Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Kass Materials was on the third row out from the academy gate, licensed, unglamorous, with a testing bench that took up half the shop.

Merris Vann had sent him there after looking at a photograph of the batch. She bought herbs and gathered plant material; Deral Kass handled beast parts, and her name was enough to get Jin through the door without turning an ordinary sale into an interview.

Deral Kass was maybe forty, with a burn scar across one forearm and the unhurried manner of a man who had seen every possible attempt to sell him rubbish.

He tested every piece separately. All eleven.

He weighed the plates, checked their fracture surfaces under a lamp, scraped a fleck off each one and ran it through a bench reader. He put the forelimb blade in a clamp and stressed it until Jin was fairly sure it was going to snap, and then wrote something down when it did not. The fragments he poured onto a tray, sorted with a finger, and priced as a lot.

It took twenty-five minutes. Jin stood there for all of it, because five sales to Vann had already taught him that testing often took longer than the actual transaction.

"Iron-Shell," Kass said finally. "Upper quarry, going by the crust. Four plates are C-grade, cracked through on two of them, that’s fine, that’s what plate is. Blade’s good. Blade’s actually good, the edge hasn’t been chipped and somebody didn’t drag it out of the joint sideways."

"That’s the one I thought was worth bringing."

Kass looked up.

"You brought this yourself?"

"Personal salvage," Jin said. "It came out of a discarded mixed lot. Most of it was junk. Vann said you handle the parts that aren’t."

"And you can tell which isn’t."

Jin took out his Meridian card and put it on the bench.

"C-Rank Data Appraisal," he said. "It’s a support talent. Everybody who has it ends up calculating feed ratios at a desk. It’s also quite good at telling you that two of the four plates on the ground are cracked through and two aren’t."

Kass turned the card over, looked at the class marking, and handed it back.

"So you’re not a hunter."

"I’m a Fourth Class student with a lizard," said Jin. "I’d rather not meet anything that produced a plate this size."

Something in Kass’s face relaxed a fraction, and Jin understood that he had just passed the only test that mattered. A student claiming to be a great hunter would have been interesting. A student admitting he picked things up off the floor was Tuesday.

"Seven hundred and forty," Kass said. "Blade’s four hundred of that. Plates are two-forty, fragments are a hundred, and I’ll tell you now the fragments are barely worth your walk."

"That’s board price?"

"Board’s on the wall."

Jin checked the board, because he had learned that too.

"Fine."

Kass counted it out.

"You get more of this, I’ll look at it," he said. "Same terms. I test everything, I price it separately, I’m not buying anything I can’t put a source line against. Small lots, legal material, no surprises."

"What counts as a surprise?"

"Forty plates," said Kass. "Or one thing I have to ask three questions about."

Small and boring. Everyone in this trade says the same sentence.

He moved the full amount into savings on the walk back. The Fourth Class feed allocation covered Glitch’s current requirements, which meant the sale no longer had to disappear into protein before Jin could decide what else it was for.

[Personal Savings: 2,140 Credits]

He looked at that number for a while, standing outside the dormitory block in the cold.

An ordinary Iron-quality beast egg, unremarkable species, no hidden anything, ran between twenty-five and forty thousand Credits at a licensed hatchery. His family had paid fifty for the Grey Rock Lizard, and had been robbed, and everyone had known it at the time except the person selling it.

At the two or three hundred Credits his smaller weekly sales usually added, he would have the lower end of that price in about two years.

So that’s not the route.

He knew what the route was, in the abstract. Somewhere in this city there were eggs sitting in a case with the wrong price on them, because whoever had graded them could see quality and could not see potential, and Jin had a phone that could.

He also knew he was nowhere near ready to go looking. Walking into a hatchery with twenty-one hundred Credits and a talent for spotting undervalued stock was a good way to find something extraordinary he could not afford.

Later. It’s a real number now instead of a joke. That’s the whole improvement.

If he ever did get a second beast, it would have to complement Glitch rather than duplicate him. Glitch owned the ground inside four meters of himself and owned very little else.

Which was, as it happened, the exact subject of the notice waiting on his slate.

[MERIDIAN — MIXED-CLASS DEFENSIVE TRAINING ASSIGNMENT]

[Preparatory to: Academy Astral Tide Gate-Defense Exercise]

[Astor, J. — assigned to training group under student commander VENN, C. (First Class)]

[Attendance mandatory. Report 0700.]

The training ground at 0700 was a two-hundred-meter field with a temporary gate structure at one end and a lot of scaffolding.

Cassia Venn was already there, and she was the shortest person in her own command group by a clear margin, which did nothing at all to change who was obviously in charge.

Her beast sat beside her with the compact stillness of something that did not need to move much.

[Razorquill Porcupine]

[Quality: Silver — Elite]

[Combat Rank: 1 — Novice, 6-Star]

Its quills lay flat along its back in overlapping ranks, dull grey, each one longer than Jin’s forearm. Even at rest they were angled slightly outward, and Jin’s appraisal put the launch mechanism somewhere in the muscle sheath along its spine.

Cassia looked at Glitch.

She did it properly, which Jin appreciated. She took her time. She looked at his shoulders and his claws and the way he set his feet, and Jin could see her filing him as genuinely dangerous, which he was.

Then she looked past him, up the field, at the handlers wheeling out the covered pens where the academy’s controlled aerial attackers were waiting.

When she looked back, the small black lizard was still standing on the ground.

"Astor."

"Yes."

"Explain to me," said Cassia Venn, "how that is supposed to protect anyone from something that never has to come down."

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