Taming the Wild Beast of Alamina

Thomas Lancaster fought like a man who had never considered panic a useful emotion.

The first beast came low, ruined muscle dragging through mud, jaws split too wide beneath infected bone. Thomas stepped aside and put two rounds through the soft joint under its skull before its weight fully committed.

It collapsed at his feet.

The second leapt over it.

Thomas caught it with the edge of his blade, turned with the momentum, and drove it into the fire line his soldiers had opened half a breath earlier.

On command black, Nero’s voice was pleased in the worst possible way. ”I see why Sylvia is fond of him.”

”Focus,” Arion said.

”I am focused. Appreciation is not distraction.”

Thomas ignored them both. His world had narrowed to the flank, Eva behind him, Andrea to his left, and the sudden wrongness spreading through the field like oil beneath water.

Then the dead beast moved, not really rising... but multiplying.

One dark body shuddered in the mud, and then another body pulled itself out of its torn side. Then another. Then three more, wrong and wet and half-formed, dragging themselves free from the same corpse as if the field had become a wound producing monsters.

The second beast split too.

Two became six.

Six became a dozen.

For one terrible second, the entire right flank lost rhythm.

”Contact multiplication!” someone shouted.

”Hold formation!” Thomas snapped.

But panic had already struck the line.

There was no doctrine for beast cloning under active fire. No normal model for bodies producing more bodies without mass, without time, without biological sense. Drone feeds stuttered as targeting systems tried to assign threat values to creatures that appeared faster than sensors could classify them.

Medical relay surged red.

Sahan monitoring screamed warnings.

Eva staggered behind Thomas. ”That is not possible.”

Andrea’s breathing had changed.

Thomas heard it.

Before he could turn, Arion’s voice cut through the command black.

”Wait.”

It was not loud.

It froze everyone anyway.

At the center, Arion stood with one hand lifted, golden eyes narrowed through smoke and ash. Beasts crowded the right-flank display, too many, impossibly many, a mass of claw and hide and open mouths.

But they were not advancing.

Some twitched. Some screamed. Some dragged themselves half a meter before collapsing into shuddering stillness. Several mouths opened with no sound at all. Their bodies blurred at the edges, too thin, too wrong against the mud.

Dean saw it at the same time.

”They are not all real,” he said.

Nero’s voice sharpened. ”Pheromone projections.”

”Or incomplete bodies,” Hendrik snapped. ”Incapable of movement without direction.”

Thomas’s gaze flicked toward Andrea.

Andrea was already moving toward Eva.

”Eva!” Thomas barked.

Too late.

Andrea’s hand flashed silver.

The field knife went in below Eva’s ribs, shallow enough not to kill quickly, deep enough to bleed freely.

Eva’s gasp cracked across the open comm.

For half a second, the battlefield stopped being battle and became betrayal.

Andrea caught her wrist, his expression calm, almost tender. ”Stay still.”

Eva looked down at the blood spilling over her armor, then back at him with disbelief so raw it cut through even the infected pressure.

”You—”

Andrea dragged her injured hand outward.

Blood dripped into the churned mud.

The nearest half-formed beast convulsed, then moved obediently.

Dean’s neutralization field slammed openly, but Andrea’s pheromones flared through Eva’s blood like a lit fuse.

Every false beast on the right flank turned its head toward the scent.

Then toward Thomas.

Thomas moved before anyone ordered him.

He threw himself between Eva and Andrea, one arm sweeping Eva back hard enough to break Andrea’s grip. His body became the wall he had always been accused of resembling.

Andrea’s knife came up again.

Thomas caught his wrist.

The impact sounded ugly even through the comm.

Andrea smiled.

For the first time, openly.

”There you are,” Thomas said, voice flat.

Andrea’s smile widened. ”Commander Lancaster.”

Thomas twisted his wrist.

The knife dropped.

Andrea’s pheromones surged.

The false beasts screamed and lurched forward, dragged into motion by blood and command, their bodies tearing as they moved. The real ones came with them, hidden among illusions and half-formed meat, a dozen threats pretending to be one swarm.

”Right flank, fire low!” Thomas ordered. ”Ignore mouths. Target weight-bearing limbs. If it casts no shadow, do not waste ammunition.”

His soldiers obeyed.

Because they were his.

Because panic lasted only until Thomas gave it something useful to become.

Eva hit the ground behind him, one hand pressed to her side, eyes wide and furious. Dean’s field reached her a heartbeat later, cutting through Andrea’s hold. She inhaled sharply, as if waking from years underwater.

Andrea felt it break.

His face changed.

Nero laughed once across the field.

”There it is,” he said.

The left flank moved.

Nero crossed the distance like a blade thrown by a god, fire gathering along his weapon, Sahan soldiers opening space around him. Hale shouted something that sounded very much like a prayer and a curse combined.

Arion’s voice cut through command. ”Contain the projections. Do not chase what does not move.”

Dean followed instantly. ”Neutralization sweeping right. Medical, to Eva, on my mark. Thomas, hold him.”

Thomas looked down at Andrea, whose wrist remained trapped in his grip.

”With pleasure,” he said.

Andrea’s pheromones struck again, trying to slide past dominance, past anger, past training.

Thomas was not a beast.

He was not Eva.

He did not move.

Andrea’s eyes flickered with fear.

Thomas smiled then.

It was not warm. It was not courtly. It was not the smile Sylvia knew.

It was the expression of a man who had been waiting two weeks for permission to stop being polite.

”You talked about Sylvia in Rohan,” Thomas said softly.

Andrea’s face went pale.

Behind them, the beasts screamed louder as Nero hit the first line of them in blue-white fire, burning real flesh from pheromone lies, ash from illusion, and command from chaos.

Eva pushed herself up on one elbow, blood still dripping, but her eyes were clear now.

”Andrea,” she said, her voice shaking with pain and hatred.

He looked at her.

Thomas broke his wrist.

Andrea screamed.

The false beasts screamed with him.

Across the field, every sensor finally understood what had been hidden for years.

Andrea Vale was not a stabilizer.

He was a leash.

And now the whole battlefield had seen his hand.