SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Chapter 501: Chapter 501: Sparring with Eryndor [I]

The match began without flourish.

Eryndor shifted his grip on the greatsword, angled the blade slightly, and gave the smallest nod a teacher might give a student before a lesson started properly. Trafalgar answered by moving first. Maledicta cut through the space between them in a clean diagonal arc, aimed more to test than to wound. Eryndor met it with the broad of his weapon, absorbed the contact, and turned the impact aside with almost insulting ease. The sound rang across the field, dark steel against massive iron, and the first exchange opened the way for the next one.

Trafalgar pressed immediately. A low cut toward the leg. A rising return toward the ribs. A thrust that shifted halfway through into a horizontal slash meant to draw a reaction. Eryndor answered each one with compact movements that wasted almost nothing. His size should have made that greatsword cumbersome. It did not. He moved it like a man handling something he had owned for so long that its weight had become part of his own body. Trafalgar circled, stepped in again, changed rhythm, and searched for the familiar pull in the back of his mind.

Nothing came.

His blade met Eryndor’s again, slid off, came back from another angle, and still Sword Insight gave him nothing.

’Why isn’t it activating?’

The thought crossed him while his feet kept moving. He had expected at least a flicker, some response, some quiet pressure telling him there was structure here worth seizing. There was only the match itself. No passive surge. No hidden thread opening in his head. It left him mildly off balance, though not enough to slow him. If anything, it sharpened his attention further.

The field began to notice.

Wooden practice swords kept clacking in the background, but the rhythm had broken. Students who should have been focused on their own partners were glancing over every few breaths, and those glances were beginning to linger. Trafalgar pushed forward through another sequence, stepped inside the reach of the greatsword, and forced Eryndor to shift back half a pace. A few more exchanges followed. Trafalgar drew another step from him, and this time the class could no longer pretend not to care. A murmur rolled across the training grounds.

From the outside, it looked as though Trafalgar was driving him back.

Eryndor knew better.

He caught Maledicta once more, let the impact run through his arms, and his grin widened despite himself. He had heard the reports. He had heard the gossip around an SSS talent, the stories coming out of the war, the rough versions told by people who had seen only pieces of what Trafalgar had done. Hearing it was one thing. Standing in front of the boy with a blade in hand was another.

’This is already beyond what I expected.’

A quick change in footing from Trafalgar forced him to lift the greatsword higher than before, and another clean hit slid toward his shoulder. Eryndor caught that as well, though only narrowly.

’An SSS talent is monstrous. Give him a few years and he may well surpass even me.’

The thought should have sounded dramatic. It did not. It felt plain.

A brief thread of amusement followed close behind it.

’If I win now, I could brag later that I beat the great Trafalgar du Morgain before the rest of the world caught up.’

His own mind answered that with a dry snort.

’I’m his teacher. I shouldn’t be thinking like that.’

But the grin stayed.

And something in him decided he had seen enough to stop measuring from a distance.

The change came without warning.

Until that point Eryndor had been reading, receiving, testing what Trafalgar brought to him. Now the greatsword moved first. It came down in a brutal vertical cut that forced Trafalgar to catch the edge of it with Maledicta and angle the force away before it crushed straight through his guard. The impact jarred his arm to the shoulder. He had barely turned it aside before Eryndor followed with a lateral swing that crossed the space between them much faster than a weapon that size had any right to move. Trafalgar dipped under it, pivoted, and brought his own sword up in a short rising line aimed at the wrist. Eryndor pulled back just enough, reversed the greatsword’s path, and hammered downward once more.

The field changed around them.

Now there was no murmur at all, because most of the students had stopped their sparrings outright.

Trafalgar felt the difference in every exchange. Eryndor had not become wild. He had become exact. The greatsword no longer looked like something heavy being forced into speed by brute strength. It looked domesticated. Every swing arrived where it should. Every angle closed a path before Trafalgar could fully take it. The weapon’s mass did not slow Eryndor’s technique. It fed it. Each collision sent thick force through Trafalgar’s arms and into his chest.

So this had been the truth of it.

The earlier ground Eryndor had given up was not Trafalgar overrunning him. It was Eryndor letting him see what lay at the surface.

Trafalgar’s boots carved shallow marks into the dirt as he gave way under another heavy strike, redirected the blade, and slid to the side before the follow-up caught his shoulder. Maledicta flashed back in answer, quick, severe, aimed for the opening Eryndor’s weapon should have left behind.

It was gone before the cut arrived.

Eryndor’s greatsword was already there.

’So this is serious.’

The realization hit harder than the blows.

Trafalgar did not have room to be frustrated. He adapted instead. He shortened his swings. Stopped trying to force long sequences. Began meeting power with angles, turning the blade rather than stopping it, testing where Eryndor’s wrists transitioned, where his hips committed, where the next line would form. Each clash taught him something through plain effort even if Sword Insight continued to sleep.

Eryndor noticed that too.

Most students buckled when a heavier, faster blade started dictating the exchange. Trafalgar did not. He yielded space when he had to, found better footing, and came back into the line again before pressure could turn into collapse. The more Eryndor pushed, the more obvious it became that the boy was not clinging to the match by desperation alone.