SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Chapter 522: Chapter 522: After the Final Test [II]

On the other side of the hall, Alfons stood with three first year students who orbited him in the way people always did when a great family name stood behind someone.

None of them were close friends. That would have required equality, and there was none of that here. They were simply boys who had attached themselves to him through family ties, status, convenience, and the quiet hope that staying near Alfons au Vaelion might amount to something later. In a place like the Academy, that alone was enough to keep people smiling longer than they meant to.

Alfons barely listened to any of them.

His attention kept drifting across the hall toward Trafalgar.

The bastard stood with his usual group, looking far calmer than Alfons wanted to see. He did not carry himself like someone waiting nervously for the final results. He looked almost comfortable, as though the outcome had already stopped mattering to him before the directors even appeared.

That irritated Alfons more than he liked to admit.

’What did the bastard hunt?’ he thought, his jaw tightening very slightly. ’Ever since everyone found out his talent is SSS, he’s gotten even more unbearable.’

That was how Alfons saw him now. Not as a rival in the clean sense, and not even as someone he simply disliked. The feeling had gone far beyond that. He hated him.

Part of that hatred had begun with Zafira.

There had been a time when Alfons believed things would move in a natural direction. He had the name, the bloodline, the talent, the kind of future anyone with eyes should have recognized. Declaring himself had not felt reckless to him. It had felt obvious.

And Zafira had rejected him.

Not politely enough to leave room for self deception. She had rejected him with Trafalgar already occupying the space Alfons had wanted for himself. That alone would have been enough to leave a mark.

The Council had made it worse.

Alfons still remembered that duel more clearly than he wanted to. At the time, he had not gone into it with real caution. He had limited himself, yes, but even within those limits he had believed he would crush Trafalgar without much trouble. That had been the ugliest part of it in hindsight. He had not merely expected to win. He had expected it to be easy.

Because that was what Trafalgar had been to him then.

Trash.

A bastard from House Morgain, late to everything that actually counted, someone Alfons had already filed away as beneath notice. He had walked into that fight carrying superiority so naturally that he had not even examined it.

And he had been humiliated.

The wound from that had never really closed. It had simply sunk deeper, where pride fermented into something bitterer.

His father had not made any of it easier.

Roderic au Vaelion had not lost his temper publicly after the Council. Anyone watching from the outside would have called him graceful about it. Pleasant, even. The wager had been honored. A legendary item had passed from Vaelion hands to Valttair du Morgain because of Alfons’s defeat, and Roderic had handled the matter with the kind of refinement powerful men wore when they knew everyone was watching.

But Alfons knew his father better than anyone else in the family.

He knew the mask.

He knew the difference between the face Roderic showed the world and the one that surfaced in the spaces where no one else could see him properly. His father had not been enraged over losing the item itself. A legendary item could be replaced, recovered, or compensated for over time. What had disgusted him was the way Alfons had lost. He had gone in overconfident, underestimated a Morgain, and dragged Vaelion pride through the dirt in front of the other Great Families.

That was the offense.

That was what Roderic could not forgive cleanly.

The Vaelion were one of the Eight Great Families. Along with the Morgain, they were one of the only two human bloodlines seated among those eight. Roderic never said it openly in public, but comparison with House Morgain had long since become instinct in him. Every measure of success quietly bent in that direction. Every heir from another family became a point of reference. Every result needed to be weighed against the Morgains sooner or later.

For years, Alfons had been his father’s hidden answer to that rivalry.

He had talent greater than any Morgain heir of his generation. That had been the comfort. The secret advantage. The thing Roderic could hold in his mind and say, at least here, Vaelion stands above Morgain.

Then Trafalgar appeared.

And when the truth of Trafalgar’s talent became known, Alfons had seen his father’s face change in a way he would never forget. There had been no shouting. No lecture or no dramatic punishment.

Only that look.

As if bringing Alfons into the world had been an error in judgment that now stood in front of him breathing.

That memory clung to him more stubbornly than the Council itself.

’I can’t rank below him in these exams,’ Alfons thought. It was the only idea in his head now, stripped clean of everything else. ’I won’t.’

Around him, the other three boys kept talking because none of them understood when to stop.

One of them, a brown haired boy with green eyes, tilted his head slightly toward Trafalgar’s group and asked in a low voice, ”What do you think the Morgain bastard hunted?”

Another snorted. ”Nothing that impressive, probably. Maybe something decent in the forest, but not much more than that. He couldn’t have gone after a higher level beast.” He gave Alfons a glance meant to flatter. ”He’s not like Alfons.”

The third joined in at once, eager not to be left behind. ”Exactly. There’s no way he hunted something with a Flow Core or a Prime Core. According to what people say, he only awakened like two or three years ago, right? They were obviously hiding it. It’s impossible to move between cores that fast.”

Alfons said nothing, but the irritation building in him grew heavier with every word.

Because he knew they were wrong.

Not in principle. In another case, maybe they would have been right. The speed they were talking about should have been absurd. That was precisely why it annoyed him to hear them dismiss it so lightly. They spoke as if the idea were ridiculous, while Alfons himself stood there as proof that monstrous progress could exist under the right conditions. His own talent was not SSS. His own growth had still been enough to place him above nearly everyone else of his age.

And Trafalgar’s talent was better.

Far better.

That was the poison in it.

If Alfons had possessed Trafalgar’s talent, his father would have looked at him differently. There was no doubt about that. Roderic compared everything. Not only Alfons, but his brothers as well. The first heir against Maeron du Morgain. The second against whoever stood nearest in standing and blood. Every child in House Vaelion lived beneath a scale they had never chosen.

Alfons hated that part of his father because he understood it too well.

No one else in the family saw Roderic as clearly as he did. To everyone else, his father remained elegant, controlled, admirable. Alfons alone had seen enough to understand the truth. Roderic lived behind a mask so complete that most people mistook it for character.

And Alfons could do nothing about it.

The brown haired boy started to speak again, probably to pile on another pointless guess, but Alfons cut across all three of them before the words could fully form.

”You shouldn’t underestimate the Morgain bastard.”

The reaction was immediate.

All three straightened without thinking, as if the sentence itself had slapped them into shape. A second ago they had been speaking casually, almost lazily, tearing Trafalgar down because that felt safe in front of Alfons. Now the atmosphere around them changed at once.

If Alfons said Trafalgar should not be underestimated, none of them wanted to be the fool arguing otherwise.

One of them recovered first and nodded quickly. ”That’s true. Alfons is right. The rumors about what he did in the war aren’t normal at all. What he pulled off was insane.”

The second boy followed just as fast. ”Yeah. I can only imagine what it looked like, but I honestly would’ve liked to see it live.”

The third, trying to adjust even harder than the rest, said, ”I kind of want to go talk to him.”

The other two turned toward him with open alarm, as if he had just confessed to some ugly defect.

The first hurried to patch the mistake. ”Talk to him, sure, but to make a few things clear.”

The second nodded far too quickly. ”Right. That. So his ego doesn’t go straight into the clouds.”

Alfons closed his eyes briefly, tired of all three of them at once.

Could they flatter properly? Could they insult properly? Could they think properly? It seemed the answer to all three was no.

”Can you shut up?” he said at last, his tone flat with annoyance. ”The directors are here. They’re about to announce the results.”

That was enough.

All three went quiet.

By then, movement had already drawn the attention of the hall upward. The empty balcony at the far end no longer stood empty. Four figures had emerged into view, one after another, their presence spreading across the room faster than any shouted command could have.

The four directors had arrived.

And at once, the hall began to tighten around them, the restless noise of hundreds of first years thinning as everyone understood the same thing.

The results were finally about to be given.