Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Chapter 9: Combat Instinct

Chapter 9: Combat Instinct

Jin used most of the afternoon to test what he had discovered.

Teaching.

That 3% result from the night before had changed the way he understood the avatar. The Baby Lizard was more than a body he controlled and leveled up. It could learn from repetition.

And if it could learn, then maybe Jin would not need to handle every movement forever.

He started by taking his thumbs off the screen.

No dodge inputs. No counter commands. He let the Baby Lizard enter combat alone while he watched what happened.

At first, what happened was terrible.

Without Jin directing it, the lizard moved like a clumsy child again. It stepped into hops that should have been easy to avoid. Its counters came too soon or too late. Slimes hit it over and over while Jin sat there forcing himself not to seize control.

[Slime defeated!]

[Avatar HP: 6/14]

[Slime defeated!]

[Avatar HP: 3/14]

He kept going anyway.

The same patrol. The same slimes. Run after run, with the lizard stumbling through each fight as best it could.

The improvement came slowly enough to be irritating.

First, the Baby Lizard began reacting sooner to the little tells before a slime hopped. After that, it started moving early. Then the movements became actual dodges instead of panicked guesses.

By the tenth run, it could sidestep the slower slimes without help, though Jin still had to take over against the larger one.

At fifteen runs, it read a hop and countered on its own.

Jin had taught it that exact response by hand. Now it performed the whole sequence without a single touch from him.

He leaned away from the phone and left both thumbs still as his lizard defeated a slime entirely by itself.

There was no control for that.

The menu did contain an [Auto-Battle] option, but it remained gray and locked because the avatar level was too low. This was different. Nothing had been switched on.

The Baby Lizard remembered.

It was taking the drills Jin had forced into it and turning them into reflexes. Eventually, it could become something capable of fighting even while he was not there to watch.

So he could not simply disable the grind.

He had to train the grind out of it.

One lesson at a time. One repetition after another, until the avatar knew the work well enough to do it alone.

Balanced, Jin thought, feeling that same reluctant respect for whoever had designed the Engine. I can’t AFK all the way to a dragon. I still have to train it first. Even the shortcut makes me do the work.

That part did not bother him.

The work had always been what he enjoyed.

The next part bothered him quite a lot.

Jin had relaxed too much. He leaned back and allowed the Baby Lizard to handle a battle that still deserved his attention.

The larger slime lunged.

The lizard judged the distance wrong.

The impact nearly emptied its health bar.

[Avatar takes 9 damage!]

[Avatar HP: 2/14]

Jin snapped forward and planted both thumbs on the glass.

If the avatar died, the timer would begin. He would lose two hours, waste the entire run, and probably receive corrupted combat data. He was almost certain now that an ugly death gave a weaker sync than a properly completed run.

Neither loss was acceptable.

Not with only four days left.

His gaze jumped to the inventory.

The Glimmer-Leaf.

He had been saving them.

Jin hit [Feed] while the fight was still active.

The Baby Lizard swallowed the shining leaf as the slime drew back for the final strike. Green light flashed through its body, and the nearly empty HP bar shot upward.

[Emergency Recovery Applied.]

[Avatar HP: 2 → 9/14]

The killing blow missed by almost nothing. The lizard rolled clear, Jin resumed direct control, and the rest of the battle ended without another mistake.

His heart was still pounding when the slime burst.

Then the sync result appeared.

It was wrong.

[Combat Data Stability: 71%]

Seventy-one.

Every clean run before that had reached one hundred. This fight had been frantic, badly handled, and one hit from ending in death. The Engine treated the result accordingly.

The data came out damaged. Less stable. Less valuable.

Jin remained still for a moment, thinking through what that meant.

Then he opened the notebook. His hands had not fully settled when he wrote:

It’s not just whether the avatar survives. It’s HOW. Clean fight = stable data = full sync. Messy fight = unstable data = garbage sync. Panicking and clutch-saving counts as messy.

Brute force would not work.

He could not throw the lizard into bad fights, rescue it with herbs at the last second, and pretend the result counted as progress. The Engine cared about how well the work was done.

Mastery produced rewards.

Flailing received a quiet penalty.

The cheat itself required Jin to become good.

Somehow, he did not mind that either.

The wall-screen switched on for its evening broadcast while Elsa did push-ups in the corner.

"—four days remaining until the Academy Entrance Examination," said the cheerful announcer. Behind the voice, a polished candidate in Inner Core whites directed a silver-feathered hawk through aerial exercises. "Final preparations are underway across all sectors—"

Elsa stopped halfway through a push-up.

Breathing hard, she watched the footage with a look Jin knew well. She was calculating something, and the answer was bad.

"The rich candidates already have Bronze beasts," she said. There was no bitterness in her tone. She stated it like a fact. "Some have Silver. They use elite hatcheries and bond with them at twelve."

She shifted back onto her heels.

"I saw a thread. There are a couple of candidates this cycle with Gold-quality hatchlings. Gold, Jin. At sixteen. Their families bought them Lords."

Arthur had returned late. Across the unit, he slowly eased his injured leg onto the cot.

He did not answer.

He did not have to.

Money always caused the same reaction in him. A brief flinch, then the shame. His shoulders drew inward.

For one second, Arthur looked toward the slate-dark egg inside the incubator.

An Iron-tier joke. A bargain lizard. The best thing he had been able to provide.

Then he turned his eyes away.

Jin saw the entire exchange from behind the curtain. Nothing changed on his face.

Let them believe it’s Iron, he thought. Gold-quality hatchlings. Bonded Silvers. Fine. Show up to the exam feeling smug.

His beast would enter wearing the cheapest rank in the shelter.

Every rival, scout, and self-satisfied Inner Core heir would dismiss it the moment they saw it.

That suited Jin perfectly.

Underestimation was armor he did not have to pay for.

By now, he had collected quite a lot of it.

"Here." Elsa stood and crossed the room. "Look at this one. This is the person you’re competing against."

She pushed her phone through the curtain.

Jin accepted it.

The screen displayed the public candidate rankings. At the very top sat the student everyone had already decided would win.

#1 — LUCIAN VALE.

Even the photograph looked like promotional material. Lucian was a handsome teenager wearing perfect Inner Core whites. Silver hair framed the relaxed, confident smile of someone who had probably never worried about missing a feed cycle.

The listed details sounded ridiculous.

Talent — A-Rank (Storm Resonance).

Contracted Beast — Thunder Falcon, Silver-quality.

Status — Recommended for Direct Elite Placement.

Below that came the profile.

"Inner Core heir," the blurb read. "Already hailed as the most promising tamer of his generation. Vale Conglomerate scion. Predicted top placement by a wide margin."

A-Rank talent.

A Silver beast.

Recommended for placement before the examination had even begun.

Lucian Vale had everything the world gave to those it had already chosen to value.

Jin studied the page for two seconds.

"Mm."

He returned the phone.

At that exact moment, hidden behind the puzzle-game skin on his own screen, the Baby Lizard finished a battle and attempted some kind of victory walk.

Its rear foot caught on its tail.

The lizard fell face-first into the moss.

[Avatar tripped.]

Jin stared at the Sub-Dragon-bloodline beast with S-potential, the creature valuable enough to break the economy, lying in the dirt because it had forgotten its own tail existed.

"We might be a little behind," he said.

Elsa laughed and smacked the curtain with one hand.

"He has an A-Rank talent and a Silver falcon, Jin. Can you take anything seriously?"

"I’m taking this extremely seriously," Jin replied.

He was telling the truth.

Elsa simply had no way to recognize it, and Jin did not explain.

The final sync happened long after the unit had gone dark.

Everyone else was asleep. Only the incubator’s temperature display gave off any light.

The Baby Lizard had completed an entire patrol cleanly. No damage. Stable combat data.

Jin held his thumb above the sync command, then pressed it.

Light flowed away from the screen and toward the incubator, just as it had each night.

This time, the egg reacted differently.

A narrow dark mark appeared along the slate shell.

It started near the seam at the top and split into branches as it rushed over the surface, crossing the curve of the egg in a heartbeat. It looked almost like a vein.

The line pulsed once.

Against the already dark shell, it was somehow blacker. Almost living.

Then it vanished.

The egg returned to smooth slate, leaving no trace that anything had moved across it.

Arthur was asleep.

Elsa was asleep.

Neither of them saw.

Jin did.

He also saw the message beneath the sync result.

The Engine printed it in a color Jin had only seen once before, during the first scan on the first night, before everything else had started.

[Sub-Dragon Bloodline Response: 0.7%]

Jin stopped moving.

Completely.

Those words had not appeared since the night he bound the egg.

Hidden Bloodline: Sub-Dragon Mutant.

That was what lay beneath the shell. The secret no appraiser in the shelter had been able to detect. The reason an egg bought as a fifty-thousand-credit joke was more valuable than anything the Astor family had ever possessed.

All this time, the bloodline had remained quiet.

It slept beneath the Iron-tier shell while Jin strengthened the body, trained its instincts, and adjusted its diet.

Now it had responded.

Point seven percent.

For one heartbeat, something darker than slate had risen to the surface before disappearing again.

The Engine offered no explanation.

Of course it did not.

It gave him the number in that cold, clipped way of its, then left him alone in the dark while his pulse rose and the need to understand spread through him.

Zero point seven.

Waking up.

Jin was still watching the place where the dark line had vanished when the incubator chimed.

It was not the temperature warning.

This sound was higher and sharper, carrying an urgency he had never heard from the machine before.

The small display on the incubator’s front lit amber. It was the cheap diagnostic monitor Arthur had repaired himself with a screwdriver.

A message moved across the display in the incubator’s blocky factory text.

This had nothing to do with the Engine. It was not hidden information.

The physical machine was reading something directly from the egg.

[ HEART ACTIVITY DETECTED. ]

Cold went through Jin.

That should not have happened yet.

Not for several days.

Every guide Elsa had read aloud said the same thing. So did every forum post and incubation chart. An Iron-tier egg would not show a detectable heartbeat until the last stage of incubation.

The incubator still placed this egg at 51%.

Nowhere near the final stage.

Yet the amber display remained firm.

Heart activity detected.

Something inside the shell had begun beating strongly enough for the machine to sense it. Days too early.

And it had happened on the same night the sleeping Sub-Dragon bloodline responded for the first time in five days.

Jin lunged toward the incubator. He had to silence the alarm before anyone woke—

The curtain on the other side of the unit opened.

Arthur stood there in the darkness, one hand still gripping the fabric. The chime had woken him.

His gaze went first to the amber monitor.

Then to the words glowing across it.

Finally, he looked at Jin, caught halfway over the incubator with his phone still in his hand.

Several reactions passed over Arthur’s face too quickly to separate cleanly. Confusion. Fear.

And beneath both, the first sharp edge of a question he had never thought to ask before.

"Jin," he whispered.

The amber message flashed between them.

"...What did you do?"