SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

The creature came at him with its head lowered, driving that armored mass forward like a ram while the tentacles fanned wide around it, choking off any clean exit. Trafalgar tilted into the charge and slipped across it, Maledicta dragging a dark line through the water as he ran along its flank instead of meeting it head-on.

The blade bit. The edge scraped more than it sank when it crossed the plated section, but the softer flesh near the base of the tentacles parted easily, and black blood spilled out thick into the current.

The thing wheeled on him.

It had stopped fighting like an animal. The rage was still there, churning beneath every movement, but something close to caution had crept in alongside it, and that made everything worse. The tentacles no longer threw themselves at his sword. They circled, cut his angles, measured distance, and only struck when they expected his blade to be elsewhere.

One came from above. Two from the flank. A fourth slid in low, clearly meaning to wrap his legs again. Trafalgar drove through the closing space and released [Morgain’s Requiem], turning the water around him into a black storm of cuts. The sea churned with every beat of the sequence. Curved shadows tore outward in six rapid arcs, splitting the nearest limbs and sending strips of dark flesh spinning through the current. Blood bloomed in every direction, and the creature recoiled hard enough to drag the water with it.

Above, the surface convulsed.

A heavy dome of water rose and burst, soaking the four of them again. Xavier dragged a hand down his face, jaw tightening in a way it hadn’t been earlier.

”Can any of you see what’s happening down there?”

”No.” Cynthia kept her strokes going, breath coming harder now. ”I can only feel the mana bursts.”

Bartholomew swallowed and forced his arms to keep moving. ”That was one of his big ones, right?”

Zafira didn’t answer right away. Her attention stayed locked on the dark patch of sea ahead of them, where blood kept surfacing in broken swirls.

”Yes,” she said finally. ”And it’s still alive.”

That did nothing for any of them.

Below, Trafalgar pushed himself out of the cloud before it swallowed his vision again. The pendant around his neck made the movement possible at all. Without it, the water would have turned every retreat into labor. With it, he could fight rather than just survive.

The creature’s outline came back through the dark stain, drawn tighter now. Several tentacles were gone. Others hung split open and wrong. Its head had taken damage, though not the kind he wanted.

The mouth was untouched.

That was where this ended.

It rushed him again, but the line was different this time. It came in on a slow curve, forcing him to choose between the armored front and the tentacles sliding around to seal his back. Smarter than before. And worse for it.

Trafalgar let it think he had chosen the head.

He brought Maledicta up, made the angle obvious, and the creature committed at once. Its mouth yawned open beneath the head as it came, wide and grotesque, ready to swallow him whole if the collision didn’t crush him first.

He dropped under it.

The shift came late enough that even the creature’s adjusted rhythm couldn’t catch it. Trafalgar kicked downward and slipped beneath the head just as the jaws snapped shut where he’d been. One tentacle clipped his side as he passed, hard enough to jar him and twist his frame, but not hard enough to stop him.

Pain flared across his ribs. He pushed it aside.

Mana surged into Maledicta again, heavier this time, enough that the pressure in his chest turned painful under it. His core was already straining. Flow Core had spent half the fight beating against its own limits, and every skill now felt like another hammer blow against that wall.

Good.

He wanted the wall to crack.

He used [Morgain’s Final Crescent].

The inverted crescent tore upward from below and drove straight into the open mouth.

The result hit instantly. Flesh split. A violent shudder ripped through the whole creature. Its body lurched upward, and one of the surviving tentacles curled in a jerking spasm, as if the strike had reached somewhere far deeper than the wound itself.

The underside wasn’t just softer. It was where the whole thing held itself together.

Trafalgar gave it no room to recover.

A second [Morgain’s Final Crescent] followed, forced through the same opening before the creature could twist away. The current around him broke apart under the pressure of the strike, and the beast convulsed hard enough that black blood and torn membrane burst out around its mouth like ripped

sailcloth in a gale.

It tried to flee upward.

He stayed beneath it.

The tentacles flailed without control now, all panic and no shape, and that changed the fight in a way none of his earlier slashes had managed. One whipped him across the shoulder and spun him half sideways through the water. Another passed close enough to brush his cheek with slick flesh that turned his stomach. A third came within a hair of catching Maledicta itself.

He recovered before it could collect itself and drove up again.

The third [Morgain’s Final Crescent] carved through the lower half of the head, opening a deep line that refused to close. The fourth tore into the base of the mouth and split two tentacle roots where they met the body. The fifth he forced out with more mana than was wise, more than Flow Core wanted to give without rupturing, and that one turned the entire underside into ruin.

The creature came apart from below.

Not cleanly. It opened in dark strips and torn sections, the crescents cutting

through flesh and inner tissue and the softer structures hidden beneath the plated head until the whole shape gave way. Tentacles separated from the body and drifted off in writhing pieces. The mouth, which had looked large enough to swallow him moments ago, became a shredded cavity bleeding black into the

sea.

The water around Trafalgar vanished into that stain.

He was breathing hard now, even with the pendant’s help. His arm ached from

forcing that much mana through Maledicta over and over. His core had become a furnace inside his chest, swollen with pressure until every heartbeat felt

wrong.

The creature no longer resembled something that could fight.

It floated in pieces.

Some of those pieces still twitched. A severed tentacle curled weakly as it

drifted past him, and a torn section of the head rolled in the current like wreckage from a ship no one would ever mourn. The rest hung in the dark

water, butchered and sinking.

Trafalgar held position for a breath, sword still in hand, chest rising hard.

He had won.

That should have made what came next easy. It didn’t.

His body started collecting the debt.

The five crescents had pulled far more out of him than he wanted to admit. The

pendant could ease the sea, but it couldn’t refill what he had burned through,

nor could it steady Flow Core while it sat right at the edge of rupture. Strength began leaving his limbs in slow, ugly amounts that came in waves rather than all at once, just enough to feel each one as it went.

’Annoying!

He tried to kick upward and found the motion heavier than it should have been.

The surface was farther away than it had any right to be.

The black blood didn’t help. It had turned the water around him into something

murky and hostile, thick enough that even the light from above filtered through in broken strips. The others were gone from his vision now. Only pale motion somewhere beyond the red-black haze.

His grip around Maledicta loosened by a fraction.

Not here.

He forced the thought of the sword aside and focused on moving, one pull and

then another, though the sea pushed back harder with each one, or maybe his body was simply surrendering what it had still owned a breath ago. His ribs throbbed where the tentacle had clipped him, and his chest sat packed with heat and stone in a way that refused to ease. The strain at his core hadn’t faded

after the kill; if anything, it had dug deeper.

Something was close.

Not the creature, nor any part of what was left of it. A shape was coming down through the dark water, more force than form, and unmistakably human. Trafalgar tried to turn toward it, but his body had stopped caring much for

what he wanted.

A hand closed around his arm.

And pulled him up.