Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

The East Gallery was a series of connected stone passages running downward at a shallow grade, with packed mineral soil underfoot in the wider sections and bare rock in the narrows.

It was, Jin thought within about ninety seconds, an almost unfairly good place to bring Glitch.

[Tremor Sense — active]

The impressions came through the bond clean. No machinery, no impact plates, no five overlapping sources — just stone that carried, and things moving in it, and the occasional slow settle of a passage doing what passages did.

He got the first contact at four hundred meters in.

One. Deep, maybe six meters. Not moving toward us.

"Single," Jin said. "Six meters down, off the left wall. It’s working, not hunting."

Brunt turned toward the wall without being told. The Ironback Badger had a way of settling his low, plated body that Jin had come to recognize as a decision.

"Take it?" said Bram.

"It’s alone and it doesn’t know we’re here. Yes."

The kill took under a minute. Glitch tracked it to within a meter of where it surfaced, Brunt blocked the retreat, and the Ridgeback came up into a Bronze anchor already standing on the spot it wanted to be.

Jin appraised the carcass afterward and tagged the core and two of the four armor plates.

"Not those two?" Bram asked.

"Cracked. They appraise at about a fifth and they weigh the same." Jin shouldered his kit. "You’re carrying. I’m not making you carry rubbish."

They took three more over the next hour and Jin enjoyed himself in a way he decided not to examine closely.

Nobody asked him to justify anything. He broke north at the second beacon because Glitch reported the eastern continuation as quiet and the northern branch as busy, and the monitoring system logged the change and said nothing. He declined a cluster of five that Glitch found packed into a chamber off the main line, because five at once in a confined space was worth more contribution than it was worth risk.

"Your call," said Bram, who had clearly been about to say something and had decided not to.

"Say it."

"Five’s the whole afternoon’s points in one room."

"And they’d come at us from four directions in a space where your beast can’t hold a line." Jin looked at the passage. "I’d rather take eight singles."

Bram considered that.

"Fine."

"You disagree?"

"No. I wanted to hear the reason." He picked up the kit. "You’d have told me either way. Some people don’t."

The armor was the problem, and it became a problem on the fifth.

The Ridgebacks had overlapping plates across the back and flanks, and when one of them decided it was in trouble it stopped fighting and simply closed — tucked its limbs, pulled its head under the shoulder plate, and became a rock with a beast inside it.

Glitch bit it. The bite skidded. He put his tail through it twice with the full weight of his evolved body behind the swing and the thing rocked and did not open.

"That’ll take ten minutes," said Bram.

"It’ll take longer than that."

The closed Ridgeback’s hammering filled the nearby stone. It masked a second contact until that contact was already inside the wall behind Bram.

The sixth came through without warning and went for the space between Brunt and the passage edge, where Bram was standing.

"Glitch. Acid Breath."

Glitch turned and put the stream across the closed one’s back plate.

It was not a beam and it did not dissolve anything. It went on for perhaps three seconds, a controlled corrosive spray that hit the overlapping edge where two plates met and stayed there, and the surface went dull and pitted and began to sag along the seam.

Then Glitch put his weight through the same spot and it went in.

The Ridgeback opened, which was the last thing it should have done, and Glitch was already there.

Brunt took the sixth one on the shoulder plating and held it against the wall for the four seconds Glitch needed to cross the passage. Bram’s own talent came up around the badger as the impact arrived, and the two of them did not move a centimeter.

It was over in about twenty seconds.

Glitch was breathing hard afterward, which Jin registered before anything else.

He crouched and checked him — mouth, throat, the plating along the jaw. Nothing damaged. The bond carried a scraped, used-up quality that Jin had felt before, once in a quarry and once in a Rift.

How many of those have you got in you?

The answer came back as effort rather than a number, which was as much as Glitch could ever give him. Not many. Not close together.

"Right. That’s for armor we can’t get through and nothing else."

Bram had been checking his own beast. He straightened up, looked at the pitted plate on the ground, and then at Glitch.

"Since when?"

"After the evolution."

Bram looked at the plate again. He nudged it over with his boot, examined the sagged seam, and grunted.

"Useful."

That was the entire conversation.

Jin had expected Bram to ask when the skill had appeared, or how well Glitch controlled it. Instead, a Fourth-Class student had poked a corroded plate with his boot and moved on.

A Bronze beast with three skills. Nobody’s surprised. Why would they be.

Bram was already looking at the next passage.

"If it works on the seams," he said, "I can hold one of them still. Face-on, plates closed, and it’s not going anywhere while your lizard picks a spot."

"That’s about eight seconds of standing in front of it."

"Yes."

"You’re all right with that?"

"I’m built for it," said Bram, which was the closest thing to boasting Jin had ever heard from him.

They used it twice more and it worked both times, and the second time Jin picked a lower seam near the hip because the upper plates were thicker, which Bram noticed and adjusted his hold for without being asked.

After the eighth cull they had fallen into a rhythm that neither of them had discussed.

Then the pattern under the floor changed.

Jin felt it as a shift in how Glitch was standing. The bond went narrow and attentive, and what came back was not one contact or three, but several, and they were not doing what the previous nine had done.

They’re not working. They’re moving.

Then something heavier struck the stone, well below and ahead. A single deliberate impact, weighted, with a shape to it that was nothing like a burrower digging.

Three of the smaller contacts stopped.

Jin waited.

The heavy impact came again — twice, spaced — and the three smaller contacts turned, together, and began moving in the same direction.

He had seen this before, in a quarry, on a phone, for two months.

"Bram."

"I heard your beast go still."

"There’s something bigger down there and it’s signalling." Jin got up. "Nine Ridgebacks in a row acted like independent animals. These three just took an instruction."

"Broodguard," said Bram. "It’s in the mission notes. It’s inside the rating."

"I know it’s inside the rating."

Below them, the heavy impact struck once more, and this time four separate replies came back through the stone from four different passages.