SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

He held at the edge of the light and ran the numbers, and for once they came out against him.

Caving the ground was out. Up in the shaft he’d had a hollow floor to drop the last swarm through; here the throat was his only road down, and bringing it in would bury the way to the bottom with everyone crammed inside. Funneling was just as dead; that trick paid when he could hold a chokepoint and let it thin them for him, and this time he was the one forcing it. It stood three deep in frozen muscle and pale burning eyes, wedged so tight the ones at the back couldn’t have dropped if he’d cut them down.

Which left the oldest, ugliest work there was: open a hole in them and walk through it. So he went in.

The first one lunged, and he didn’t break stride for it. He crossed the open ground and drove into the packed front of the passage like a wedge into green wood, and as he landed he let Maledicta wake all the way [Morgain’s Requiem].

Six cuts spun out of him in a tightening spiral, each flinging a curved black wave off the edge, and the shadows tore through the press in every direction at once.

The front rank came apart where it stood, opened along wounds that refused to close, dark spray hazing the frozen air, and for one breath a pocket of ruin yawned around him where a wall had stood a heartbeat before.

The pocket lasted as long as it took the passage to notice it was full. The dead had nowhere to drop, so they stayed upright, and the living behind them climbed the wreck of their own kind to reach him. The gap he’d bought closed over his head like water over a sinking stone.

That was the whole game, and he had it read before the second swing. He wasn’t emptying this the way he’d emptied the mouth or the slope; nothing that refilled itself the moment you tore a hole in it could be emptied at all.

Forward was the only answer left him.

Kill whatever stood in the stride ahead, take the ground it dropped from, and do it again, and leave the ones he couldn’t reach to wait their turn to die.

He quit counting them, because counting a horde like this was how a man gave his nerve away for nothing, and shrank the war down to the arm’s length in front of his blade.

They came at angles the open ground had never given them.

Down here the walls and the ceiling were as good as the floor, and the horde used all three.

A runner peeled off the stone overhead and dropped for the back of his neck while two tall ones crowded him from the front to pin him in place for it.

He caught the drag of its claws in the air before it landed and answered without looking up [Crosswind Edge], a crossing cut ripped out at an angle no honest swing could have found, and the thing crumpled around the wound and burst apart before its feet reached him.

When they boxed him properly, when the crush sealed shut and no cut of his could reach the next living body, he quit cutting and moved instead [Severance Step].

The world smeared and spat him out a body’s length deeper in, behind the ones who’d penned him, planted in a seam of open dark at their backs, and he opened three from shoulder to hip before they’d turned to find where he’d gone.

He learned to wall off his flanks as he moved. A diagonal slash flung into a side opening [Severing Fang] left its edge hanging in the narrow a breath after the cut itself had gone, so the next crawler to force through ran onto pressure fixed to nothing at all and came apart on it before it reached him.

He walked a moving box of cutting pressure down the tunnel one stride at a time, and the mountain surrendered those strides one at a time, and neither of them gave an inch for cheap.

And somewhere in the slog of it, for the first time since he’d walked into the dark, he felt the cost. It crept in quietly, the way it always had. His arm came up heavier than it had gone down.

The cold he’d been shrugging off since the mouth finally reached the skin under the black plate, and the sweat beneath his armor was turning to frost. His breath dragged at the bottom of each pull. And under all of it, in the place he drew his power from, the well that had felt bottomless for two years running turned out to have a floor after all, far down but there, and he sank toward it with every wave he spent.

He clocked it instantly. ’So there it is,’ he thought, dry even now. ’The wear catches up. Slow, but it catches up.’ He split a tall one hip to collar and stepped into the room it left behind. ’A lot of killing to ask of one sword. Even this one.’

It ran deeper than a sore arm, and the honest part of him didn’t bother lying about it. Under the strain his core had started to labour, running nearer its own ceiling than it had in a long while, grinding against a limit he rarely went hunting for.

Behind that limit, faint and a hand’s breadth out of reach, waited the feel of something more, another room the wall wouldn’t open to him. He’d grazed that edge before, in flashes, never long enough to put a name to it. He filed it with the rest and left it be. Chasing it here, with the whole passage still ahead, was a fine way to die on the doorstep.

The throat had one more argument to make before it let him by. Where the stone pinched tightest a heavier thing had jammed itself across the gap, one of the armored brutes, plated in slabs of glacier ice, slow as a landslide and wider than the gap would let anyone pass. It corked the passage whole, and the smaller ones tucked behind its bulk and jabbed at him past its flanks, and for a dozen breaths his advance stalled out against it. Every lighter strike he had left skidded off the ice plates and cost him mana he could no longer throw around.

He had one technique that would punch straight through it, and a stack of them gone cold from the grind, with no time to wait them out the way an hour ago would have allowed. So he spent the one that gave the others back.

He set his feet in what little room he had, hauled Maledicta up over his head, and poured everything left in him into the edge until the air along the blade started to hum [Morgain’s Last Dusk].

Last time he’d loosed this thing it had been reflex, flung at a startled beast in a corner, and he’d called it overkill and meant the word. This time he meant the cut.

The rising diagonal came up through the brute and split the stone it stood on, opened the armored bulk from hip to shoulder and carried straight past it, and the thing that couldn’t regenerate never got the chance to try. It fell apart across the narrow and unplugged the gap in one avalanche of steaming ice, and as it died his spent techniques came flooding back to his hands all at once, live again, the drained well shoved hard toward full.

’Better,’ he allowed, dragging in a breath. ’Wasteful up top. Down here it earns its keep.’ The way down lay open where the brute had stood.

The last stretch ran faster, though faster was a long way from easy. He worked through the remainder the same punishing way he’d worked all of it, the dead choking the passage at his back while the living thinned ahead, until the pale burning eyes were reaching him in ones and twos instead of a solid wall, and finally not at all.

Past the last of the press, the passage gave out. He felt the change before he saw it, the walls falling back off his shoulders, the cramped stone opening into a great dark hollow ahead that breathed cold up the tunnel at him.

The air ran different here. It carried a stink he’d been catching the fringes of for a hundred paces, plain now that the slaughter had thinned enough to let him think: the deep, animal, ammoniac reek of a place lived in, a place things were whelped in.

Under his boots the frost lay thick and layered and old, tramped down by the passing of weight across a stretch of time that had no business fitting inside one season.

Trafalgar halted at the mouth of it, chest heaving, one arm dragging heavier than the other, and pushed his senses out ahead into the dark beyond.

Something vast waited at the center of it.

’There you are,’ he thought, and under all the wear dragging at him something went cold and quiet and certain. ’That’s the heart of it. That’s what every last one of them died to keep.’ He rolled the ache out of his sword arm and stared into the black where the thing crouched. ’Whatever you are, I’m about one door away.’