Chapter 182: Chapter 182: What the Fuck Is Going On?

“Enough.”

Arion’s voice hit the room like a blade dragged clean across stone.

Everything stopped.

Nero’s next step died half-formed. The heat in the ring collapsed inward with a violent hiss, fire along the boundary strips guttering down into ugly embers. Dean, one hand still half-lifted, froze with blood bright over his mouth and chin, chest rising and falling hard enough to make the torn fabric over his ribs pull.

For one beat, no one moved.

Then Arion was in the ring.

He did not remember crossing the distance.

One second he was at the observation barrier; the next he was stepping over the ruined floor with the kind of speed that made even trained adults in rooms like these remember exactly why he had once been a student they survived rather than controlled.

He stopped in front of Dean first.

His hand came up without warning, fingers grabbing Dean’s jaw and turning his face slightly toward the light.

Blood from the nose. Split lip. Bruising already darkening on one cheekbone. Soot over the collar. Shirt scorched. Pupils too wide. Adrenaline was still roaring through him.

Fine enough to be furious.

Arion’s temper got even worse, though.

“What the fuck is going on?”

The words came out low, cold, and very much not princely.

Dean blinked at him, puzzled.

Nero, still bleeding from the clavicle, the arm, the cheek, and one side where Dean’s telekinetic assault had made a private point about structural integrity, wiped blood from his mouth and looked equally puzzled by the reaction.

“We were fighting,” he said.

Arion turned his head very slowly.

Nero, for perhaps the first time in months, had the decency to look like he was not sure whether that had been the ideal answer.

“I can see that,” Arion said. “I am asking why.”

Dean frowned, still breathing hard. “Because he asked.”

Arion looked back at him.

Dean, blood still running from his nose in a line that had reached his mouth, looked honestly offended by the need to clarify.

“He wanted to fight,” Dean said. “I wanted to hit something. A professor said something stupid. This seemed efficient.”

Above them, Sylvia made a small helpless sound that was perhaps laughter and perhaps spiritual collapse.

Arion kept one hand under Dean’s jaw for one second longer than necessary, thumb already red with Dean’s blood, then let him go with visible reluctance only because he needed both hands free to avoid strangling someone.

He turned to Nero.

“You promised to wait.”

Nero, to his credit, did not try to lie. “I did.”

“And yet.”

“You were late.”

That was true. It remained annoying.

“It was an exam,” Arion said.

“It was boring,” Nero replied. “Then it improved.”

Dean, still right there and apparently under the impression that this conversation was happening around him rather than because of him, wiped at his nose with the back of his wrist, looked at the blood, and said, “For the record, it improved considerably after I entered.”

Arion turned to him with such complete silence that Dean, finally, visibly reconsidered the exact amount of cheerfulness appropriate to the moment.

Not enough to apologize, but enough to shut up.

The professors above did not intervene.

The silver-haired one was openly observing now with the expression of a woman who had once graded Arion through much worse scenes and was therefore not about to rescue any of them from the consequences of being themselves.

Arion looked between the two of them again.

Dean: bloodied, wired, still vibrating with the last shreds of combat aggression.

Nero: bruised, bleeding, heat not fully settled, and looking at Arion, like this had all become unexpectedly personal for reasons he genuinely did not understand.

That part was the problem.

Neither of them understood.

Neither of them thought anything exceptional had happened.

Because to them, in the ugly direct logic of young dominants and things even worse than dominants, this was nothing more than the fights they had just last year.

Arion’s expression changed by a degree.

“Both of you will get medical assistance,” he said, his voice low and stripped of everything except command, “and the fight is over.”

“Come on,” Dean said, visibly disappointed. “We were only blowing off steam.”

Arion turned his head slowly. “And the first person you wanted to fight was an enigma.”

Dean, still breathing a little too hard and still bright with leftover violence, lifted one shoulder as if that were self-explanatory. “Well. It doesn’t matter what he is. If he’s within a one-meter radius, his pheromones are neutralized.”

The silence that followed was extraordinary.

Nero looked at Dean.

Arion looked at Dean.

One of the professors, somewhere above them, made a sound that might have been a cough and might have been a laugh strangled at birth.

Arion repeated, very carefully, “That is your defense?”

Dean frowned. “It’s a good one.”

Nero, wiping blood from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand, muttered, “It is, actually.”

Arion looked at him.

Nero had the decency to shrug with only one shoulder, the other still punctured and bleeding. “His neutralization range is obscene. You know that.”

“Yes,” Arion said. “I also know you are still an enigma with functioning hands, a skull, and instincts that turn rooms into structural repairs.”

Dean pointed, immediate and sharp despite the blood. “Exactly. Structural repairs. Not funerals. See? Perspective.”

Sylvia covered her face again.

The silver-haired professor did not bother hiding her amusement this time. It was not warm, but it was there, a thin cut at one corner of her mouth. “He argues like you did,” she informed Arion.

Arion did not look away from Dean. “I know.”

That should not have pleased Dean.

Annoyingly, some faint, unhelpful thing in his face suggested that it did.

Then Arion stepped closer and caught Dean’s wrist again when he tried, for the third time, to wipe at the blood under his nose.

“Stop doing that.”

“It’s still my nose.”

“And still bleeding.”

Dean looked down at the hand on his wrist, then back up. “You are being dramatic.”

Arion’s gaze was ice. “No. I am being generous.”

Dean’s mouth flattened.

Nero, apparently unwilling to let the room recover, said, “For the record, I was fine.”

Arion turned his head.

Nero, blood down his throat and shirt, one side of his face split open, concrete dust still on his shoulders, and a wound high near the clavicle that would absolutely require stitching, had the remarkable audacity to look sincere.

“You had a metal pin through your shoulder,” Arion said.

“Minor.”

“You were on fire,” Dean added, as if that helped.

Arion looked between them and understood, with the fresh and terrible clarity of a man watching two people share a private language he had not been there to learn, that they genuinely thought this was normal.

A rhythm they had already survived often enough that blood, impact, and scorched walls did not automatically translate to catastrophe in their minds.

That did not improve his mood.

It made it worse.

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