Throw the dice. Keep playing until the house finally takes everything.

He thought of the draft notice every Awakened received as soon as they turned seventeen.

Then he pictured an indoor warehouse desk. Safe. Tedious. Predictable.

Yeah. No thanks.

He would keep the slum.

He would keep lying.

He would spend eleven hours every day making slimes miss on a cracked phone for the rest of his life before he let the east lock swallow him too.

All he needed to do was make sure no one discovered what made his beast different.

He was already getting better at that.

The first crack sounded at two in the morning.

Jin wasn’t asleep.

Part of him had expected it. The bloodline number had risen throughout the evening, and the heartbeat line on the incubator had changed from a slow crawl into something with a steady rhythm.

A tiny sound touched the room, like a fingernail tapping glass.

Tk.

He sat upright.

Blue monitor light washed over the incubator. The egg rested in its cradle, almost black, its surface smooth like metal.

A single fracture ran down one curved side.

It was so thin Jin had to lean closer before he could see it.

The shell wasn’t opening yet.

Something inside was knocking.

He climbed off the cot and crossed the cold floor in his socks. Crouching in front of the incubator, he lowered himself until his eyes were level with the egg.

Two fingers settled against the warm shell.

The Engine responded.

[Synchronization Complete.]

[Incubation Progress: 100%]

After that, nothing happened.

There was no chime or bright effect. No celebration.

The egg remained warm, dark, and silent beneath his hand.

For one long second, Jin wondered whether he had ruined it after all.

He stopped breathing.

Something answered from within the shell.

A heartbeat.

Thump.

Weak, but real.

The first beat from a creature that had existed only as numbers on a screen, finally forming a body capable of holding it.

Thump.

Thump.

Three soft beats pressed against his fingertips, almost like a question.

Jin Astor, puzzle-game addict, professional coward, owner of the weakest talent on the Association chart and the most dangerous talent no one knew about, held the cracking egg and smiled to himself.

"...See you tomorrow."