"I wasn’t going to," Arion replied, his eyes never leaving the treeline. It was a clear lie, spoken in the calm, steady voice of a man who was completely at ease lying on the battlefield.

"Your pheromones spiked with pride," Dean pointed out, compressing three more pebbles into dense, jagged little bullets that hovered just above his palm. "It was loud and frankly unprofessional."

"I will issue a formal apology to the command structure later. Stand ready."

The change in Arion’s tone was complete. The teasing prince disappeared, and in his place appeared the battle-hardened commander who had been bleeding in this dirt for the past eighteen years.

The pheromone wall at the edge of the drainage cut flickered with a shimmering distortion. It was a small drop in pressure, a momentary thinning caused by the damp ground and the heavy rot in the air, but the corrupted beasts could feel it.

They did not howl. They did not roar like the monsters in the storybooks. Infected beasts moved with a horrifying, silent desperation, driven only by the fungal parasites hijacking their nervous systems.

Three of the large, matted shapes broke from the dead orchard, rushing the thinnest section of the wall.

"Emitters to maximum!" Arion barked, his hand dropping to the heavy, specialized firearm at his thigh. "Hold the line!"

The beasts hit the barrier. The air sparked, and a harsh, ozone crackle came over the radio. Two of the beasts recoiled, their corrupted biology rejecting the concentrated dominant pheromones, but the third—larger, heavily mutated, with bone spurs breaking through its matted fur—pushed through the distortion.

It cleared the wall, its blind, milky eyes locking onto the nearest cluster of body heat: the containment squad.

Arion moved to intercept, bringing his weapon up, but he didn’t need to fire.

Dean flicked his wrist.

The compressed pebble shot forward with the ballistic crack of a sniper rifle. It punched through its skull with enough kinetic force to shatter the bone spurs and instantly dropped the massive creature into the mud. It slid two meters before coming to a twitching halt at Arion’s feet.

The containment squad blinked.

Arion looked down at the dead beast, then back over his shoulder at Dean.

"Not a word," Dean warned, his eyes glowing with that eerie, violet light of active neutralization. The remaining pebbles hovered around him like tiny, lethal satellites.

"I didn’t say anything," Arion said smoothly.

"Your face is saying it."

"My face is focused on the tactical situation."

"Your face is smug." 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

"Contact front!" a technician yelled, pointing toward the sky above the drainage cut. "Insect swarm breaching the upper grid!"

The zombie mosquitoes.

They were worse than the beasts: a black, shifting cloud of parasitic infection that no bullet could penetrate. They poured through the temporary gap in the upper pheromone net, bringing an angry, buzzing haze down on the convoy.

"Seals on!" Arion ordered, his own dominant aura erupting—a heavy, suffocating pressure of vetiver scent and command intended to stun the larger beasts still pacing the border.

Dean stepped forward, placing himself between Arion and the descending swarm.

He didn’t compress matter this time. He expanded his reach. He felt the dust in the air, the loose gravel, and the shattered glass from the ruined barricades. Dean used a quick, pulling motion with his hands to sweep the trash up into a small, spinning vortex.

He caught the swarm in the makeshift shrapnel storm. The glass dust and gravel acted like a grinder, shredding the fragile wings and corrupted bodies of the insects before they could clear the fifty-meter mark. The black cloud turned into harmless ash and debris, raining down onto the dead grass outside the wall.

Dean lowered his hands, exhaling a slow, controlled breath. The glowing violet in his eyes dimmed to their normal, aristocratic purple.

"Swarm neutralized," Dean said clinically, brushing a speck of dust from his dark field coat.

Hendrik’s voice crackled over the comms, dry as ever. "West team, status."

Arion pressed two fingers to his earpiece, his eyes locked on Dean. "Breach contained. One beast down, the swarm shredded. The wall is stabilizing. What is the status of the grid?"

"Everything is as planned," Hendrik reported. The sound of distant artillery echoed faintly through the channel. "South is clear. Nero pushed the line five hundred meters further than requested. Hale is currently threatening to shoot him if he breaks formation again, but they are effective. Sebastian’s northern fan is holding with zero casualties. The center ridge is entirely stable under Thomas and Andrea’s anchor."

Arion lowered his hand. "Understood. We hold positions here."

The field settled into a tense, controlled quiet. The remaining beasts outside the wall, having watched the breach fail catastrophically, retreated back into the shadows of the dead orchard to wait.

The plan was working.

It was a huge, synchronized machine of violence, and every part was working exactly as it should have been.

Arion holstered his weapon and walked back toward the armored vehicle. He stopped in front of Dean, his large frame blocking the cold wind blowing in from the infected zone. He reached out, his gloved thumb gently wiping a smudge of dirt from Dean’s cheekbone.

"You did well," Arion said quietly, the commander stripping away to leave only the mate.

Dean tilted his chin up, refusing to lean into the touch in front of the containment squad, though his eyes softened just a fraction. "Of course I did. It’s basic physics, Arion. Force, mass, and velocity."

"And pure, terrifying competence."

"If you start reading me poetry in the middle of a war zone, I am going to compress your radio," Dean threatened, though there was no real bite to it.

Arion smiled, stepping back to give him space. "Noted. But the offer stands. If you get tired, you get back in the vehicle."

"I am not getting in the vehicle," Dean said, looking back out at the shimmering wall, his hands slipping into his pockets where a fresh handful of gravel was already waiting. "We have a schedule to keep. And I refuse to let Nero rack up a higher body count than me."

Arion let out a low, warm laugh that felt completely out of place in the mud and the rot. "I’ll inform command that the West Flank is now operating under competitive parameters."

"Do that," Dean agreed. "And tell them to send more beasts. I’m barely warmed up."