Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Chapter 20: Everyone Is Preparing

Chapter 20: Everyone Is Preparing

The Outer Ring had become unrecognizable overnight.

Jin wasn’t happy about it.

There had been no disaster. Nothing had broken. The problem was that the entire Ring seemed to have woken up at once.

Most mornings, the walkways were filled with exhausted workers dragging themselves from one shift to the next. Today, noise and movement covered everything. Training grounds overflowed with children putting their beasts through drills beneath mana barriers that sagged from constant use. Supply shops that usually had no stock worth buying now had queues stretching outside.

Glitch rested in the bend of Jin’s arm as Jin made his way through the crowd. One look at the Ring was enough to understand what was happening.

Big event incoming. Everyone’s grinding before it starts.

The shops made the reason obvious.

Families stood three rows deep at the counters, buying sacks of beast feed, rolls of splinting-tape, cheap healing salves, and battered secondhand chest-guards sized for hatchlings. A mother placed a small vial in her son’s palm, then wrapped his fingers around it with both hands. From her expression, she might have been handing over something more valuable than her own life.

A couple of stalls farther down, a father tried to bargain for a used barrier-charm. The seller wouldn’t budge. The father paid anyway.

The farewells were worse.

Those managed to bother even Jin.

A girl close to his age held a scruffy Bronze pup against her chest while her whole family tried to embrace her at the same time. Her grandmother was crying. Her father’s jaw shook from how hard he clenched it.

It looked like a family sending someone to war.

Jin was starting to understand that some of them were doing exactly that.

This wasn’t merely a school examination. Humanity was studying its own children and deciding which of them might stand near the blast doors when the next Tide arrived. Which ones would be sent outside.

Most of the candidates filling the Ring would fail.

Many of those who succeeded would never come back.

Every family here already knew.

Glitch noticed none of it. He opened his mouth and tried to catch a drifting speck of dust.

"Come on," Jin said quietly, catching his snout. "Read the room, buddy. There’s a whole mood happening."

The candidate registration center felt like another world.

The Association operated the place, and the Association apparently considered shabbiness a personal insult. Once Jin and Arthur passed through the outer checkpoint, the Ring’s crowded desperation vanished behind them. In its place were spotless corridors, harsh white lights, and hundreds of candidates being pushed through strict, perfectly arranged lines.

Nothing moved out of order.

The first station handled identity verification. Each candidate’s wrist was scanned and checked against the registry, with no exceptions. Beast verification came next. Every hatchling was recorded and matched to its registration chit. Candidate numbers were confirmed after that, followed by a temporary examination bracelet that locked around the candidate’s arm and gave off a dim glow.

Armed Tamers guarded every junction.

Real Tamers.

They stood without speaking, armored and watchful, with their beasts waiting at heel. None of them made threats, but their stillness carried enough danger that conversations throughout the hall stayed low.

When Jin reached the front, he extended his wrist and let the scanner pass over it.

At the next station, a clerk recorded Glitch with the same bored manner she’d used for the beast before him.

Grey Rock Lizard variant. Iron. Rank 1. One-star.

Inside Jin’s pocket, the Engine produced its second reading and confirmed that the false result had survived the check.

The examination bracelet closed around his arm, cold against his skin.

For a moment, Jin took in the entire process. The inspections. The armed guards. The organization that left no space for carelessness.

He understood the Association a little better now.

These weren’t officials creating pointless problems because they enjoyed paperwork. They were part of what stood between sixty million people and a wasteland that wanted every one of them dead.

They treated everything seriously because one lazy mistake could get people killed.

Respect, Jin thought, and genuinely meant it.

Then came the second thought.

Now please let me finish this and get back to my couch.

The hall fell quiet.

Jin noticed the change before he found the cause.

He had dealt with wealthy candidates looking down on him all week. Garrick and his Bronze wolf. The constant briquette jokes. Rich-kid status games were easy enough to ignore.

This wasn’t one of those.

A candidate had entered through the Inner Core wing.

The crowd opened around him without anyone asking. Nobody was shoved. No guard ordered them aside. People simply moved on instinct, the way they would back away after realizing they stood too close to a ledge.

The boy looked about Jin’s age. His charcoal uniform was spotless, but it carried no house crest. He had no followers around him and showed none of the swagger Jin had come to expect from Inner Core types.

He didn’t speak or acknowledge anyone.

Beside him walked a lean, four-legged beast with a coat like old bronze mixed with honey. Muscles shifted beneath its burnished hide as it moved.

The movement itself bothered Jin.

It was far too smooth. Far too aware.

Its eyes swept across the hall once, measuring every candidate present, then dismissed them all.

The clerk at the bracelet scanner straightened when the beast’s result appeared.

[Gold-Quality] — Lord-tier.

Whispers carried the words from one end of the hall to the other. The boy’s bracelet assigned him to a separate sector and time block. He was one of dozens of elite candidates, and Jin might never enter the same arena as him.

The examination was far bigger than any single rivalry.

Jin wasn’t jealous.

His gamer instincts came online instead, cool and automatic, and began breaking down what he saw.

Handler isn’t showing off because he doesn’t have to. Beast keeps its balance toward the back, ready to launch. Its eyes move without the body following. Nobody trained that into it. That’s natural Gold-tier instinct.

He stored the details without getting emotional about them.

Fast. Smart. The real thing. Nothing like Garrick. This one could actually be trouble.

There was no envy in it. He was gathering information.

A boss would have received the same treatment.

Glitch had no interest in analysis.

Glitch had spotted a bug.

While everyone else watched the Gold-tier prodigy, a tiny beetle wandered across the polished floor. From Jin’s arm, Glitch fixed on it with the complete focus he normally reserved for socks and leaves.

His body twisted.

Jin’s grip loosened for one second.

That was enough.

Glitch slid free, landed on the floor, and scrambled after the beetle with tremendous determination and almost no control. His low body darted between candidates’ legs. He tripped over his oversized tail, recovered, and kept going.

The beetle changed direction.

Glitch followed.

Then his snout bumped directly into a pair of perfectly polished charcoal boots.

Every sound in the hall stopped.

The Gold-tier candidate looked down.

At his feet sat an Iron-tier lizard the colour of a dropped coal. Glitch had already forgotten the beetle. He settled onto his haunches and blinked up at the boy with enormous, innocent golden eyes.

Jin shut his eyes for a moment.

"...Naturally," he said.

He crossed the floor without hurrying and picked Glitch up.

Everyone was watching. Jin could feel what they expected to happen next. The arrogant elite would sneer at him, humiliate him, perhaps make an example out of the slum kid and his little briquette.

The boy did nothing of the kind.

His gaze remained on Glitch for another second. Then the corner of his mouth shifted.

It wasn’t a sneer.

It almost looked like a smile. The expression was faint and impossible to read, but there was interest behind it.

Jin would have preferred contempt.

The candidate stepped aside and continued walking. His Gold-tier beast moved after him with that same unnatural smoothness.

He said nothing.

There was no confrontation.

The hall finally breathed again.

Later, when Jin told Elsa what had happened, she would stare at him in confusion.

"He never said a word?"

Jin wouldn’t have an answer.

All he knew was that plenty of people had looked at Glitch that week, but this was the first time he had wished one of them hadn’t.

A bell sounded, and staff directed the candidates into a broad assembly hall. A senior examiner climbed onto the raised platform at the front.

She was old, covered in scars, and wore the flat, unimpressed expression of someone who had buried more students than she cared to remember. She wasted no time.

"The complete rules will be provided tomorrow at the examination hall," she said. Her voice reached the back without effort. "For today, remember four things."

The hall became completely still.

"First. Cheating results in immediate and permanent disqualification. We will catch you. Don’t try."

"Second. Beast welfare matters. Your beast is not equipment to discard in exchange for a passing mark. Abuse it, and you are finished."

"Third. You may withdraw whenever you choose. There is no penalty, and there is no shame in doing so. Candidates who understand their limits live longer than candidates who don’t."

She stopped briefly.

"Fourth."

No one moved.

"Injuries are expected. Broken bones. Burns. Worse injuries than either. Do not act surprised when a monster hurts you." Her level gaze crossed the room. "Death is extremely rare, but it is possible. Every year, we conduct this examination by the book. Every few years, the book is insufficient. Some of you may be standing beside people now who will not be alive in three days."

The room stayed frozen.

All the nervous chatter and excitement vanished. So did the swagger. What remained was a hall full of children who had remembered at the same moment that the future they were competing for could kill them.

"Report back in twenty-four hours," the examiner said. "Dismissed."

Even Jin had no dry comment for that.