Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

Nia had turned toward the second breach and a third Stonehorn was coming out of it, and it was coming out at her.

She saw it. Jin watched her see it. Her whole body registered the threat and then locked, absolutely, for about a second and a half, which was not cowardice and was simply what a nervous body sometimes did the first time something the size of a transport came at it.

Mira hit her at the shoulder and drove her sideways.

She got Nia clear. She did not get herself clear.

The Stonehorn’s flank caught her across the left leg above the knee and she went down hard, and the beast kept running because it had never been interested in any of them.

Bram was there in two strides. Jin was maybe four seconds behind him and by then Nia had arrived, and everything about her had changed.

"Don’t move her. Don’t move her." Her voice was steady and pitched to carry and had nothing in it of the girl who had frozen ninety seconds ago. "Rook, hold her shoulders, don’t let her sit up. Halden, can you feel your foot?"

"Yes—"

"Wiggle your toes. Don’t try to move your leg, just your toes."

Mira’s boot moved.

Nia had the trouser leg cut open in about eleven seconds and her hands went over the limb in a specific pattern, and Jin watched her talent working in the way she checked — pressure at the ankle, then behind the knee, then the top of the foot, then back.

"Circulation’s good. Pulse below the injury is strong." She pressed and Mira made a noise. "Femur’s intact. I think that’s soft tissue and a lot of it — muscle tearing, deep bruising, possible fracture in the fibula but she’s got sensation and blood flow all the way down."

"Can she be moved?" Jin said.

"She can be moved. She can’t walk on it and if she tries, it gets worse fast." Nia was already splinting. "She needs weight off that leg entirely. Two people or a support."

Mira, through her teeth: "I can—"

"You can’t," said Nia. "Sorry. You can’t."

The Carrion Hounds came nine minutes later.

They came off the grazer trail from the northeast, six of them, lean and low, and they were not interested in the students at all yet because there were wounded Stonehorns bleeding across half a kilometer of terrain.

That was going to change and everybody knew it.

Mira tried to run it.

She got two orders out and both of them were reasonable and then she stopped in the middle of the third, and Jin watched it happen and understood it completely. She was on the ground with a leg that would not hold her, she had four possible routes and no idea which ones had passages under them, she had just watched the map be wrong twice, and every option in front of her was a guess with a serious cost attached.

She was not panicking. She was doing the thing she did when she had insufficient information, which was to keep looking for more of it, and there was not any more of it.

Jin did not announce anything.

He simply started talking, and kept it short, and kept it to things that were true.

"Rook, the west side’s the exposed one. Take it with your beast and hold that line, don’t advance past the shelf edge."

Bram went.

"Voss. Don’t chase anything. They’re going to come in loose and try to pull us apart, and if you go after one you’ll be alone. Anything that fully commits and comes inside eight meters is yours. Nothing else."

Kellan opened his mouth, closed it, and took position.

"Pell, you’re inside the formation with Halden and you don’t leave her for any reason. If somebody’s hurt, you shout and I’ll bring them to you."

"Understood."

"Halden." Jin crouched next to her. "I need the surface. Every time something moves above ground I need to know what it was and where it went, because I can only see what’s underneath."

Mira looked at him for about a second.

"Northeast, three hounds, wide," she said. "They’re circling. There’s a fourth on the low ground that I’ve lost."

"Good. Keep going."

The fight, when it came, lasted about six minutes and Glitch did most of the interception work.

He fought the way he had been trained to fight in a chalk-marked wedge on a Meridian field: he held the middle, he did not chase, and he took the ones that committed.

Harden when a hound came in on him. Claws and tail and body weight, and one charge that put a hound off the shelf edge entirely. Twice he broke position at Jin’s word and crossed nine meters to intercept something angling for Nia and Mira, and both times he came back afterward without being told.

He did not use Acid Breath. It did not occur to Jin to want it. There were five students and three body cameras pointed at the middle of this.

The other beasts did their jobs. Bram’s plated beast locked beside him and turned the west side into a wall. Mira’s scout stayed close to her but snapped its head toward anything trying to circle through the scrub. Nia’s small lizard clung to the stone beside her and hissed whenever an unseen hound came close enough to disturb the ground.

Kellan waited, which visibly cost him, and his hound waited with him. When a Carrion Hound finally came in fully committed, Jin said "now." Kellan’s beast caught it low and spoiled its footing; Kellan’s two seconds finished the strike and put it down.

"That’s timing," Kellan said, half-laughing, half something else. "That’s all it was—"

"Reset. You’ve got five minutes before you can do that again."

Bram and his beast held the west and did not move a step in either direction for the entire six minutes.

The hounds broke off.

Jin had Glitch down with the sense open before the dust settled, and got the answer he had been afraid of.

"The retreat route’s compromised."

Mira, grey-faced: "The whole thing?"

"There’s movement under it. Two lines that I can pick out and probably more that I can’t." He pulled the map up and laid it beside the sensor log and put both of them next to what Glitch was giving him. "Southwest is worse. North is where the grazers went and that’s where the hounds are."

"So we don’t leave."

"So we don’t leave on foot with someone who can’t walk," Jin said. "Not across four kilometers of ground I can’t check."

He looked at the map again.

There was one thing on it that was not a route.

[UNIT 6/7 — SENSOR STATION — reinforced foundation, structural housing, secondary shelter designation]

"Marker six isn’t a mast," he said. "It’s a station. Reinforced foundations, actual walls, it’s rated as secondary shelter."

"It’s also damaged. That’s why it’s on the inspection list."

"It’s damaged and it’s eight hundred meters away and it’s the only thing within reach that’s built on something solid." Jin stood up. "Everything else out here is dirt with tunnels under it."

He pointed.

"Rook, you and I take Halden. Pell, right behind us. Voss, front, and you move when I say and not before."

Nobody looked at Mira.

Jin noticed that and did not have time to feel anything about it.

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