Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

They killed the broodguard and the alpha at Wave Ten in eleven minutes, cleanly, using the same reconnection pattern that had worked before.

Then Jin read the status line.

[Wave 10 Checkpoint Cleared]

[Glitch — stamina 49%]

[Flicker — stamina 58%]

[Enduring Pair — not satisfied]

Forty-nine.

He sat and looked at that for a moment.

The number was not an abstract failure. It was Glitch breathing hard beside Flicker after carrying the heavier share of every linked finish. One decision somewhere in the previous nine waves had made the difference, and Jin had made it knowingly.

One percent.

He could point to exactly where the missing stamina had gone. Glitch had spent the run creating safe finishing windows — turning things, holding things in place, taking hits so Flicker could arrive at an opening rather than a fight — and every one of those had been a stamina cost that a straight kill would not have incurred.

She’s at fifty-eight because he did the work. That’s the whole build.

[Linked Execution — 16/20]

Sixteen. Four short, with the run still alive.

Then the interface did something new.

[Route selection — Wave 11 onward]

[Standard Approach — no modifier, no route bonus]

[Lower Causeway — no modifier, no route bonus]

[Danger Route: Predator’s Tempo]

[Persistent modifier: enemy movement speed increases at each route stage until the next checkpoint]

[Checkpoint-clear bonus: 25 Tide Tokens]

Jin read all three and knew what he was going to do before he finished.

Two safe roads that pay nothing and one that pays twenty-five and makes everything faster.

He checked his own reasoning, because he had promised himself he would.

Shallow repetition cannot reach a thousand tokens. I need the deep routes eventually and I have never seen one. And whatever’s past Wave Ten is information I don’t currently own.

Glitch is at forty-nine. Flicker’s at fifty-eight. Four more links to bank forty tokens even if I die.

He selected Predator’s Tempo.

The route ahead of the avatars changed — the arena wall opened onto a broken causeway that ran off into charged haze — and something turned over in the display.

[Predator’s Tempo — Stage 1 active]

Wave Eleven was on a causeway and Jin noticed the speed change before the panel told him anything.

It was jackals, which he had fought a dozen times across three runs, and the first one reached Glitch’s flank about a second earlier than it should have.

Not dramatically. Just wrong.

"Flicker, wide — he’s faster than he looks."

She went wide and the jackal followed and the second one was already cutting her line, and what should have been a clean two-part sequence turned into nine seconds of repositioning before Glitch could set anything up.

They cleared it. It cost more than it should have.

[Linked Execution — 17/20]

Wave Twelve was in a sunken channel with standing water and two Ridgebacks, and the Ridgebacks finished their emergences noticeably faster than the ones at Wave Six had. Glitch read the first commitment correctly and still braced a fraction late, because his internal clock had been calibrated on a slower animal.

"That’s the modifier," Jin said out loud, to nobody. "Same enemies, less warning."

He adjusted the timing and got the second one right.

[Predator’s Tempo — Stage 2 active]

The route gave him a physical choice between stages and Jin inspected what it actually told him, which was less than he wanted.

[Foundation Field — open ground, elevated contact count]

[Collapse Run — reduced distance, unstable footing]

The interface gave him those two lines and nothing else. No enemy composition, no wave count, no indication of what unstable footing meant for a beast that had to brace.

He tried, briefly, to look at the unchosen branch from the previous fork and got a flat refusal — the path he had not taken had closed behind him and the display showed it as unavailable rather than unexplored.

Then he tried to back out of the route selection entirely.

[Route committed. Backtracking unavailable.]

He wrote both of those down.

Can’t inspect. Can’t return. Every fork is a live decision made on two lines of text.

Which means the map is worth something, if there is one.

He took the Foundation Field, because more enemies on good footing was a problem he understood and unstable footing under a faster enemy was one he did not.

The linked finishes came in three different shapes across Waves Thirteen and Fourteen and Jin enjoyed all of them.

The first was Glitch rotating an armored Ridgeback with his tail — a full quarter-turn against a braced foreleg, exposing the flank seam — and Flicker arriving at the seam inside the window.

[Linked Execution — 18/20]

The second was the reverse. A jackal committed hard at Flicker, and instead of avoiding it she led it twelve meters across the field and past Glitch’s reach, and Glitch took it out of the air without moving his feet.

[Linked Execution — 19/20]

The third was neither of those. Flicker was mid-strike on a Ridgeback when a second one came out of the ground behind her, and Glitch left his position to interrupt it — not to kill it, just to hit it hard enough to spoil the attack — and then Flicker finished the first one and turned and finished the second while it was still recovering from Glitch.

That last one did not count as a link. Jin checked. The interruption had not marked or displaced the target Flicker eventually killed; it had only bought her time.

So the chain needs the mark to be on the thing that dies. Good. That’s a real rule.

He wrote it down.

Around Wave Fifteen the route stopped letting him have things.

[Predator’s Tempo — Stage 3 active]

A surface pack came at Flicker from two angles while three burrowers worked underneath Glitch, and Jin had to separate them, which cost him the linked defensive effect and put a fast bird alone in open ground.

He took the separation deliberately and hated every second of it.

"Flicker, north, keep moving, do not stop to finish anything."

She ran. Glitch held the connected ground and took two commitments and could not follow her, and for about forty seconds the run was two independent fights.

Then Jin reconnected them with a timed displacement — Glitch turned a burrower out of the ground and into the pack’s flank, which broke the pursuit long enough for Flicker to come back inside range.

The reconnection was the part that taught him something.

The speed doesn’t matter while everyone’s doing one job. It matters when we’re changing jobs. Every transition is where the extra second costs me.

He noted it and stopped attempting transitions inside contact.

There were also two possible linked finishes in that encounter that he refused, because completing either would have required Flicker to hold position for a second and a half in a lane the pack could reach.

Nineteen out of twenty and I’m turning down chains. That’s fine. That’s the correct decision.

The twentieth came in Wave Eighteen and he did not manufacture it.

They were both tired by then. Glitch was in the thirties and Flicker was in the low forties, and there was a Ridgeback that had come out badly and was trying to get its plates back down.

Glitch hit it once, low, and it did not go over — but its hip came out of line and stayed out, and it made a half-turn to correct.

Jin did not say anything.

Flicker was already moving. She had watched the same hip come out of line, and she went in without an order and put everything she had left into the exposed joint, and the thing came apart.

[Linked Execution — 20/20]

[Achievement complete: Linked Execution]

[Tide Tokens acquired: 40]

[Current Tide Tokens: 65]

[Note: achievement rewards are permanent and are retained regardless of run outcome]

Jin read the last line twice and let himself have about four seconds of it.

Sixty-five. Banked. Even if this run dies at the gate.

Then he closed the panel, because there was a checkpoint ahead and a celebration inside an active run was a good way to lose the thing he was celebrating.

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