Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

The alarm went off at half past ten and Jin was awake before it finished, on a floor mat two feet from his beast, with one arm entirely dead beneath him.

The first thing he checked was not the phone.

Glitch’s hydration line was still running and the bag had gone down about a third. His foreleg was extended and immobilized exactly as the technician had left it, which meant he had not tried to move it in six hours. The water bowl beside the mat had been used. The treatment monitor showed a slow steady respiration trace and a green condition band that had not changed since 0500.

Then Glitch heard him sit up, and his head came off the floor, and he began the process of getting his shoulders under himself.

"No."

Jin got a hand on him before the leg took any weight at all.

"You’re not doing that because I’m awake. Lie down."

The bond came back with an entirely sincere argument about how fine he was, which Jin had heard the previous morning about a strained tendon and did not credit any more today than he had then.

"You’ve slept six hours. That’s not a treatment plan, that’s a nap."

Glitch lay back down and made a sound of enormous grievance.

The medic came through at eleven and spent nine minutes on the leg.

"Better," she said. "Not fixed. The inflammation’s come down about as much as I’d expect from rest and the anti-swell, and it’ll come down further if he stays off it."

"And the throat?" Jin asked.

"Still irritated." She checked it with a light while Glitch tolerated her. "That heals on its own schedule and there’s no shortcut. He is not clearing for combat before the twenty-four hours, and I’ll tell you now that I’m going to look at him at the twenty-four-hour mark and possibly say another twelve."

"Understood," Jin said.

"You said understood yesterday too," the medic said.

"I meant it yesterday," Jin said.

The medic looked at him for a second, decided he was telling the truth, and moved on to the next mat.

A status notice came through while she was writing it up.

[ASTOR, J. — EXTERIOR SHIFT: COMPLETE]

[Reserve status: released pending new orders]

[Contribution assessment: pending — active defense continuing]

Still going, then.

He could hear it, distantly, through two walls and a floor. Nothing about the Tide had ended because his shift had.

Flicker’s ward was two floors up and considerably quieter.

Verrick was at the far end with a different animal when Jin came in, so he had about four minutes alone at the cradle before anybody spoke to him.

Flicker was awake and had been fed recently, going by the state of the bowl. The folded overshirt was still where he had left it, pushed to one side of the cradle now and slightly flatter than it had been.

She saw him and moved.

Not far. She shifted about six centimeters, turning her body so that she was facing the panel rather than the back wall, and then she pushed her head forward until her beak touched the transparent surface where his hand was.

Jin opened the panel and put two fingers in and she leaned into them.

That was all of it. She did not stand up, or walk, or repeat the doorway. She stayed exactly where she was with her head against his fingers and her eyes half shut, and the contract carried across something small and tired and entirely satisfied.

He stayed like that for a while.

At some point she looked past him toward the doorway, which he understood perfectly, and he said, "He’s downstairs. He’s fine. He’s got a bad leg and he’s being extremely dramatic about it."

She settled.

Verrick came over eventually with a slate.

"She’s had a good night. Thermal’s held inside range the entire time, respiration’s normal, she ate about eighty percent of both meals." He turned the display so Jin could see it. "That’s green."

"Green meaning what, exactly?" Jin asked.

"Green meaning stable inside a narrow plan." Verrick did not soften it. "She’s not cured, she hasn’t improved, and if you took her out of this ward and put her somewhere with a two-degree swing in it we’d be having a different conversation by tonight."

"Understood. What about—" Jin began.

"No," said Verrick. "Whatever you were about to ask about acceleration, enrichment, supplements, or anything that ends in -therapy, the answer’s no. She walks under supervision and she rests. That’s the plan."

"That’s what I thought," Jin said.

"Then why ask?" Verrick asked.

"Because I’d rather hear it than assume it," said Jin.

Verrick considered that, made a note, and said, "Fair enough."

Jin ate before he opened the Engine, which was new.

He got something from the ward-block canteen that had actual protein in it and sat with it for ten minutes, and he did it deliberately, because he had learned something over the last week about resources that could not be restored by wanting them restored.

Six hours of sleep makes me functional. It doesn’t make me good. I made a build decision at two in the morning yesterday that cost me an entire run.

Then he opened his run notes and reread both of them, and he had learned something there too.

His notes from the failed offensive build said Wave 8. That was the entire entry. His notes from the successful run had timestamps, stamina values at every boon interval, the exact cost of the eleven seconds Flicker had spent outside Bulwark range, and a line at the top in block capitals about nothing coming back.

One of those is a score. The other one is information.

Only after all of that did he deploy the avatars.

Digital Glitch came up and put full weight on the right foreleg. Jin watched him do it and felt the same complicated thing he had felt at two in the morning: relief that the avatar was untouched, and an immediate check on the impulse behind it.

Avatar’s fine. That does not mean Sync is safe. Nothing has changed about the leg on the mat.

Digital Flicker moved like the Basin had made her — balanced, quick over broken footing, with a way of settling her weight before a strike that her real body could not currently produce for four consecutive steps.

Then the achievement panel opened, and Jin sat forward.

[Linked Execution — 0/20]

[Complete twenty linked finishes during one Event run]

[Reward: 40 Tide Tokens]

[Enduring Pair — incomplete]

[Clear the Wave 10 checkpoint with both deployed avatars above 50% stamina]

[Reward: 60 Tide Tokens]

He read both twice and immediately saw the problem.

Linked finishes required Glitch to manufacture openings instead of taking the cheapest kill, while Enduring Pair required both avatars to finish Wave Ten above half stamina.

Those goals pull against each other.

He thought about it for a minute and made a decision he was fairly sure was correct and was not certain about.

Chase the links. Don’t sabotage the sustain doing it. If I have to pick, the route past Wave 10 is new information and I’ve never seen it, and information is worth more right now than sixty tokens I can get on the next run.

He did not plan to fail. He simply did not know what was on the other side of the checkpoint, and he wanted to.

The third run began at Wave One and Jin compressed everything he already understood.

The jackal pack broke against a wall the same way it had the previous run. The Wave Two Ridgeback got displaced and seamed in ninety seconds. Wave Three was a mixed group and cost him nothing.

What changed was intent.

Where he would previously have let Glitch simply put a jackal into terrain, he now had him turn it instead — a shoulder that rotated the animal rather than crushing it — and Flicker arrived at the exposed flank inside the chain window.

[Linked Execution — 1/20]

Where a Ridgeback committed at Glitch, he had Flicker bait it first, drawing the commitment across a line Glitch could break, so that when the balance went the finisher was already in position.

[Linked Execution — 4/20]

By Wave Six, it had become their default way of fighting.

And it cost.

Jin noticed it accumulating around Wave Seven. Turning an animal was more expensive than killing it. Glitch spent stamina setting up positions that a straightforward hit would have resolved, and the boon offers had given him a decent kit — a modest sustain effect and one linked-range protection — but not enough to cover the difference.

He took a slower setup over a cheaper kill four separate times in Waves Eight and Nine, and he knew what he was choosing. Wave Ten would tell him what it had cost.

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