SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Dawn came up raw and colorless over the snow, and by the time it cleared the ridge the willing had already gathered at the mouth of the mine.

Gerhardt had brought a dozen of them, hard highland men with picks and boar-spears and not one weapon among them worth a damn against what waited below, and Trafalgar was glad none of them pretended otherwise. He set them well back from the black mouth, behind a shoulder of rock that might take a charge if by some miracle a charge came this far, and gave them the one instruction that counted.

”Nobody sets foot inside. You wait for me or the captain to walk out and tell you it’s finished.” His gaze traveled the nervous line of them. ”When it’s done there’ll be carcasses to strip and materials worth good coin. That’s your work today. The killing’s ours.”

That won a few tight nods and a mutter of grim relief. Gerhardt gripped his spear and looked ready to say something with weight to it, and Trafalgar cut it off with a small shake of the head. Enough had been said at the graves.

Moses stood apart, weight easy, eyeing the mine the way a butcher eyes a hog. He hadn’t spoken since they left the town. He rolled one shoulder and the great warblade bled up out of the dark of his inventory and hung across his back, a slab of black steel near as long as a man was tall.

”Been a while since I’ve had a proper day’s work, boy.” He said it to the mountain more than to Trafalgar. ”Try to keep up.”

”I went down there alone yesterday, old man.” Maledicta woke in Trafalgar’s hand out of nothing, and the black plate of Obsidian Wings flowed up over him a breath behind it, the small wings folding in at his ears. ”You’re the one catching up.”

The ghost of a grin cracked the captain’s weathered face. Then the two of them walked into the dark together.

What had cost Trafalgar a full day alone, the pair of them took apart in a morning. He’d half forgotten what it was to fight beside a man who could hold his own flank. Every stretch of tunnel he’d bled for on the way down, they crossed now at a walk that only paused to kill, and the walls that had cornered him yesterday were just walls with the old man at his shoulder. They passed the torn-open floor where he’d dropped a whole swarm into the black, and the choked throat he’d carved through by hand, both clogged now with frost and grey dead, and neither of them slowed to remark on it.

The nest, though, had not spent the night mourning. It found them deeper down, where the crystal glow crept back into the stone, and it came harder than a gutted brood had any right to. The matriarch had found her dead. Trafalgar read it in how they hurled themselves up the tunnel at the two of them, no longer holding ground to guard the deep but flooding out to meet the threat head-on, agitated, furious, drawn up thick from every hole in the warren at once.

’She counted her losses and didn’t care for the sum,’ he thought, wading in. ’Well... Angry things make mistakes.’

They found their rhythm inside three exchanges. Moses planted himself where the tunnel ran widest and let them break on him, the black slab coming down in strokes that shook grit off the ceiling [First Fang Descent], each swing folding two and three of the tall grey ones into ruin at once. He didn’t chase. He made a killing floor of the ground under his boots and dared the warren to keep feeding him.

Trafalgar was the other half of it, everything the old man was not. Where Moses held, he moved, blurring through the gaps that bulk left open [Severance Step] to gut whatever tried to slip the flank. Maledicta answered lighter and faster than it had in two years, and he let the Morgain forms off the leash the way he rarely could in a crowd, because a crowd was exactly what they were forged to reap. He turned into the thickest press of them and opened the dance [Morgain’s Requiem], six curved shadows tearing out of him in a spiral, and the whole front rank came apart along wounds that wouldn’t knit, bleeding onto the frost before they dropped.

”Sloppy,” Moses called over the din, splitting a runner mid-leap [Cleaving Tide]. ”You’re throwing shadow like a boy showing off for the yard.”

”They’re already dead. They just haven’t caught up to it.” He met a brute barreling in from the flank head-on and poured everything into a single inverted crescent [Morgain’s Final Crescent], the strike punching through its crystalline plating and out the back, the thing folding around a wound that killed its core before its body understood. ”See? Efficient.”

Moses grunted, which from him was applause. It should have been thinning by now, and it was not. For every rank they put down, two more climbed the wreck to fill the gap, and the deeper the pair of them pushed toward the core, the denser the warren grew, as if every last thing the mountain held were pouring up to fling itself between them and the queen. The old man’s line crept forward a stride at a time and paid in sweat for each one. Trafalgar felt the Morgain forms drinking mana faster than any mop-up had a right to demand.

He took a breath he didn’t have time for and drove a finisher up through a brute wedged across the passage [Morgain’s Last Dusk], the diagonal splitting it hip to shoulder and slamming the cold weight of his spent forms back into his hands. It bought a heartbeat of room. He spent it looking past the brute’s falling halves, down the throat ahead toward the blue glow of the core, and did not care for what waited there.

The tunnel beyond wasn’t thinning toward the nest. It was filling.

A fresh mass of them came climbing up out of the deep to meet the two of them, packed denser than anything they’d carved through yet, and behind that mass, past the crush of bodies and the burning eyes, something far larger shifted in the blue light and began to move.

”Moses.” He set his feet and brought Maledicta up between him and the dark. ”It’s not getting easier.”