Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

The next one came at 22:51, and Glitch caught it first again.

Jin had been sitting with his hand flat on the desk for half an hour, and he had felt nothing and seen nothing, and Glitch’s head came up eleven seconds before the sound.

It was a scrape. Very faint, from inside, the noise of something small dragging across the underside of a shell.

Jin ran Appraisal.

[Terminal maturation: 100%]

[Hatching readiness: ACHIEVED]

[Vitality: 34% — stable]

He read it, and then read what was not there.

There was no estimate, probability, countdown, or assurance of any kind. Appraisal said she was ready to try and nothing about whether trying would work.

Ready doesn’t mean strong.

He wrote the time in the notebook because his hands wanted something to do.

The first crack came at 23:07, and Flicker made it herself.

There was no Sync, berry, adjustment, or anything Jin did. He was sitting on the floor with the case open and the airflow running when a hairline appeared near the shell’s wide end, about eleven millimeters long with a faint raised ridge.

Then nothing happened for forty minutes.

It took six hours and four minutes.

Jin did not leave the desk. Afterward, he could not have described most of those hours, because they consisted almost entirely of doing nothing while something very small worked.

The pattern established itself early. She would push—a series of scrapes and small impacts that sometimes rocked the egg—for thirty seconds to four minutes. Then she stopped, the readings showed fast, shallow breathing, and she rested for ten minutes to half an hour.

Then she would do it again.

By 0100 the crack was two centimeters and had branched.

Jin’s job was airflow.

He had not anticipated that part and had to work it out live. As the shell opened, its interior stopped being sealed. Warm air escaped through the fracture while outside air entered, and her chest pocket was suddenly interacting with the room.

He cut the airflow when the fracture widened and the fan began overcooling her, then raised it when she pushed hard and her heat production spiked. At 02:08, after a thirty-four-minute rest let the shell drift a full degree low, he ran a ninety-second element pulse.

He scanned before every single change, and did not make any change he could not justify from a reading.

What he did not do, at any point, was touch the shell.

He came close twice.

The first was at 01:40, when she got a piece of shell partly free and could not push it clear, and spent nine minutes working at the same fragment with what was audibly diminishing force. Jin’s hand was actually on the edge of the case before he stopped himself and ran the scan.

[Respiration: elevated, stable]

[Exertion: high]

[Distress indicator: none]

[Membrane integrity: intact]

She’s not in trouble. She’s just working.

He took his hand back.

The second came at 0355, when she stopped for fifty-one minutes. Jin scanned her eleven times and forced himself to accept the same answer every time: resting, breathing steadily, not deteriorating.

If I open it and the membrane’s still vascular, I’ll kill her. If I open it now because I can’t stand watching, I take away the only thing she’s actually doing for herself.

He sat on his hands, which was undignified and effective.

Glitch held the watch for all six hours.

He did not sleep. He lay at the desk’s corner with his chin down, rising onto his forelegs whenever the scraping started and staying there until it stopped.

Twice he stood, and once he put a forefoot on the edge of the desk.

Jin felt what came through the bond both times — a hard, focused impulse toward the case, an animal that could hear something small struggling and had four working claws and knew exactly how thin that shell was.

Jin pushed back the only thing he could: the membrane, the danger, and the need for Flicker to complete the struggle herself. It was not an order, only compressed intent sent as clearly as he could manage at four in the morning.

Glitch took his foot off the desk slowly and stayed standing for a long time afterward. He did not like it, but he never touched the case.

She came out at 05:11.

The last stage went faster than everything before it. A section of shell about the size of Jin’s thumbnail came free at 0448 and after that the whole wide end started giving, and at 0503 a wing came out — grey, wet, folded wrong, far too small — and stayed out.

Then eight minutes of nothing.

Then she pushed with everything she had left and the shell came apart in two pieces and she came with it, sideways, into the cradle, trailing membrane.

Jin cleared her airway with the corner of a cloth, which was the first time in six hours he had touched anything, and checked that she was breathing before he checked anything else.

She was breathing.

[Flicker — Ashwing Sparrow]

[Status: HATCHED]

[Vitality: 35%]

[Respiration: independent, stable]

[Condition: severe neonatal weakness. Cannot stand. Cannot fly. Requires warmth, airflow support, assisted feeding, and continuous monitoring.]

Thirty-five percent.

She was tiny, wet, grey, and looked like something that had spent six hours fighting its way out of a box. Her eyes were shut, and her legs folded under her at an angle that would have alarmed Jin if he had not spent two weeks watching her avatar do exactly that.

And the bond changed.

It came in without warning and without ceremony. The thin distant thread that had carried weight and not-quite-warmth for two weeks simply thickened, and opened, and became something with a shape at the far end of it.

[Beast Contract Established]

[Contracted Beast: Flicker]

[Species: Ashwing Sparrow — Iron Quality]

[Hidden Potential: SS]

[Dormant Bloodline: Sunpiercer Roc]

[Combat Rank: —]

[Condition: newly hatched. Severe weakness. No combat capability.]

The Engine displayed it and did nothing else. No unlock, no reward panel, no new function, no lore.

Jin barely read it, because the first thing that came down the contract was not information.

It was exhaustion—enormous and total, from a body with nothing left.

Beneath it lay the other thing, unmistakable: flat, stubborn, and without drama. The same refusal he had watched for three days in a grey render space now came from an actual bird in an actual cradle.

Yeah, Jin thought. I know. I’ve met you.

She rested for about four minutes.

Then she started trying to move.

She could not stand; her legs would not hold her, and she had almost nothing to push with. What she could do was drag herself with one wing and a great deal of effort, perhaps two centimeters at a time.

She was doing it toward the front of the cradle. Toward the edge of the case. Toward the two shapes on the other side of it.

Jin very nearly picked her up.

He got his hands halfway there and then stopped, and lowered the front panel of the case instead, and laid the cloth down as a ramp, and let her do it.

It took almost eleven minutes to cross twenty centimeters.

Glitch came around the desk while she was doing it and lay down on the floor with his chin flat, so that his foreleg was at the bottom of the cloth, and did not help her at any point, and did not move.

She reached the end of the cloth and got one wing over his foreleg, and stopped.

Jin sat down on the floor beside them and put two fingers against her back, which was all of her there was room to touch.

She had gone still, but not collapsed. Her breathing was even, the readings were stable, and the contract carried nothing alarming. She was asleep, touching both of them.

The bond stayed open, and what came along it now was very quiet: the weight of something completely spent, and underneath it, still going, that flat refusal to stop.

Jin looked at the two pieces of shell in the cradle, and the fan still turning in its bracket made from a ration tin lid, and the notebook full of terrible handwriting, and a lizard who had not slept in six hours and was not going to move.

It was 05:26. He had a field exercise in a little over a day, one hundred and forty Credits, and a bird who could not stand.

Alive, though.

He left his hand where it was and did not move either.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!