SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

The hesitation was all Trafalgar needed.

A hurt thing that stops to think has already lost, and this one had stopped with one arm hanging ruined at its side and its skull dropping low as it gathered itself for one last charge. Trafalgar let it charge. He wanted the mass moving. He wanted all that frozen weight committed to a single line it could not pull out of.

It lowered its plated skull and drove forward to crush him under the whole of its bulk, and that was precisely where he had been steering it.

He set his feet, brought Maledicta up over his head in both hands, and dropped the mountain onto it [Earthsplitter]. The two-stage cleave came down through the charging brute’s skull and kept going into the ground beneath its feet, and the shockwave that burst out of the impact fractured the frozen earth in a spreading web and drove the creature’s own momentum straight down into the fault. Its charge died. Its footing died with it. The armored bulk pitched forward off its ruined balance, skull split, and for one breath the whole enormous thing hung there stunned and wide open.

Moses took the invitation without being asked.

The captain crossed the field in two ground-eating strides, greatsword already rising, and finished what the cleave had begun. He turned his entire body through the strike [Demonic Warblade Art: Fourth Fang, Reaver’s Wheel], and the blade came around in a wheel of purple pressure that took the brute’s head and half a shoulder from its neck in a single pass, demonic force crushing what the edge did not part.

The hulking mass hit the snow in pieces and did not stir again, and the cold haze that had rolled off it thinned and went out like a snuffed lamp. The ground where it fell had cracked clear across, a jagged fault steaming faintly where the creature’s cold met the raw earth the cleave had opened.

What was left of the pack came apart quickly after the big one fell.

With their heaviest down and their numbers scattered across the ice in shards and dark blood, the surviving grey ones lost whatever cold cohesion had held them together, and the two men cut through the remnant like reapers through late wheat.

Trafalgar ran down a fleeing runner and split it before it reached the broken tree line [Arc Slash]. Moses flattened the last knot of tall ones with a downward blow that needed no name behind it. Inside a handful of breaths, nothing at the mouth of the mine moved that the two of them had not left moving.

The last of them, a lone tall grey one that had hung back from the killing, made a break for the dark of the shaft rather than face them. Trafalgar caught it before it reached the threshold. One flick of the wrist sent a compressed wave chasing it down [Arc Slash], and the creature came apart across the mouth of the tunnel it had been trying to reach, its pieces skidding into a dark it would never carry a warning down. Whatever waited below would have to learn of them the hard way.

Trafalgar stood in the cleared wreck of the outer works and let his gaze travel over it. The snow lay churned black and grey, littered with the melting shards of the things they had killed, and past it the mouth of the mine gaped open, a throat of pure dark bored down into the mountain. Not all of the survivors had run for open ground. A number of them had fled the other way, back inward, down into that dark, toward whatever it was they guarded. Exactly as Gerhardt had promised.

’Every last one of them ran home to the deep,’ Trafalgar thought. ’Whatever waits down there, they would sooner die guarding it than live anywhere at all.’

He turned the thought over and did not care for any answer it offered. Beasts did not do this. A brood floods a valley and scatters.

It does not garrison a shaft and hold the line for a month with its own dead piling at the door. Something had put this here, and arranged it, and gone to a great deal of trouble to dress it up as a natural disaster. He had his suspicions about whose hand it was. He kept them where they were. There would be time to name them once he had seen the deep with his own eyes, and not a breath before.

Moses came up beside him, breathing no harder than when they had started, and followed his gaze into the dark. ”They ran toward the thing instead of away from it,” he said. ”In thirty years of this I have watched beasts do a great many stupid things. I have not often watched them choose where they would die.”

”No,” Trafalgar said. ”Neither have I.”

”You still mean to go down alone.”

”I do.”

Moses weighed that, and did not argue it. ”The report will say you were offered help and turned it down.”

”The report will say whatever you saw.” Trafalgar almost smiled. ”I would not ask you to write it any other way.”

He let out a slow breath, and Maledicta vanished from his hand back into the nothing it had come from, the black plate of Obsidian Wings dissolving off his frame an instant behind it. Beside him Moses opened his fist, and the great demonic sword unmade itself in the air the same way it had arrived, gone as though it had never hung there at all.

The wind kept screaming across the emptied mouth of the mine. The two of them stood at the lip of the dark, the work above ground finished and the work below it only waiting.

Trafalgar turned from the black throat of the shaft to the captain at his side.

”Stay here.”

That was the whole of what he gave, and Moses understood every layer of it. The mouth was the captain’s to hold. The dark below, and whatever it was keeping, was Trafalgar’s to walk alone.