Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

The exercise field looked ridiculous and everybody treated it seriously anyway.

Eleven temporary gates across two kilometers of training ground, each one a scaffold-and-plate structure with a mechanism at its heart that could be "disabled" by three solid hits. Sector markers. Marked civilian dummies behind each gate that counted against your score if they were struck. Controlled attackers in pens, released in waves.

It was a simulation of a shelter under Astral Tide pressure, and it was a simulation in the way that a scan is a simulation of an animal, which is to say it measured real things.

The briefing sheet listed what the evaluators were actually watching, and it was not kills.

[Gate functionality maintained]

[Protected target integrity]

[Efficient allocation of students and beasts]

[Recognition of irregular threats]

[Resource management]

[Inter-gate cooperation]

[Command performance under changing pressure]

Cassia read it aloud to her eleven students, then said, "Kill count is not on that list. If I catch anyone chasing points, I’ll bench you and take the score hit, and you’ll explain it at your own review."

Nobody chased points.

The first wave came in at 0930 and it was mostly ground attackers, and the main line handled it.

Cassia stood four meters behind the line with the Razorquill Porcupine beside her and fired approximately nine quills in the first twenty minutes.

Jin noticed the number because he was counting.

"You’re rationing."

"Forty," Cassia said, without turning around. "The wave chart says four surface waves and something aerial in the second half. If I spend twenty on ground attackers that six students can handle, then at 1300 I’m a slow beast with an empty back and a gate behind me."

She dropped two more attackers at eighty meters, both of them ones that had broken past the line’s left flank.

"That’s what a quill’s for," she said. "Not for helping."

Jin filed that.

He ran the reserves from a scaffold platform six meters up, which gave him the field and a headset and no ability whatsoever to hit anything.

Five students. Ren Colby and Anvil, which Jin had been pleased about and had not mentioned. A tall girl called Sura Pike with a Bronze-quality hound. A boy called Aldren with something that spat sparks. Two others he was still learning.

He kept his instructions short, because he had watched twenty-two students give conflicting orders in a wasteland once and had never forgotten how fast it went wrong.

"Pike. Left flank’s thinning, Denn’s beast is limping. Take her position, she rotates back."

"Colby. Nothing yet. Stay."

"Aldren. Two coming around the eastern marker. Stop them at the marker, don’t follow past it."

The hardest one was Glitch.

He kept him on the platform’s base the entire first hour, and Glitch spent that hour vibrating with a very specific frustration: other beasts were fighting, forty meters away, and he was standing next to a scaffold.

A reserve that gets committed in the first hour isn’t a reserve, Jin thought at him. It’s just a slow person on the line.

Glitch conveyed that he would be a very fast person on the line.

"Stay."

The aerial wave came at 1146 and it went exactly the way they had trained for, which Jin found almost unnerving.

The Porcupine engaged four hawks at range and forced three of them to break high. The fourth one dropped out of the pattern on the far side, came in low over the eastern scaffolding where the quills could not track it cleanly, and picked a target.

Jin saw it orient. He saw its head stop scanning.

He looked at where its line went and found a Fifth Class boy on the main line’s right end with his back to the open ground and a damaged section of gate plate two meters behind him.

"Glitch. Right end, behind Marsh. Go."

Glitch was moving before Jin finished the name.

He crossed thirty meters, put himself between the boy and open field, and turned. The hawk committed to the last third of its dive, discovered a hardened obsidian shoulder in the place it had planned to be, and hit it.

Aldren’s beast contained it on the ground four seconds later.

Jin looked over at Cassia, who had watched the last two seconds of it while reloading her own firing angle, and who said nothing at all.

Thirty seconds later his headset clicked.

"Astor. You don’t need to clear reserve movements with me from now on. Tell me after."

"Understood."

The wave thinned at 1230.

The attackers on the surface began breaking off, the pens stopped releasing, and up and down the line students started doing the thing students do when pressure eases, which is to stand up straighter and start talking.

Jin heard somebody two positions over say they were probably into the second half now.

Glitch went completely still.

It was not the stillness of a beast at rest. Jin felt it come up the bond before he saw it: a sharp, total narrowing of attention, and then Glitch lowered himself and pressed his chest and forelimbs flat against the ground, spreading his weight the way he did when he wanted every point of contact he could get.

Jin came down the scaffold ladder fast.

"What?"

The impression that came back was not a picture. It was weight and repetition, several sources, moving, low, and it carried an insistence to it that Jin had learned to take seriously.

He crouched and put his own hand on the ground, which did nothing for him at all and helped him think.

"Show me the count. Slowly."

He worked through it with Glitch for ninety seconds. Tremor Sense gave direction, approximate distance, and the strength of each signature, and it gave nothing whatsoever about what any of them were.

But burrowers moved differently from footsteps. There was no impact rhythm. It was continuous, grinding, and the depth read wrong for anything walking.

Four signatures. Maybe five, if two of them were traveling close together.

And their paths were the part that made Jin’s stomach drop, because they were not converging on the main line at all. They were passing underneath it, angling in from the southeast, and where their lines met was somewhere behind the defensive front and roughly under the open ground eighteen meters short of the gate mechanism.

He keyed the headset.

"Venn. Underground. Southeast, moving under our line."

The pause was about a second and a half.

"Certainty."

"Four signatures, possibly five. They’re at maybe six to ten meters depth and they’re converging on a point behind the main line, call it fifteen to twenty meters short of the gate." Jin kept his voice level. "High confidence that something’s down there and moving. Medium confidence on the count. The emergence point is my best estimate from three paths and it could be off by ten meters in any direction."

"Time?"

"I don’t know. Their speed’s been steady. If it holds, four to six minutes."

Another pause. Jin could hear the Porcupine firing behind her voice.

"Can you tell me what they are?"

"No. The skill doesn’t do that."

"Good," said Cassia, and Jin understood that she meant the answer rather than the situation. "Reserves are yours. Set it up. Tell me what you need from me and don’t take anyone off my front."

He had the reserves in position in three and a half minutes.

At four minutes twenty, the ground eighteen meters behind the main line made a sound like a plate cracking, and dust lifted in a ring, and something began to come up exactly where Jin had said it would.

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