Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Jin did not put anyone on top of the emergence point.

That had been the instinct, and he had talked himself out of it in the first thirty seconds. A thing tunneling six meters down could feel five students standing in a circle over its head, and the last thing he wanted was for it to change direction and come up somewhere he had not planned for.

So he left the middle looking empty.

Pike and her hound sat twelve meters northeast, behind a stack of barrier plates. Aldren was fourteen meters west with the sparking beast held low. Ren and Anvil anchored the line between the emergence zone and the gate mechanism itself, which was the one place nothing could be allowed to reach. The last two reserves covered the flanks wide.

Glitch stood alone in the open, eleven meters from the predicted point, doing absolutely nothing.

"He’s just standing there," someone said on the channel.

"Yes."

"Shouldn’t he—"

"No."

The ground cracked.

The first burrower came up in a spray of loose earth, a squat armored thing with a wedge-shaped head and forelimbs built like shovels, and it was fast the instant it broke surface.

Glitch had been tracking it through the last four meters of soil.

[Harden — Active]

He hit it while it was still coming out.

That was the whole thing, and it worked because of timing rather than power. A burrower that fully surfaces gets its legs under it, picks a direction, and becomes a problem for whoever is in that direction. This one got its head and shoulders clear and then took a hardened obsidian body weight into the side of the wedge, and went over sideways into the loose soil it had just excavated, and spent four seconds trying to work out which way up it was.

Ren and Anvil were already there.

"Second," Jin said. "Six meters north of the first, coming now — Pike, that’s yours, take it as it clears."

Pike’s hound took it as it cleared.

The third one did not do what it was supposed to.

Jin lost it about two meters from the surface, which he had not expected, and then found it again nine meters west of where it should have been. It had turned underground, either because it had felt Aldren or because burrowers simply do that.

"Aldren, west, it’s nearly under you, move back four meters, don’t stand over it—"

Aldren moved back four meters and the thing came up into open ground instead of directly beneath his feet, and his beast put a charge into it before it found its footing.

The fourth was the dangerous one. It came up correctly, at the predicted point, and it did not attack anyone. It oriented immediately toward the gate mechanism and ran.

"Colby," said Jin.

"On it—"

Anvil planted, and a Bristleback Boar at a dead stop is one of the least movable objects in the academy, and the burrower hit him and stopped and Ren shouted something that was not a word.

"Venn, I need quills, one target, behind the line, eleven meters east of the mechanism."

"Angle’s bad."

"I know."

Three seconds. Then Cassia moved her firing position two meters and had the Porcupine put four quills into the burrower’s exposed back from behind the main line, without shifting a single student off the front, and the thing stopped being a problem.

The fifth signature, which Jin had never been sure about, turned out to be real. It surfaced forty meters out on the wrong side of everything, apparently disoriented, and Pike’s hound and one flank reserve dealt with it between them while Jin watched and gave two instructions.

Six minutes, start to finish.

The gate mechanism was untouched. The main line had not lost a single defender to the rear. Two reserves had minor beast injuries.

Jin was still coming down off the platform when the alarm went.

[GATE 5 — BREACH — REAR SECTOR]

The neighboring gate was four hundred meters east and it was, from the top of Jin’s scaffold, visibly coming apart. Attackers were inside the rear sector. Their line had bent and then folded and students were falling back in three different directions at once, which was the thing Marr had told twenty-two students not to do in a wasteland.

Cassia was on the channel immediately.

"Astor."

"I see it."

"If Five collapses, everything in their sector comes down the corridor into ours and into Six. I can’t ignore it."

"You also can’t send everyone," said Jin. "We just took five burrowers. I have no way of knowing whether there’s another group under us, because Tremor Sense doesn’t work on things that aren’t moving and I’d have to have Glitch down and listening for two minutes to even guess."

"Recommendation."

Jin looked at the eastern field and made himself be specific.

"Three reserves. Pike, Aldren, and Doss. Not you, not me, not Glitch, and not Colby, because Anvil’s the only thing standing between our mechanism and anything that gets past the line."

"Objective?"

"Narrow. They reinforce the broken flank, cover the students falling back, and hold long enough for Five’s commander to rebuild a line. They do not take command of Five’s gate, they do not chase anything past the sector marker, and they come back when Five has a line again."

There was a two-second pause.

"Send them," said Cassia. "Exactly that."

Jin sent them, in those words, twice.

Somebody on the reserve channel said, fairly quietly, that it seemed like a small response.

Jin let it go. He had thought about answering and could not think of a version that did not sound defensive, and he was aware that from the outside "the coordinator stayed at his own gate with the strongest reserve" had a shape to it that he did not love.

Then, at 1319, the pens released a small late wave against Gate 4’s northern approach.

Eleven attackers. Nothing exotic. It would have gone through a depleted reserve line like a hand through smoke.

It went into Glitch, Anvil, and two students instead, and it was over in ninety seconds, and afterward nobody on the reserve channel said anything about caution.

At Gate 5, three reserves and their beasts arrived at a folding flank, stopped the retreat from becoming a rout, held one corridor for eleven minutes, and left when Gate 5’s commander had a line again.

They came back at 1348 with one injured hound and a great deal to say.

The all-clear sounded across the whole course at 1420.

Jin sat down on the bottom rung of the scaffold ladder and discovered that his hands had been shaking for a while.

Glitch came over, filthy to the shoulders, and put his entire head in Jin’s lap without asking.

"You did good."

Glitch conveyed that this was self-evident.

Across the field, Cassia Venn finished her handover with the evaluator, turned, and looked at Jin for what was probably three seconds and felt considerably longer. She did not say anything. She had the expression of a person who had finished rewriting an opinion in her head and had not yet decided whether to read it out loud.

Then the evaluators called every gate team to the assembly ground for the debrief.

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