SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

”Let’s take a breath before we go down,” Trafalgar said. ”We need to think about how we do this.”

He kept his eyes on the far end of the cavern while he said it. ”That’s not Prime rank. And it isn’t an Ascend either. It’s something above that, and I’d rather not learn what it is the hard way.”

The two of them stood at the lip of the core chamber and looked down into it, and from up here they could take in the whole of the thing. The cavern fell away beneath them into a vault of blue-violet light, pillars of raw crystal taller than houses climbing up into the dark, the whole of it gnawed and cracked where the brood had eaten the mountain hollow from the inside. The reek of the nest rolled up to meet them, thick and animal, riding a cold that owed nothing to the season.

She held the far end of the cavern, over the clutches, where the crystal grew thickest. She was colossal, a mountain that had sprouted limbs. She’d drunk so much mana across so long that half of her had grown into living crystal, and she glowed from the inside like a lantern the size of a house, frost smoking off her hide in slow, curling sheets.

Her eyes were the worst of it. Bigger than her children’s, brighter, colder, and they had just lifted off the nest and found the two of them standing in the mouth of her home. When she shifted her weight, the whole hollow shifted with her, crystal and frost and clutch moving as one vast breathing thing.

Moses studied her a while before he spoke, and when he did, there was no mockery in it.

”That looks like rather more than you can handle, young master. No offense meant by it.” He said it plainly, a craftsman naming a flaw in the timber. ”It’s fed on this vein until it grew far past what it ought to be. You made the right call last time, turning back before you threw yourself at that thing on your own.”

Trafalgar said nothing, so Moses went on.

”Don’t misread me. I’m not saying you’re of no use here.”

”I know, Moses. You don’t have to say it.” Trafalgar lowered himself to sit at the lip of the drop, forearms on his knees, eyes never leaving her. ”That thing’s been down here longer than anyone up top cares to imagine. When we’re back at the castle, we’re going to need a serious conversation with Valttair about all of this.”

”On that,” Moses said, ”we agree.”

So they waited, and watched, and Trafalgar let the quiet do its work. He read her the way he read everything down here, hunting for the seams in her.

She had size on her side, and terrain, a thousand crystal handholds to fight from and a nest full of her own young to throw in the way, and under all of it something he couldn’t put a number to yet. That was the part he meant to fix before either of them touched her.

He hadn’t planned on it, but his body had ideas of its own. The mana in this place ran thicker than anything he’d stood in, and though the richest of it stayed locked in the crystal, the very air of the cavern hung heavy with the stuff.

His Primordial body reached for it without being told, drawing the loose mana into him in a slow, unnatural pull. The breath he’d burned on two hours of slaughter began to come back. His core drank it down and swelled by a hair, the worn edges of him filling in, the well refilling deeper than he’d left it.

He let it run and kept his face empty and his eyes on the queen. By the time the pull had spent itself he was past rested. He was keener than he’d been when the day started.

’Convenient,’ he thought, working the ache out of his sword hand and finding it already gone. ’A nest built on the one thing that puts me back together. She dug her own grave and lined it with my medicine.’

He rose off the lip of the drop. ”Right. I’m ready.” He rolled his shoulders and looked down over the nest. ”Let’s talk about the plan, because there’s still far too much moving down there. All the small ones.”

The clutches below crawled with the soft-shelled young, dozens of them, more than dozens, chewing through the shards their elders had left them and biding time to grow into the things he’d spent the morning taking apart.

”Let me deal with those, young master.” Moses hadn’t reached for his blade yet, but something in his weight had shifted. ”If you’ll allow it.”

Trafalgar tipped his head. ”All of them? You can clear the lot?”

”In one strike.” He said it the way another man might offer to fetch water. ”The only question worth asking is whether the mine holds when I do, and it will. This wouldn’t be my first mine, nor the first time I’ve opened up my full power inside one.”

That pulled a flicker of true interest across Trafalgar’s face. ”I’m curious to see that.”

”I’ll do my best not to disappoint.” A grim humor moved under the words. ”Though I’d hear your intent for the mother first. Once the small ones are gone, what is it you mean to do with her?”

”I want you to let me take her a while.” Trafalgar’s gaze went back to the vast crystalline thing at the end of the cavern, weighing it stone by stone. ”Alone, at first. I want to feel the gap between the two of us with my own hands, and know exactly what I’m standing across from. After that, we play it as it comes.”

Moses considered him, and what he found there pleased him.

”Risky.” A low sound that came close to a laugh. ”I like it. Something new, for once.” He squared his stance toward the drop. ”Shall we, then?”

Trafalgar pushed to his feet, Maledicta bare in his hand, and looked down into the heart of the nest and the mother waiting at the bottom of it.

”It’s time,” he said. ”Yes.”