Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

The Shattered Iron Quarry had stopped being an adventure about three weeks ago, and Jin considered that an improvement.

He ran it the same way every night now. In through the upper cut, left along the eastern shelf, down into the sorting bays, a loop through the flooded gallery, and back out. Forty minutes if nothing went wrong. Fifty if something did.

The route existed because he had spent two months learning where the floor talked.

[Tremor Sense — Active]

Glitch moved eight meters and stopped.

Not a dramatic stop. A pause, weight settling, claws spread so nothing scraped. Jin counted four seconds in his head and watched the sense report back: two Iron-Shell Tunnel Mantises working the bay above. Neither was travelling, but one scraped steadily at the stone while the other shifted its weight often enough to remain detectable.

Neither is patrolling. Go.

Eight more meters. Stop. Listen.

It was the most boring possible way to play a dungeon and it worked, which Jin had learned was frequently the same sentence.

The upper region had a rhythm to it. Ordinary hunters patrolled loops that varied by maybe fifteen seconds. They reported to the colony through the stone whenever they found something worth reporting, and the trick was to never be a thing worth reporting. If Glitch crossed the connected shelf at speed, the whole eastern half of the quarry knew about it. If he crossed the fractured floor in eight-meter increments with pauses, nothing did.

Glitch hated it.

Jin got the impression about every third run and he got it again tonight, somewhere between the shelf and the bays. It arrived as a low, hot restlessness with a direction attached to it, and the direction was down.

"No."

The restlessness intensified.

"You want to go fight the big one."

Confirmation, immediate and enthusiastic.

"We’re not going near the big one. We’re taking eleven kilograms of shell off some mantises and going to bed."

Glitch expressed an opinion about the quality of that ambition.

Jin pushed back the memory of a quarter-second death, followed by the blunt fact that nothing about Glitch had changed since then except that he was slightly better at hitting things.

That was true and Glitch did not enjoy it, and the restlessness settled into a sulk that lasted most of the way to the sorting bays.

The fight in the bays was the part that showed him where they actually were.

Two months ago Glitch had needed forty seconds and a wall to kill one Iron-Shell. Tonight he took the first one in about nine.

He did not do it by being stronger, though he was. He did it by putting himself in the right place before the mantis had committed, taking the opening strike on hardened plating instead of dodging it, and going for the forelimb seam on the way past.

[Harden — Active]

The blade skated off his flank and he was already under it.

The second one was harder, because the quarry had never once let him have two easy ones. Its shell had the heavy mineral crust that some of the older hunters developed, a grey-white accretion over the thorax that turned Glitch’s first two attacks into noise and a bruised shoulder.

Jin watched it happen and adjusted, because straightforward force had stopped being an answer about a month ago.

A seam is still a seam. The crust can’t grow into the joints without stopping them from moving.

He put Glitch on the floor plates and had him strike the loose edge of one twice. The impacts rang through the stone away from Glitch’s actual position, and the mantis oriented toward the displaced vibration for half a second before the sound faded. That was the whole opening. Glitch took it, got under the forelimb, and worked the joint until it stopped working.

Then he stepped backward onto a loose plate, and the plate went, and he lost his footing and took a gouge across the ribs from a third mantis that Tremor Sense had not reported because it had been standing absolutely still in a side gallery.

[Avatar Condition: 71%]

Jin killed it and pulled the run.

Information, not victory, he reminded himself, which was a sentence he had written down in a Rift and had needed to reread more than once since.

[Run Complete]

[Materials: Damaged Iron-Shell Plate ×6, Intact Forelimb Blade ×2, Mineral Fragment ×9]

[Engine Coins: +74]

[Coin Balance: 1,146]

[Glitch — Rank 1 Novice, 3-Star (81%)]

He looked at that last line for a second. Eighty-one percent, up from sixty-something three weeks ago, and the last stretch of any star was always the slowest.

Four-star eventually. Not tonight, not next week. Eventually.

The manifestation math took longer than the run.

[Damaged Iron-Shell Plate — Manifestation Cost: 20 coins]

[Intact Forelimb Blade — Manifestation Cost: 35 coins]

[Mineral Fragment — Manifestation Cost: 8 coins]

He had seventeen items in the night’s haul and could not manifest anywhere near all of them, which was the first constraint. Two hundred and sixty-two coins for a full clear-out was more than three nights of grinding, and coins were the only thing the Engine did not hand him freely.

The second constraint mattered more.

Seventeen pieces of fresh mantis material from a Fourth Class student with an Iron-quality lizard.

Nobody would believe it. Nobody should believe it. A student doing academy-approved surface work brought back a handful of things, and the handful was usually damaged, and half of it was usually not worth the trip.

He built the batch backward from that.

Four damaged plates, because damaged was the entire point. One forelimb blade, intact, because one good find in a batch was a story and three was a supply chain. Six mineral fragments, which were essentially gravel with an opinion.

[Manifestation Complete — 163 coins]

[Coin Balance: 983]

The material appeared on his desk in an untidy pile, and the room immediately smelled faintly of old shell.

Jin ran Data Appraisal across every piece, then did what Orsill had drilled into him and checked them by hand as well: the fracture faces on the plates, the edge on the blade, whether the fragments had the powdery surface that meant they had been sitting in damp.

They were exactly what they claimed to be. That was the strange comfort of the whole arrangement. He was not selling anything fake.

He was selling real mantis shell that had never been inside a mantis.

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