Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Chapter 37: Adapt or Fail

Chapter 37: Adapt or Fail

The Head Examiner’s voice didn’t shake.

That was the first thing Jin noticed. Whatever had gone wrong underground, the man on the loudspeaker had already decided the candidates would not hear one gram of it in his tone.

"Due to an unexpected incident," the voice said, flat and enormous across the whole dome, "Phase Two has been converted into an emergency survival assessment."

No apology. No we’re sorry. No this wasn’t supposed to happen.

Just the next instruction, delivered like a man reading a grocery list.

"Stay alive. Protect your beast. Assist other candidates where it is safe to do so. Proceed to the nearest designated extraction point."

A pause.

"The examination continues. You are still being evaluated."

Then silence again.

Jin, crouched over Glitch’s injured leg with a handful of crushed herbs, exhaled slowly through his nose.

Translation: something they couldn’t control got loose, and the damaged barrier network made a mass teleport riskier than guided extraction. They were turning the evacuation itself into the assessment because the cameras were already running.

"Cool," he muttered. "Love a difficulty spike with no patch notes."

The zone reacted the way eighty scared teenagers always would — which was to say, in eighty different wrong directions at once.

Somewhere to the east, a candidate actually whooped. "Emergency assessment means more targets! More kills, more points—" His voice carried, bright and stupid, before distance swallowed it.

A girl near the safe-zone barrier sat down hard and stopped moving entirely, hands pressed over her ears.

Two boys who’d been running together split apart the instant the announcement ended, each sprinting for extraction without a backward glance at the other.

And a small cluster near the ridge did the opposite — pulled together, tightened their formation, started counting heads.

Jin watched all of it from the edge of the safe zone and filed it away without comment.

Panic didn’t reveal skill.

Panic revealed people. Who you actually were when the tutorial ended and the safety rails came off.

He already knew who most of these people were, now.

Glitch’s leg came first. Before anything else.

Jin didn’t open the Engine.

Old reflex still screamed at him to — check the stats, pull the readout, find the heal — but there was no heal, he’d already learned that the hard way an hour ago, so instead he reached for the talent everyone thought was useless.

C-Rank Data Appraisal. The desk-job talent. The one that made him fit for calculating beast diets and nothing else.

He let it crawl across Glitch’s foreleg.

[Analyzing biological subject: GLITCH] [Muscle strain — minor.] [Laceration — shallow. No arterial involvement.] [Mana channel: slight instability. Non-critical.] [Assessment: Non-life-threatening. Rest advised.]

Jin let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding.

Not deep. Not the mana channels, not really. Just a cut and a strain and a scare.

"See, this is the thing nobody tells you," he murmured to Glitch, unwrapping the river-herbs. "Everyone thinks my talent’s garbage because it can’t punch. But you know what a garbage talent that reads bodies is great for?"

Glitch blinked up at him.

"Knowing exactly how hurt you are before I do something dumb about it."

He pressed the crushed herbs to the wound—the same plants he’d gathered the previous afternoon because Arthur’s voice in his head said never walk past food or medicine—and bound it with a strip torn from his own sleeve.

Later, once he’d finished, the Engine gave a single quiet pulse.

[Beast condition: Stable. Treatment effective.]

Jin snorted softly.

Yeah. I know. Beat you to it.

The C-Rank talent wasn’t just a cover story anymore. It had done real work. It had told him the truth about Glitch’s body, and the truth had been don’t panic. That was worth more than any fireball.

His hands moved on autopilot, wrapping the leg, and somewhere in the middle of it a memory surfaced — old, worn smooth from handling.

Arthur, years ago. Before Jin had a system, before any of this. Sitting on the edge of a too-small cot in their too-small apartment, gripping his ruined leg after another long shift he shouldn’t have worked.

Jin, younger, asking if it hurt.

"When you’re hurt," Arthur had said, quiet and tired, "stop pretending you aren’t. That’s how tamers die out there, kid. Not from the wound. From lying to themselves about the wound."

Jin tied off the bandage.

He looked at Glitch’s leg, at the way the lizard tried to put weight on it and flinched.

"We’re going slow," Jin said. "No arguments. You’re hurt, so we stop pretending you aren’t."

Glitch huffed, clearly wanting to protest.

"Nope. Party rules. The tank rests when the tank’s bleeding."

He didn’t push the pace after that. Not once.

The rescued kids hadn’t left.

Jin noticed it the way you notice a debuff creeping onto your status bar — slowly, and then all at once. The two he’d freed from the pillar. Milo. A third who’d drifted over during the chaos. They’d all just... arranged themselves around him. Waiting. Watching which way he’d move so they could move the same way.

Nobody had appointed him anything. He hadn’t given a single order they were obligated to follow.

They were following anyway.

Jin stared at them, deeply unenthused.

"...I didn’t sign up to be party leader," he muttered.

Milo, checking his rabbit’s paws nearby, didn’t even look up. "You kind of did."

"I really didn’t."

"You told me to conserve stamina, gave those kids a rescue plan in under a minute, and you’re rationing your herbs like a field medic." Milo shrugged. "That’s leader stuff. Sorry. You’re it now."

"I hate this game," Jin said, to no one.

But he didn’t tell any of them to leave.

Before moving, he made them show him what their beasts could still do. Two stocky, spine-backed defenders had enough stamina to brace but not chase. A narrow-bodied runner remained quick in short bursts and useless in a prolonged grapple. Milo’s Thorn Rabbit could detect motion through the ground, yet a hard impact would fold it in half. Glitch was the most experienced fighter present and the one least able to bear weight.

It was a bad party composition. More importantly, it was the party he had. Jin rearranged the candidates so the slow and injured stayed inside the formation, then made everyone repeat the retreat signal until fear could not erase it.

The two Iron-quality beasts came out of a dry gully with the extraction point still half a kilometer off.

Wolf-shaped again, mottled, hungry. Not the Bronze Stalkers — these were the ordinary wild kind, driven agitated by the chaos rippling through the zone. Two of them, spreading to flank a group of five nervous kids and their tired beasts.

Running wasn’t an option. Not with Glitch limping and the younger candidates already at their limit.

Jin’s brain flipped into a mode he knew better than his own name.

Party fight. Mixed builds. One tank hurt, two supports, two glass cannons who’ve never fought together.