Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Chapter 60: The Guard Dog on Dry Land

Chapter 60: The Guard Dog on Dry Land

The Caiman realized Jin was stealing its lake exactly three seconds too late.

By then Glitch was already up on the maintenance pipe with his claws around the drainage wheel, and the whole plan was in motion, and three seconds was nowhere near enough for an armored reptile to do anything about it.

It had been a quiet morning up to that point. Seven days remained until the results arrived, the real Glitch was fast asleep on the blanket, and his digital avatar had followed the recorded Auto-Battle route to the air-scrubber checkpoint without incident. Jin had let the automation carry them that far. At the checkpoint, he took back control—because what came next needed hands, not a recorded loop.

The eight Corrosive Glands sat in the inventory. Dropped, one and two at a time, by the weakest things in the dungeon. The leeches that had nearly embarrassed Glitch on the way in.

Jin was about to spend garbage loot to unmake an elite, and he found that deeply, personally satisfying.

Glitch crossed the narrow pipe above the chamber while the Caiman patrolled the black water below—a slow dark shape gliding beneath the surface, waiting for something warm to come down to its level. Nothing was coming down to its level. That was the entire point.

The drainage wheel was seized solid. Years of rust had welded it into its housing until it might as well have been part of the wall; Glitch shoved at it once and it didn’t give a millimetre.

Jin had expected that.

Glands, he sent.

Glitch crushed them against the wheel’s housing, one after another, and the corrosive secretion ran down into every seized seam. The same acid that had slipped between Glitch’s hardened scales and forced Lesser Regeneration to work overtime now went to work on the rust instead—and rust was exactly what it was built to eat. It bubbled. It hissed. Decades of accumulated corrosion softened and sloughed away, and the wheel, groaning, came loose in its housing.

Glitch set his claws and began to turn it.

That was when the vibrations reached the water.

The Caiman came up like a thrown anchor in reverse, launching straight for the pipe—but the pipe was narrow, and it was high, and the beast’s full body simply couldn’t reach it. Its jaws snapped shut a body-length short, then closer as it flung itself higher, then closer still, teeth cracking together near enough that Glitch could feel the wind of them while he strained at each rotation of the wheel.

He didn’t freeze. But he wasn’t fearless, either, and Jin was glad of that. Glitch knew—Jin could feel him knowing, through the bond—that a single successful bite ended the avatar right here, plan and all. His courage this time wasn’t the swaggering I killed a hill confidence of the leech fight. It was quieter, and Jin thought it was better: it was trust. Glitch kept his claws on the wheel and his back to a monster’s teeth because Jin had told him this would work, and Glitch had decided to believe him.

The wheel groaned through a full turn. Then another. Then the mechanism caught, and something enormous let go deep in the chamber wall.

The gates opened.

The black water began to spiral.

It found the enormous grates in the chamber floor and started draining through them all at once, and the whole flooded room turned into a slow whirlpool—debris and broken walkway sections dragged spinning toward the grates, the level dropping visibly, the Caiman suddenly thrashing to stay in the environment that was disappearing out from under it.

[Environmental Mechanism Activated]

[Caiman Chamber: Draining]

[Aquatic Ambush Disabled]

[Death Roll Effectiveness Greatly Reduced]

[Ambient Corrosion Level Reduced]

The water fell away, and the chamber revealed itself: a broad concrete basin, ribbed with drainage channels, studded with rusted pillars and the hulks of broken machinery. The green haze thinned as the corrosion drained with the water.

And the Caiman came down onto exposed ground with a heavy, graceless slap, stranded on dry concrete for the first time in who knew how many years.

Jin made himself read the numbers before he got excited, because excitement got beasts killed.

The Caiman was still [3-Star] and still [Bronze]. Glitch was still [2-Star] and still [Iron]. Draining the lake hadn’t touched any of that. The armor was still a fortress, the bite still a workshop, the tail still a wrecking bar, the raw strength still overwhelming. He hadn’t made the elite weak.

He’d made it findable. No more vanishing. No more strikes from nowhere. No more disappearing act to reset the fight on its own terms. That was all he’d taken—the water—and it would have to be enough.

The rematch began.

The Caiman fought nothing like the one they’d faced on the platform, and not because of the water.

Because it remembered.

Jin guided Glitch toward the wreckage of the old collapsed-pipe trap, dangling the same bait that had worked before—and the Caiman, watching that unstable pile of debris with one ancient eye, deliberately changed course to avoid going anywhere near it. It had felt that walkway come down on its skull. It would not do that twice.

Jin had counted on exactly that.

Because a creature that avoids one specific thing is a creature you can steer. The Caiman’s swerve away from the old trap carried it exactly where Jin wanted it—out across a stretch of wet, sloped concrete beside one of the freshly exposed drainage channels, ground where its own weight worked against it.

And there, Glitch went to work on the one plan that didn’t rely on tricks the Caiman could learn around: its turning circle.

He baited a charge. Held his ground until the beast fully committed to a straight line, then slid aside only after there was no more correcting it, and drove a strike into the seam beneath its jaw—the wound from their first fight, still there, still soft—before retreating clear of the tail. He used the pillars, ducking between them, forcing the Caiman to keep changing direction it couldn’t change, wearing it down one wasted turn at a time.

The fight stayed dangerous. Jin never let himself forget the numbers, and the Caiman reminded him anyway. On one exchange it read Glitch’s dodge before Glitch made it—anticipated the direction, brought its tail around early—and caught him a glancing blow that sent him skidding across the concrete with his health dropping into a range that made Jin’s chest go tight.

Lesser Regeneration flared. And Glitch’s stamina bar began to empty, fast, as the skill fought to close damage that big.

Too much at once, Jin thought. He had a choice, and about half a second to make it: press the attack now while the Caiman recovered, and risk the next hit ending it—or pull back and let the healing catch up.

He pulled back.

He sent Glitch up onto the narrow maintenance structure, the one place the Caiman’s bulk couldn’t follow, and held him there just long enough for the regeneration to stabilize the worst of the damage. Not a full heal—nowhere near it. Just enough that the next glancing hit wouldn’t be the last one. Enough to keep breathing.

Below, the Caiman did not throw itself uselessly at the structure. It settled onto the concrete and waited, patient as a closed door, because it knew the small thing had to come down eventually.

Both of them, Jin thought, watching two predators sit and think in a drained sewer. Both of them were smart. That was what made it good.

When Glitch came down, Jin used the channel.

He baited one more charge—and this time the escape route ran across the narrow drainage channel itself. Glitch crossed it at the last instant, light and quick, and the Caiman, committed to the charge, tried to turn away from the gap—

—and couldn’t. Not on wet concrete, not at that weight, not with that turning circle. Its momentum carried it sideways, one foreleg came down over the edge of the channel and dropped in, wedging, and the sudden stop slammed its already-injured jaw down hard against the concrete lip.

Trapped. Just for a moment.

_____

Glitch didn’t wait to be told.

He hardened his hide and dove beneath the pinned head, straight for the torn seam under the jaw, and hit it with everything a 2-Star body could put behind a strike. The wound widened. Blood ran. The Caiman heaved, hauling its trapped leg, nearly free—

Again.