SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Moses watched with his arms folded and his blade at rest, and did not lift a finger.

He’d expected the young master to struggle. The thing at the heart of the nest was Apex, a full rung above where Trafalgar stood, and a rung was not a gap a man closed with cleverness alone. Moses had cleared enough of the world’s monsters to know what a rung was worth. He’d half thought to watch the young master overmatched inside a minute.

He’d thought wrong, and it pleased him to be wrong.

Trafalgar fought like a scalpel with a grudge. Fast, precise, always low and moving, opening the great wound wider stroke by stroke, reading the beast’s fury and living in the half-second of daylight it left him. It was clever work. It was more than clever. For a man on the wrong side of a rank, he was making the queen bleed, and doing it with a composure Moses hadn’t credited him for.

But Moses had felt his own stroke land, and he knew what it had done to her, and he knew that would not hold.

Sunder had taken her hard. Not the wound alone, though the wound was real, but the shock of it, the pain and the rage and the sight of her brood scoured off the stone in a heartbeat. It had knocked the sense straight out of her. She’d come off it wild and blind, all thrash and scream, and that blindness was half of what the young master had been fighting. A beast with its judgment burned away is a far simpler thing to kill than a beast with its wits about it.

He could see her getting them back. It started small, the way these turns always did, in the places a younger eye would miss. Her swings stopped chasing where Trafalgar had been and began arriving where he was going. Her head, which had thrown itself about in fury, steadied and turned with him now, tracking, learning. The screaming dropped to a low grind. The whole storm of her quit spending itself in every direction at once and began to point.

’There she is,’ Moses thought, and something in his chest went cool and grave. ’The rage is burning off. Now the young master meets what actually lives in there.’

The fight turned by degrees, and Moses read every degree of it.

Where Trafalgar had been dictating the exchange, now he was answering it. The gaps he liked to vanish into closed before he reached them, a wall of crystal-plated bulk arriving to seal each one. She herded him.

She took his angles away one at a time, pushed him off the open floor and back toward the pillars and the fractured ground where his own footing turned traitor. His cuts still bit, but he was spending them to stay alive now, not to win, and a man who fights to stay alive has already handed the fight to whoever put him there.

Moses had watched a thousand duels tip on exactly this hinge. The smaller fighter dazzles, the bigger one weathers it, and then the bigger one remembers that it is bigger. From here the arithmetic ran only one way, and Trafalgar, for all his gifts, could not argue with arithmetic by wanting to.

Trafalgar was losing. Slowly, a step at a time, but losing.

Moses knew why Valttair had sent them, and he had not forgotten it standing here. The patriarch wanted the sixth core wrung out of the young master under a weight no training hall could ever put on him. So Moses had held back, and let the pressure stack, and waited on the crack. That was the whole purpose of his idleness.

But a breakthrough was a door a man kicked open going forward, not one that swung wide while he was driven into a corner and ground down. Pinned and battered, Trafalgar would not ascend. He would only break. And a dead heir taught the family nothing worth the price of him.

So Moses let it run a little longer, because the edge was where the growth lived and he would not cheat the young master out of it an instant early. He got three more exchanges before the queen ended the question for him.

Trafalgar overreached. One cut too many, chasing that wide wound when he should have given ground, and she had been waiting for exactly that slip of patience. Her bulk pivoted with a speed the thing had no business owning, and the full sweep of a foreleg the size of a felled oak caught him square across the chest before he could blink clear of it.

The sound was terrible. Not the wet crack that had ended lesser men under Moses’s eye, but a deep hollow boom, the noise of a body turned into a thrown stone. Trafalgar left the ground and flew the width of the cavern, and hit the far wall, and did not stop at its surface. He punched into the rock and through the first foot of it, stone caving and spidering around him, and a fist of dust and shards blew out of the crater he made.

Moses did not move.

He stood where he was and read the wreckage the way he read everything, without heat. A killing blow and a hard knock make different sounds and leave different silences behind them, and this had been a knock. He watched the dust roll and thin, and found what he’d expected in it.

Trafalgar was already moving. Down in the broken stone, half-buried, he had a hand under himself and was dragging his boots back beneath him, spitting rock and blood, more insulted than injured. His eyes came up burning. There was fight in every line of him yet.

’Hard as old iron,’ Moses thought, and for once there was no weighing in it, only respect. ’Nineteen, and Prime, and half through a wall, and already climbing out of it. Valttair chose well, whatever the rest of that family likes to whisper.’

But the beast was gathering itself for the pin now, swinging its bulk toward the crater and the small stunned thing lodged in it, and a young master half out of a hole was in no state to slip what came next.

That decided it.

Moses let his arms drop, and the great warblade bled back into both hands out of the dark, and he started forward across the churned frost with the unhurried certainty of a man crossing a room to move a table.

”I’ll take the next few minutes, young master.” He said it easily, without turning his head, his eyes on the queen as she swung her attention toward him. ”Catch your breath. She and I have a thing or two to settle.”

And Moses walked into the space between Trafalgar and the Deepmother, and for the first time since the killing had begun, the thing at the heart of the mountain found itself facing something that did not stand beneath it.