SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

The fresh wall came up out of the deep, and the two of them met it without a word.

There was nothing left to say down here. Moses had told him to keep up, so they quit talking and started working, and the working did not stop for a long time.

Trafalgar set the pace, because the pace was his to set. A dozen of these he’d have walked through without breaking stride, and a hundred was a chore. What poured up the tunnel now was neither. It was the whole warren emptying itself into his path, hundreds on hundreds, every last one a Prime-rank killer standing on the same rung of the ladder he did. One against one, no contest. It was the count that bit, the grinding arithmetic of them, wave on wave with no floor to the well.

So he built himself an engine and fed it. He turned into the thick of the press and opened the dance [Morgain’s Requiem], six black arcs spiraling out to gut the front rank where it stood. Before the shadows finished bleeding he drove a finisher through the biggest thing left upright [Morgain’s Last Dusk], and the kill slammed his spent forms cold and ready back into his hands, and he opened the dance again. Requiem to reap them, Last Dusk to reload, and around once more. A wheel of slaughter that never had to stop for breath.

They kept coming. He kept turning the wheel.

When one broke the arcs he took it without looking, a crossing cut off the wrist [Crosswind Edge]. When three tried to box him he was already gone from the box [Severance Step], opening them from the dark at their backs before they’d found the space he’d left.

One of the tall ones reared up out of reach, too far to cut and closing fast. His hand found the dagger without asking [Widow’s Whisper], and he put it square between the thing’s eyes, a flat hard throw that snapped its head back and locked it rigid mid-lunge. It hung there a breath, blind and stunned with the steel in its skull, and that breath was all he wanted. Maledicta took it through the throat before it dropped, and the dagger bled back into the dark of his palm for the next one.

Behind him, most of the time, Moses simply watched.

The man killed when the killing reached him, whole ranks folding under a single swing of black steel [Gravewall], but he did not press and did not chase.

More than once he stepped back off a wave and left it whole for the boy to take. To Moses these things were worms. Prime-rank worms, worth a shrug and no more, and a captain of the First did not blood himself on vermin when there was a lesson standing right there waiting to be taught.

Because he knew why Valttair had sent them. It wasn’t the mine. The old man had cleared a hundred mines, and the patriarch didn’t spend his captain on a beast hunt any errand-runner could manage.

He’d sent them because the boy stood a hair off his sixth core, and there was no forge for a breakthrough like a wall of enemies that would not end. So Moses hung back, and let the numbers pile onto the young master, and waited to learn whether the weight would crack something open or only grind him down.

’Come on, young master,’ he thought, folding another rank under his blade with no great interest. ’Show me you’re worth the seat.’

Trafalgar felt none of that, and would have laughed at it if he had. He wasn’t close to breaking anything. He was busy.

The hours ran together. He lost the count somewhere past the second wave he’d stopped bothering to number, and the frost underfoot went white to grey to a slick dark red, and the dead heaped up the walls until he fought in a trench of his own making. The wheel kept turning. Requiem, Last Dusk, again. Requiem, Last Dusk, again.

Two hours. Two hours without a pause worth the name.

And then, between one swing and the next, there was nothing left to swing at. The last of them slid off his blade and did not rise, no new thing climbed the tunnel to take its place, and the grinding hiss that had packed his skull for two solid hours cut out all at once and left a ringing quiet behind it that was almost louder.

He stood in the wreck of the warren and breathed. He wasn’t beaten, nowhere close, but two hours of hundreds on hundreds was two hours of hundreds on hundreds, even for him, and his chest heaved and his sword arm hung heavy and the sweat under Obsidian Wings had gone to cold. He rolled the ache from his shoulder, dragged the air down deep, and let himself have the one breath. He’d earned the one breath.

Moses stood a few paces back, blade already gone from his hand, not so much as winded. He looked at the boy in the red ruin, and past him down the last of the tunnel, and held his peace.

The way was open now. It ran on ahead of them, down and clear, into a widening dark where the blue-violet glow crept back into the world. Trafalgar knew that glow. He’d stood in it a day ago and turned his back on what it lit. The core. The heart of the nest, where he’d chosen the walk over the fight and carried the choice back up the mountain with him.

He straightened off his knees, one hand on Maledicta, and stepped through into the chamber he’d sworn he would come back to.

She was still there. She loomed over the clutches at the far end of the cavern, vast and half-grown into living crystal, exactly as he’d left her, and the pale fire of her eyes lifted and found the two of them standing in the mouth of her home.

The miners who’d fled this mountain had put a name to the thing that turned it into a grave.

The Deepmother.