Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Chapter 28: Something Bigger

Chapter 28: Something Bigger

Jin kept his pace steady.

Arthur had once explained that fleeing prey woke up the chase response in almost every predator. Jin had written it off as another fact he would never need. Now it was the only reason he wasn’t sprinting.

He walked with deliberate slowness, calm enough to look insulting from a distance.

Glitch retreated beside him, matching each step while facing the threat. His little frame stayed wound tight, but he followed Jin’s lead.

First, the boulder hid them. After that came a fallen log. Jin used the hill’s downward curve next, never turning their retreat into a straight path. He kept them moving downwind so their scent scattered instead of pointing directly toward them.

The growling remained behind the ridge.

Three minutes passed, then four. It weakened little by little. Whatever was back there had no interest in spending effort on prey that had stopped offering an easy chase.

Only then did Jin breathe normally again.

They had gained no loot, no XP, and no kill for the count.

They were alive.

Probably my best deal this week.

Noise carried from ahead before the next scene came into view. Something struck hard enough to crack. A beast roared, only for the sound to end abruptly. Over it came a boy’s shout, part order and part fear.

Jin reached the top of a small rise and peered into the gulch below.

The spear-boy from the staging line was there. Jin remembered him as nervous and equipped for three different disasters at once. Now he stood above a predator of the same species Jin had avoided.

The creature had fallen, though it was still alive.

The boy looked close to following it. He swayed between breaths, and his beast had a rough set of claw wounds torn across one flank.

Technically, he had won.

Nothing about him looked victorious.

Jin stayed out of sight among the trees and watched. The lesson settled in without help from a tutorial.

He brought it down. The exam probably counts that as a win.

But if another threat arrived within twenty minutes, the boy was finished. His stamina was nearly gone, his beast was hurt, and the gulch offered almost no protection.

He had chosen one unnecessary fight. The rest of the exam would be harder because of it.

Jin didn’t enjoy being right. Mostly, he felt bad for him.

Winning one fight didn’t matter much if it left you unable to survive the next one.

In the observation room, the examiners reviewed Candidate 417’s record. Two eliminations had cost him half his stamina and left his beast injured.

Jin’s feed showed the reverse. No eliminations. No wounds. Two dangers identified and avoided before combat began.

The veteran examiner entered marks on both records and said nothing. The scoring model did not confuse fear with sound judgment. The real question was whether either candidate would repeat the same decision once exhaustion began clouding every choice.

Between a pair of boulders, Jin found a narrow space that could be defended from both sides. He sat and finally released the breath still trapped in his chest.

Glitch climbed onto his lap on his own. His gold eyes continued darting toward the trees. The flaps beside his head, or ears, or whatever they counted as, remained pinned slightly down.

Jin tapped him gently between the horn buds. "You handled that pretty well."

Glitch answered with a doubtful little sound.

"No, really. Growling was the bad part. You got everything right after that." Jin rubbed behind one horn bud until the tension in Glitch’s body slowly eased. "We didn’t back off because we’re weak. That thing knew the area, and we didn’t. Pride doesn’t give XP, and real life doesn’t come with respawns."

Glitch cocked his head.

At best, he understood two words out of five. The tone got through perfectly.

"You actually sit there and listen when I talk," Jin murmured. "That’s kind of nice."

No mechanic tracked the moment. A bond value didn’t appear in his vision, and the Engine gave him no notification to announce that anything had changed.

None of that stopped it from mattering.

They resumed their search at a reduced pace. Jin gave the predator’s last known location a wide berth, circling around it rather than taking the shortest route and risking another meeting.

Once he stopped looking only for immediate threats, the forest began telling him something else.

Several branches had been broken far above the reach of an ordinary Rank 1 predator standing on four legs.

A dead trunk carried four deep claw grooves. The spacing between them was greater than the width of Jin’s spread hand.

Near another trail lay the remains of an animal roughly the size of a deer. Its ribs showed through the torn carcass, but much of the meat remained. The killer had either been disturbed or had simply stopped caring.

Tracks crossed the same section from different directions. Some were recent. Others had been worn down over several days.

Jin crouched beside the damaged trunk. He studied the grooves longer than he wanted to.

Those aren’t from the thing we escaped.

Whatever had left them was much larger.

Until now, the mental map had been simple enough. Water in one direction. A chokepoint farther on. The predator’s territory covering another section.

A new area took shape beyond those landmarks, except Jin had no name for it. Its borders were marked by trails bending away and animals refusing to pass through.

The predator hadn’t been protecting its own territory.

It had been avoiding someone else’s.

That possibility settled heavily in Jin’s stomach.

If something can scare the thing that scared us...

He refused to carry the thought any further.

The Engine offered nothing.

No popup appeared. No stat window opened. There wasn’t even a bracketed warning pretending to be useful.

Only the same weak pulse from before touched his awareness. It was brief and subdued, almost as though the Engine had bad news and couldn’t find a useful way to deliver it.

Glitch went completely rigid.

This wasn’t the alert posture he had taken near the predator. His breath stopped. Every part of him locked at once, and his widened eyes fixed on the far side of the valley.

Jin turned his attention in the same direction.

For a moment, he saw ordinary distance. Trees. A ridge bending away. The pale not-sky hanging over the arena.

Movement passed between the trunks.

The shape was so large that the forest seemed to shift around it.

It traveled without urgency. There was no reason for it to hurry. Spaces in the treeline that should have taken several seconds to cross vanished behind its silhouette in one step.

Jin’s mouth dried out.

That isn’t Rank 1.

It wasn’t anything listed on the candidate roster, either.

High above the valley, the mana barrier flashed.

Light stumbled once across the dome and immediately disappeared, as though the arena had lost control of itself for a single pulse.

Inside the observation room, every conversation died at the same time.

Warning chimes sounded along the monitors. Red indicators spread across a dozen screens almost together.

Minutes earlier, the veteran examiner had been smiling.

Now he stared at the values running beside the silhouette’s feed. The numbers climbed beyond limits that had no place inside a Level 2 replica arena.

The colour drained from his face.

"...That can’t be possible," he said under his breath.

No one responded.

There was nothing any of them could say.