Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

The first one surfaced eleven meters off Kestrel’s center and forced the commitment before anybody was ready for it.

"Contact — it’s out, out on my right—" Kestrel called.

"Take it," said Jin. "That’s your one."

The plated beast crossed and met it and held. Jin heard the impact from the join. It was not a clean absorb; the E-8 animal went back nearly two meters with its feet ploughing, and it stopped the thing, and it stayed upright.

"That’s the hold," Kestrel reported immediately. "That’s the one I said I had. My beast can still block and it can still shove. It cannot take another one of those."

"Received. Western line is spent."

Jin changed the priority map in his head and then said the change out loud, because he had learned that anything he did not say did not exist.

"Kestrel, you’re a blocker now, not a wall. You obstruct and you shove and you don’t stand in front of a commitment. Glitch takes the emergences from here."

"Understood."

Which makes me the western line.

The east hit its own limit two minutes later and Lysa spent it deliberately.

"Dropping section four," she said, and dropped it — a damaged run of web that came down across three jackals at once and fouled all of them, which was the last useful thing that section was ever going to do. Bringing it down sacrificed one of her three remaining spools.

"Marks," she told her ranged pair, and they cleared two of the three while the animals were tangled.

"Load line two failed," she reported eleven seconds later. "That was the last one. Inner boundary is spools only and I have two. Nothing has crossed the line."

"Received. Can you hold?"

"For a while. Not indefinitely. I’ll tell you when it changes."

Runner turned down an opportunity around the same time and only mentioned it afterward.

"Something’s coming down the east side of the center. Volley’s tracking it. Do you want me on it?"

"No. Are the wounded moving?" Jin asked.

"Two left," Runner’s handler said.

"Then that’s your job and Volley has that one," Jin said.

"Received." A pause. "Just checking you hadn’t forgotten I was here."

"I hadn’t," Jin said.

The next twenty minutes were the hardest of Jin’s life and afterward he could not have narrated most of them.

Two more Ridgebacks came out of the western blind ground. Glitch took both. Jin timed the first commitment correctly and nearly missed the second — Glitch braced a quarter-second late, took the hit at the wrong angle, and lost his footing entirely for the first time all day.

He got up.

The third one nearly finished them, and Jin came within about a second of ordering Acid Breath and did not.

He used what he had instead.

"Kestrel — shove it, don’t hold it. Shove it left. Volley, I know you’re at fourteen, I need four into its right shoulder as it comes round. Glitch, stay down until it commits."

The plated beast hit it from the side without trying to stop it, which moved its line by perhaps thirty degrees. Volley put four shots into the shoulder as it turned. Glitch met it at the join with his feet properly set for the first time in ten minutes and put it into the wall.

Finishing it took another minute, and Jin’s hands were shaking by the end.

Throat’s still intact. He’s still got one if the position needs it.

E-9 did not destroy the redirected force. That had stopped being a possibility somewhere around the ninety-minute mark. What E-9 did was stop anything reaching the wounded, keep both inner boundaries standing, and stay organized.

Relief arrived at one hour and forty-one minutes.

Jin heard it before he saw it — a fresh control beast sealing the eastern branch mouth with something that went up like a wall and stayed there, then two Association teams moving down the center at the unhurried speed of people who had done this before.

Neris came in behind them. She did not charge anything. She stood at the join for about forty seconds and listened, and in those forty seconds she heard three things.

"Pell — inner boundary holding, two spools, no crossings," Lysa reported.

"Kestrel — western line is blockers only, my beast is spent for absorbing," Kestrel reported.

"Runner — evacuation route clear, last casualty through," Runner’s handler reported.

"Received all," said Neris, and started rotating them out.

She did it through the structure rather than around it. Eastern zone first: a fresh team took Lysa’s boundary while Lysa was still standing on it, and Lysa handed over in about ninety seconds in the same clipped format she had used for three hours. Then the western line, with Kestrel walking his dented beast back down the center. Then the join.

"Astor. You’re relieved."

"Understood."

"You gave them decisions instead of errands," said Neris.

That was all she said about it. Then she was talking to somebody else about lane assignments, and Jin walked four hundred and sixty meters to a gate with his beast beside him.

Inside the secondary wall the noise did not stop, which he had not expected. The alarms were still running and the exterior band was still full and the whole layered defense was still fighting, and he was standing in a processing bay under electric light having his armor removed by somebody who did it for a living.

He checked Glitch before he let anyone look at him.

The academy medic took eleven minutes.

"Foreleg strain. Treatable, no fracture, nothing torn — he’s been loading it wrong for nearly an hour and it’s inflamed." She worked down the limb while Glitch endured her with what dignity he had left. "Throat’s irritated. That’s the corrosive skill. It isn’t permanent damage, but the tissue is telling you to stop."

"How long?" Jin asked.

"Twenty-four hours minimum, no combat. Controlled hydration, observation, and I see him again before he does anything at all." She wrote it up. "He’s also exhausted in a way I’d call severe. Nothing permanent. He needs to sleep for a long time."

"Understood," Jin said.

"You’re not going to argue about the twenty-four hours?" the medic asked.

"No."

"That’s the first time today," said the medic.

Lysa went through the same processing two benches over, was classified as an exhausted defender rather than a casualty, said something short and unprintable about her web reserve, and then fell asleep sitting upright.

Jin checked Flicker’s monitor once, sitting on the floor beside Glitch’s treatment mat.

[Flicker — linked medical monitor]

[Thermal: stable]

[Respiration: resting range]

[Regulator: connected]

[Alarm: clear]

A message sat under it from Verrick, timestamped an hour earlier.

She’s fine. Slept through most of it. She’s had the shirt in the cradle the whole time and won’t let the technicians move it. — V

Jin read it twice and put the slate face-down on his knee for a moment.

Glitch was already asleep on his side with the treated foreleg extended and a hydration line in, and the exterior alarms were still audible through two walls.

[E-9 — OBJECTIVE HELD]

[Sector integrity: maintained]

[Casualty transfer: complete]

[Contribution assessment: pending — active defense continuing]

He did not open the log any further than that.

He opened the Engine because he could not sleep and did not want to lie there listening to alarms.

[Bound Beast: Glitch — Avatar available]

[Bound Beast: Flicker — Avatar available]

He looked at the first line, then at the animal two feet away with a line in his foreleg.

The avatar’s fine. The avatar has always been fine.

He opened the Sync panel out of old reflex and closed it immediately, because there was accumulated growth sitting in it and there was a strained foreleg on the mat, and pushing development into an inflamed limb was the fastest available method of turning twenty-four hours into six weeks.

Not while he’s hurt. Not for anything.

Then a notification arrived that he had never seen before.

[Real-World Event Recognized: Astral Tide — Shelter 7]

[Limited World Event Unlocked: Astral Tide Survival]

[Availability: while the recognized Astral Tide remains active]

[Estimated remaining window: 60–72 hours]

Jin sat up.

He read it three times and then checked what it was not — no map of E-9, no live feed, no sector data, nothing suggesting the Engine had any idea what was happening beyond the wall except that something was.

It noticed. It’s built me a mode about it.

He opened the event page.

[ASTRAL TIDE SURVIVAL]

[Deployment: Glitch, Flicker]

[Wave 1 — Begin?]

The exhaustion did not go anywhere. It just stopped being the main thing in his head.

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