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 medical monitors watching his hormone levels like he was a lab-grown pathogen and Arion standing across from him like the human embodiment 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 hummed 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. Someone 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 judgement.
Dean flexed his right hand once.
At the edge of his awareness, small things answered.
A loose screw near the barrier seam. A metal pin from a maintenance panel. Two fragments 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 - metal, 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 meter, give or take, depending on strain, pain, adrenaline, the target, and how much his body wanted to cooperate that day. Not projection. Not some 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 someone 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 judgment."
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 assessment."
Arion took one slow step forward. "The parameters 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 me lightly while I attempt not to die in a medically 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 men sometimes did when receiving battlefield conditions, terminal diagnoses, or institutional emails that began with per my last message.
"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 someone 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 time."
Dean set his feet.
He struck first because dignity demanded at least that much.
Three metal 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 fragments of composite flooring after them, faster and lower, one aimed 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 centimeters. One struck his shoulder and bounced off. Another hit his ribs with a hard metallic crack that should have hurt more than it apparently did. The fragment aimed at his ankle missed altogether. The one for the knee came closest - close enough that Dean saw the correction happen in real time, Arion’s weight shifting with that smooth, economical precision that made everything he did feel like an insult to human reaction time.
"This is unfair." He mumbled.
"It is calibrated," Arion said, and kept coming.
Dean wanted to bite something.
Instead, he snapped his wrist, unleashing a second wave of debris on Arion’s face and hands - smaller this time, denser, meaner little flecks of metal and composite transformed 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 mercifully simple. They came in layered, changing currents, pressure folding over pressure, a living field reshaping itself to whatever the moment 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 something 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 immediate and brutally localized.
At roughly a meter, Arion’s pheromones hit resistance and broke shape. Not disappeared - Dean was not some 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 fragment aimed 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 fragment scored fabric instead of flesh.
Dean stepped fully into the meter and drove his shoulder toward Arion’s sternum at the same time 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, fragments 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.