Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Chapter 35: Chaos Rewards the Prepared

Chapter 35: Chaos Rewards the Prepared

The ground shook again.

Not the deep, grinding groan from before. A sharper tremor this time — the kind that came after a door finished opening, when whatever had been behind it started to move.

Birds exploded out of the tree line all at once, a black scatter against the bruised false sky, shrieking as they went.

Across the entire exam zone, seventy-something candidates froze mid-motion and looked up at the same time.

Nobody knew what it was.

Nobody got a warning. No announcement, no instruction, no calm voice explaining the situation. The exam had kept them isolated on purpose, and now that isolation curdled into something ugly.

Panic didn’t spread like fire.

It spread like cold water — silent, fast, seeping into everyone at once.

Jin was already on his feet.

The observation room had one job now, and it was barely managing it.

"Confirmed," an examiner said, voice tight. "Three candidates breached the old Sector Nine maintenance bunker. Ignored every warning marker on the hatch."

"And?" the veteran demanded.

"It wasn’t a containment vault." Relief and dread fought across the man’s face. "It was old holding pens. Pre-clearance, from when this ground was a research outpost. There were beasts still trapped inside."

"How many?"

"A pack. Six, maybe seven. Bronze-quality Pack Stalkers, best read on the scans." He swallowed. "They’ve been feeding off ambient mana in the dark for seven years, sir. They’re starving. And they’re fast."

The veteran exhaled — a fraction of the tension leaving his shoulders. Not a world-ender. Not the thing he’d feared reading the old files. Just a starving pack of predators.

Then the rest of it caught up to him.

"Their location," he said slowly.

The examiner pulled up the map.

The breach point glowed red.

Scattered around it, close, far too close, were the position markers of two dozen isolated, exhausted, sixteen-year-old candidates.

The relief drained right back out of the veteran’s face.

"...They’re right on top of them," he whispered.

Milo was scrambling for his pack, hands shaking. "What is it? What was that? Do we run? Which way do we—"

"Quiet." Jin wasn’t looking at Milo.

He was looking down.

At the ground. At the underbrush. At the small things.

A stone rat burst out of a gap in the rocks and streaked past their feet, not even registering them as a threat. A pair of the little needle-squirrels followed, then a low ripple of insects, all of it moving in the same direction.

Away.

Everything small was running the same way, and none of them were running toward Jin.

He turned his head and traced the flow backward — to the section of forest they were all fleeing from.

"There," he said, pointing. "That’s where it is. Whatever it is."

Milo blinked. "How do you—"

"The wildlife knows the map better than we do." Jin was already shouldering his own pack. "They’re not scared of us. They’re scared of that. So we go the other way."

He looked at the direction the animals were running, then picked the route that ran perpendicular to it — not straight away, which would just put the pack behind him in a straight line, but angled, cutting sideways out of the danger corridor.

"We’re leaving," he said. "Now. No debate."

For once, Milo didn’t debate.

Others weren’t so quick.

A cluster of candidates near a rocky rise heard the tremor and charged toward it, convinced the disturbance meant a hidden objective — the tall boy who’d found the bunker not among them, because the tall boy who’d found the bunker was no longer in a position to charge anywhere.

Another candidate simply sat down where he was, hands over his head, frozen solid, his beast circling him in confused distress.

A girl bolted into a shallow cave — a dead end, no second exit, the exact wrong place to hide from something that hunted by scent.

Two more started fighting each other over the last of a shared water supply, forgetting entirely that the ground had just shaken.

Every one of them thought they were being brave, or clever, or safe.

Every one of them was wrong in a slightly different way.

The exam didn’t care about courage.

It never had.

They’d been moving for maybe five minutes when Glitch stopped.

Just — planted, mid-stride, nose lifting into the air, gold eyes narrowing at a fork in the path ahead.

Jin had already picked the left branch. Higher ground, better sightlines, it was the obvious call.

Glitch turned right.

Not hesitating. Not asking. He took two deliberate steps down the right-hand path and looked back at Jin, waiting.

Jin stopped.

Every instinct he had said left. The map in his head said left. Left was correct.

Glitch was telling him it wasn’t.

Jin looked at the lizard. At the tail-tap warnings from last night, at a week of instincts that had been right more often than his own map.

"...Fine," he muttered. "Your call."

He went right.

Three minutes later, the left path came back into view from above — and Jin saw the fresh claw marks gouged across it, wet earth still crumbling at the edges. Something had passed that way seconds ago. Something big.

If they’d gone left, they’d have walked straight into it.

Jin stared at the marks. Then down at Glitch.

"Good call," he said quietly.

It wasn’t just praise this time. Something in his chest shifted, settled.

For the first time, it wasn’t Jin keeping Glitch alive.

It was the other way around.

He rebuilt the route in his head around that fact. Glitch could smell and hear things his map could never contain; Jin could read terrain and predict what those signs meant. Neither source was complete alone. From then on, every fork received two votes—his eyes and Glitch’s instincts. If they disagreed, they stopped until they understood why.

It cost them thirty seconds at the next crossing. It saved them from another set of tracks so fresh that mud still shone inside the prints. Jin considered the exchange excellent.

The two younger candidates were pinned under a fallen stone pillar when Jin found them.

Kids. His age, though fear made them look younger, their faces streaked with dirt and terror. One had a leg trapped under the toppled column, the other frantically, uselessly trying to lift it.

"Please—" the free one gasped, seeing Jin. "Please, it won’t move, we can’t—"

Milo grabbed Jin’s sleeve. "We don’t have time. The pack—"

Jin was already crouching by the pillar.

He didn’t think about heroics. He thought about load-bearing math.

Weight, angle, leverage. The pillar was heavy, but not solid all the way through — cracked at the base, resting at an angle against a lower stone. Not a dead lift. A pivot.