Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Chapter 16: Training Instance

Chapter 16: Training Instance

Two words waited on Jin’s screen, begging to be pressed.

Every part of him wanted to do it.

Instead, he slipped the phone away.

Arthur and Elsa were walking three steps in front of him, still debating whether Nightclaw qualified as an official secondary designation. Testing a newly unlocked system mechanic in the middle of a public walkway, with his whole family close enough to look over his shoulder, ranked somewhere near the top of Jin’s worst ideas.

He fell back on his usual solution.

Pretend nothing had happened.

It might have worked if Glitch hadn’t kept watching him.

The hatchling turned in the bend of Jin’s arm until they were face-to-face. His gold eyes stayed fixed on Jin without blinking. Whatever that notification had been, Glitch had felt it too, and now he seemed determined to find out what Jin planned to do.

"Quit staring," Jin muttered.

Glitch continued staring.

Elsa slowed until she was beside him. "That’s completely normal and not creepy at all." She grinned. "Your lizard’s looking at you the same way I do when you promise to wash the dishes."

"He’s a lizard. That’s his only face."

"No, he’s judging you." She leaned closer, enjoying herself. "Even the burnt briquette can tell you’re hiding something. What happened? Did you lose his registration chit already?"

Jin touched the pocket holding the chit. Still there. Still safe.

"How tragic," he said. "My pet finally pays attention to me, and he uses the opportunity to ruin my reputation in public."

Glitch chirped.

Elsa took that as confirmation and laughed all the way back to the apartment.

A faint trace of that morning’s disasters still hung in the air.

Arthur started preparing food. In the Outer Ring, that meant softening a gray protein brick over the apartment’s single working burner, then thinning it with recycled-water broth until it came close enough to a meal.

He moved through the task slowly, taking care with his bad leg, but he hummed as he worked.

That was new too.

Jin couldn’t remember the last time Arthur had hummed before today.

Elsa had already moved on to something else.

"Right." She pushed things aside to clear part of the floor, loosened her shoulders, and stared at Glitch like a drill sergeant inspecting a recruit. "Training starts now. We’ve got three days before the exam. First conditioning, then short sprints, balance drills after that, and once he’s got those down, I’ll work on hand signals—"

"No."

She looked at him. "No?"

Jin lifted Glitch out of reach before she could take him.

"He hatched yesterday, Elsa." His tone stayed light and certain. "His muscles are still developing. Hard drills this early won’t strengthen him. They’ll put stress on the growth process and could stunt him. I worked through the numbers this morning."

He tapped his temple, pointing to where everyone believed his talent operated.

"New hatchlings need controlled, low-impact training during the first week. Very small amounts, plenty of recovery, then you increase the workload."

None of that came from actual research.

Still, it sounded convincing. Jin had spent days experimenting with the sort of language a genuine specialist would use. By now, he could talk like someone who had studied beast development his entire life.

Arthur glanced over from the burner. "He’s right, sweetheart. Same thing’s written in the depot incubation manuals. The first week is mostly rest."

Arthur had no idea whether the depot manuals said anything of the sort.

He simply trusted his son.

Elsa’s shoulders dropped. "Fine." She folded her arms. "But after that first week, he’s mine. I’m turning him into something nobody laughs at."

"Low impact," Jin reminded her. "I’ll take care of his early conditioning. It’s the one thing I’m supposedly useful for."

She gave him an eye roll, but she let the matter go.

Jin made a mental note of that.

The fake talent did more than cover his real abilities. It gave him control. Nobody argued with the diet-and-density specialist about how the beast should be raised. He now had a permanent excuse to keep Glitch’s training under his supervision.

Considering what he intended to try, that worked out perfectly.

He waited.

They finished the gray broth. Elsa settled in with her manual and began drawing out combat forms. Arthur eventually fell asleep sitting upright in the chair.

Only then did Jin open the Engine.

Glitch had been sleeping in his lap for nearly an hour. Jin kept his legs still, disabled the perception filter with one thumb, and brought up the interface.

[Real-World Beast Functions Expanded]

[Training Instance Available]

He selected the notification.

Training Instance:A controlled combat-learning environment generated from the bound beast’s current real-world condition.

[Warning: Training Instance affects both avatar reflex mapping and real beast response conditioning.]

[Warning: User focus required.]

Jin read the warnings twice.

This wasn’t the same as the tutorial dungeon.

The Mossy Hollow, the slime area he had been grinding from the first day, trained the avatar. The digital version of Glitch fought, died, respawned, stored growth, and passed the results down to the real hatchling through their sync.

The language here pointed to something else.

Real beast response conditioning.

Instead of feeding progress through the avatar and letting the real body absorb it afterward, this feature would directly affect the creature sleeping on him.

Jin lowered his eyes.

Glitch’s small black body rose and fell with each calm breath.

"...All right," Jin whispered. "We’ll keep it easy. Show me how this works."

He pressed Begin.

The display melted away.

All the green mess of the Mossy Hollow disappeared. A round platform of pale stone formed in its place, empty and evenly lit. There were no slimes, gathering nodes, or obstacles. Only a clean circle of flat ground.

Glitch’s avatar appeared in the middle.

Black scales. Gold eyes. A tail that looked slightly too long for the rest of him. It matched the real hatchling perfectly.

The avatar checked the ring, then faced the screen as it had learned to do.

Waiting for Jin.

Another figure took shape on the opposite side.

It was a translucent training dummy with a soft glow and the rough outline of a beast. It made no attempt to rush Glitch. Instead, it performed slow, obvious attacks. One arm pulled back. There was a long pause. Then came a wide swing.

An instruction appeared above the ring.

[Lesson 1: Dodge.]

Jin understood the purpose at once.

There was nothing to defeat. The dummy had no health bar, dropped no loot, and couldn’t be killed. No clear condition appeared.

Only the movement mattered.

Jin took control of the avatar. The dummy drew its arm back and swung.

He moved Glitch sideways.

The dodge came out clean, polished by thousands upon thousands of repetitions against slimes.

Something shifted in Jin’s lap.

Glitch’s hind legs gave a tiny jerk. His sleeping body adjusted its weight in the same direction the avatar had dodged.

Jin stopped moving.

He reset the lesson.

The dummy prepared another swing. Jin sent the avatar left.

Glitch shifted left in his sleep.

He tried again, this time moving right.

The real body followed with a small sleeping motion to the right.

The system wasn’t making Glitch fight, and nothing was striking or injuring him. His newly hatched body wasn’t taking damage or being forced through difficult exercise.

The lesson was laying down a pattern.

Each clean repetition pressed the movement directly into Glitch’s reflexes while he slept.

"You’re training without waking up," Jin murmured.

Between attacks, the avatar turned toward the screen and chirped.

Jin continued.

The longer he worked, the clearer the difference between the two systems became.

The Mossy Hollow was for general progress. He could use it for battle experience, materials, raw growth information, and the gradual strengthening of Glitch’s entire body. It could run while Jin handled other things. It offered volume and efficiency.

The Training Instance did something narrower.

It built specific responses.

A single dodge. A command reaction. The muscle memory for one exact motion.

Every repetition also tightened the connection between Jin and Glitch. The sync information rising along the edge of the screen looked nothing like the rough estimates generated by dungeon runs.

This data was precise.

There was only one drawback.

After about twenty minutes, the edges of the stone ring started to blur.

Jin blinked until the image sharpened.

A moment later, the softness returned. Pressure gathered behind both eyes, and his thoughts began to feel heavy. It reminded him of staring at tiny print under weak lighting for far too long.

There was a limit to his concentration.

He had reached it.

Right. The other warning. User focus required.

The Engine drew from him. Jin had learned that after the soul-fatigue headaches brought on by his first long night inside the dungeon.

Ordinary runs through the Mossy Hollow had become familiar enough that he barely needed to think about every movement. He could guide the avatar through most of it on instinct.

The Training Instance demanded his full attention.

Every repetition took something from his concentration, and twenty minutes here had drained him more than a much longer manual dungeon run.

Precision cost more.

His thumb moved toward Cancel.

He was about to save the progress and stop when a voice came from behind him.

"What is that?"