Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Chapter 19: Public Training

Chapter 19: Public Training

Elsa stepped in first.

"Go on. Say it again." She moved toward Garrick, anger burning through every word. "Say one more thing about my brother and I’ll—"

"Elsa."

Jin caught her arm. Nothing dramatic. Just a firm, easy stop.

Arthur’s voice ran through his head. The best revenge is staying alive. The world already wants us dead. Don’t help it.

Ten years of watching his father drag a ruined leg toward the desk had taught Jin the price of losing control in a world that showed no mercy for it.

"He’s not worth a fight three days before the exam," Jin said quietly. "Let it go."

Garrick took restraint for fear and grinned. "You heard him, Elsa. Listen to your coward of a brother."

Jin ignored that too.

His attention rested on Garrick’s wolf for a few seconds longer. With no spite involved, and only because his brain handled everything like a game encounter, he noted the details.

Favored the right side. Probably an old injury. Left turns were slower.

Stored.

Garrick still wanted his spectacle.

A reflex-training ball lay nearby, dense rubber and about the size of a fist. He scooped it from the ground and threw it at Glitch without warning.

Hard and fast.

The goal was obvious. Knock over the little brick, get a laugh, and make Jin look worse.

"Hey—" Elsa started.

Glitch had been busy staring at a leaf.

The ball tore toward him, low to the ground.

Glitch took one step.

That was all.

No dramatic jump. No flashy movement. The hatchling shifted his weight onto his hind legs and turned cleanly aside at exactly the right moment. The ball passed through the space he had occupied and struck the dirt behind him.

Glitch watched it bounce.

Then he walked over, closed his jaws around it, and carried it back. He set the ball neatly at Jin’s feet before sitting down, tail wrapped around himself and golden eyes raised for the next command.

The noise around them died.

Garrick’s grin disappeared into a tight frown. The brick was supposed to fall over. Instead, it had avoided the throw with the timing of a beast that had spent years on reflex drills, then fetched the ball like that had been the assignment.

Someone nearby muttered, "...Huh."

An old instructor stood a few feet away. Until then, he had paid them no attention. Now he studied the little black lizard, taking in the calm response, exact movement, and quiet discipline.

"That hatchling is unusually well trained," he said under his breath.

Then he turned back to his students.

Nothing else happened.

No alarm. No sudden suspicion.

Just discipline.

A well-behaved Iron-tier hatchling with excellent obedience. Perfectly ordinary.

No one saw the reflex buried in Glitch’s soul. No one noticed Evasive Step sitting silently at five percent inside a beast the world had already dismissed as trash.

Garrick swore and stormed off, his wolf following at his side.

Jin crouched and offered his hand. Glitch climbed onto it without hesitation.

"Nice dodge," Jin murmured.

The hatchling chirped, clearly proud of himself, then bit playfully at Jin’s collar.

That night, Jin sat cross-legged on his bed while Glitch slept on the pillow beside him. He opened the Engine.

There was no update, and he had not expected one. He only meant to look over the numbers.

He reached the training statistics, paused, scrolled back, and read the same line twice.

His avatar’s stats had increased.

The gain had not come from the dungeon. It had not happened inside the Training Instance either.

The numbers had risen during the hours spent at the public training ground. Real-world practice. Sitting, turning, jumping, and one perfectly timed dodge against a thrown ball.

Training outside the game had affected the avatar.

Jin went still.

He had misunderstood the relationship.

Until now, he had treated the Engine as the source and reality as the result. The game trained the beast. The beast became stronger. That was the whole system. A one-way advantage that let him replace ordinary grinding.

Except the flow went in both directions.

The game trained reality, and reality trained the game.

Practice inside the stone ring had given Glitch the movement needed to avoid Garrick’s throw. Dodging the ball in the real world then sharpened that response, improved the imprint, and fed the result back into the avatar.

A loop.

Each side strengthened the other.

An avatar grinding by itself would eventually reach a limit. A real beast training alone would only improve like any normal beast. Connected together, though, they kept building. Every pass through the cycle made the next one more effective.

Jin breathed out slowly.

A small smile appeared, quiet enough that no one else would have noticed. It belonged entirely to Glitch.

At last, the Engine’s purpose made sense.

It was not a shortcut around the real world.

It amplified effort. Real effort, in both places. Then it multiplied the result.

Every other candidate had access to a feedback loop of their own. Wealth simply let the richest families buy a better wheel.

Jin had two wheels.

And his were linked.

"...Oh," he whispered. "That’s completely unfair."

He was thrilled.

Arthur returned home exhausted, his face gray and his injured leg dragging worse than usual. He lowered himself into a chair and made a sound that was half sigh, half question.

"How did the training ground go?"

"Glitch humiliated a Bronze beast," Elsa announced before Jin could minimize the entire thing. She practically shone with pride. "That Garrick kid threw a ball at him from all the way over there because he wanted to be a jerk, and Glitch just stepped aside. Perfectly. Then he fetched it, brought it back, and sat down in front of everyone. One of the instructors called him disciplined. Our one-star briquette embarrassed a Bronze candidate."

Arthur stared at her.

Then he burst out laughing.

It was not the thin, tired laugh Jin had heard over the last few days. This one came from somewhere deeper. Arthur folded forward in the chair, one hand pressed to his ribs, helpless against it. He laughed until tears gathered in his eyes and he had to wipe them away.

"He fetched it," Arthur managed. "Our rock brought the ball back and sat down. Oh—oh, that might be the best thing I’ve heard in ten years—"

The ball was not really why he was laughing.

Jin could see that, even though Arthur never said it aloud.

His father was not looking at Elsa as she told the story. He kept watching Jin, catching the small, unguarded smile Jin had failed to hide while they talked about Glitch.

It was the first time Arthur had seen his son smile over his beast.

He noticed.

He did not mention it.

Arthur only kept laughing, reached across to mess up Jin’s hair, and let his worn-out, uneven, genuinely happy expression carry everything that would have sounded too clever if spoken.

Jin allowed it.

The message arrived much later, after everyone else had gone to sleep.

Light flashed from Jin’s phone beside Glitch’s sleeping head. It was not the Engine.

The Tamer Association’s cold official channel had sent the same broadcast to every candidate in the shelter.

[TAMER ASSOCIATION — ACADEMY ENTRANCE EXAMINATION]

[Candidate: Jin Astor]

[Candidate Number: 4471-G]

[Report: East District Examination Hall]

[Status: Confirmed — Eligible]

The rules followed.

Reporting time. Sorting procedure. The flat bureaucratic language of an institution that turned children into soldiers without pretending otherwise.

At the bottom sat one final line.

[Examination commences in: 48:00:00]

Forty-eight hours.

Jin watched the countdown for a long time.

Then he turned toward the small black creature asleep on his pillow. Glitch was barely two days old. Officially worthless. Inside him, two connected wheels were already turning, while a skill the world said could never grow began taking hold in his soul.

Somewhere beneath the artificial sun of the Inner Core, Lucian Vale slept beside his Silver falcon. He had ten years of purchased advantages behind him, and the entire shelter already expected him to take first place.

Here, there was a slacker and a brick.

Jin reached out and rested two fingers against Glitch’s side. The hatchling’s body rose and fell beneath them.

"Time to see," he whispered, "if gamers can beat prodigies."