Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Chapter 59: Take Away the Water

Chapter 59: Take Away the Water

Glitch considered the difference between repelled and defeated to be meaningless bureaucracy.

He stood on the broken walkway, chest heaving, and puffed himself up to roughly twice his normal size. Pride rolled through the bond in warm, relentless waves.

He had faced a larger, stronger, better-armoured monster, and that monster had left. As far as Glitch was concerned, this was the only definition of victory that mattered.

He stared at the empty water with the swagger of a champion whose opponent had fled, then looked toward Jin through the screen.

See?

"We didn’t beat it," Jin said.

Glitch looked at the water again. There had been a monster in it. Now there wasn’t. He returned his gaze to Jin with the patient expression of someone explaining an obvious fact to a slow child.

"It left because it decided you weren’t worth another torn jaw. That isn’t the same as winning. That’s a landlord deciding not to evict you today."

Glitch chirped, unmoved. The distinction was beneath him.

Jin sighed. "But you survived a fight you had no business surviving. Nobody told you to strike beneath its jaw. You stopped wasting attacks on its back and found the one place that worked."

He paused.

"That part was good. That part was really good."

Glitch accepted the praise as his natural due. Jin allowed him the victory pose because the little beast had earned every piece of his pride, even if he had earned it for slightly incorrect reasons.

Jin configured the farming route while the Caiman was still somewhere in the darkness reconsidering its meal choices.

[Partial Auto-Battle Route: Active]

[Avoid Unmapped Water]

[Engage Identified Leeches Only]

[Return to Safe Zone at 18% Toxin Exposure]

[Do Not Engage Rustjaw Caiman]

The settings were conservative enough to qualify as paranoia, which was exactly what Jin wanted.

Twenty-one percent of Rustwater Drain had been mapped. The leeches were a known enemy, the checkpoint could clear toxin exposure, and the one creature capable of ending the run was explicitly forbidden.

That allowed the avatar to farm the safe section independently—killing leeches, practising movement across the corroded pipes, gathering coins and glands, and accumulating combat experience while the real Glitch slept.

Jin watched the first loop personally.

Glitch followed the elevated route, paused before the broken valve, and waited for its poisonous discharge to pass. He crushed three leeches against the same pipe they had used during the original encounter, then returned to the air scrubber when his toxin exposure reached seventeen percent.

The second loop required no correction.

On the third, the Caiman’s marker briefly appeared at the edge of the mapped region. Auto-Battle immediately abandoned the final group of leeches and sent Glitch back to the checkpoint rather than risk crossing the elite’s patrol boundary.

Jin nodded with satisfaction.

The system wasn’t merely repeating his route. It was obeying the limits he had established around it.

He left the loop running and rested his eyes.

Four hours later, the Engine chimed.

[Auto-Battle Report]

[Completed Routes: 7]

[Rustwater Leeches Defeated: 21]

[Coins Obtained: 49]

[Corrosive Glands Obtained: 8]

[Route Incidents: 2]

[Avatar Deaths: 0]

[Unsynchronized Growth Load: Low]

No deaths. No permanent wounds. Four hours of growth gathered while Jin barely touched the screen.

He opened the two incident reports. During one loop, an unusually large leech cluster had forced Glitch to retreat before completing the route. During another, the pressure valve had discharged six seconds earlier than expected, and Auto-Battle had marked its timing as variable rather than fixed.

Neither incident had caused a death because the route valued survival above completion. It abandoned uncertain rewards instead of gambling the avatar on them.

[Route Data Updated]

[Pressure-Valve Timing: Variable]

[Maximum Safe Leech Cluster: 5]

The loop was teaching itself within the boundaries Jin provided. Each interrupted run made the next one slightly safer.

This was the whole beautiful, broken loop of the Engine: turn terror into routine, one mapped metre at a time.

The accumulated load remained Low, and Jin deliberately left it in the bank. He wouldn’t Sync even a small amount until enough food sat on the shelf to support the transfer. Growth could wait safely. His family’s meals couldn’t.

That restraint hurt more now that he knew exactly what waited behind the button. Even a Low-load Sync might sharpen Glitch’s reactions or strengthen his claws before the rematch. But using tomorrow’s food to gain an advantage today was simply another kind of debt, and Jin refused to make his family pay it.

For now, he had forty-nine coins, eight corrosive glands, a stronger avatar, and a very angry elite waiting beyond the safe route.

That was enough to work with.

Jin reviewed the Caiman encounter before stopping for the night. A repelled elite was simply a rematch waiting to happen, and he wanted the next meeting to go better than get lucky with a falling pipe.

The recording revealed something he didn’t like.

The pipe trick was a one-use coupon.

The Caiman wasn’t a mindless mechanic that would repeat the same mistake forever. Jin had watched it calculate the danger and withdraw. It had felt the walkway collapse across its skull. As long as the same creature remained inside this active dungeon, it wouldn’t charge beneath that pipe again.

They needed an advantage the Caiman couldn’t learn its way around.

Jin replayed the footage, this time watching the chamber rather than the beast.

That was when he noticed the emergency wheel.

It sat high on the chamber wall above the waterline, half-hidden behind rust and the edge of the earlier fog of war. Faded warning markings surrounded its housing, alongside an old flow diagram from whoever had constructed the drainage system.

The wheel controlled the water level inside the Caiman’s territory.

Jin froze the recording and studied the route leading toward it. A narrow maintenance pipe crossed above the chamber. It was too small to support the Caiman and too high for the creature to reach from solid ground.

Glitch could cross it.

There was one problem. Years of rust had seized the drainage mechanism. Even if Glitch reached the wheel, he probably couldn’t turn it through brute force.

Jin opened the inventory.

[Corrosive Gland ×8]

The secretion had eaten through Glitch’s hardened scale seams. Applied carefully around the wheel’s rusted housing, it could dissolve the corrosion locking the mechanism in place.

For the first time, the glands stopped looking like vendor trash.

The weakest monsters in the dungeon had provided the tool needed to strip away the elite’s greatest advantage. It was the kind of circular dungeon design Jin adored—the answer hidden inside the enemies most players would dismiss as an annoyance.

He looked from the glands to the drainage wheel and then to the black water where the Caiman had disappeared.

Every advantage the creature possessed depended on that flooded chamber: its ambush, its mobility, its ability to vanish, and the death roll it hadn’t yet needed to use.

Drain the chamber, and the Caiman would become a heavy, slow-turning reptile stranded on exposed concrete. It would still be stronger than Glitch. Its armour and crushing bite would remain just as dangerous.

But it would have to fight where Jin could see it.

The guard dog owned the water.

So Jin decided to take the water away.