Taming the Wild Beast of Alamina

Andrea’s scream tore through the field.

The beasts answered... but not all of them.

That was the first thing Nero noticed.

He drove his burning blade through the throat of the nearest real beast, felt infected cartilage split, and then turned the fire inside out. Blue-white heat flashed through rotten muscle. The creature’s skull cracked open with a wet pop, black blood boiling before it hit the ground.

Three projections vanished with it.

Five did not.

Nero’s smile faded.

”Wrong,” he said.

Hale’s voice cut through his comm. ”What is wrong?”

Nero stepped over the collapsing body and burned another beast from jaw to spine. Its legs kicked even after the head came apart. He crushed the twitching skull beneath his boot and watched the remaining swarm.

Only part of it reacted to Andrea and charged the soldiers.

The rest moved badly.

”They are not all fighting us,” Nero said.

Arion’s voice tensed. ”Explain.”

Nero raised his eyes toward the forest in front of them.

The tree line had started moving.

Black shapes poured between the trunks, low and fast, but several of them did not run like beasts. They staggered upright for half a step, fell forward on too-long arms, and then dragged themselves back onto two legs as if their bodies kept forgetting what they were supposed to be.

Nero’s blood went cold.

”New contact from the forest,” Hendrik snapped. ”Drone classification failing.”

Dean’s neutralization field widened. ”Failing how?”

Nero saw one of the shapes step into the smoke.

Then the second.

Then the third.

For one heartbeat, the battlefield lost all sound.

They were not beasts.

One had the remains of a military jacket fused into its shoulder, fabric grown into infected flesh. Its jaw had split down one side, teeth visible through the cheek, but one eye was still human enough to look terrified. Another dragged a broken arm behind it, fingers opening and closing as if reaching for help. The third still had hair matted to its skull, a throat swollen with black veins, and a mouth opening around a sound that was almost a word before infection turned it into a scream.

Humans.

Infected humans.

”Do not engage as standard beasts,” Nero ordered, his voice suddenly stripped of amusement. ”Three human-infected entering from the forest. Confirmed.”

The command line erupted for half a second.

Then Arion cut through it. ”Silence. Positions hold.”

Andrea’s breathing changed beneath Thomas’s grip.

Thomas heard it.

So did Nero.

”Oh,” Nero said softly.

Andrea knew.

Thomas drove Andrea down to one knee, broken wrist still trapped. ”What did you do?”

Andrea laughed through his pain. ”You think I made them?”

Eva, pale and bleeding behind Thomas, looked toward the forest and went utterly still.

One of the human-infected lifted its head.

Blood dripped from its torn mouth.

Then Andrea’s pheromones pulsed again.

The creature screamed and charged at Eva.

Thomas moved.

He released Andrea only enough to kick him sideways into the mud, then stepped into the infected human’s path. His first shot took the creature in the shoulder. It staggered, flesh bursting black around the bullet hole, but did not fall.

”Head does not stop them cleanly,” Nero said, already moving. ”Spine. Heart cluster. Burn after rupture.”

Thomas fired twice more, then met the creature with his blade.

It hit him like a corpse thrown from a moving truck.

His boots dug into the mud. The infected human’s hands clawed at his armor, nails splitting aback to bone. Its mouth opened too wide, spraying black saliva across his chest plate as it tried to bite through reinforced plating.

Thomas shoved the blade up beneath the ribs.

The thing screamed like a person.

Sylvia would have hated that sound.

Thomas did not hesitate.

He twisted the blade until something inside tore loose, then drove his knee into its abdomen and threw it sideways into Nero’s fire.

Nero burned it completely.

The smell was worse than beasts. It was burnt hair, meat, and old blood that smelt sweetly rotten.

Human.

Dean’s voice shook once, then steadied. ”Neutralization cannot reverse infection at that stage.”

”No one asked you to,” Arion said, low and immediate. ”Hold the field.”

”I am.”

The second human-infected reached the right flank.

A Rohan soldier hesitated.

It only lasted a second, but it cost him.

The creature’s hand punched through the weak seam under his arm, fingers sinking into flesh with a wet crunch. He screamed. The human-infected bit into his throat and tore open, blood spraying hot across the mud.

Thomas shot the soldier before infection could take him.

One clean round.

Then he shot the creature’s knee, shoulder, and exposed spine in three brutal strikes that dropped it twitching into the dirt.

No one spoke.

There was no time.

The forest kept moving.

More beasts poured out now, true beasts, false beasts, half-formed things, and shapes that might once have had names.

Nero reached the third human-infected first.

It looked at him.

For a fraction of a second, beneath the black veins and torn skin and mutated jaw, something human stared back through one remaining brown eye.

Nero’s hand tightened around his blade.

The creature whispered, ”Please.”

Then Andrea’s pheromones snapped through the air like a leash.

The eye went empty, and the creature lunged.

Nero cut it in half from collarbone to hip.

Blue-white fire followed the blade, opening the body in a burst of burning blood and infected organs. The upper half hit the mud first, hands still clawing, mouth still forming that almost-word. Nero stepped down on its back and burned until bone whitened and cracked beneath his boot.

When he lifted his head, the field had changed.

This was no longer only a trap around Andrea.

This was something larger.

Arion knew it too.

”Secondary containment, prepare,” he ordered. ”Otto. Hendrik. Stand by.”

Otto’s voice entered the line, calm and terrible. ”Already moving.”

Dean’s field pulsed hard enough that every unstable marker on the command map dropped two levels. The air cleared for one blessed second.

Then Andrea laughed.

Blood ran from his mouth, where Thomas had slammed him down. His wrist hung wrong. Mud covered one side of his face, red hair behind him like a trail of blood.

But he laughed.

”You are late,” he whispered.

Thomas turned toward him.

Andrea’s eyes lifted to the forest.

”They were hungry before I called.”

Nero understood one thing then... that the beasts on the field had never been the whole swarm.

They had been the noise.

The lure.

The excuse.

Hale swore in Sahan.

Arion’s voice became ice. ”All teams, fallback pattern three. Do not break the central anchor. Dean, with me.”

Dean answered instantly. ”Field locked.”

”Nero.”

Nero smiled.

There was no humor in it.

”I see them.”

From the forest, more human shapes emerged among the beasts.

Some charged the line.

Some did not.

Some turned at strange angles, following a path no living beast should have cared about.

Nero’s rage finally found somewhere to go.

He raised his burning sword, fire climbing the blade until the air around him warped white.

Andrea’s smile faltered.

Nero looked at him across the battlefield, over the bodies, smoke, blood, and ruined mud.

”You should have stayed patient,” Nero said.

Then he turned toward the forest and burned a path straight into the swarm.