Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Chapter 34: Unauthorized Seal Breach

Chapter 34: Unauthorized Seal Breach

Half a mile away, three candidates stood in front of a hole in the ground.

It hadn’t been a hole an hour ago. A stretch of collapsed earth had given way beneath a cracked concrete lip, revealing a stairwell descending into the dark — old, industrial, sealed once behind a heavy blast hatch that now hung open on a single rusted hinge.

"It’s gotta be a bonus objective," one of them said, a tall boy with a scarred Bronze hound at his side. "Think about it. Hidden entrance, sealed door, nobody’s found it yet. First one down there gets whatever they stashed."

"I don’t know," a girl muttered, hugging her arms. "It looks... old. Really old."

"It looks lootable." The tall boy grinned. "You want to pass, or you want to camp like a coward all night while everyone else scores?"

The third candidate was already testing the first step.

It held.

He grinned back.

None of them noticed how quiet the forest around the entrance had become.

None of them noticed there were no animal tracks near that hole. None going in. None coming out.

Nothing living went near it.

They went in anyway.

The false sun didn’t set. It just gave up.

The dome dimmed to a deep, bruised twilight, and across the entire exam zone, seventy-nine candidates simultaneously realized the same terrible thing.

It wasn’t ending.

Panic rippled through the arena like a dropped current. Somewhere, a boy screamed for a withdrawal that wasn’t coming. A girl huddled against a rock, rationing water she should’ve rationed six hours ago. Two candidates who’d burned every scrap of stamina fighting for a scoreboard they couldn’t see now stared into the dark with nothing left.

Jin had known since noon.

He built the camp the way Arthur used to describe it, half-remembered field discipline dredged up from a crippled man’s stories.

Back against solid stone. No fire — light and smell both. A pack of crushed river-herb rubbed low around the perimeter to muddy their scent. Glitch and the Thorn Rabbit set to rest in shifts, one watching while the other slept. One narrow approach in, one marked escape route out.

Boring. Careful. Alive.

"You’ve done this before," Milo said quietly, watching him work. It wasn’t a question anymore.

"No." Jin settled against the rock. "I just listened to someone who did."

Milo looked at him for a long moment.

Then, without another word, he sat down and started copying everything Jin had done.

Genuine respect, Jin noted. It had taken a whole day and one near-death, but the kid finally got it.

The night went deep.

Jin drifted in that thin, gamer’s half-sleep — the kind where part of you stays logged in, watching the minimap even with your eyes closed. He’d trained it over years of AFK grinding. Never fully out. Always one alert away from awake.

Something touched his wrist.

Not a claw. Not a bite.

Glitch’s tail. Pressed flat against the inside of Jin’s wrist, and — tapping. Light. Deliberate. Twice.

Jin’s eyes opened without a sound.

He didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Just followed Glitch’s gaze into the dark tree line, where — a moment later — Milo’s Thorn Rabbit finally stirred, quills rising as it belatedly caught the scent of something passing at the edge of their perimeter.

Something large. Something that moved on, uninterested, back into the dark.

Jin waited until it was long gone before he let out his breath.

He looked down at Glitch.

The lizard looked back, gold eyes steady in the dark, tail still resting against his wrist.

He didn’t roar. He didn’t growl. He knew a loud warning would give us away — so he found a quiet one. He made up a signal. For me.

Jin had trained beasts in a game for years. Leveled them, geared them, treated them like numbers on a screen.

He’d never had one talk to him before.

Something in his chest went tight and warm and unfamiliar.

"Good," he whispered, barely a breath. He rested two fingers against Glitch’s head. "That was really good."

Glitch’s tail tapped his wrist once more. Softer.

Understood.

Then the forest died.

Not gradually. All at once — every insect, every distant call, every rustle of leaves cutting out between one heartbeat and the next, like the world had held its breath.

Jin was already sitting up.

A sound rolled through the ground. Not through the air — through the ground, felt in the stone at his back, in the dirt under his palms.

Low. Metallic. Grinding.

A long, drawn-out groan of old machinery forced into motion after years of stillness.

Not a beast. Beasts didn’t sound like that.

Not an explosion. Explosions ended.

This kept going. A slow, deliberate, mechanical shift — enormous and patient.

A door.

A very large door, somewhere underground, opening.

Milo jolted awake beside him, eyes wide. "Was — was that part of the exam?"

Jin stared toward the ruins, toward the dark stretch of collapsed earth half a mile off where he’d refused to go.

The dome above them flickered. Just once. A stutter of light across the whole false sky.

"If it was," Jin said quietly, "the examiners would look less scared."

The observation room was no longer an observation room.

It was chaos.

Examiners were on their feet, shouting over each other, a dozen screens flashing red at once. The dry, confident evaluation of hours ago had evaporated completely, replaced by the raw, ugly sound of professionals watching a controlled situation stop being controlled.

A single warning bloomed across the central display, huge and red and impossible to look away from.

[⚠ UNAUTHORIZED SEAL BREACH DETECTED]

[LOCATION: SECTOR NINE — SUBLEVEL ACCESS]

[STATUS: DANGER ZONE SUBLEVEL — OPENED]

[CANDIDATE PROXIMITY: CRITICAL]

The veteran examiner stood frozen in front of it.

Every drop of color had drained from his face. His hand, half-raised toward the screen, hung there, shaking.

He’d read the old records. He knew what was under Sector Nine. He knew why it had been sealed, and by whom, and what it had cost the last team that stood on that ground seven years ago.

He knew what the beacon had been trying to say.

Do not open.

Somebody had opened it.

"...Evacuate them," he whispered.

Nobody moved fast enough.

"EVACUATE THEM!" he roared. "ALL OF THEM! NOW!"

The communications operator hit the emergency broadcast. Static swallowed the first transmission. The opened sublevel was bleeding old mana through the arena grid, forcing the barrier to spend every reserve cycle stabilizing itself; candidate bracelets that should have received directions showed broken arrows or nothing at all.

"Mass recall is offline," the operator said. "If we force it through that interference, we could scatter them between anchors."

The veteran’s jaw clenched. "Then no recall. Launch every extraction drone, light the safe corridors, and guide them on foot. Nobody guesses with a child’s body."

Across the tactical map, dormant rescue units blinked awake one by one. Between those lights, dozens of candidate markers kept moving without knowing the rules had changed.