Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Six percent was, in practice, about eleven mantises.

Jin had worked that out over the last four runs by watching the number move, which was the sort of arithmetic he had once done for cosmetic drop rates and now did for a lizard.

[Glitch — Rank 1 Novice, 3-Star (94%)]

He opened the quarry at 2140 with a single objective written down and nothing else on the list.

Eleven fights in the upper region. Then out. No detours, no bays I haven’t cleared this week, nothing below the third level.

The avatar loaded at the surface cut and Jin started the route.

The first four went the way most fights went now, which was quickly and without anything worth describing.

That was the actual progress, and Jin had learned to notice it. Two months ago a single Iron-Shell Tunnel Mantis had been an event. Tonight Glitch took one in the eastern gallery in about seven seconds by walking into the correct position before the mantis had finished orienting, letting the opening strike skid off hardened plating, and putting his weight through the forelimb joint on the follow-through.

No new abilities. Harden, teeth, tail, and a beast that had been in three hundred of these and had stopped wasting movement.

The fifth one cost him.

It had the heavy mineral crust across the thorax, and Glitch went at the crust twice before Jin caught himself and corrected.

"Stop hitting the armor."

Glitch stopped hitting the armor.

Jin put him on the plates and had him strike the floor once, which confused the thing’s orientation for about half a second, and Glitch went under the forelimb and worked the seam until the limb stopped answering.

[Avatar Condition: 88%]

[Glitch — 3-Star (96%)]

Number six was in the flooded gallery and the water made it slow and unpleasant for both of them. Seven and eight came as a pair, which Jin had not wanted, and he pulled Glitch back to a narrow section so they had to come at him one at a time.

Nine was uneventful.

Ten produced the only real temptation of the night.

Glitch killed it at the mouth of a bay Jin had not touched in three weeks, and through the opening Jin could see a spill of material along the far wall: mineral fragments, at least two intact forelimb blades, and something with a shell sheen to it that Data Appraisal put at higher grade than anything he had sold Kass in a month.

He looked at it for a while.

That’s four hundred Credits on the floor.

It was also three more fights minimum, in a bay whose patrol pattern he had not checked since before the gate exercise, at 2320, with an avatar at eighty-one percent.

He thought about the version of himself who had spent nine hours on a spawn table, and then about the version who had gone down a passage toward a fruit and lost eleven meters and two hours to something he still could not identify.

"No."

Glitch, who had also seen the bay, expressed strong disagreement.

"It’ll still be there Thursday."

Number eleven was an ordinary hunter on the shelf near the exit, and Glitch killed it cleanly, and the number moved.

[Glitch — Rank 1 Novice, 3-Star (100%)]

[Threshold reached. Advancement available at synchronization.]

Jin pulled the avatar out and closed the dungeon inside forty seconds.

Objective complete. Leave.

He had genuinely wanted to go back for the bay, and he noted that, and he did not go back for the bay.

He did not sync that night.

Glitch had trained with Cassia’s group that afternoon and had been on the floor since 2000 with his sides moving in the slow rhythm that meant properly asleep. Jin ran a hand along his flank and checked the shoulder that had been stiff on Tuesday, checked the joints, checked that he was cool and breathing easily, and then left him alone.

Nothing goes into a body that’s already working on something.

He synced the following evening, after a rest day and a full feed, with the door locked and the lights off.

[Synchronization]

[Transferring accumulated growth and combat experience.]

[Threshold reached.]

[Glitch — Rank 1 Novice, 4-Star]

That was the whole notification. No fanfare, no new panel, no skill offer.

Glitch woke up.

He stood, shook himself out from nose to tail the way he did every morning, and then stopped, and Jin felt something come up the bond that he could only describe as a beast checking his own arithmetic.

Then he walked across the room and hit the wall.

Not hard. He had misjudged the distance by about a stride, moved faster than he had intended, and got his feet down late, and his shoulder met the wall panel with a solid thump that made the neighbor’s shelf rattle.

Glitch turned around and looked at Jin with an expression of enormous dignity.

"Yeah," said Jin. "That was very impressive."

The bond conveyed that the wall had moved.

"The wall has been there since I got here."

Glitch tried the distance again, more carefully, and got it right, and then tried it once more at speed and got it right again, and then stood in the middle of the room quivering with the specific delight of a thing that has just discovered it is faster than it was yesterday.

Jin watched him for a while and did the honest assessment.

Stronger. Not dramatically. Maybe fifteen percent across the board in strength, speed, stamina and reaction, which sounded small on paper and was enormous in a fight where everything happened inside two seconds. He would hold a Harden longer. He would cross eighteen meters in slightly less time.

He would still lose badly to anything Silver-quality, and he would still die in a quarter-second to whatever was under the quarry.

Fifteen percent. That’s the difference between arriving before the dive lands and arriving after.

He registered it in the morning, openly, at the Beast Development Centre desk, because a beast that changed and a tamer who did not report it was exactly the combination that got a file escalated.

The technician ran the confirmation scan, compared it against the last one, and raised her eyebrows.

"Four-Star. That’s fast."

"He trains a lot."

"How much is a lot?"

"Two academy sessions a week with a First Class group, plus my own." Jin kept his voice bored, which was not difficult. "And he sleeps about sixteen hours a day. My nutritionist supervisor thinks that’s the actual reason."

The technician wrote something.

"It’s within range," she said. "It’s the top of the range, which your file already says about four other things, so nobody’s going to fall over. Congratulations."

[Registered: Glitch — Rank 1 Novice, 4-Star]

[Comparative flag: maintained]

Same flag. Same words. One more line under it.

He spent that evening looking at the Thursday session notes Cassia had circulated, which were three pages long and contained the phrase "commitment discipline" four times.

Glitch lay against his leg radiating an expectation that Thursday was going to be excellent.

Jin read the notes again.

She’s running multi-attacker. Three or four moving targets, funneled, with the porcupine shaping lanes.

He could already see the shape of the problem, and it had nothing at all to do with the fifteen percent.

He can reach more things now. That’s the entire danger.

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