Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

In a monitoring room at Meridian, three instructors watched fragmentary footage from five body cameras.

The feed was poor. Two of the students had spent significant time face-down and one camera had been obscured by dirt for eleven minutes. There was no audio from the northern half of the incident at all.

There was enough.

"Halden’s still the assigned leader," said the woman on the left.

"She is."

"He never took it off her. Watch — he goes to her for surface reads three separate times after the injury, and he asks."

Odgar watched the segment again where a Fourth Class student with no combat talent put a defender on the exposed flank, gave an attacker a firing lane and a hold order, put the medic inside the formation, and used the injured leader as an information source.

"He’s using four talents he doesn’t have," he said.

"And none of that came from a combat talent," the woman said. "His own gave him information. Nothing that could protect him."

Odgar checked the panel. Five student tags, five beast markers, all vital signs inside range. Every beast identified in the sector logged as Rank 1.

"Threat ceiling’s holding," he said. "Nobody’s near the line."

"So we don’t go in."

"So we don’t go in," Odgar agreed, and marked the file.

[FIELD ASSESSMENT — TEAM 7]

[Command transition noted: HALDEN (assigned) → ASTOR (de facto), following leader injury at 15:02.]

[No formal challenge recorded. Assigned leader retained in support role.]

[Observation: role assignment efficient. Talent utilization across team: high.]

[All students alive. No emergency intervention criteria met.]

Nobody slept for the first two hours because Jin did not let them.

He did it in order, out loud, so everybody could hear where they were in the list.

"Pell — Halden’s leg, properly, with light. Take as long as you need and tell me what she needs that we haven’t got."

Nia worked for forty minutes and came back with an answer he liked.

"There’s no fracture. I was wrong, or I was being careful, either way — the fibula’s intact. It’s deep muscle damage and a lot of bleeding into the tissue, which is why it looks that bad. She needs it elevated, cold if we had it, which we don’t, and she needs to not walk on it for about three weeks."

"Is she in danger?"

"No. She’s in a lot of pain and she’s going to be furious about the three weeks."

"I’m right here," said Mira.

"I know," said Nia.

Then: entrances. Jin walked the building with Bram and found three ways in. The main barrier, now shut. A service door at the rear, buckled but closed, which Bram wedged with a fallen shelf unit. And a ventilation gap in the collapsed section high on the west wall that nothing bigger than a hound could use and that they blocked anyway.

Then: positions. Bram at the main barrier with his beast. Kellan at the service door, which Jin chose deliberately because it was the quietest post and Kellan needed a quiet post. Glitch in the central room where he could feel the whole slab. Nia and Mira in the interior office, which had one door.

Then: supplies. Water for about eighteen hours at careful rationing. Food they did not need to worry about. Medical pack down about a third. Two working lamps and four hand lights.

Then: beasts. Nia went over all five of them, which took twenty minutes, and reported Mira’s scout sound, Bram’s beast tired but undamaged, Kellan’s beast with a shallow flank wound she cleaned, her own fine, and Glitch —

"He’s at his limit," she said quietly, out of the room, which Jin appreciated. "Not injured. He’s exhausted in a way I don’t have a good word for. He’s been doing something continuously that the rest of them haven’t."

"Yeah."

"He needs to stop for a few hours."

"He does."

Then: watches. Two-hour rotations, two people awake, Jin taking the middle one because it was the worst.

Mira said it at some point during all of that, without any ceremony.

"You’re running this."

Jin looked over.

"You’ve got a leg you can’t stand on and I’ve got a beast who can feel through the floor. That’s the whole reason."

"I’m not arguing." She shifted, winced, and settled. "I just want it said, because when we get back there’ll be a debrief, and I’m going to say the same thing in it."

"You don’t have to."

"I know." She closed her eyes. "Ask me things. I can still read ground. I can do that lying down."

Jin checked the Engine at around 2100, sitting against the wall of the central room with Glitch asleep on his boots.

[Flicker — Recovery Trend: STABLE]

[Vitality: 36%]

[No decline events recorded.]

[Avatar: progress accumulating]

[Sync progress: accumulating]

Thirty-six.

One percent in a day and a half, which for a normal weak hatchling in a neonatal unit was exactly, boringly, correct.

He watched the avatar for a minute. She was standing in the grey space. Not for six seconds — she was just standing, unremarkable about it, and then she folded down and got up again about thirty seconds later.

She got through the first day.

He felt the relief arrive properly and let it, which he did not often do, and it lasted about eleven seconds before the more useful part of his brain took over.

Forty-eight-hour window. Another eight hours. I’m here until 1400 at the earliest.

He closed the panel without selecting Sync, for the fourth time in two days.

The auxiliary power was the last thing on the list, and he did it at 2140 because the lamps were going to run out before dawn.

The station had a buried generator with a cracked housing and a dead starter circuit, and Jin got it running in about fifty minutes by bypassing the starter with a connection Bram held in place while he worked.

It came up with a low industrial hum.

Lights came on, four of them, harsh and yellow. The internal seal controls showed green on two of three doors. Three local sensor channels woke up and started reporting.

"That’s better," said Kellan, from the service door, with feeling.

The hum ran down through the concrete into the foundation slab.

Glitch woke up.

He came off the floor in one movement and Jin knew immediately that this was not the lecture-hall alarm and was not a warning about anything close. It was the other thing — the total, narrow, listening stillness, the one he went into when he was counting.

Jin was on the floor beside him with his hand on his neck inside three seconds.

"What have you got."

The first impression was a single line of movement. Deep, distant, grinding.

One. Fine. There’s been Tunnelmaws under this whole sector all day.

Then Glitch separated it, and there were two.

Then a third, from a different direction entirely, and a fourth, and Jin sat very still and let him keep going, because he had learned in a quarry that a beast counting through stone should not be interrupted.

Five. Seven. Nine.

The lines were not parallel. They came from the northwest, from the south, from directly beneath, from the east — a dozen separate approach vectors converging inward through a network that Meridian’s map showed as solid rock.

Jin’s stomach went cold in stages as the count kept climbing.

The station’s built on a slab. On solid ground. The only solid ground in four kilometers.

Which means it’s built on the one thing they tunnel around.

He looked up at the walls, at the reinforced foundation, at the quiet industrial hum running down through the concrete into the rock beneath them, and understood that he had spent fifty minutes carefully turning on the loudest object in the sector.

Not a warning. Not an alarm. A vibration, steady and continuous and unlike anything natural, transmitted directly into a nesting network by a slab designed to be solid.

It’s not a signal that says danger. It’s a signal that says something is here.

Glitch was still counting.

Twelve. Fifteen. More.

Across the room, Bram had his hand on the main barrier and was watching the door. Kellan was watching the service entrance. Nia had come to the office doorway with a light in her hand and was watching the ventilation gap in the west wall.

All three of them were looking at the ways in.

Glitch had not lifted his head from the floor.

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