Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

[Terminal maturation: ACTIVE — 97%]

[Vitality: 33% — stable]

The element barely ran anymore.

Jin had it down to ninety-second pulses at 36.8, three or four an hour, and the honest truth was that he was not certain she needed them at all. Her own chest pocket now produced more heat in twenty minutes than the element supplied in a pulse, and the entire job of the machine had inverted. He had built a heater. He was operating a cooler with a heater bolted to it.

The airflow phase ran twelve minutes now and he had thought seriously about extending it further.

Which means we’re near the end of what the case can do. And near the end of what she needs it for.

Ninety-seven percent. He had watched it climb through the eighties over four days and had stopped writing every reading down, because the log was becoming a list of nearly identical numbers and the notebook was for things he needed.

He ran a scan and adjusted nothing. The treatment had reached the point where restraint mattered as much as intervention; changing a setting merely because he had checked it would only turn Appraisal into a more expensive form of guessing.

The rest of the day followed the routine that had carried them through the last two weeks. Glitch split the daily berry with one claw and pushed the pieces within reach. Flicker ate them in eighty seconds, then went through her balance work with grim competence. Four steps, rest, then five before she folded against the foreleg waiting beside her.

Jin logged the result without opening the Sync panel. The avatar could practice, the body in the shell could mature, and neither crossed into the other without a transfer. For now, both versions of Flicker were advancing under their own rules.

He left the Engine only after she had settled. Glitch’s real body remained at the corner of the desk, chin on his forelegs and attention angled toward the case, while the fan ran through another long, low cycle.

Leaving the room was easier than it had been a week ago. It was not comfortable, but the difference mattered. The incubator no longer held one rigid pattern long enough to become dangerous, the remote feed told Jin whether its parts were obeying the current settings, and Glitch had already proved what happened when the numbers missed something alive.

His Supply shift and afternoon classes passed without another emergency. The feed stayed boring: low baseline, element pulse, extended airflow, then low baseline again. Jin checked it often enough to be ridiculous, but he did not race back merely because the same four numbers continued being the same four numbers.

Once, between obligations, he opened the Engine. Flicker was asleep after the balance work, tucked against Glitch’s avatar, while the real lizard remained on watch in the dorm. Jin watched long enough to confirm that nothing had changed, closed the screen, and returned to the part of his life that insisted on attendance.

By late afternoon, Jin went to the assembly board. Attendance at official postings was mandatory, and he had learned not to skip boring obligations merely because something more important waited in his room.

[MERIDIAN ACADEMY — COMBINED FIELD EXERCISE]

[Classes: Fourth and Fifth, mixed squads]

[Objective: survey and route-mark assigned Rank-1 wilderness sector; collect designated environmental and biological samples per squad manifest.]

[Duration: approximately 30 hours, including one overnight period.]

[Departure: 0600, two days from posting.]

[Squad composition: assigned by academy. Rosters posted 24 hours prior to departure.]

[Student command: no appointed squad leader. Squads are expected to coordinate internally.]

[Threat assessment: genuine Rank-1 wilderness hazard within an academy-monitored sector. Academy supervision and extraction available. This is not a simulated facility exercise.]

[Attendance: mandatory. Exemptions require medical certification.]

Jin read it standing at the board with forty other students, and about six words in, everything about it stopped mattering except one.

Thirty hours.

He read the rest anyway, properly, because he had learned that from Wren Halloway.

Rank-1 wilderness. Real hazard, real supervision, no facility walls. No appointed leader, which was going to be interesting and which he had no capacity to think about right now. Mixed squads, rosters in a day. Overnight.

Thirty hours. Plus travel. Call it thirty-four before I’m back in that room.

He walked back across campus doing the arithmetic and not liking any version of it.

The case could run three hours unattended. He had spent two weeks arranging his entire life around that number, and thirty-four was not a scheduling problem, it was a different category of thing entirely.

He could not carry it. He turned that over for about a minute out of obligation and discarded it. A taped-together incubator with a card baffle did not belong in a Rank-1 wilderness sector overnight, surrounded by a squad of students who would all see it.

He could not get an exemption, because an exemption required medical certification, and medical certification required the ward, and the ward required explaining an egg.

And I’m not doing that. Not while she’s an egg.

Which left one thing, and it depended entirely on a process he did not control.

If she hatches first, this becomes solvable.

A hatched Ashwing Sparrow was a registrable beast. He could walk her into the ward and say exactly what was true — clearance purchase, rescued, Iron quality, hatched weak, needs neonatal support — and every word of it would hold up, and nobody would ask a single awkward question, because weak hatchlings were the ward’s entire business.

Thirty hours of professional neonatal care was better than thirty hours in his dormitory anyway. That was the part he kept coming back to. If she hatched, the assignment stopped being a crisis and became an inconvenience.

If she did not hatch in two days, he had a problem with no good answer and he would have to pick the least bad one.

Ninety-seven percent.

He got back to the room at 1840 and performed another scan. The pulse came down by ten seconds, the airflow remained unchanged, and he refused to touch anything else. Afterward, he sat on the floor with his back against the bed frame. For about twenty minutes, the room was completely quiet except for the fan cycling.

The assignment stayed at the edge of his mind, unresolved but contained. Until Flicker hatched, there was nothing useful he could do about the ward, the registration, or the thirty hours away. Tonight still belonged to the egg.

At 2214, Glitch’s head came up.

Jin noticed because Glitch had been lying with his chin down for an hour and the movement was sudden and total. He rose onto his forelegs in one motion, the small ridges where ears might have been angled forward, every bit of his attention fixed on the case.

The bond went sharp. Not the alarm from the lecture hall — nothing in it said wrong. It was closer to the way he went when something moved in a passage twelve meters away.

Jin got up.

The readout said what it had said all evening. Baseline 35.6. Fan running. Airflow phase, minute seven.

It’s not the machine. He’s not looking at the machine.

Jin knelt in front of the case and looked at the egg.

Pale grey. Darker mottling toward the narrow end. Sitting in its cradle exactly as it had sat since he had carried it across three districts in a kit bag.

For maybe fifteen seconds nothing happened at all.

Then it rocked.

It was not much. The egg shifted perhaps three millimeters in the cradle and settled back, and it was not the fan, because the fan had been running for seven minutes and had never once moved it, and it was not vibration from the element, because the element was off.

It came from inside. The shift had direction and intent, and four seconds later it happened again.

Jin sat back on his heels.

Beside him, Glitch had not moved a muscle.

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