Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Jin checked the Engine at that rest stop with his back against a rock and his hat over the screen.

[Flicker — Recovery Trend: STABLE]

[Avatar: progress accumulating]

[Sync progress: accumulating]

Nothing had changed and nothing needed to. He looked at the little grey chick standing up in the render space — six seconds, wobbling, folding down again — and closed the panel without selecting Sync.

Slowly. On paper. Like a normal weak hatchling.

He put the phone away and went back to work.

Marker five was at kilometer nineteen and it was the worst unit yet.

Something had hit it. The mast was bent thirty degrees and the housing had cracked, and half the sensor array was dark. Jin spent thirty-five minutes on it with Bram holding the mast steady and got three of the five channels back.

The restored unit reported.

[UNIT 5/7 — PARTIAL RESTORE]

[Channels active: surface motion, thermal, acoustic]

[Channels dead: seismic, depth]

[Route section 5→6: CLEAR — no surface movement logged, 6 hours]

"Clear," said Mira. She had been reading the ground for four minutes in the direction of marker six. "That matches. There’s nothing recent through there at all. Some old grazer traces, three days minimum."

She stood up and dusted her hands.

"Then we go."

Glitch stopped.

He did it eight meters short of the route entrance, and he did not stop the way a beast stops to look at something. He went flat — chest down, forelimbs splayed, weight spread across every point of contact he had — and his whole body locked.

Jin was on the ground beside him inside four seconds.

"What."

The impressions came fast and layered and Jin had to work through them one at a time, which took a minute and a half he did not enjoy.

Movement. Continuous, not footsteps. Grinding.

Depth — deep, deeper than the burrowers in the beginner Rift, ten meters at least.

Count — not four. Not six.

Direction — several. Not one line. Lines that cross.

Jin looked up.

"Halden. There’s movement underneath this section."

Mira turned around.

"Underneath."

"Multiple sources, ten meters or more down, moving through what feel like connected passages. Several of them intersect." He kept his voice level. "High confidence something’s there and moving. Low confidence on count — more than six. I can’t tell you what they are and I can’t give you a map."

Mira came over and crouched and looked at the ground, and Jin watched her run her talent across it a second time and a third.

"There’s nothing on the surface," she said. "There’s nothing at all. No breach, no subsidence, no displaced soil. The vegetation’s undisturbed."

"I believe you."

"And the unit says clear."

"The unit says the surface is clear. Its seismic and depth channels are dead. I couldn’t restore them." Jin heard how that sounded and said the rest anyway. "So it’s telling us the truth about a question we didn’t ask."

Mira stood there.

She was not dismissing him. That was clear from the way she kept looking at the ground and then at him and then at the ground again, and Jin understood the shape of the problem exactly, because it was a genuinely hard one.

She had two academy instruments and her own talent all saying one thing, and one Fourth Class student with a lizard saying the opposite, and no way to check.

"The alternate route is six hours," she said. "Which puts us at the ridge waypoint after dark, in terrain we haven’t mapped, with an overnight."

"Yes."

"And if you’re wrong, I’ve cost us the schedule and half the assessment."

"Yes."

She looked at the route entrance for a long moment.

"Give me two minutes," she said.

Then Jin’s map display flickered, and marker five’s acoustic channel spiked, and the ground about forty meters ahead of them made a sound like something enormous clearing its throat.

[UNIT 5/7 — SURFACE MOTION: 1 CONTACT]

[SURFACE MOTION: 4 CONTACTS]

[SURFACE MOTION: 11 CONTACTS]

[SURFACE MOTION: 2— ]

The first thing through was not a threat and was still enormous.

A Stonehorn grazer came out of a fresh breach at a full run with its head down, a Rank-1 herbivore built like a boulder with legs, and it was not hunting anybody. It was terrified.

Four more came behind it.

"Off the line!" Mira had them moving before Jin had processed it, which he noted and gave her full credit for. "East, the rock shelf, east —"

They got to the shelf. The grazers went past at eleven meters and did not so much as look at them.

"They’re fleeing," said Nia, breathing hard. "They’re not — that’s flight response, that’s not aggression."

"From what?"

Jin was already crouched with his hand on Glitch.

Tunnelmaws, he thought, half a second before the name meant anything, because the shape of the movement underneath had resolved into something he recognized from the beginner Rift: continuous grinding displacement, the specific signature of a thing that made its own corridor.

"There are burrowers under the whole sector," he said. "Not four or five. They’re everywhere, and they’re expanding, and they’ve come up under the grazers’ territory."

Mira’s face changed.

"Tunnelmaw colony," she said. "That’s a containment sector two kilometers north. That’s supposed to be two kilometers north."

"Then they’ve grown."

The chain came together in Jin’s head as he said it, and he did not enjoy any part of it.

Tunnelmaws expand. They come up underneath a grazer territory. Grazers panic and break out through every hole they can find. Wounded grazers bleed on the way.

And something follows blood.

"Halden, the grazers are going to pull predators through this whole sector."

"I know." She was already scanning. "Rook, rear — second breach, west, now —"

The second breach came up where the map showed solid stone, eleven meters west of the shelf, and it came up under the equipment line.

It happened in about four seconds.

A Stonehorn came out of the new breach sideways, panicking, and went straight through the stacked gear. Jin saw the communication pack go up in the air, and saw the strap catch on the sweep of a horn, and saw the beast’s head come round.

The strap held for perhaps half a second, which was long enough to jerk the pack after it.

Then it snapped, and both the beast and the pack went down into the opened tunnel, and there was a long grinding rumble and then nothing.

Bram got a hand to the edge of the breach and looked down and came back.

"Gone."

"How far gone?"

"It’s a hole," said Bram. "It goes down and then it goes sideways."

[COMMUNICATION PACK — SIGNAL LOST]

Jin checked his own tag. The little indicator was still lit, which meant the tracking tag and the body camera were still transmitting, one way, to a monitoring room somewhere.

So they can watch us. They just can’t tell us anything, and we can’t tell them anything either.

"Everyone still has cameras and tags," he said. "They’ll see this. They won’t be able to warn us and we can’t call."

"Understood," said Mira, and then, "Pell — Pell, move —"

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