The 3rd Alien Battlefield was exactly what its name promised, a scar carved into reality itself, a permanent wound in the fabric of space where the invaders poured through in endless, relentless waves.
The Heliaster Galaxy's Aurion Sector had become synonymous with war. Solfire Reaches stretched across a desolate expanse of cracked earth and crystallized battlefields, where the ground itself had been scorched and reformed so many times it no longer resembled any natural terrain.
Fortress Solarius loomed at the edge of the battlefield—a massive military installation carved from reinforced starstone, its walls etched with defensive runes that hummed with constant power, its spires bristling with artillery that never stopped firing.
And at the heart of the chaos, where the rift's edge shimmered with unstable spatial tears and alien biomass crawled across the ground like living cancer, Aurelien Kaelion Herculio stood as an immovable pillar of controlled destruction.
He moved through the battlefield with the grace of a predator and the efficiency of a weapon honed to perfection. Golden electricity traced along his bronze skin in elegant arcs, his hair catching the light of explosions and energy discharges like liquid sunlight. Each movement was economical, precise—a palm strike that detonated an alien construct into ash, a gesture that sent cascading lightning through a cluster of chitinous invaders, reducing them to smoking craters.
His golden eyes, luminescent even in the chaos of battle, remained calm. Calculating. Unbothered.
At twenty-six, Aurelien had long since mastered the art of war. Seven years in Tartarus had taught him precision, and another two in the imperial academy had thought him patience, the value of overwhelming force applied with surgical intent. Two years commanding the 3rd Alien Battlefield had refined those lessons into doctrine.
He didn't speak. Didn't need to. His presence alone was enough—an anchor of dominance that steadied his soldiers and crushed the enemy's morale before they even engaged.
Behind him, Rowan Valcrist laughed, yes laughed as he brought his massive warhammer down on an alien warrior's carapace with bone-shattering force. The impact sent shockwaves rippling across the ground, cracks spreading like spiderwebs as the creature's body exploded into ichor and fragments.
"Thirteen!" Rowan called out cheerfully, his voice booming across the battlefield despite the cacophony of combat. "I'm at thirteen, my lord! You're slacking!"
Aurelien didn't even glance back. He raised one hand, and golden lightning arced from his fingertips in a branching cascade that incinerated five alien constructs simultaneously.
"Oh, come on!" Rowan's grin was audible in his voice. "You're counting the small ones! That's cheating!"
Silence.
Aurelien's answer was another gesture—lightning cascading through three more targets with devastating precision.
The Titan bloodline holder—standing nearly seven feet tall, built like a fortress given human form—laughed again as he pivoted to intercept three more invaders. His movements were deceptively fast for someone his size, his warhammer moving with devastating momentum that left craters where enemies once stood.
Despite his role as personal butler and bodyguard, Rowan had never quite managed the "dignified servant" aesthetic. He fought like a berserker, laughed like a madman, and somehow still managed to have Aurelien's tea prepared perfectly every morning. It was a contradiction that had confused their enemies for years.
Aurelien's gaze flickered left—a subtle shift that Rowan caught immediately. The berserker moved without question, intercepting the threat before it could form. A slight tilt of Aurelien's head, barely perceptible, and Octavia Montvale materialized from the shadows forty degrees aerial, her trajectory perfect.
She materialized from the shadows behind an alien commander—a towering creature of segmented armor and too many limbs—and drove twin daggers into the weak points at its joints with surgical precision. The creature convulsed, its nervous system severed in three places simultaneously, and collapsed as she was already moving to her next target.
Octavia was everything Rowan wasn't—refined, efficient, utterly professional. Her movements carried the elegance of a dancer and the lethality of an executioner. Not a single motion wasted. Not a single strike that didn't kill.
Her brown hair was pulled back in an immaculate braid despite the chaos, her expression composed even as ichor splattered across her armor. She looked like she was attending a formal function, not carving through alien invaders in a warzone.
"Seventeen confirmed eliminations, my lord," she reported as she appeared at Aurelien's side, her daggers already cleaned and sheathed. "The eastern cluster has been neutralized."
Aurelien's gaze met hers for a brief moment—acknowledgment without words. Something flickered in her carefully controlled expression—satisfaction, perhaps, or the closest she allowed herself to pleasure at that subtle recognition.
She'd been managing Herculio affairs during his years in Tartarus, coordinating military operations and intelligence networks with ruthless competence. When he'd returned, she'd requested reassignment to his personal retinue—ostensibly to better serve the heir directly, to utilize her skills where they mattered most.
A subtle shift in Aurelien's stance—weight redistributing almost imperceptibly—and Rowan's head snapped toward the center formation.
"On it!" Rowan's massive form blurred forward, his Titan bloodline pulsing as his already considerable size increased, muscles bulging with enhanced strength. He crashed into the alien formation like a meteor, his warhammer scattering bodies and creating space for the Herculio soldiers to regroup.
The three of them moved like a perfectly synchronized machine—Aurelien as the calm center of devastating power, Rowan as the unstoppable force that broke enemy lines, and Octavia as the precise blade that eliminated priority targets.
They'd been holding this section of the battlefield for six hours now. The aliens kept coming—they always kept coming—but the Herculio forces held firm.
Aurelien's golden eyes tracked the battlefield with mechanical precision, calculating trajectories, identifying weak points, coordinating his forces through subtle gestures and brief glances. His aura remained furled—tightly controlled despite the intensity of combat, contained to avoid overwhelming his own soldiers.
Even in the chaos of war, he maintained perfect control.
And then, without warning, everything changed.
...
It hit him like a hammer to the chest.
Aurelien's next strike faltered—golden lightning dissipating before it could fully form—as his heart suddenly lurched in his chest. Not pain, exactly. Not injury. Just a violent, arrhythmic wrongness that made his breath catch.
His hand went to his chest instinctively, pressing against the reinforced armor as if that could somehow steady the erratic pounding beneath.
What—
Another sensation crashed over him before he could complete the thought. Foreign. Overwhelming.
Helplessness. Desperate, clawing helplessness that tasted like ash and failure.
But it wasn't his helplessness. It was someone else's, bleeding into his consciousness like a wound he couldn't see, couldn't locate, couldn't understand.
Hatred followed—raw and incandescent, directed inward with such vicious intensity it made his teeth clench. Self-loathing mixed with fury, a toxic combination that burned through his mind like acid.
And beneath it all, threading through every other sensation: danger. Immediate, visceral danger that made every combat instinct he possessed scream warnings.
But there was no threat. The aliens he'd been fighting were dead or retreating. His soldiers were secure. The battlefield was stable.
So why did his heart feel like it was trying to tear itself out of his chest?
Aurelien staggered and Rowan's head whipped around instantly, his jovial expression vanishing.
"My lord?" Rowan's voice carried concern now, his massive form already moving toward Aurelien.
"I'm—" Aurelien started to say he was fine, that it was nothing, that he was in perfect control.
And then the arousal hit.
It slammed into him like a tidal wave of heat and need, sudden and overwhelming and wrong. His body responded instantly—blood rushing, temperature spiking, every nerve ending suddenly hypersensitive beneath his armor. His breath caught in his throat as his alpha biology surged to the forefront with devastating force.
Rut. He was going into rut.
But that was impossible.
Aurelien's ruts were controlled, predictable, manageable. He'd perfected the art of suppressants and discipline over years of military command. His cycles were tracked, anticipated, prepared for. He didn't just spontaneously enter rut in the middle of a battlefield without warning.
And yet here he was, his body betraying every shred of control he'd cultivated, heat flooding his system and pheromones beginning to leak from his carefully maintained restraint.
What the fuck is happening?
"My lord!" Octavia appeared at his other side, her professional mask cracking slightly as she took in his condition. "Are you injured? What—"
A single shake of his head—sharp, minimal. No.
His golden eyes had begun to glow brighter, power fluctuating beneath his skin in visible arcs of electricity that he couldn't quite control.
A theory formed—desperate, grasping for logical explanation. The aliens. A weapon. Chemical agent.
But even as the thought formed, he knew it was wrong. The invaders were alien in every sense—utterly incompatible biology, incomprehensible physiology. They didn't understand human secondary genders well enough to weaponize them. And even if they did, no drug worked this fast, this completely.
Another wave of foreign emotion crashed over him—fear this time, pure and primal, the kind of terror that came from being utterly helpless in the face of overwhelming threat.
Not his fear. Someone else's.
Aurelien's hands clenched into fists, golden electricity crackling violently across his knuckles. The sensations were getting worse, not better. His rut was intensifying with unnatural speed, his control slipping with every passing second.
And beneath it all, that maddening sense of something fundamental shifting, and he was the only one who could feel it.
"Drug," he managed to say, forcing the single word out even as his mind rejected the explanation. His voice was rougher, strained—each syllable taking effort.
But Octavia was already shaking her head, her sharp eyes scanning him with clinical precision. "No toxins detected, my lord. No foreign agents in the atmosphere. This is—"
She cut herself off, but Aurelien saw the flicker of confusion in her expression. She didn't understand this any more than he did.
Rowan's massive hand closed on Aurelien's shoulder—steadying, grounding. "Boss, whatever this is, we need to get you out of here. Now."
Aurelien didn't respond. Couldn't respond. Another surge of sensation crashed over him—arousal so intense it made his vision blur, his carefully maintained aura beginning to fray at the edges.
And for the first time in years, Aurelien Kaelion Herculio felt something he'd almost forgotten: genuine fear.
Not of the enemy. Not of death or injury.
Fear of losing control.
The anger came then—volcanic and absolute.
He'd spent seven years in Tartarus mastering himself. Years commanding battlefields. A lifetime cultivating perfect discipline and unshakeable control. And now, in the space of seconds, something unknown was ripping all of that away.
"No."
The single word carried more weight than a shouted command. His voice was dangerous, primal, barely controlled.
Golden electricity exploded outward from his body in a cascade of uncontrolled power. His aura—usually so carefully furled, so precisely maintained—erupted like a solar flare, expanding outward in waves of crushing dominance that made the very air tremble.
And for the first time since returning from Tartarus, Aurelien couldn't hold back.
The Solarion bloodline ignited fully. Golden light blazed from his body like a miniature sun, electricity arcing in branching cascades that carved through the battlefield with indiscriminate fury. The ground beneath his feet cracked and melted, superheated by the sheer intensity of power radiating from him.
He raised both hands, and the sky itself seemed to answer.
Lightning descended in pillars of devastating force—not the controlled, precise strikes he usually employed, but raw, unfiltered destruction. Alien invaders evaporated instantly. The ground shattered into glass. The very air ignited from the heat and pressure.
Rowan's Titan bloodline flared as he threw up a barrier of enhanced durability, his massive form interposing between Aurelien and Octavia. "Octavia, shield!"
She was already moving, her own S-rank abilities creating a pocket of spatial distortion that deflected the worst of the energy cascade. But even through their defenses, they could feel the weight of Aurelien's power—oppressive, overwhelming, *absolute*.
The aliens were dying by the hundreds. So were sections of the battlefield itself, reduced to molten slag and crystallized ash. Energy readings spiked so high that monitoring equipment in Fortress Solarius began screaming warnings.
And through it all, Aurelien stood at the center of the devastation, his body radiating light and heat and barely-controlled fury, his aura crushing everything around him with the weight of a collapsing star.
His pheromones had fully emerged now—Super Dominant Alpha pushed into rut and stripped of all restraint. The scent was overwhelming: sun-warmed amber and lightning-scorched ozone, mixed with something darker, more primal, more 'demanding'. It carried notes of absolute authority and barely-leashed violence, a biological command that bypassed rational thought entirely.
"Rowan!" Octavia's voice was sharp with urgency. "We have to move him! Now!"
Rowan didn't argue. He surged forward, his Titan-enhanced strength allowing him to weather the storm of power radiating from Aurelien. His massive hands closed on his lord's shoulders—not restraining, but guiding, grounding.
"Boss," he said, his usual humor completely absent, replaced by calm determination. "We're getting you out of here."
For a moment, Aurelien's blazing golden eyes fixed on Rowan with something feral and dangerous. But beneath the rut-driven aggression, recognition flickered. Trust, earned through seven years of surviving Tartarus together.
A single, sharp nod.
"Octavia," Rowan called without looking away from Aurelien. "Clear a path. Fast."
She was already moving, her daggers flashing as she eliminated the few remaining aliens between them and the fortress. Her movements were faster now, more aggressive—responding to the urgency of the situation and perhaps, unconsciously, to the overwhelming alpha pheromones flooding her senses.
Rowan began moving, half-supporting and half-guiding Aurelien away from the battlefield's center. The golden light surrounding Aurelien was beginning to fade, exhaustion finally catching up to the uncontrolled power expenditure, but his aura remained crushing—heavy enough that soldiers in their path stumbled and fell without him even trying.
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Fortress Solarius's outer checkpoint came into view, and that's when the soldiers noticed.
Their general was returning. But not in victory. Not in control.
The first soldier to see them—a young beta recruit barely twenty years old—froze mid-step as the weight of Aurelien's aura crashed over him like a physical force. His knees buckled instantly, and he hit the ground hard, gasping for air that suddenly felt too thick to breathe.
"Command incoming!" someone shouted, but the warning came too late.
Aurelien's presence swept through the checkpoint like a pressure wave. Soldiers crumpled—betas and alphas alike, regardless of rank or training. Even those who couldn't sense pheromones felt the crushing weight of his aura, the sheer density of power radiating from him making it impossible to stand.
Officers tried to maintain order, shouting commands, but their voices died as Aurelien passed. His pheromones were so aggressive, so overwhelming, that even dominant alphas among the troops found themselves fighting the instinct to submit, to bare their throats, to acknowledge the apex predator in their midst.
"Make way!" Rowan's voice boomed across the checkpoint, his own S-rank aura flaring to help push back the overwhelming pressure.
Octavia moved ahead of them, her expression carefully controlled despite the way her hands trembled slightly. She could feel it too—the pull of those pheromones, the biological demand they carried. Her alpha nature wanted to respond, but she crushed that instinct with iron discipline.
He's in distress, she told herself firmly. He needs help, not—
She didn't finish the thought.
They moved through the fortress in a bubble of devastation—not physical destruction, but the complete breakdown of order and discipline as every person they passed collapsed or fled. The command center fell silent as Aurelien was guided past, seasoned officers gasping on the ground, unable to do anything but weather the storm of his presence.
"Medical wing," Octavia directed, her voice cutting through the chaos with professional efficiency. "Private quarters, full isolation."
"Already on it," Rowan confirmed, adjusting his grip on Aurelien as the heir's steps began to falter. The golden light had faded completely now, leaving Aurelien looking almost... vulnerable. Exhausted. His breathing was labored, his usual perfect composure shattered.
But his eyes—those luminescent golden eyes—still burned with confusion and rage.
What is happening to me?
They reached his private quarters—a reinforced chamber designed to contain even SS-rank power fluctuations—and Rowan guided him inside. The moment the door sealed, Aurelien collapsed onto the edge of his bed, his head in his hands, electricity still crackling weakly across his skin.
"Suppressants." The word was clipped, a command despite his weakened state. "Strongest."
"Already being retrieved, my lord," Octavia said from the doorway, her professionalism a thin veneer over obvious concern. "Medical personnel are en route."
"No." Sharp. Final. "Only suppressants."
Rowan and Octavia exchanged glances. They'd both seen Aurelien in rut before—controlled, managed, never like this. Never spontaneous. Never out of control.
"Boss," Rowan said carefully, his usual humor completely absent. "What happened out there?"
Silence. Aurelien's hands clenched tighter, electricity sparking between his fingers.
He was trying to make sense of it himself—the foreign emotions, the sudden rut, the complete loss of control. None of it made sense. None of it followed any pattern or logic he understood.
And beneath his confusion and anger, buried deep where he couldn't quite acknowledge it, was that lingering sensation: fear. Helplessness. Danger.
Not his own.
Someone else's.
Somewhere in the vast expanse of the Aethorian Empire, someone was in desperate trouble.
And for reasons Aurelien couldn't begin to understand, he could feel it .
....