Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Chapter 57: The Guard Dog

Chapter 57: The Guard Dog

The first thing Jin did was get Glitch out of the water.

The corrosion had taught him enough. The black water imposed a constant tax on Glitch’s stamina, and Lesser Regeneration was the only reason that tax hadn’t already become serious. There was no reason to keep paying it when routes existed above the flooded floor.

Jin began mapping upward.

He guided Glitch onto elevated pipes and across narrow maintenance walkways, jumping gaps where entire portions of metal had collapsed. The path was slower than wading directly through the channel, but it preserved both stamina and Harden.

Slow was acceptable.

Two-hour respawns were expensive, even when death was harmless.

The deeper they travelled, the more carefully Glitch moved. His earlier confidence hadn’t vanished, but it had sharpened into something more useful. Before placing a paw, he checked the metal for disguised leeches. Before crossing above the water, he studied the ripples below.

At the first junction, the dungeon tried a different method of killing him.

A corroded valve overhead shuddered without warning. Jin noticed the green liquid gathering around its rim a moment before the joint ruptured.

Left!

Glitch sprang sideways as a stream of poison struck the walkway. The metal hissed and sagged beneath it. Glitch landed on a parallel pipe, but his claws found little purchase on its curved surface. For one ugly second, his hind legs slipped toward the water.

He activated Harden only through his claws, driving their strengthened tips into the rust. The pipe groaned beneath him, but he held.

[Environmental Hazard Recorded: Corroded Pressure Valve]

[Unsafe Route Marked]

Jin studied the map carefully. The direct walkway had turned red, while Glitch’s higher route appeared as a thin green line. The dungeon wasn’t simply testing whether they could defeat its monsters. It was testing whether they could recognise which parts of the environment were about to become monsters themselves.

"Fine," Jin murmured. The architecture is hostile too. Good to know.

Glitch climbed onto the next platform with as much dignity as a lizard could manage after nearly falling into sewer water.

Then a new meter appeared.

[Toxin Exposure: 6%]

[Toxin Exposure: 11%]

[Toxin Exposure: 14%]

Jin watched the numbers climb and understood the dungeon’s second major rule. The contaminated water wasn’t its only danger. The air carried poison as well. Green haze leaked constantly from the failing valves and accumulated inside the avatar’s body.

They couldn’t clear Rustwater Drain by wandering through every passage. Remain inside the haze for too long, and the toxin would eventually bring Glitch down without help from any beast.

There had to be somewhere safe to breathe. A ventilation room, an air pocket, anything that could lower the meter.

Jin searched for elevation and airflow. He rejected a tunnel where the haze gathered too densely, then sent Glitch across a branching walkway, past a collapsed junction, and up a short ladder of welded rungs.

They found an abandoned maintenance platform above the drainage channel. The green haze was thinner there. An old air-scrubber unit sat against the wall, rusted but mostly intact.

Glitch nudged it.

The machine coughed out a cloud of dust, made a noise like an elderly man objecting to work, and grudgingly returned to life.

The toxin meter stopped rising.

Then it began to fall.

[Temporary Safe Zone Recorded]

[Exploration Progress: 17%]

[Partial Auto-Battle Route Available]

Jin released a satisfied breath.

A checkpoint. Clean air inside a hostile map, somewhere Glitch could recover his stamina and reduce his toxin exposure. More importantly, the Engine now possessed a route that Auto-Battle could follow.

Seventeen percent of the dungeon had been mapped. It wasn’t much, but it was the beginning of a reliable grinding loop.

He opened the partial route settings long enough to confirm its limits. Auto-Battle could carry Glitch from the entrance to the maintenance platform, avoid the broken valve, kill identified leeches, and retreat if toxin exposure exceeded twenty percent. Everything beyond the platform remained blacked out and forbidden.

It wasn’t an entire dungeon route yet. It was a safe seventeen-percent loop—and seventeen percent could run while Jin ate, rested, or slept. Tomorrow, he could extend it farther.

This was the part Jin loved: taking something unknown and dangerous and converting it, piece by piece, into a route he could eventually farm in his sleep.

Glitch stood on the maintenance platform while his stamina recovered and the remaining corrosion faded from his scales. For the moment, he was safe.

Then the water beneath him rose.

It didn’t ripple. It heaved.

The black surface bulged upward, forming a dome as something enormous rose from below. Water slammed against the platform supports hard enough to make the entire structure tremble.

The creature from the dungeon preview—the shape Jin had glimpsed moving beneath the water the previous day—surfaced in full.

It looked worse in the light.

A vast armoured reptile emerged from the channel, low and broad and built like a battering ram. Its hide was covered in overlapping scutes, with jagged fragments of rusted metal embedded throughout its body as though it had deliberately grown armour from the dungeon’s wreckage. Water sheeted from its back like rain from a corroded hull.

Its jaws opened to reveal a workshop’s worth of broken teeth.

The creature pressed its weight against the base of the platform and regarded Glitch with small, ancient, patient eyes.

[Rustjaw Caiman — Elite]

[Bronze Quality]

[Rank 1 Novice, 3-Star]

[Warning: Target Exceeds Bound Beast’s Current Combat Level]

Three-Star. Bronze Quality.

Glitch was only a 2-Star Iron-quality beast. Every number said the same thing: this would be an uphill battle.

But uphill didn’t mean forbidden—not when death cost Glitch nothing permanent. The true expenses would be time, another two-hour respawn, and whatever exploration progress the Engine didn’t preserve.

Jin’s sensible instincts still advised retreat. They had already secured a checkpoint and a partial Auto-Battle route. There was no reason to gamble the entire session against an unknown elite before studying its attacks.

Then he felt the emotion travelling through the bond from Glitch.

It wasn’t fear.

It was delight.

Glitch had gone completely still, his weight settled and his tail flat. It wasn’t the frozen stillness of prey. It was the coiled attention of a predator who had encountered something larger and found the prospect interesting.

He had defeated a living hill. He had learned to crush leeches against pipes. Now a genuinely stronger beast stood before him, and every eager line of his body communicated the same word Jin was ashamed to be thinking.

Finally.

"No," Jin said automatically, although his own pulse had already quickened.

The gamer inside him stared at the 3-Star elite and began performing the exact calculations it shouldn’t.

Where is its armour thinnest? How quickly can it turn? How many deaths will it take to understand?

Then the Engine displayed another message, and every developing plan stopped.

[Dungeon Boss Signature: Still Unlocated]

Jin read it twice.

The Caiman wasn’t the boss. The enormous armoured monster that had raised the entire waterline merely stood between Glitch and whatever waited at the bottom of Rustwater Drain.

The creature from the preview wasn’t the dungeon boss.

It was the guard dog.