SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

”If any of you move, Matteo dies.”

The words froze the room better than any ward.

Matteo hung against his own wall, one hand pinned to the ward plate by dark Marrowglass filaments, his body half-twisted as reversed mana dragged through him in cruel pulses. His cane had fallen near his feet, close enough to mock him. Blood had soaked the front of his coat where one strand had carved across him, and the veins along his trapped arm stood raised beneath the skin, as if the house he had built had finally turned on its maker.

Trafalgar did not move, though his mana kept pressing outward. The obsidian armor hummed over his body, Maledicta rested low in his hand, and the cracked floor beneath his boots trembled under the force he was holding back. Every instinct in him wanted the direct answer. Cross the room, break Esmond, end this. The ugly part was that Matteo would die before the first step finished, and a dead Matteo di Ravelle inside his own home during Aurevane’s grand event would turn the city into a screaming nest.

Esmond knew exactly what that corpse would buy him. That was why his smile had returned.

Selara kept the pistol raised, though her aim had shifted from Esmond to the threads around Matteo. She did not fire. The Marrowglass had crawled into the ward plate, and Matteo had already warned her what would happen if she ruptured it. So she watched instead, forcing herself past the anger, past the sight of her old colleague choking against his own wall, past the homunculus standing between Trafalgar and Esmond with dark fluid dragging down her side.

Her attention followed the mana.

The Marrowglass was more than a grip around Matteo. It answered when Esmond lifted his wounded arm because he had given it a road to travel. His mana signature rode through the broken room, across the cracks, into the ward feed. The entire chamber had become a circuit, and Matteo was trapped inside the part designed to kill him.

Selara’s attention snapped to the homunculus.

The same principle lived there.

The pale lines under the homunculus’s skin were not channels alone. They carried instruction. Every shift in Esmond’s mana reached her before her body chose anything for itself. The obedience had not been taught to her mind. It had been threaded through her frame, buried deep enough that flesh mistook command for survival. Selara’s stomach turned, but her voice came out steady.

”Trafalgar,” she said, without taking the pistol off the homunculus, ”the orders are built into her body. The control runs through the back of the neck, just below the skull. Cut there, and you can break the hold without destroying her core.”

Esmond’s expression changed. Trafalgar heard the shift in Selara’s tone and understood this was not a guess. She had found the chain. ”How close?”

”Very close,” Selara said. ”Go deep and you kill her. Miss the line and she will keep moving without stopping.”

”Wonderful,” Trafalgar muttered. ”Tiny target, ruined room, hostage on the wall, and a lunatic yanking the leash.”

Selara’s mouth tightened. ”Yes. So do not make me regret trusting your hands. Please, help her.”

Esmond lifted his hand another fraction, and the Marrowglass cinched around Matteo’s throat. Matteo choked, his face twisting as the dark filaments climbed along his collar. Caelum moved before the sound finished, not toward Esmond, but toward the wall. A dagger flashed from his sleeve and pinned one strand to the panel before it could curl fully around Matteo’s neck. Another Caelum clone appeared beside the fallen cane, seized it, and hurled it toward Selara. Selara caught the cane without letting the homunculus leave her aim.

Matteo dragged air through his teeth. ”Turn the head counterclockwise. Half turn only.”

Selara stepped to the ward plate’s edge, shoved the cane head into the lower groove, and twisted exactly as he told her. The plate shuddered. Several runes dimmed, and the Marrowglass around Matteo’s chest loosened for one blessed breath before Esmond forced more mana into the circuit.

”Do not test me,” Esmond said, his soft voice fraying at the edges. ”I can crush his throat before you finish congratulating yourselves.”

Caelum cut another strand near Matteo’s shoulder. ”I am not testing you. I am reducing your options.”

Esmond’s expression hardened, and the homunculus lunged.

She went for Caelum, not Trafalgar, because Caelum stood closest to ruining the hostage play. Trafalgar caught the change and moved with her. He released [Arc Slash] in a compact burst, sending dark-blue mana across her path. She raised a partial barrier, but the strike forced her to angle aside, giving Trafalgar room to sweep Maledicta down into [Earthsplitter].

The two-phase cleave split the floor beneath her feet. The shockwave did not throw her, but it broke the alignment of her next step. Trafalgar drove forward with [Morgain’s Linebreaker] before she recovered, his sword wrapped in pure mana as he tore through the narrow distance and slammed the cutting wave into her guard.

The homunculus skidded back toward the broken pillar.

Her wounded side opened further, dark fluid spattering across the fractured stone. That empty reaction fed Trafalgar’s anger more than a scream would have, because every blank response reminded him that Esmond had created a body capable of pain and denied it any language to protest. Esmond’s hand twitched.

The homunculus’s mana surged toward Matteo again.

Selara caught it first.

She fired twice. The first bullet struck a channel along the homunculus’s collarbone, disrupting the mana before it gathered. The second punched into the wall near Matteo, severing a Marrowglass strand as it began coiling around his jaw. The recoil snapped through her wrist, but she kept the pistol steady.

”Trafalgar, now,” she said. ”Before he rebuilds the command.”

Trafalgar triggered [Severance Step].

Dark mana curved around him, bending his movement through the ruined room in a tight arc that slipped past the homunculus’s front guard. Esmond tried to drag her back, but Selara fired again, aiming for the channel nearest the neck. The homunculus turned late. A barrier bloomed over the back of her throat, thin and rushed.

Maledicta reached it.

Trafalgar did not use a killing stroke. He compressed the force, drawing the edge into a narrow crescent of dark mana that kissed the barrier and bit through it with a vicious whine. The sword cut across the base of the homunculus’s neck, shallow by the width of a breath, deep enough to tear through the pale command line buried under the skin.

The reaction hit instantly.

Mana flared beneath the homunculus’s skin in broken patterns. Her body jerked once, as if every order inside her had shouted at the same time and found no road out. The barriers around her collapsed into fragments. The dark fluid along her side slowed, losing the aggressive pulse that had been driving her through wounds that should have dropped any living creature.

She staggered.

For the first time since Esmond had brought her into the house, the homunculus did not obey the next command.

Esmond’s face drained.

Selara lowered the pistol a fraction, not because the danger had passed, but because it had changed shape. The homunculus stood near the broken pillar, wounded and quiet, her head angled as if listening for a voice that no longer arrived. Her hands hung at her sides. The room waited for her to choose, and the cruelty of it was that nobody had ever taught her how.

Caelum used the opening.

He reached Matteo with two clones cutting ahead of him. One held the Marrowglass away from Matteo’s throat. Another pressed the cane into the ward groove while the real Caelum drew a small vial from his coat, crushed it against the nearest filament, and smeared the liquid over the dark glass threads. The reaction hissed. The strands stiffened, lost their hunger, and cracked under his dagger.

Matteo dropped from the wall with a ruined gasp.

Caelum caught him before he struck the floor. He cut the remaining thread from Matteo’s wrist, tore a strip from the old scholar’s sleeve, and bound it tight above the worst of the bleeding. A second vial went between Matteo’s lips with no ceremony, and when Matteo tried to protest, Caelum pressed two fingers against his jaw and made him swallow.

”Save the complaints,” Caelum said. ”You need blood for those.”

Matteo coughed, which at least proved he was alive.

Esmond moved. The instant his hold over the homunculus failed and Matteo slipped free of the wall, he tried to retreat toward the broken door. He made it two steps.

Trafalgar was already there. Primordial strength and speed carried him across the room like a blade freed from its sheath. His armored shoulder crashed into Esmond, driving the old man down hard enough to crack the stone beneath them. Esmond’s weapon skittered away. Trafalgar planted one knee into his back, pinned his arm under the weight of the obsidian armor, and lowered Maledicta until its edge pressed against the side of his throat. The room finally stopped moving.

Caelum knelt beside Matteo, keeping pressure on the wound as the potion fought to steady his breathing. Selara stood between the homunculus and Esmond, pistol in hand, her face pale with anger that had nowhere decent to go. The homunculus lingered by the shattered pillar, bloodied and motionless, stripped of orders like a door opened into a room nobody had prepared for.

Trafalgar leaned closer, and Maledicta drew a thin red line against Esmond’s skin.

”Now,” Trafalgar said, ”you are going to answer my questions.”