Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Chapter 36: Run

Chapter 36: Run

"It’s not as heavy as it looks," he said. "It’s balanced wrong. Milo — here. Get low, push up and toward me. You—" to the free kid, "—when it lifts, pull him straight out, don’t twist his leg."

Milo hesitated one half-second, then dropped beside him.

"Three," Jin said. "Two—"

They heaved.

The pillar groaned, pivoted on its cracked base exactly where Jin had read it would, and rose maybe eight inches — just enough. The trapped kid screamed and scrambled free.

Jin let the pillar drop.

Under a minute, start to finish.

No speech. No you’re safe now, little one. He was already scanning the tree line for the next threat before the kids had even finished thanking him.

In the observation room, a rescue coordinator merged the two freed candidates’ signals with Jin’s marker and requested a drone. The network returned an eleven-minute estimate, then revised it to seventeen as corrupted pathing data forced the unit around the unstable sector.

"They can’t wait there," the coordinator said.

On-screen, Jin was already moving them away from the collapse. He checked the rescued boy’s trapped leg, made him test his weight, and assigned the other candidate to support him on the uninjured side. It was not treatment, but it would keep a strain from becoming a break before they reached a medic.

The veteran examiner logged the decision and switched one of the emergency feeds to follow their route. Until a drone reached them, watching was the only help the control room could give.

Then, finally, the readers of the forest saw them.

The Pack Stalkers broke from the tree line in a low, coordinated rush — six of them, lean and gray-black, built like greyhounds crossed with something that had never needed to be beautiful. Bronze-quality. Muscle over bone, no wasted mass.

They didn’t charge blindly. They fanned, spreading into a hunting arc, two peeling wide to flank while the rest drove straight — cutting off escape routes with an intelligence that made Jin’s stomach drop.

Seven years starving in the dark hadn’t made them slow.

It had made them desperate.

"Move," Jin snapped. "Everybody. Follow me exactly, step where I step."

He didn’t try to fight. Six coordinated Bronze predators against one Iron lizard and a defensive rabbit was not a fight, it was a math problem with only one solution, and the solution was don’t.

He ran the terrain instead.

He led them through a narrow gap between boulders — single file, forcing the pack to funnel and break their formation. Over a shallow stream, killing their scent trail. Along a ridge too narrow for the flankers to spread.

Every choice bought seconds. Every second was a resource. Jin spent them like a man who’d budgeted his whole life for exactly this and hated every second of the withdrawal.

Behind them, the pack snarled, regrouping, adapting.

But they were built to run down panicking prey in the open.

Jin never gave them open. He never gave them panic.

He gave them a maze.

It happened at the stream.

One of the flankers had circled faster than Jin accounted for — cut the angle, came in low and fast from the side while the pack drove them forward.

Jin didn’t see it.

Glitch did.

The lizard broke sideways without a command, throwing himself between the incoming Stalker and Jin’s exposed flank — not to fight it, just to break its line, to make it flinch, to buy the half-second Jin needed to react.

The Stalker’s claws raked out.

Glitch twisted, mostly clear —

Mostly.

A line of red opened along his foreleg. Not deep. Not crippling. But real.

The Stalker, thrown off its lunge, skidded past into the stream, and Jin was already moving, already grabbing Glitch, already hauling both of them up the far bank as the pack lost another precious second reorienting.

But something had changed in Jin’s head.

The exam didn’t matter anymore. The score didn’t matter. The escape route was still there, still the priority, but underneath it, the whole calculation had rearranged around one single input:

Glitch is hurt.

For one ugly instant, Jin wanted to rewind the choice and command Glitch to stay beside him. The thought died as soon as he examined it. Glitch had seen an attack Jin missed and made the only move that kept the Stalker from reaching his ribs. Ordering away that judgment would not protect either of them; it would only make Glitch hesitate the next time Jin was blind.

The answer was not tighter control. It was becoming worthy of the trust that had put a small body between him and a predator.

They broke the tree line into open ground, and the pack didn’t follow.

Bronze Stalkers didn’t chase into the unknown when the ground stopped favoring them — and the open field ahead was crawling with the scent of medical staff, transport vehicles, safety.

The temporary safe zone.

Medics were already moving, pulling eliminated candidates onto stretchers, running triage. Someone shouted at Jin to keep moving toward the barrier line. The two rescued kids were swept up by staff. Milo collapsed to his knees, chest heaving, alive.

Jin didn’t stop for any of it.

He dropped to the ground with Glitch cradled against him, and for the first time all day, his hands weren’t steady.

The wound was shallow. He could see that. Clean-edged, not deep, nothing that would cripple.

But it was blood. Glitch’s blood. Real, and warm, and wrong.

Jin’s mind — the part that never stopped gaming — automatically reached for the Engine, for a heal, for some menu with a [Restore] button.

There was nothing.

No prompt. No option. No instant fix.

The Engine could accelerate. It could grow. It couldn’t undo.

Glitch had bled for him, and Jin was going to have to clean it, and bind it, and worry about it, the same as any Tamer who’d ever come home from the wasteland with a hurt beast and no shortcut waiting.

"Okay," Jin murmured, already digging the river-herbs out of his pack—the ones he’d gathered the previous afternoon for no reason except that survival always needed them. "Okay. Hold still. I’ve got you."

Glitch pressed his head weakly against Jin’s chest.

Jin’s throat went tight.

"You didn’t have to do that," he said quietly. "But — thanks. Seriously."

He got to work.

He was still cleaning the wound when the loudspeakers activated.

For the entire duration of Phase Two — through the predators, the beacon, the breach, the panic — the exam had stayed silent. No announcements. No guidance. Isolation by design.

Now, without warning, sound crackled to life across the whole zone, huge and echoing, carried to every corner of the artificial wilderness at once.

Every candidate still standing went dead still.

The Head Examiner’s voice rolled out over the forest.

"All candidates."

A pause. Long. Heavy. The kind of pause that meant whatever came next had not been in the original plan.

"...the examination has changed."