SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

He went back in like a man with something to prove, because he was.

Moses had left her softened but standing, and Trafalgar meant to make that gift count. No more living in the gaps to survive. He came off the broken stone with the well inside him filled past the brim, and this time he didn’t fight to stay breathing. He fought to take her apart.

The first strike set the tone. He crossed the distance and drove an inverted crescent of black light into the tendon-cut Moses had opened on her hind leg [Morgain’s Final Crescent], and the whole limb buckled, and she crashed down onto that side with a shriek that rang the pillars. He didn’t wait on her to recover. He was already moving.

And here the cavern gave him what it had been giving him all day, only more of it.

Every skill he spent, the rich dark mana of the place flooded straight back in to replace it, quicker than he could empty himself, so he never once had to break off and gather. He hauled it out of the air in sheets and threw it at her and hauled more, and the cycle ran faster the harder he leaned on it, until he was casting from a well that refilled the instant he touched its floor.

So he quit holding anything back.

He sheathed Maledicta in pure mana and charged her in a dead straight line [Morgain’s Linebreaker], the cutting wave shearing through crystal and flipping her half onto her spine. He rolled off the impact, came up on her flank, and put a compressed crescent through the great flank wound [Morgain’s Final Crescent] before the Core Tear had faded off the last one. Linebreaker. Crescent. Again. Again. He drove the heaviest strikes he owned into her one on the heels of the last, no breath between them, because the cavern would not permit a breath.

He fought her the way a storm fights a coastline, without pause and without mercy, every stroke arriving before the echo of the last had died. He put a crescent through the socket of her wounded shoulder and felt the joint give. He ran a linebreaker up the length of her exposed flank and split the crystal to the meat beneath. She swung for him, slower now, and rather than dodge it he cut straight through the limb on his way past, because he had the mana to burn and not one reason left to hoard it.

He sheathed Maledicta in pure mana and charged her in a dead straight line [Morgain’s Linebreaker], the cutting wave shearing through crystal and flipping her half onto her spine. He rolled off the impact, came up on her flank, and put a compressed crescent through the great flank wound [Morgain’s Final Crescent] before the Core Tear had faded off the last one. Linebreaker. Crescent. Again. Again. He drove the heaviest strikes he owned into her one on the heels of the last, no breath between them, because the cavern would not permit a breath.

He fought her the way a storm fights a coastline, without pause and without mercy, every stroke arriving before the echo of the last had died. He put a crescent through the socket of her wounded shoulder and felt the joint give. He ran a linebreaker up the length of her exposed flank and split the crystal to the meat beneath. She swung for him, slower now, and rather than dodge it he cut straight through the limb on his way past, because he had the mana to burn and not one reason left to hoard it.

She was dying by inches under it, and he could feel himself running more power through his body than his body had ever been built to carry.

That was the thing that crept up on him in the middle of the storm. It wasn’t her. It was him. Every strike came hotter than the one before, denser, heavier, his core laboring past anything he’d ever asked of it to keep pace with what his hands were doing, and somewhere under his ribs it had begun to strain.

He knew the feeling. He’d brushed it once already, up in the throat above, when the grind had pushed his core to its ceiling and he’d felt that faint further room on the far side of a wall he couldn’t open. He’d filed it away and walked past it.

He couldn’t walk past it now. He was standing on it.

The wall was right there, and he was slamming into it with every strike, his brimming core pressing up against the barrier to the sixth harder and harder, the mana of the whole cavern pouring through him with nowhere left to go but up. He felt it flex. He felt it start to give.

’...Oh,’ he thought, from somewhere far under the roar of it. ’This is what he was for.’

This was the lesson. This was why Valttair had spent a captain and a mine and let him bleed against a thing a rung above his head. Not to kill the queen for him. To drive him here, to this exact edge, with a full core and no way down and something waiting on the other side of the wall, and let the pressure do what comfort never could.

So he quit fighting the strain and threw himself at it instead.

He forced everything through at once, one last flood dragged screaming out of the cavern and slammed against the barrier from the inside, and the wall broke.

It broke like something tearing loose deep in his chest, and the pain of it whited out the world. There was no gentleness in it, nothing kind, only a searing overpressure blowing through every channel he had at once as the core split its old shell and began to remake itself larger. His muscles seized. His veins lit. For one endless instant he hung suspended in agony with his body caught between two states, half the man he had been and half something else, the old core dying and the new one not yet born, and it hurt in a way all its own, worse than Sunder, older than any wound.

He did not go down. He would not give it that.

He locked his knees in the frost and rode it the way he’d ridden everything, teeth clamped, breath sawing, refusing to let his legs fold while his own power tore him open and built him back around the tear. The cavern light strobed white behind his eyes. His heartbeat slammed once, enormous, and stopped, and did not come again for a stretch that felt like drowning.

Then it beat.

And when it beat, everything was different.

The new core caught deep inside him and turned over, and steadied, and settled into a rhythm slower and vaster and heavier by far than the one it replaced. The searing drained away. The overpressure eased into a low, immense hum that ran the whole length of him. Mana he’d had to reach and drag for a breath ago simply came now, thick and willing, answering him like it had always been his to spend. His whole body felt remade, deeper, denser, planted on ground it had never touched before.

And the world had cracked open. Where his senses used to reach a room, they reached the whole cavern now, every current of mana in the air suddenly legible, every seam of crystal singing at a pitch he’d been deaf to a minute earlier. He could feel the Deepmother across the basin the way a man feels a fire in a dark room, that vast wounded core of hers guttering and raw, and for the first time since he’d laid eyes on her she did not read like a mountain he had to climb. She read like a thing he could reach out and touch. He flexed one hand, and the new power answered so fast and so heavy it startled him, mana leaping to his fingers as though it had waited his whole life for the call.

Somewhere far off, he heard Moses let out a low sound that might have been satisfaction.

Trafalgar pulled in one long breath of the cold, and it went down like the first breath of his life, and he lifted his head, and opened his eyes.

The sixth core turned over inside him, new and steady and his.

Ascend.