Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Chapter 44: No Words Allowed

Chapter 44: No Words Allowed

The final evaluation began by taking Jin’s voice away.

He found out at the forward camp one hour after the announcement, standing in a line of exhausted candidates before a structure that definitely hadn’t been there yesterday.

It had been dragged in overnight on transport rigs and bolted to the ground—an enormous enclosed shell of gray composite, sealed and humming, with barrier emitters ringed along its spine like vertebrae. It had no windows. No sound came out of it at all, which was somehow worse than noise.

Stenciled across its side, in the flat institutional font the Association used for everything from ration tins to death notices, were the words:

SILENT COMMAND ARENA — STANDARDIZED EVALUATION UNIT

"That’s a level," Jin said.

Milo, beside him, looked up with the glazed eyes of a boy who hadn’t slept. "What?"

"Nothing."

But it was.

Jin could see it from here. Enclosed lanes. Moving walls. Hazards on timers. Somebody had built a puzzle box the size of a warehouse and was about to make nearly a hundred exhausted teenagers play it for their futures.

Every one of them was looking at it like a gallows.

Jin was privately the only person in the line who looked interested.

The Head Examiner didn’t waste words.

"This evaluation is being conducted at examination centers throughout the nation," she said. "The same time limit. The same scoring standards. Equivalent lanes and hazards. Individual Shelters govern their own districts, but the central Tamer Association standardizes education and licensing across all of them. Your performance data will be uploaded tonight and compared against every other candidate."

That got a reaction.

Not gasps—this crowd was too tired for gasps. Just a collective sag as nearly a hundred candidates remembered they were not, in fact, the main character of anything.

"You will not receive your final placement today," she continued. "Hundreds of thousands of candidates must be assessed. Shelter Seven’s Phase Two incident will also require manual review. Expect your results in approximately two weeks."

Someone groaned.

"The national Top One Thousand will be publicly ranked. Everyone else will receive a standardized score. You will use that score for Tamer high-school academy applications and scholarship consideration. It will follow you."

The shelters called them academies because they trained future Tamers, but administratively they were still upper-secondary schools. The examination decided which of those schools would even consider an applicant.

Jin absorbed that with complete calm.

Top One Thousand. Out of hundreds of thousands.

That number wasn’t for him, and he felt no particular attraction toward it. Fame meant scrutiny, and scrutiny was the one resource he couldn’t afford.

He wanted a decent score. One good enough to keep him out of the bottom-tier schools where the food was worse than home and dormitories were mostly a rumour. One good enough to earn him somewhere to live and something real to eat.

That was the entire quest objective.

Everything else was optional side content.

"Understand what this test measures," the Head Examiner said. "Beyond the walls, your beast may be separated from you by smoke, noise, terrain, or distance. You may not be able to shout. You may not be able to point. You will have your contract and nothing else."

She allowed that to settle over the candidates.

"This test asks one question: when your voice is gone, does your beast still know what you mean?"

The rules came quickly.

The candidate would remain in an observation booth while their beast entered the lane alone. Sound couldn’t pass through the barrier. The glass appeared as a flat gray wall from inside the arena, preventing gestures or visible signals.

No tail-taps. No hand signals.

Only the mental link created by the contract—that thin, blunt, frustrating little channel available to every Rank 1 Novice and properly trained by almost none of them.

Every lane contained five Astral Markers. The candidate had ten minutes to collect as many as possible while the terrain shifted around their beast. There would be hazards, false routes, and academy-controlled enemies.

Registered talents and approved linked devices were permitted. External assistance wasn’t.

"Attacking everything is not the correct answer," the examiner said. "It is rarely even a good one."

Then came the line that made Jin’s ears sharpen.

"Markers are only part of your evaluation. Command accuracy, route judgment, reaction time, synchronization, and your beast’s condition at extraction will also be assessed. If you injure your beast to claim one additional marker, you may lose more than you gain."

There it is.

They had built the scoring system to punish exactly what a tired, desperate sixteen-year-old would do during the final minute.

Which was, Jin had to admit, decent design.

A medic examined Glitch before his turn.

She was gentle about it, running two fingers along his bandaged leg while Glitch endured the examination with the stiff dignity of a creature who had been poked enough for one week.

"Healing clean," she said. "No infection. He’s cleared because the arena is controlled."

She looked up at Jin.

"But I’ll say it once. Repeated jumping, hard landings, or violent movements could tear the wound open again. He won’t tell you when it hurts. They never do."

"Yeah," Jin said. "I’ve noticed."

After she left, Jin crouched until he was level with Glitch.

"Hey."

Gold eyes met his.

"We don’t need all five," Jin said quietly. "I want you to understand that part. We need a score, but your leg is worth more than a marker."

Glitch tilted his head.

"If it hurts, you stop. I’m not going to be angry. There’s no version of this where I get angry."

Glitch listened to the entire speech with grave attention.

Then he stood, placed his injured foot flat on the ground, and walked three perfectly normal steps—chest out, head high, his gait so aggressively healthy that it looked choreographed.

He turned and delivered a meaningful look.

See?

Jin said nothing.

Satisfied, Glitch turned toward the arena.

Then he limped.

Immediately. Blatantly. The instant he became convinced Jin was looking elsewhere.

Jin watched the entire performance without moving a muscle in his face.

Amazing. He thinks I’m the stupid one.

He decided not to embarrass Glitch publicly. The kid had his pride.

It was, arguably, most of his build.

Lucian entered before him.

The observation booths lined the arena’s flank, while a display allowed the waiting candidates to watch the active lane.

The Silver Thunder Falcon dropped into the course like it had been fired from a weapon.

Then it simply solved everything.

Jin had expected speed.

He got something better and considerably more annoying.

The Falcon reached a moving-wall junction and didn’t slow down. It read the opening and threaded the gap. It reached a hazard field and flew over rather than around it, choosing the single aerial line the emitters didn’t cover.

An academy-controlled beast lunged out to bait it into a fight.

The Falcon simply wasn’t there anymore.

Marker.

Marker.

Marker.

Lucian stood inside his booth with his hands at his sides. He said nothing, did nothing, and kept his expression perfectly still.

Five markers.

Beast in good condition.

Time to spare.

The spectators became very quiet. Nobody cheered. You didn’t cheer for something like that. You stared at it and silently adjusted your expectations downward.

Jin, however, wasn’t watching the Falcon.

He was watching Lucian.

And he noticed something nobody else at the rail seemed to understand.

Lucian wasn’t steering.

He wasn’t sending hundreds of tiny corrections through their link, controlling the Falcon like a drone. He gave it a destination and then let go.

The Falcon selected the route. The Falcon decided when to climb. Lucian merely told it where they needed to go and trusted it to determine how.

Huh.

Jin had been planning to guide Glitch through every step like a remote-controlled car.

Now he understood that would have been slow, noisy, and stupid—a hundred instructions crammed through a channel built to handle six.

You didn’t micromanage a partner.

You gave him an objective and trusted him to reach it.

Lucian emerged from the booth, tired and unreadable. Their eyes met across the rail for half a second.

A nod.

Nothing more was needed.

Thanks for the tutorial, Jin thought, and meant it.

The arena speaker activated.

"Candidate 314. Jin Astor and registered beast, report to the testing lane."

Beside him, Glitch raised his horned head.

Their turn.