Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Chapter 24: The First Impression

Chapter 24: The First Impression

The arena didn’t cheer.

That was the strange part.

Glitch had cleared the course, landed his impossible dodge, and sat down neat as a filing clerk — and instead of the laughter the crowd had loaded, there was nothing. A long, suspended quiet, the sound of a thousand people recalibrating at once.

Above the floor, the screen still glowed.

[Command Response: Excellent] [Reflex Grade: Excellent] [Synchronization Estimate: Abnormally High]

The first two lines, people understood. Good training. Impressive for the grade, sure, but explicable.

That third line, nobody understood.

Not the candidates. Not the aides. Not — and this was the part Jin clocked as he walked off the floor — the senior examiner on the platform, who was staring at it with the specific frown of a professional looking at a number her instruments weren’t supposed to be able to produce for an Iron-tier lizard.

Jin kept his face bored and his pace even and got off the arena floor as fast as bored would allow.

Don’t look interesting, he reminded himself. You looked interesting. Undo it. Be boring.

Glitch, on his shoulder, chirped at the crowd like he wanted an encore.

"No," Jin muttered. "We do not want an encore."

Up on the platform, the senior examiner didn’t look away from the readout.

"Run the synchronization check again," she said quietly.

Her aide blinked. "Ma’am, it’s an Iron—"

"I can read the plate. Run it again."

The second scan pinged a moment later. She studied it. It came back nearly identical to the first — a bond reading that sat where it had no business sitting, wedged up in a bracket reserved for pairs who’d trained together for years.

"It’s not strength," she said, half to the aide and half to herself. "The beast’s exactly as weak as the grade says. Iron. Feeble." She tapped the number. "But the coordination. The response latency’s almost negative — the thing’s moving before the commands finish. That’s not a strong beast. That’s a perfectly tuned one."

The aide leaned in. "How does a slum kid with a C-Rank talent get an Iron beast tuned like this?"

The examiner watched the small black lizard disappear into the candidate holding area on the boy’s shoulder.

"Either that boy trained it day and night," she said slowly, "with a discipline I haven’t seen in a first-year in a decade..."

She let the thought hang.

"...or he’s frighteningly talented, and hiding it."

She marked something on her slate. Jin, mercifully, did not see what.

Down in the tiers, the rumor was already breeding.

"It’s still an Iron beast," one candidate scoffed, arms crossed, refusing on principle to be impressed. "One-star. It’ll get flattened the second Phase Two has anything with teeth in it. Coordination doesn’t kill monsters."

"Yeah," his friend said slowly, not really agreeing. "But did you see that last dodge? The dummy ramped. It went full speed — I saw two other beasts eat that arm and go down. That lizard slid under it like it knew."

"Lucky."

"Twice? It stopped before the kid even said stop. That’s not luck, man, that’s—" The friend trailed off, frowning. "I dunno what that is."

A few rows down, a girl was describing the dodge to someone who’d missed it, hands miming the slide. Someone else was asking what the candidate’s number was. 4471-G. The black lizard. Astor.

It moved through the crowd the way rumors do — quiet, sideways, gathering.

Which was, Jin would have been relieved to know, precisely the temperature he wanted. Not awe. Curiosity. A weird well-trained Iron-tier, a footnote, a "did you see that" that would fade the second something flashier happened.

Nobody was reaching for the truth.

They just thought the slum kid was surprisingly good at his homework.

Lucian Vale hadn’t moved.

He stood where he’d been standing, Thunder Falcon on his arm, and he’d watched the entire run without a word — watched the small black beast read a course that had humbled dozens of stronger ones, watched it dodge a strike built to catch beasts flat-footed, watched it come up sitting and waiting like the whole thing had been trivial.

He watched Jin walk off the floor with the beast on his shoulder and the studied, deliberate boredom of someone trying very hard to be forgotten.

The falcon shifted, arcs of blue crackling between its feathers, and made a low sound.

Lucian’s eyes stayed on the black lizard until it vanished into the holding area.

"Interesting," he murmured.

Just that. He didn’t call out. He didn’t sneer, didn’t threaten, didn’t do a single one of the things a lesser rival would have done to make himself the center of the moment.

He simply filed it, the way Jin filed things, and turned back to his own preparations.

And somehow that one quiet word made him more dangerous than every loud boast Garrick had ever made — because Garrick looked at Glitch and saw a briquette, and Lucian Vale looked at Glitch and saw a question.

Beyond the outer barrier, where the families waited, Arthur Astor was smiling.

Not a small smile. Not the careful, guarded thing he’d worn for ten years. A real one, wide and helpless, still fixed on the arena screen where his son’s scores hung.

He wasn’t smiling because the scores were high — though they were.

He was smiling because of how Jin had looked out there. Loose. Certain. Crouching in front of that lizard like the lethal course was a walk in the corridor, saying whatever he’d said too quiet to hear, and then just — trusting it. His anxious, lazy, hiding-in-his-room son had walked onto the floor and looked, for the first time in his life, like he belonged somewhere.

"He looked so sure," Arthur said, to nobody, voice thick.

Elsa had no such restraint.

"I TOLD you!" She was on her feet, jabbing a finger at the screen, at the whole tier of Outer Ring families around her. "I TOLD everyone Glitch wasn’t trash! Everybody said briquette! Everybody said paperweight! Who’s laughing NOW—"

"Sweetheart, sit—"

"—EXCELLENT, EXCELLENT, and whatever that third one means it’s clearly ALSO good—" She rounded on a mortified stranger. "That’s MY brother. That’s our lizard. We hatched that."

A security aide finally persuaded Elsa to sit, though not to lower her voice. Arthur laughed once under his breath and pressed two fingers over the faded contract mark at his wrist. He knew better than most that an excellent score could not stop a claw or guarantee a return. Even so, for this one minute, pride outweighed fear.

On the arena feed, Jin disappeared behind the holding-area doors and the next candidate’s number replaced his. The crowd’s attention moved on, as crowds always did. Arthur kept looking at the empty doorway.

"Come home," he murmured again, too softly for Elsa or the cameras to hear.