Taming the Wild Beast of Alamina Chapter 188: Regrettable Architecture

Dean regretted being born.

This was not poetic exaggeration.

It was, in fact, the cleanest available description of his current state.

Now, standing in the center of the training ring with dical monitors watching his hormone levels like he was a lab-grown pathogen and Arion standing across from him like the human embodint of institutional regret, Dean felt less like he had made a deal and more like he had sold parts of his soul for a university accommodation.

The air was sterile, stripped raw by industrial filters that humd overhead with a monotony designed to make violence feel clinical. Embedded sensors sat in the walls and ceiling, tiny red lights blinking as they tracked his vitals, his pheromonal fluctuations, the stress spikes in his muscles, and the changing chemistry of his sweat. Soone behind the glass was probably already taking notes.

Dean hoped they all developed personal problems.

Across the ring, Arion looked insultingly calm.

Arion had switched from his tactical uniform to a black, short-sleeved shirt and dark combat pants. The fabric clung to the dense muscle of his arms and chest in a deeply attractive and unfair to Dean’s already questionable judgent.

Dean flexed his right hand once.

At the edge of his awareness, small things answered.

A loose screw near the barrier seam. A tal pin from a maintenance panel. Two fragnts of chipped composite lodged near the edge of the mat. Tiny objects. Light enough. Dense enough.

That was the cleaner of his two gifts. The easier one to understand.

If it was small enough, he could take it and turn it into a projectile.

Not telekinesis in the broad theatrical sense. He was not ripping half the room apart and hurling furniture like a poltergeist with academic trauma. He could transform small objects - tal, stone, compact debris, objects that fit the internal logic his body appeared to accept - into velocity, impact, and bullets.

Fast. Precise. Brutal.

His other ability was worse because it was harder to explain.

Pheromone neutralization, but only close.

About one ter, give or take, depending on strain, pain, adrenaline, the target, and how much his body wanted to cooperate that day. Not projection. Not so elegant area-wide suppression field. It was small, ugly, and designed for proximity. Anything within that radius could be disrupted, flattened, or stripped of influence if Dean could keep it together for long enough.

Useful in theory.

Less useful when the thing entering that radius was Arion.

Up in the observation tier, Sylvia had folded her arms and settled into the rail with the detached attention of soone preparing to watch a professionally supervised tragedy.

Beside her, Nero looked deeply annoyed to be there and even more annoyed to not be the one in the ring.

His healing remained offensive.

The bruising from the previous disaster had faded too far, too quickly; the physicians had still banned him from sparring for weeks, relegating him to audience status. Dean would have pitied him if Nero were not visibly enjoying this.

"Your hand," Arion said.

Dean looked down. He had dug his nails into his own palm hard enough to break skin. A thin crescent of blood welled red against his lifeline.

"It’s symbolic," Dean said.

Arion’s expression did not change. "Of what?"

"My poor judgnt."

From above, Nero laughed.

Sylvia did not. "You can still stop this before he starts throwing you into infrastructure."

Dean looked up at her. "That is not support."

"It is a realistic assessnt."

Arion took one slow step forward. "The paraters remain simple."

Dean almost smiled at that.

Simple.

Of course they were simple to the man built like an imperial solution to civil unrest.

"You will use both abilities," Arion said. "The physicians will monitor your pheromonal output, your stress response, and the effect radius. We are calibrating what your body can sustain under pressure."

"So basically," Dean said, "you try to beat lightly while I attempt not to die in a dically interesting way?"

Arion’s expression did not change.

"Yes," he said. "More or less."

Dean stared at him.

Then he nodded once, slow and grim, the way n sotis did when receiving battlefield conditions, terminal diagnoses, or institutional emails that began with per my last ssage.

"Good," he said. "I just wanted to make sure we were naming the violence correctly."

From the observation tier above, Nero made a sound that was suspiciously close to a laugh.

Sylvia, leaning one elbow on the rail, looked down into the ring with the detached interest of soone about to watch a well-funded disaster. "He’s taking this better than expected."

"I’m not," Dean said without looking at her. "I’m simply adapting to betrayal in real ti."

Dean set his feet.

He struck first because dignity demanded at least that much.

Three tal screws ripped free from the far seam of the barrier and shot toward Arion’s throat, collarbone, and lower ribs in a staggered sequence designed to split attention rather than kill. Before they crossed halfway, Dean snapped two fragnts of composite flooring after them, faster and lower, one aid at the knee and the other at the outside of the ankle.

Arion moved.

Not much.

That was the infuriating part.

He turned just enough that one screw missed his throat by centiters. One struck his shoulder and bounced off. Another hit his ribs with a hard tallic crack that should have hurt more than it apparently did. The fragnt aid at his ankle missed altogether. The one for the knee ca closest - close enough that Dean saw the correction happen in real ti, Arion’s weight shifting with that smooth, economical precision that made everything he did feel like an insult to human reaction ti.

"This is unfair." He mumbled.

"It is calibrated," Arion said, and kept coming.

Dean wanted to bite sothing.

Instead, he snapped his wrist, unleashing a second wave of debris on Arion’s face and hands - smaller this ti, denser, aner little flecks of tal and composite transford into shrapnel with murderous intent. The spread was designed to force a reaction, to make Arion choose between protecting his eyes and preserving his balance.

Arion chose neither.

His pheromones hit first.

Not as one blunt wall. That would have been rcifully simple. They ca in layered, changing currents, pressure folding over pressure, a living field reshaping itself to whatever the mont demanded. The first push was pure command, enough to make the muscles along Dean’s spine lock in ugly, instinctive protest. Then it shifted before Dean’s body could fully answer, sharpening into sothing narrower, colder, a precision edge sliding under resistance instead of battering it from the front.

Dean swore and threw his neutralization radius outward.

The effect was imdiate and brutally localized.

At roughly a ter, Arion’s pheromones hit resistance and broke shape. Not disappeared - Dean was not so divine off switch - but flattened, torn out of coherence where they entered his range. The pressure in the air buckled. The command lost continuity. For one short violent second, the room stopped obeying Arion’s biology.

Dean lunged for that second.

A pin shot toward Arion’s throat. A screw for the inside of the knee. Another fragnt aid low for the tendon above the ankle. Dean himself followed behind them, closing the distance because his best ability required proximity and his survival instincts had apparently filed for leave.

Arion slapped the pin off course with two fingers.

The screw hit the outside of his leg hard enough to bruise.

The low fragnt scored fabric instead of flesh.

Dean stepped fully into the ter and drove his shoulder toward Arion’s sternum at the sa ti as he shoved the neutralization harder, forcing the radius against Arion’s chest and throat like a blade of null pressure.

For one exquisite instant, it worked.

Arion’s pheromones stuttered.

The next shift he had been building faltered before it could take shape, fragnts of incompatible influence crashing together and collapsing under Dean’s interference. Dean felt it like finding the weak seam in a machine and jamming steel straight into the gears.

"Yes," Dean hissed, because dignity had already died and he might as well enjoy its corpse.

Then Arion caught him by the throat.