Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

He checked both real bodies first, because that was a rule he had built for himself and it was not negotiable at two in the morning.

Glitch: asleep on the treatment mat, hydration line in, respiration slow, foreleg extended and immobilized. A technician had looked at him eleven minutes ago and written STABLE on the board.

Flicker: green on all four lines, in a ward two floors up, with an academy overshirt nobody was allowed to move.

Then he deployed the avatars.

Glitch’s digital body came up onto all four legs and put full weight on the right foreleg immediately, without the quarter-second hesitation Jin had been watching since E-9.

He looked at that for a while.

It didn’t copy across.

He tested it properly, because assuming was how people got hurt. Four turns in both directions and a short charge; the leg loaded correctly every time. Then a two-second Acid Breath at nothing, and the throat that had made the real Glitch decline food an hour earlier produced the stream with no strain at all.

Injuries don’t transfer into the avatar. That still leaves the real animal hurt and Sync exactly as unsafe as it was.

He wrote down both halves.

The event map was not E-9 and Jin checked that thoroughly before he did anything else.

It borrowed the imagery — ruined approach lanes, defensive markers, that granular quality on the horizon — but the geometry was wrong, the distances were wrong, and there was no fallback gate anywhere on it. He looked for anything resembling live intelligence and found none. No sector names, no positions that corresponded to anything real.

It’s a mode about a Tide. It isn’t the Tide.

The rules panel gave him five lines and he suspected it was holding more back.

[Every run begins at Wave 1]

[Defeat ends the run]

[Temporary boons expire at run end]

[Checkpoint bosses guard permanent rewards]

[Event closes when the recognized Astral Tide ends]

Nothing about healing. Nothing about recovery.

Nothing about it either way.

Wave One was a jackal pack and it was, briefly, glorious.

Flicker moved.

That was the thing Jin had not been prepared for even after five Basin clears. In the Basin she had been a bait unit running a defined line. Here she was hunting — the accumulated stamina and footwork from those repeated clears turning into something that crossed a broken lane, took a jackal through the eye, and was gone before the second one arrived.

Glitch held the middle and chased nothing. He took the two that committed and put both into terrain, and when one broke toward Flicker he was there without being told, which was not a tactic Jin had given him.

Wave One cleared in fifty-one seconds. Wave Two added a surface Ridgeback and took two minutes.

Jin spent the transition testing rather than resting, because a transition was information.

Did defeated enemies leave anything? Nothing on the ground. Could the timer be paused? No — twenty seconds, running. Did positions reset? No; both avatars stayed exactly where the wave had ended. Could he change deployment? The panel was greyed out.

So it’s one continuous run with breaks in it, not ten separate fights.

He noted that and did not think about it hard enough.

The first boon choice came after Wave Three.

[Select 1 of 3 — expires at run end]

[Kindling: increasing damage per consecutive kill without taking a hit]

[Bulwark: reduced incoming damage while avatars remain within 8m]

[Tithe: shared stamina return on first marked kill each wave]

Jin read all three and took Kindling in about six seconds.

The reasoning was not stupid. Three waves had cost him almost nothing, both avatars were near full, and killing faster meant fewer exchanges, which meant less damage taken, which meant the sustain options were solving a problem he did not have.

And whatever’s dented gets fixed between waves anyway.

He did not examine that thought. It arrived fully assembled out of a hundred other games and he accepted it without checking, which was the entire error and took roughly one second to commit.

Wave Four made that choice expensive. Two jackals pulled Flicker wide while a Ridgeback took the center. Glitch absorbed the emergence, Flicker finished it, and a jackal clipped her wing on the return. Both avatars spent heavily to clear.

The twenty-second timer ran.

Jin watched the status panel and it did not change.

[Glitch — stamina 71% | minor abrasion, left flank]

[Flicker — stamina 64% | wing bruising]

The same numbers he had gone into the transition holding.

Oh.

He checked twice, then reread the rules. They had never mentioned healing.

[Boon: Kindling — locked for this run]

It never promised. I filled it in.

He tried to save the run, and it was a reasonable attempt.

If nothing came back, then the answer was to stop taking damage — and Kindling actively rewarded that, since the kill counter broke whenever an avatar was hit. So he played for clean waves. Glitch in front of everything, Flicker only on displaced or finished targets, and Waves Five and Six went by with neither avatar losing more than a few points.

The second boon selection offered a control option and two offensive ones and no sustain at all.

He took the control option, because the build was already committed and half-building for recovery now would give him neither.

Wave Seven was fast. A mixed pack that split immediately and made Flicker reposition four times in ninety seconds, and repositioning cost stamina, and stamina did not come back.

[Flicker — stamina 38%]

Wave Eight was armored. Three Ridgebacks were visible and a fourth signature remained underground, with no room for Glitch to avoid the two commitments he had to absorb. A sustain build could have recovered part of that cost across the following minute. This run simply kept it.

[Glitch — stamina 44% | contusion, right shoulder]

They died on Wave Eight and they died well, which somehow made it worse.

Flicker went first. She had been sent to finish a Ridgeback Glitch had turned and displaced, and she took it, and the fourth animal — which had come out of the ground eleven meters away while Jin was watching the third — reached her before she had recovered from the strike.

At thirty-eight percent she did not have the stamina to break off.

Glitch held alone for about forty seconds and Jin watched with genuine admiration and no ability to help at all. He put two of them into terrain and Harden went up twice, and the pack had more left than he did.

[Run Ended — Wave 8]

[Checkpoint not reached]

[Temporary boons lost: Kindling, Sundering Line]

[Tide Tokens: 0]

[Avatars respawning — no permanent effect]

Two feet away, the real Glitch had not moved. The hydration line was still running and the board still said STABLE.

Jin sat in a processing bay at three in the morning with a phone in his hands and felt, for the first time in six hours, entirely awake.

I built for the fastest single wave. This is one long run with pauses, and everything I spend stays spent.

He opened the boon log and read every option he had been offered, including the ones he had refused. Then he opened a blank note and wrote one line at the top.

NOTHING COMES BACK UNLESS A BOON SAYS IT DOES.

Then he started a second run.

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