Taming the Wild Beast of Alamina

Chapter 180: Chapter 180: Passed as Usual

”He isn’t,” Dean murmured back, eyes fixed below. ”That’s the problem.”

Because Nero was not fighting like a student proving himself.

He was fighting like a man deeply inconvenienced by the fact that the assessment had been scheduled at all.

The trainer came in hard again, abandoning the polite opening logic of evaluation and stepping fully into pressure. His shoulders turned. Weight dropped. A low strike feinted into a higher one with enough force behind it that any ordinary candidate would have had to choose between retreat and bruising.

Nero did neither.

He slipped inside the angle with infuriating ease, caught the trainer’s wrist just long enough to redirect the force harmlessly past him, and used the borrowed momentum to turn the older alpha half a step off-line. It was barely visible if one did not know what to look for.

The effect, however, was humiliating.

The trainer recovered fast - of course he did; a lesser man would not have been in that ring at all - but the recovery came with irritation now, the first real crack in his composure.

The pressure hit the glass like a furious wind.

Sylvia inhaled sharply; she couldn’t feel the scent, but the pressure was there even for her.

Dean did not move, but some instinctive part of him braced anyway.

Below, Nero finally looked awake. Not challenged, exactly.

Only marginally less bored.

”Better,” he said, his voice carrying easily through the sound system.

The trainer’s answer was not verbal.

He drove in again, faster now, combining physical force with directed pheromonal pressure in a clean, brutal wave meant to box Nero in and cut down his options.

It would have worked on almost anyone else.

Nero stepped left and the pheromones broke like smoke in wind.

Dean saw it happen and hated, immediately, that he understood what he was seeing. Nero had not overpowered the pressure head-on. He had sheared it. Turned its clean line sideways. Forced the trainer’s own output to waste itself in the wrong direction while his body followed through on an attack no longer supported by the force meant to secure it.

The trainer’s hand hit empty air.

Nero reached out.

A touch at the shoulder. A shift at the hip. A pressure break so exact it looked almost insulting.

Then the older man was on the floor.

The room above remained silent for one beat, then two, as if everyone present were politely allowing the trainer to process his own public education.

Sylvia looked at Dean with naked civilian astonishment. ”That was legal?”

Dean, who was fighting his own highly inappropriate satisfaction, said, ”Apparently.”

Below them, the trainer rolled to one knee with murderous calm, as if he had no intention of embarrassing himself twice in the same position. He stood, reset, and stared at Nero, as if reconsidering not the assessment but the concept of youth.

Nero stood where he had been left, one hand loose at his side, expression flat enough to be offensive.

One of the professors on the right made a note.

The silver-haired woman at the center did not even look surprised.

”Continue,” she said into the microphone.

The second round lasted less time than the first.

The trainer came in smarter this time, less proud and more technical, trying to bait Nero into committing early, forcing him into narrow angles, and testing whether the prince’s boredom could be turned into overconfidence.

It was a respectable attempt.

Nero responded by taking the man apart in increments.

A pressure interruption here.

A false opening there.

A command feint that forced a misread.

Then a clean reversal so sharp Sylvia actually made a sound under her breath.

The trainer hit the floor again, this time harder.

The older alpha lay there for half a second too long, breathing once through his nose in what might have been reflection, resignation, or the private consideration of homicide. Then he sat up and looked toward the judges’ desk.

The silver-haired professor glanced at the others.

One by one, the panel confirmed on their tablets.

Then she said, in the tone of someone announcing weather instead of a young royal’s continued indecency, ”Candidate passes. As usual.”

No one stood up and clapped for the Saha’s terrifyingly competent son.

They had, apparently, seen all this before.

Nero rolled one shoulder, as if the result had been exactly as interesting as predicted, and looked up toward the observation glass.

Directly at Dean.

Dean felt the problem coming one second before it arrived.

”No,” he said immediately.

Sylvia turned to him. ”He hasn’t said anything yet.”

”He doesn’t need to. I know that face.”

Down below, Nero tipped his head slightly.

Then he said into the room speaker, ”Come down.”

Dean stared at him in exhausted fury. ”Absolutely not.”

One of the professors to the left glanced back. ”You’ve trained with him before.”

It was not phrased as a question.

Dean hated everyone.

”Briefly,” he said.

Sylvia choked on a laugh. ”That is a disgusting lie.”

Nero’s mouth moved faintly. ”He’s underselling it.”

”I’m preserving dignity,” Dean snapped.

”You lost that when you followed me here.”

”That sentence alone justifies violence.”

The trainer, now back on his feet and collecting what remained of his pride, gave Dean a look that said, ’good luck.’

The silver-haired professor rested her pen against the desk. ”Lord Dean is a dominant omega. He has nothing to do with a pheromonal combat evaluation.”

There it was.

The sentence hit cleanly, almost clinically.

And because Dean was already tired, already overeducated for one day, and already raw from beast mutation theory and the reminder of Arion’s childhood near-death and Nero being Nero, the words landed in exactly the wrong place.

He turned his head slowly.

The professor did not flinch.

Of course she didn’t.

She had survived Arion.

”Nothing to do with it,” Dean repeated.

Her gaze was level. ”Correct.”

Nero, below, made the fatal mistake of looking interested.

Dean rose.

Sylvia looked up at him. ”Oh no.”

”Oh yes,” Dean said.

The professor’s brow lifted by a degree. ”Sit down.”

”No.”

That got the attention of all five faculty members.

Dean, now fully standing and beyond rescue, looked through the glass toward the ring, then back at the judges’ table. ”With respect, Professor, if the point of this exam is pressure discipline, range manipulation, command interruption, and response integrity, then a dominant omega has quite a lot to do with it.”

The professor at the far right, a lean man with the exhausted expression of someone who had once graded disasters for a living, said, ”A dominant omega’s role in such engagements is not offensive combat.”

Dean looked at him. ”No. It’s usually surviving alphas who mistake that for a limitation.”

Sylvia closed her eyes briefly, perhaps in prayer, perhaps in delight.

Nero, below, was now very clearly amused.

The silver-haired woman tapped her pen once. ”You’re angry.”

Dean gave her a bright, sharp smile. ”Yes.”

”Why?”

That annoyed him further because it was such a clean question.

Because it deserved an honest answer, and Dean did not enjoy giving them under observation.

”Because,” he said, voice still perfectly even, ”I’ve spent the last several days being professionally informed that my body is either a diplomatic concern, a stabilization variable, or an administrative risk profile, and I’m getting a little tired of hearing versions of ’not relevant’ from people who ought to know better.”

He took a deep breath. ”And because I want to throw punches.”