On the southern line, Nero sneezed.

Hale looked at him immediately. "Are you infected?"

Nero, standing with one boot on the chest of a twitching corrupted beast and his heavy military blade sunk through its throat, looked offended. "I am being discussed."

"You are being reckless."

"That too."

The southern ridge had been ugly for exactly eleven minutes and then started becoming educational.

The first wave of beasts had come from the broken trench line: six large corrupted bodies moving too fast over uneven ground, joints cracking, fungal plates blooming pale along their spines. Normal corrupted beasts. Nothing elegant. Nothing clever. Just rot, hunger, and the old biological insult of things that should have died but hadn’t done so politely.

Nero had smiled when he saw them.

Hale, unfortunately, had been near enough to hear it.

"You are not to push past the marked line," Hale had said.

"I know."

"I mean it, Nero. If you break formation, I will shoot you myself and tell command the beasts got lucky."

"You wouldn’t," Nero had replied cheerfully, pulling his blade free with a wet shuck that made the nearby infantrymen wince. "You’d miss me. Besides, who else is going to keep you entertained?"

Nero did not use guns. Guns were impersonal. Guns were for people who didn’t want to get their hands dirty, who didn’t want to look the rot in the eye. Nero preferred the brutal, intimate weight of Sahan steel. He carried a heavy, serrated combat blade that looked less like a knife and more like a localized war crime.

"Movement," a scout called out from the ridge line, his voice tight over the comms. "Deep trench. We have a swarm cluster."

Hale brought his rifle up, the thermal scope finding the target. It was a boiling mass of heat signatures pouring out of the collapsed earthwork, driven forward by a blind, parasitic frenzy.

"Form line," Hale ordered. "Concentrated fire on my mark."

"Oh, put that away," Nero sighed, stepping off his dead beast. He rolled his shoulders, the dark fabric of his field coat pulling tight. "You’ll just make a mess."

"Nero," Hale warned.

But Nero was already moving. He strolled past the invisible boundary of the marked line with the casual saunter of a man admiring a garden path.

"He’s breaking formation," one of the Alaminian soldiers noted. He sounded resigned, like a man watching a very expensive car drive slowly into a lake.

"Let him," Hale ground out, his finger easing off the trigger. "Squad, shift aim to the flanks. If anything gets past him, put it down."

Nero walked toward the oncoming wave of corrupted beasts. The creatures shrieked, the sound a horrifying mix of animal rage and fungal wheezing, as they scrambled over the uneven ground to reach him. They were thirty meters away. Then twenty.

Then, Nero let go.

The air around Nero shimmered, warping as if viewed through a mirage. The scent of damp earth and rot was instantly vaporized, replaced by the sharp, suffocating smell of brimstone, ozone, and ash.

The front line of beasts hit the invisible edge of his pheromone field.

They didn’t stop. They simply burst into flames.

It was instantaneous, violent combustion. The pale fungal plates on their backs acted like tinder, rapidly heating up under the sheer, impossible pressure of Nero’s aura. The beasts screamed in agony as the fire consumed them from the inside out.

Nero kept walking, twirling his blade lazily in his right hand.

Every step he took pushed the thermal boundary forward. Beasts that tried to flank him turned into screaming pyres before they could get within ten meters.

Hale could feel the heat coming off of him from the ridge. The wet mud under Nero’s boots hissed and baked into cracked terracotta.

The mindless wave broke. The fungal parasites driving the beasts were primitive, but even they recognized the absolute, total destruction of fire. The creatures in the rear scrambled backward, trampling each other to escape the walking inferno.

One monster, a huge, heavily mutated version with bone spurs sticking out of its burned fur, was able to get through the flames by sheer force of will. It lunged at Nero, its jaws wide, blind and burning.

Nero didn’t flinch. He didn’t drop his pheromone output. He simply brought the blade up in a blur of motion, sidestepping the lunging mass and driving the serrated steel straight up through the soft tissue beneath its jaw.

He twisted the blade, severed the spinal cord, and let the beast crash to the earth. Its body immediately caught fire from the residual heat of his pheromones, adding to the pyre.

Nero stood amidst the burning carcasses and the smoking earth, breathing easily. He looked back over his shoulder at Hale, his pale violet eyes reflecting the orange flames.

"Perimeter is clean, Hale!" Nero called back, his voice entirely too cheerful. "Though it smells a bit like an overcooked barbecue down here!"

Hale stared at the carnage, then keyed his comms, his voice perfectly flat. "Command, this is South Line. Push was successful. The line is holding."

"Understood, South," Hendrik’s voice crackled back over the secure channel. "Status of the Sahan asset?"

"The Sahan asset," Hale replied, watching Nero poke a burning beast with his boot, "is currently setting the local flora on fire because he lacks impulse control. I am formally requesting a fire extinguisher."

Nero laughed, the sound carrying over the crackle of the flames. He flicked the smoking blood from his blade and turned back toward the dark treeline of the infected zone.

"Send more," Nero whispered, a dangerous smile touching his lips. "I’m bored."

Hale heard him.

The universe was not kind enough to let Nero mutter something clinically alarming while standing in a ring of burning corpses and have the only responsible adult in the area miss it.

"Nero," Hale said over the local comm, "step back to the marked line."

Nero looked over his shoulder again, white-blond hair catching the firelight, purple eyes bright in a way that made three nearby soldiers abruptly remember they had equipment to check.

"But Hale," he said, sweetly, "I just cleaned this section."

"You sterilized the section."

"That sounds better."

"You are not advancing."

"I was not advancing. I was admiring my work from inside it."

"You are standing forty-three meters beyond the approved line."

Nero looked down at the cracked, smoking ground beneath his boots, then back up. "Forty-three? I would have guessed fifty."

Hale lowered the rifle just enough to make the gesture pointed. "Do not make me improve your accuracy."

One of the Sahan infantrymen muttered, very quietly, "He means shooting him."

"I know what he means," Nero called back without looking. "I was raised in a loving home."

"That explains too little," another soldier said under his breath.

Nero smiled.

The soldier froze.

Hale closed his eyes for half a second.

Babysitting.

This was babysitting.