Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Chapter 32: A Party of Two

Chapter 32: A Party of Two

The hazard came an hour later, and it wasn’t a monster.

The trail narrowed onto a stretch of low, boggy ground — deceptively flat, a soft green carpet of moss glowing faintly under the false light. It looked like the easiest walking they’d hit all day.

The Thorn Rabbit stopped dead and refused to move, quills snapping fully upright, thumping one back foot in sharp, staccato warning.

"It’s the moss," Milo said immediately, reading his beast like a second language. "That’s a warning-thump. The moss is bad."

Jin crouched at the edge. He couldn’t see anything wrong.

Glitch could.

The lizard stepped up beside the rabbit, sniffed once at the green carpet, and hissed — low, tail rigid, backing off a half-step without being told.

"Two beasts, same answer," Jin murmured. "That’s a no."

He picked up a dead branch and pressed it into the moss.

The green closed over it. Where it touched, the wood darkened, softened, and started to smoke faintly — a thin, acrid wisp curling up into the still air.

"Mana-thorn moss," Milo breathed. "It— it eats through anything organic. If we’d walked across—"

"We’d be the branch." Jin stood, scanning. "Okay. Rabbit finds the safe edge, Glitch confirms it. We follow the line they agree on and nothing else."

It took twenty careful minutes. The rabbit picked the route, nose down, thumping approval at each safe stone. Glitch walked point beside it, gold eyes flicking for anything the rabbit’s forage-brain might miss. Jin coordinated between them — not commanding either beast to overrule the other, just reading both, trusting both, letting each cover the gap the other left.

They crossed without a single burn.

Milo exhaled like he’d been holding his breath the whole way. "You didn’t even— you let them lead. You didn’t try to force it."

"Why would I force it?" Jin said. "They know the ground better than I do. Only an idiot overrides working intel."

In the observation room, the veteran leaned forward.

"Two candidates. Two beasts. Different owners, different builds." He watched Jin thread the moss field on the strength of borrowed instinct. "And he’s coordinating both without trying to run the other kid’s beast for him."

"Most candidates who pair up start competing within the hour," another examiner noted. "Or one tries to dominate."

"He’s not competing. He’s stacking utility." The veteran shook his head slowly. "Like the other one’s a resource, not a rival."

On the surrounding screens, the contrast wrote itself.

Candidate 417 — the point-chaser — dropped a fourth beast and staggered, his own creature swaying on its feet, foam at its mouth. He didn’t notice. He was already scanning for the next fight.

A noble candidate in a pristine gray coat waved off a struggling classmate with visible disdain, refused a perfectly good alliance, and marched alone into terrain his beast was clearly reluctant to enter.

Another candidate, further out, discovered his supply pack had torn somewhere along a river crossing — every ration gone, floating downstream, unrecoverable.

A fourth attacked a harmless forage-beast for "points," burned real stamina, and got nothing for it but a winded partner.

Four different ways to fail.

And in the middle of all of them, one lazy-looking boy in an oversized jacket walked a moss field at a careful, unbothered pace, wasting nothing, and quietly climbing a scoreboard none of the candidates knew existed.

Elsewhere in the zone, a shadow crossed the false sky.

Lucian Vale stood on a high ridge, one hand raised, a Silver Thunder Falcon wheeling in a slow, precise arc far overhead. Faint arcs of static crackled off its wingtips with every beat.

He wasn’t fighting.

He watched the falcon’s flight paths the way Jin watched terrain — reading the land from above, mapping threats before they became threats, marking clusters of movement and steering wide around anything not worth the cost.

A pack of Iron-quality beasts moved through a gully below him. Lucian studied them for a long moment.

Then he turned and walked the other way.

Not out of fear. Out of arithmetic.

The falcon folded its wings and dropped to his shoulder in a shower of harmless sparks. Lucian’s expression didn’t change — calm, focused, entirely without the arrogance the other nobles wore like cologne.

He was, in his own way, doing exactly what Jin was doing.

Two boys, two different kinds of excellence, moving through the same wasteland without ever seeing each other — one from the sky, one from the ground, both refusing to spend a single point of themselves they didn’t have to.

Neither of them knew yet how much that mirror would come to matter.

The light began to shift.

It was subtle — the false sun didn’t set so much as dim, the whole dome cooling toward a long artificial dusk. But Jin caught it immediately, and stopped walking.

"We’re making camp," he said.

Milo nearly tripped. "Camp? The exam’s still going. Shouldn’t we— push through? Cover more ground? What if it ends soon and we—"

"It’s not ending soon."

"How do you know that?"

Jin found what he was looking for — a shallow overhang of rock, back protected, a single narrow approach that any beast would have to funnel through. Defensible. Boring. Perfect.

"They told us one thing," he said, dropping his pack. "Survive. That’s it. No time limit. No objective marker. No ’reach the exit.’"

He looked at Milo, deadpan as ever.

"They said survive. They never said for how long."

Milo went completely still.

In the observation room, the veteran examiner set down his cup.

The words came through the audio feed flat, unbothered, almost bored — and landed like a dropped weight in the middle of the room.

They said survive. They never said for how long.

Nobody spoke.

Every examiner in that room had personally helped design the hidden scoring rubric. Decision-making. Resource management. Beast welfare. Awareness. Judgment under pressure. Not one candidate had been told the phase’s true duration, precisely to see who would burn themselves out sprinting for an ending that wasn’t coming.

Seventy-nine candidates were still running the race like it had a finish line.

One had just sat down, set up a defensible camp, and figured out the entire test from a single word.

The veteran exhaled slowly through his nose.

"...He heard it," he said quietly. "The rule under the rule. He actually heard it."

Nobody argued.

Glitch had been sniffing around the back of the overhang while Jin arranged their meager camp — rations sorted, forage checked, watch angles noted.

Then the lizard started digging.

Not idle scratching. Focused, deliberate, both front claws working at the base of a cracked stone slab half-sunk into the ground.

"Glitch. What?"

Glitch kept digging.

Jin sighed, crouched, and helped him lever the slab aside.

Beneath it sat a rusted metal box, its seals long since failed, lid warped by years underground. An old emergency cache — the kind field Tamers buried on long expeditions and marked on maps that no longer existed.

Most of it was ruined. Rations turned to black paste. A medkit fused into a solid, useless brick. An old mana-driven emergency launcher was so corroded it crumbled when Jin nudged it. Conventional guns had been useless against evolved beasts for generations; field teams relied on contracted beasts and specialized mana tools instead.

Seven years does that.

But tucked in the corner, sealed in a hardened casing that had somehow held, was one intact device.

Small. Palm-sized. A single indicator light on its face.

Blinking.

Slow, faint, patient — one weak pulse every few seconds.