Chapter 82: Chapter 82: Helicopter

The sound cut the world in half.

Outside became muffled – wind, distant voices, and the palace’s steady heartbeat – while inside became operationally clear: straps, headsets, clipped confirmations, and the metallic odor of gear that had been cleaned too thoroughly to be comfortable.

Arion settled into the seat like he’d done it a thousand times, because he had. The harness clicked across his chest. Someone handed him a headset, and he put it on without looking, eyes already on the tablet that had been mounted between the seats.

The map filled the screen in clean layers. Roslew marked in a calm, authoritative font. The border corridor was highlighted in a band of pale red that meant ’high saturation.’ Movement patterns overlaid in red pulsating markers.

The helicopter lifted, and the floor dropped away with the smooth, controlled violence of Alaminian engineering. The city’s lights slid under them, then the manicured palace grounds, then the pale stretch of winter landscape that looked peaceful until you remembered peace in Alamina was often only distance.

“Confirm border team status,” Arion said into the mic.

A voice answered in his ear, indicating that another unit was already in place.

“Team Alpha is holding the village route, Your Highness. Civilians are moving west. Outer farms are clearing. We have visuals on three entities.”

“Size?”

“Medium – grade two. Comparable to a full-grown boar, but built like a wolf.” A pause, then, more careful: “Our alpha agents can contain them, but their pheromonal signature started the alarms.”

Arion’s jaw tightened a fraction.

It wasn’t the size that made his blood go colder. It wasn’t even the fact that three of them had gotten through the first containment net.

It was the phrase ’pheromonal signature.’

Because Alamina didn’t call him out for a simple Alpha variant. Those were violent, yes, but predictable in the way teeth were predictable. They could be killed, trapped, redirected. They did not reach across distance with something that made trained special soldiers gag and drop to their knees.

Arion was asked to be on terrain only when the reports used words like ’abnormal bleeding,’ ’influence response,’ and ’mental degradation.’ When command suspected something at the border wasn’t just an animal behaving like a dominant but an entity saturating the air like a weapon.

And when there was a hard timeline.

Arion’s ’two hours’ to Dean had been an Alaminian metric, an ugly little rule the empire lived by.

Two hours was the window between incident and contagion, before a border event became a civilian tragedy and before Roslew felt it.

He glanced at the tablet mount again. The map was clean and clinical: the capital marked in gold, the border zone shaded in muted red, and the corridor lines drawn like veins. Roslew’s proximity to the danger strip would have seemed insane to anyone else.

But Alamina wasn’t built like other empires.

It was almost twice as large as Palatine in terrain, and only half of it could be inhabited safely by humans, half of it stable enough for farms, roads, cities, schools, and the lie of normal life. The rest was restricted land, militarized land, and quarantined land. Land that still produced dominants the way storms produced lightning.

So the capital sat where it needed to be: close enough to direct response, close enough to deploy quickly, and close enough to prevent the border from becoming its own country.

If you lived in Alamina, you learned early that distance did not equal safety.

Response did.

Arion leaned back in the helicopter seat as the rotors rose into a higher pitch. The cabin lights were dim; across from him, one of his security detail had already opened the case with his fighting gear. Gloves. Harness. A compact emitter unit designed for pheromone modulation. A blade that looked ceremonial until you knew what it could cut through.

“Confirm,” Arion said into the mic, voice calm. “Is the signature directed or ambient?”

A beat. Static. Then the unit came back, voice tighter now, like admitting a truth they didn’t want to name. “Directed, Your Highness. It spiked when our team approached the treeline. We lost two seconds of coordination… fog. Like someone poured cold water into their skulls.”

Arion’s gaze lowered to the map again.

Directed meant intelligence, or something close enough to mimic it.

He imagined Dean’s face, sleepy, irritated, and soft around the edges because he had finally stopped performing. He thought of the promise he’d given him, casually, like it hadn’t been a promise at all.

I will return in about two hours.

“Notify the border unit,” Arion said, voice steady. “I want containment first. Elimination only if it’s necessary.”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

The helicopter banked, cutting across a stretch of black forest and white ground that looked serene from above. Arion knew better. The saturation line was coming, and the invisible threshold where the air changed and instinct got louder.

His guard leaned in slightly. “If it’s directed, you’ll want to suppress them fast.”

Arion didn’t look away from the tablet. “I know.”

“You’ll have to…”

“I know,” Arion repeated, softer this time.

The guard stopped talking. There were some things you didn’t say aloud in a cabin with a live communication line because words could turn into rumors, and rumors turned into fear.

The pilot’s voice crackled in. “Drop point in twenty.”

The interior lights switched to a dimmer red. In the space of a single breath, the cabin transformed from transportation to weaponry.

Arion set the tablet into its latch with a click and reached for the harness. One motion, over the shoulders, across the chest, buckles snapping into place as if his body had memorized them before he could speak. His gloves were already on. His jacket was the darker, reinforced kind, built to take claws and not tear at the seams. At his hip, the blade sat in its sheath. On his other side, the compact emitter unit, Alamina’s polite term for something that could turn pheromones into a controlled field, locked into place.

Across from him, two agents moved in sync.

They were both dominant alphas. Not ’dominant’ the way foreigners said it, like a label. Dominant the way Alamina meant it: trained, documented, dangerous, and still under control. One was tall and lean, with hair cropped short and eyes too steady. The other had a thicker build and a scar at his throat.

They didn’t talk. They checked each other’s straps.

The lean one tapped Arion’s harness once, a quick confirmation.

“Green,” he said into the comm.

The scarred one did the same. “Green.”

Arion nodded once. “Green.”

Beneath their feet, the helicopter’s vibration deepened as it slowed and lowered. The saturation band hit them like a pressure change.

Arion’s jaw tightened a fraction. His pheromones rose instinctively, a controlled tide pressing against the inside of his ribs.

“Let’s get this over with.”

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