Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Chapter 61: Something Beneath Heard It Die

Chapter 61: Something Beneath Heard It Die

Glitch struck the same point a second time.

And the seam tore fully open. The Caiman’s heave collapsed under it, the strength going out of the great armored body before it could pull its leg from the channel, and it came down onto the concrete and did not get up.

[Elite Defeated: Rustjaw Caiman]

[Higher-Level Enemy Defeated]

[Exploration Progress: 21% → 36%]

[Coins Obtained: 85]

[Rustjaw Caiman Core ×1]

[Rustjaw Scute ×3]

[Skill Fragment Obtained: Corrosion Resistance — 1/3]

Jin let out a long breath.

They had killed something stronger than Glitch in every measurable category. Not through power—they didn’t possess enough of it—but by understanding the chamber better than the monster did and using the weakest enemies’ loot to dismantle the strongest enemy’s entire advantage.

His eyes caught on the last line. Corrosion Resistance — 1/3. In a dungeon made of acid, that skill would be worth a great deal, and one fragment meant two more waited somewhere in the Caiman’s respawns. He filed it, hungry, and did not start planning a farming cycle. Not yet. There was a located route to explore first, and a bank of growth still sitting at Low that he wasn’t Syncing into the real body until there was food to pay for it. One thing at a time. The fragment would keep.

With the Caiman gone and the water drained, the basin gave up its last secret.

Set into the wall behind the deepest part of the drained basin stood a heavy maintenance gate—sealed, industrial, and far too solid for Glitch to force. When he carried the Rustjaw Caiman Core toward it, the Engine scanned the core’s energy signature. The reward remained safely inside the inventory while something deep within the gate’s mechanism turned over.

[Elite Core Signature Recognized]

[Lower Drain Access Requirement Met]

[Lower Drain Access Unlocked]

[Dungeon Boss Signature Located]

[Identity: Unrecorded]

The gate ground open onto a tunnel that descended, sloping down into the dark, and out of it rolled a green mist far denser than anything up here—thick, and slow, and patient.

And from somewhere far below, something moved.

Jin felt it before the screen showed him anything. The pipes trembled. A low vibration came up through the whole structure, through the walkways and the drained basin and the maintenance pipe, a slow heavy shifting from deep down in the drain that made the rust flake off the walls. Whatever was at the bottom of Rustwater Drain was very large, and it was awake.

Glitch stood at the tunnel entrance, exhausted, bruised, scratched, and running on fumes. The eager little idiot still leaned toward the darkness.

"No," Jin said.

He meant it this time, and for once it wasn’t hard. Glitch was spent—stamina low, health patched together by a skill that ran on stamina he didn’t have. Sending the avatar down into an unmapped tunnel toward an unknown boss with no recorded return path was exactly how you threw away everything you’d just bled for. You didn’t dive the next area on an empty tank. You went back, you recorded the safe route, you came in fresh.

Checkpoint, Jin sent. We earned the door. That’s enough for today.

Glitch grumbled up the bond—a deep, put-upon, I-just-killed-a-Caiman-and-you-still-won’t-let-me grumble—but he turned, and started the long climb back toward the air-scrubber, dragging his pride behind him like a trophy too big to carry.

Jin looked one more time at the descending tunnel, at the dense green mist, at the readout blinking [Dungeon Boss Signature Located].

They had killed the guard dog.

Something beneath Rustwater Drain had heard it die. The boss at the bottom of Rustwater Drain was asleep.

The poison leaking from its breath was not.

Jin didn’t know that yet—he wouldn’t see the thing for another twenty minutes—but he could already feel its presence in the way the toxin meter behaved the moment he took the avatar through the lower gate. Up in the drained basin, the poison had been a slow tax. Down here it was a hand around the throat.

The real Glitch slept safely on the blanket, with six days remaining until the results arrived. His digital avatar dropped through the maintenance gate into the darkness, and Jin took manual control because the recorded route ended there. Everything beyond it remained unknown.

[Lower Drain]

[Exploration Progress: 36%]

[Warning: Severe Toxin Concentration]

[Auto-Battle Unavailable Beyond Recorded Route]

The Lower Drain was worse than the region above it in every direction.

The tunnels pinched narrow, forcing Glitch through gaps barely wider than his own body. The green mist here wasn’t a haze anymore—it was thick enough to swallow the walls entirely, so that Glitch moved through a glowing soup with the pipes appearing out of nothing an arm’s length ahead and vanishing again behind. And the toxin meter climbed roughly three times faster than it had upstairs. Jin watched it tick and did the math grimly: whatever they were going to accomplish down here, they had a few minutes to do it before the meter forced a full retreat to the scrubber.

This was not a place you wandered. This was a place you raided, on a clock, and left.

Something that looked like a chunk of corroded machinery bolted to the tunnel floor turned out not to be.

It inflated—a swollen, warty body heaving up off the ground where it had been sitting perfectly disguised, and Jin’s readout caught up an instant too late.

[Rustlung Toad]

[Iron Quality]

[Rank 1 Novice, 2-Star]

[Traits: Poison Sac, Rupture Fume, Camouflaged Breathing]

Glitch did the natural thing—lunged and struck it hard in the body.

Which was exactly wrong.

His strike ruptured the enormous poison sac swelling the toad’s flank, and it burst like a dropped water balloon full of death. A concentrated green cloud bloomed out into the already-toxic tunnel, and the meter jumped in a single sickening lurch.

[Toxin Exposure: 19% → 43%]

"Back," Jin said aloud, already sending it. Out, now, go—

Glitch bolted for the scrubber while Jin watched the number the entire way—forty-three percent and threatening to climb again. It wasn’t fatal, but it was far too close for a single ordinary enemy. That could not happen again. If one poor attack against a routine creature added twenty-four points of toxin, the Lower Drain would kill them by accident long before its boss had the opportunity.

He reviewed the recording at the checkpoint while the meter drained. And the answer was right there in the toad’s own body: the poison lived in the sac. Rupture the sac and you gassed yourself. But the throat and skull, up front, away from that swollen flank—crush those, keep the sac intact, and the thing died without exploding.

Next toad, Glitch applied it. He came in high and forward, drove a strike straight into the toad’s throat before it could inflate, and it went down without so much as a wheeze. The sac stayed whole. The meter didn’t move.

"There we go," Jin murmured. Kill it right and it was almost easy. Kill it wrong and it poisoned you. That was this whole dungeon in miniature—everything down here punished the obvious answer.

Deeper in, through the mist, they found the second ventilation chamber.

Another rusted air-scrubber, another wheezing revival when Glitch nudged it to life, another pocket of clean air carved out of the poison. The toxin meter, which had been climbing steadily the whole push, finally stopped and began to fall.

[Lower Drain Safe Zone Recorded]

[Exploration Progress: 48%]

[Partial Lower-Drain Route Available]