Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Chapter 33: The Exam Was Never Safe

Chapter 33: The Exam Was Never Safe

Jin recognized it from Arthur’s old stories. A distress beacon. Standard field issue. Broadcasts a Tamer’s position when everything else has failed.

Still transmitting.

Still calling for help.

Seven years.

Somewhere out here, seven years ago, someone had activated this, and waited, and — hadn’t been found.

Jin stared at the tiny, stubborn light.

And deep in his soul, the Game Engine gave the smallest pulse it ever had.

No message. No window. No instructions.

Just recognition — quiet, certain — as if some part of it already knew exactly what it was looking at.

The beacon blinked in Jin’s palm.

Once. Pause. Once.

A slow, tired pulse, like something too stubborn to admit it was already dead.

Milo crouched beside him, staring at it like it might bite. "We should report that. Right? That’s — that’s a Tamer beacon. We should tell the examiners immediately."

"Maybe."

Jin didn’t move to do it.

He was looking at the ground instead.

Now that he knew what he was seeing, the campsite stopped being a campsite.

Claw marks. Deep ones, raked across the rock face behind the overhang — not fresh, but not shallow either. Something big had wanted in.

Moss grew in a dark, uneven patch across the stone near his boot. Jin didn’t need his talent to know what old dried blood looked like under seven years of green.

Broken masonry, stacked. Not fallen. Stacked. A barricade, once. Somebody had piled these stones by hand.

"Milo," Jin said quietly. "This wasn’t a supply cache."

Milo swallowed. "Then what was it?"

"Someone’s last stand."

Milo’s beast pressed itself against his leg. The Thorn Rabbit’s quills weren’t up. They were flat. Cowering.

"Okay," Milo whispered. "Okay. So we definitely report it and leave."

"In a second."

Jin didn’t press any buttons.

That was the first rule of touching something you didn’t understand: don’t touch it more than you already have.

He turned the beacon slowly, examining the casing without pressing anything. Checked the seams. Checked whether the light changed when he moved it. Checked whether the pulse was steady or reacting to him.

Still transmitting. Weak. But it’s putting out a signal, which means it has been putting out a signal. For seven years. To someone.

"What are you doing?" Milo hissed. "Just—"

"Figuring out if I already made a mistake by digging it up." Jin didn’t look away from it. "Signals attract things. Live ones especially. If this has been calling out this whole time, I want to know what’s been hearing it before I add my voice to the pile."

"That’s insane. That’s — you’re being paranoid."

"Paranoid people live longer."

Milo opened his mouth to argue.

Then Glitch growled.

Low. Guttural. Wrong.

Not at the forest. Not at the dark. Both of them turned to look at the lizard, and Jin felt something cold slide down his spine.

Glitch was staring at the beacon.

He was growling at the device.

Jin lowered the beacon toward the stone without switching it off. Glitch’s growl weakened when the device moved farther away and sharpened again when Jin brought it closer. That ruled out the old blood, the ruined camp, and most of the scents trapped beneath the overhang. Whatever bothered him was coming from the signal itself—or from something hidden inside the casing that Jin’s ordinary senses couldn’t detect.

"You can feel the transmission," Jin murmured.

Glitch didn’t understand the sentence, but his rigid posture answered well enough. Jin wrapped the beacon in the spare cloth instead of placing it in his pack. He had no intention of carrying an unknown signal beside his body, especially when the one creature whose instincts he trusted was telling him it was dangerous.

The observation room had stopped feeling like an exam.

"There’s an active distress signal in Sector Nine." The younger examiner’s voice cracked on the last word. "Why is there an active distress signal in a certified zone?"

Nobody answered.

The veteran was already on his feet.

"Pull the old records," he said. "Everything. Pre-clearance surveys, the original zone map, every incident report filed for this ground before we built the arena over it."

"Sir, that’s archived data, it’ll take—"

"Now."

The temperature in the room dropped ten degrees. Examiners who’d spent all day making dry, confident notes about candidate stamina suddenly went quiet, exchanging looks.

On the main screen, the boy in the oversized jacket held a blinking light in his palm and, for reasons none of them could explain, his small black lizard was baring its teeth at it.

"Sir," someone said slowly. "That beacon isn’t in our exam manifest."

"I’m aware," the veteran said.

He didn’t blink.

Against his better judgment, Jin interfaced with it.

Just a scan. C-Rank Data Appraisal, the same useless talent that let him stare at his phone all day without anyone asking questions. He let it reach into the beacon’s dying memory and pull whatever it could.

The data came in broken. Corrupted. Bleeding static.

[Emergency Signal: Active] [Signal Type: Tamer Association — Legacy Frequency] [Last Manual Activation: 7 Years Ago] [Recipient: Unknown] [Message Fragment: "...do not open..."]

His eyes caught on the final fragment.

Then the light went out.

No flicker. No wind-down. The pulse simply stopped, mid-beat, and the beacon went cold and dark in his hand like it had been holding on exactly long enough to say that one thing.

Silence.

"...Do not open," Milo whispered. "Do not open what?"

"Don’t know." Jin turned the dead beacon over one more time, then set it down on the stone. "And I’d like to keep not knowing, honestly."

Milo was already shouldering his pack. "We’re leaving. Right now. This whole area is cursed, I don’t care about points, I want to be somewhere with less — less last stand in it."

"Agreed."

Milo blinked. "Wait, really? You’re not gonna—"

"No." Jin stood, scanning the tree line. "But not because it’s cursed. Because of the message."

"What about the message?"

Jin nodded at the barricade. At the claw marks. At the dark moss over old blood.

"Somebody built a wall here and died behind it. Then somebody, at some point, activated a beacon that says do not open." He let that sit. "Which means there’s a thing somewhere near here that people used to open. And somebody decided that was such a bad idea they used their last breath to warn about it."

Milo’s face went gray.

"So no," Jin finished, "I’m not investigating. I’m going uphill, away from the ruins, and I’m staying away from anything that looks like it has a door."

He was curious. He was always curious.

But curiosity was a resource, and Jin had died once already spending it somewhere stupid.

He wasn’t doing that twice.