Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Chapter 40: Recognition

Chapter 40: Recognition

The last stranded candidate stepped onto solid ground, legs shaking, and the whole group finally exhaled at once.

Eight of them now. Alive. Together. Dry-ish.

Nobody cheered. They just breathed.

Then one of the newly-rescued kids turned to look back across the water — and froze.

"...Guys."

His voice was wrong.

"The river."

Jin turned.

The water had stopped.

Not slowed. Stopped. The churning gray current simply... wasn’t, the riverbed going still and glistening in the space of a few heartbeats, water draining away downstream faster than it was being replaced.

Something upstream was blocking it.

Everyone went silent.

It wasn’t a monster. Jin’s eyes told him that much — nothing visible, nothing moving, no roar, no shape.

Just an entire river holding its breath.

Rivers don’t stop, Jin thought, very still. Not on their own. Something big enough to dam a river just sat down upstream. Or something big enough to dam a river just died upstream and fell in.

Neither option was good.

The silence stretched.

The silence was worse than any sound could have been.

Then the ground vibrated.

Deep. Low. Felt in the soles of his boots, in the stone, in his teeth.

And the river came back.

It surged down the empty bed all at once, a wall of water reclaiming its channel —

— red.

Not blood-red. Worse. A deep, unnatural crimson, threaded with faint veins of light, the water itself wrong, glowing sickly where it caught the dome’s dim light.

Mana-tainted. Saturated with so much raw energy it had changed color, the kind of contamination that killed anything that drank it and mutated anything that didn’t.

The stranded candidates recoiled. One made a small, frightened sound.

The Engine, deep in Jin’s soul, stayed completely silent.

No warning. No popup. No help.

It didn’t need to say anything. Jin already knew.

He looked at the red water roaring past — the same water they’d been standing in the middle of ninety seconds ago — and let out a slow, thin breath.

"...Whatever happened upstream," he said quietly, already turning his group away from the river, already moving them the other direction,

"...we’re going the other way."

The extraction checkpoint was the first thing all day that didn’t want to kill him.

Jin appreciated that.

It sat in a cleared hollow ringed by portable barrier emitters, humming steady, floodlights pushing back the false dusk. Medical staff moved in practiced lines. Cots. Supply crates. The low murmur of a lot of scared kids finally being somewhere they didn’t have to watch the tree line.

Jin led his group in and felt eight sets of shoulders drop at once.

Nobody celebrated.

That told him more than anything. A few hours ago these kids had thought this was a school test — a checkbox, a formality, a thing you passed on your way to a comfortable Tamer life. Now they sat on crates staring at their hands, beasts pressed close, the specific silence of people who’d learned something they couldn’t un-learn.

Welcome to the real patch, Jin thought. No refunds.

A medic waved his group toward triage. Jin didn’t move toward the cot they offered.

He sat down on the ground with Glitch instead.

The leg first. Always the leg first.

Jin unwound the sleeve-bandage, slow, careful. The wound underneath had closed to an angry pink line — clean, not infected, the river-herbs doing their quiet work.

Glitch immediately tried to stand on it.

"Nope." Jin pressed a hand flat against his chest and pushed him back down. "Sit."

Glitch sat. Then, a second later, deliberately shifted his weight forward like he was thinking about standing again, gold eyes sliding sideways to see if Jin noticed.

Jin noticed.

"I said sit. You’re not fooling anyone. I can see you plotting."

Glitch let out a long, aggrieved sigh — a genuinely dramatic exhale, the sound of a creature deeply put-upon by the injustice of basic medical care — and flopped back down onto his good side.

"Thank you," Jin said dryly. "Drama queen."

Glitch’s tail thumped the dirt once. Unrepentant.

Somewhere behind Jin, Milo snorted.

The medic came over anyway — an older woman with the tired competence of someone who’d patched a lot of beasts and a lot of children in her time.

She crouched, glanced at Glitch’s leg, and stopped.

"Who dressed this?"

"I did," Jin said.

She looked at him. Really looked, the way people did when their assumptions had just taken a small hit. "This is field-grade. Herb selection’s right, the wrap’s got the tension correct, you didn’t overtighten and cut circulation." A pause. "Where’d a first-year learn beast first aid?"

"I read him."

"You—?"

Jin tapped the side of his head. "Data Appraisal. C-Rank. Everyone thinks it’s for counting how much a beast eats." He nodded at Glitch’s leg. "It’s better at bodies than that. I pulled his readout when he got cut. Swelling was localized, no arterial hit. Muscle tension told me the strain was minor — he was guarding it, not tearing it. Circulation was fine past the wound, so no clot risk. Mana flow was jittery but reseated once I stopped him moving on it."

He shrugged.

"So I knew it was a rest-and-wrap, not an emergency. The talent doesn’t fight. It just tells me the truth about what I’m looking at. Turns out that’s most of first aid."

The medic was quiet for a second.

Then she nodded slowly, something like respect settling into her face.

"Most tamers twice your age panic and overtreat," she said. "Slather on everything they’ve got, immobilize a leg that just needed rest, make it worse." She stood. "You didn’t. You diagnosed, then you treated the diagnosis. That’s not nothing, kid."

She moved on to the next cot.

Jin looked down at Glitch.

"Hear that? We’re professionals now. Someone said so out loud."

Glitch chirped, smug.

First time that talent’s gotten a compliment instead of a pity look, Jin thought. Huh. Feels weird. Kind of nice.

Lucian Vale walked into the checkpoint twenty minutes later, and the whole hollow noticed without anyone saying a word.

Jin noticed too. He noticed the important part.

Lucian looked tired.

The projected number-one candidate, the young master everyone had been whispering about since registration — his pristine uniform was streaked with dirt. There was a scrape along his jaw. And the Silver Thunder Falcon riding his shoulder had three visible scratches through its feathers, one wing held a fraction stiff.

Not invincible, then.

The top of the class had bled today just like everyone else. He’d just done it more efficiently, and further ahead of the pack.

Good, Jin thought, filing it away. Means he’s beatable. Also means he’s dangerous, because ’tired and still standing’ is worse than ’strong.’ Anyone can be strong for one fight. Staying up all day takes something else.

A medic moved toward Lucian. He waved her off politely and tended to the falcon himself first — checking each scratch, murmuring something too low to hear, steady hands moving over the wing.

Beast before self, Jin noted. Same as me. Interesting.

Then Lucian walked over.

No swagger. No sneer. No entourage of hangers-on. He just crossed the hollow, stopped a polite distance away, and looked at Jin with the flat, assessing calm of someone reading a chess position.

"You were Candidate 314," he said. Not a question, quite.

Jin nodded. "Yeah."

Lucian’s eyes moved to Glitch — to the bound leg, the resting posture, the way the lizard watched him without fear or aggression.

"Your beast’s command response was impressive," he said. "The obstacle course, Phase One. And again today, from what the checkpoint feeds showed." A slight pause. "An Iron-quality beast shouldn’t move like that. An Iron-quality beast shouldn’t think like that."

Jin scratched behind Glitch’s horn buds.

"He studies harder than I do," he said.

Glitch chirped — proud, preening, clearly understanding he was being complimented even if not the words.

Something flickered at the corner of Lucian’s mouth. Not quite a smile. The ghost of one.

"...I see," he said.