Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Chapter 29: Knowledge Wins Battles

Chapter 29: Knowledge Wins Battles

The silhouette was gone.

Not gone-gone. Just gone from view, which in Jin’s experience was a very different and much less comforting thing.

The mana barrier had stopped flickering. The alarms — wherever they were, whoever they were for — had gone quiet somewhere above the tree line, muffled by distance and denial in roughly equal measure.

Glitch was still rigid against his side, breathing shallow, gold eyes locked on the empty space where the treeline had briefly forgotten how to hold itself together.

Jin looked at that empty space for a long moment.

Then he stood up, dusted off his knees, and turned the other direction entirely.

"Whatever scared that predator," he said, quiet and even, "isn’t today’s problem."

He didn’t sound brave saying it. He didn’t sound scared either.

He just sounded like someone closing a tab he had no intention of reopening.

Glitch blinked up at him, visibly confused by how calmly Jin had decided to walk away from the single most terrifying thing either of them had seen all day.

"Curiosity’s a resource," Jin muttered, mostly to himself, already moving. "I’m not spending it on something that could end the run."

Without a monster to run from, the forest stopped being scenery and started being information.

Jin crouched at the base of a leaning tree and studied the bark, where three parallel gouges had scraped clean through moss that looked at least a week old.

Old damage. Not from today. Something’s been marking this stretch a while.

He followed the tree line downhill, eyes tracking a faint depression worn into the underbrush — not a path exactly, more a suggestion of one, the kind of route something used often enough to keep the grass from fully recovering.

Animal trail. Probably leads to water. Everything eventually leads to water.

The river confirmed it twenty minutes later, and so did the mud along its bank, packed with overlapping prints in three different sizes.

Jin didn’t touch any of them. He just looked. Direction of travel. Depth. Spacing between steps.

This is a crossing point. Prey uses it because it’s shallow. Predators use it because prey does.

He noted the wind — steady, coming off the river, carrying scent away from the crossing rather than toward it, which explained why this particular stretch felt eerily peaceful compared to everywhere else.

Safe pocket. Temporary. Filed under ’rest here if desperate, not before.’

Somewhere behind him, a patch of forest had gone strangely, deliberately quiet — no birds, no insects, nothing moving. He marked that too, mentally circling it in red the way he used to circle unexplored fog on an old dungeon map.

Avoid. Or investigate later, with backup. Not solo, not today.

None of it required a system prompt. None of it required a stat window telling him what any of it meant.

It just required him to actually look, which — embarrassingly — was apparently rarer than it should have been, based on how many candidates he’d seen sprinting straight through unmarked terrain like it owed them nothing.

Glitch noticed the shift in Jin’s pace before Jin fully articulated it to himself, and started doing something Jin hadn’t explicitly trained him to do.

He put his nose to the ground at every trail crossing, sniffing longer than idle curiosity would explain.

He paused at the edge of clearings, ears up, listening for a full three seconds before Jin ever gave the signal to move.

At one point, without any command at all, Glitch stopped dead in front of a patch of undergrowth that looked completely unremarkable, refusing to go around it directly — and when Jin finally circled wide out of curiosity, he found a shallow burrow tucked just beneath the leaves, fresh dirt still loose at the entrance.

Den. Occupied. Would’ve walked right over it.

Jin crouched and scratched behind Glitch’s horn buds, slow and deliberate.

"Good catch."

Glitch’s tail gave one small, satisfied flick.

It wasn’t a stat increase. There was no notification confirming Instinct improved or Bond +1. Jin had gotten used to checking for those anyway, out of old habit, and had gotten equally used to not finding them.

This felt more real for it, somehow. Like Glitch wasn’t leveling up a number.

He was just getting smarter, the normal way. The slow way. The way that stuck.

"Keep doing that," Jin said, and meant it as more than praise.

The shouting reached them before the smell of blood did, which Jin took as a small mercy.

He crested a low rise and found the source immediately — a boy, maybe Jin’s age, pressed back against a jagged outcrop of rock with two Iron-quality beasts circling him in a loose, patient pincer.

Wolf-shaped, mottled brown, smaller than what had chased Jin off earlier but working together in a way that made up the difference. One kept the boy’s attention. The other angled steadily for his flank.

The boy wasn’t weak. His stance was decent, his beast — some kind of spined lizard, half his size — was holding its ground gamely in front of him.

He was panicking, though. Jin could see it in the way his eyes darted between both beasts instead of locking onto one, in the way his voice cracked halfway through a command his own beast clearly didn’t fully understand.

Fear makes people stupid. Not because they’re stupid. Because fear doesn’t do math.

Jin had three options, and he ran through all of them in about the time it took to blink.

Fight — burn resources helping a stranger who wasn’t his problem, risk Glitch against two beasts at once for a stranger’s mistake.

Ignore — walk away, exactly like he had with the silhouette, keep his run clean and efficient.

Or think.

He looked at the terrain instead of the fight.

There was a loose shelf of rock jutting from the slope maybe thirty feet from the standoff, the kind of formation that looked stable right up until something put weight on the wrong edge of it.

Jin picked up a fist-sized stone.

He didn’t aim for the beasts.

He aimed for the rock shelf, whipping the stone sidearm with the kind of throw he’d developed dodging his sister’s projectile lectures for years, and it cracked against loose stone with a sound like a gunshot.

Both beasts’ heads snapped toward the noise in unison.

Predators investigate threats to their territory before they finish an easy meal. Free information, every time.

The flanking wolf peeled off first, drawn by instinct toward the louder, closer sound. Jin threw a second stone further down the slope, splitting their attention wider, using the terrain’s natural funnel to pull the pair apart just enough.

"Now," Jin called down, flat and unhurried. "Move left. Behind the rock. Go."

The boy didn’t argue. Fear-brain apparently still recognized a good order when it heard one.

He scrambled left, beast at his heels, and slipped behind the outcrop just as both wolves converged on empty air where he’d been standing.

No flashy battle. No clash of skills.

Just noise, terrain, and a door someone else had been too scared to notice was open.

The boy found Jin twenty minutes later, breathing hard, beast limping but alive, staring at him like he’d personally rearranged the laws of physics.

"You—" He swallowed. "You didn’t even fight them."

"Nope."

"They could’ve killed us."

"They didn’t, though." Jin shrugged, adjusting Glitch on his shoulder. "Funny how that works out when you don’t stand still and wait for it."

The boy opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. "Thank you. Seriously. I thought—" He stopped himself before finishing that sentence, which was probably for the best.

"Running is free," Jin said, already turning to leave. "Fighting isn’t. Do the math next time before your legs forget how to move."

It wasn’t warm. It wasn’t cold either.

It was just true, and the boy looked like nobody had ever put it to him quite that plainly before.