SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Moses stepped back without a word, folded his arms, and gave him the floor. That was the deal.

He didn’t wait for her to finish turning. He went.

Frost sprayed off his heels as he crossed the basin in a heartbeat, straight for the weeping gash Sunder had torn down her flank, and he poured everything he had into the opening cut [Morgain’s Final Crescent]. Maledicta swept up and over into an inverted crescent of black light, all his mana riding the edge, and the strike hammered into the raw crystal of her side and sank.

She lurched. Light bled from the wound where his blade bit and refused to let it close, her own mana choked off inside her by the Core Tear, and for one bright instant he let himself think he’d started something.

Then she moved, and he remembered exactly what he was fighting.

The whole hollow moved with her. A limb the size of a fallen tree came around out of the dark faster than a thing that size had any right to be, and the wind off it alone nearly took him from his feet. He was already gone [Severance Step], smearing sideways between two crystal pillars as her claw came down where he’d stood and turned the stone to glittering gravel.

’Right,’ he thought, landing light on a shelf of ice. ’Not the children.’

He’d cut down hundreds of her brood without breaking a sweat, and some animal corner of him had let that colour how he looked at her. He fixed it fast.

Every one of those had died a rung below him. She stood a rung above, and the difference was written into every ton of her. So he went back in with that firmly in mind.

He worked her the only way a smaller, faster thing works a bigger one, in close and low and always moving, never where the weight came down. He drove a diagonal into the lip of the Sunder wound [Severing Fang] and the pressure tore it wider, blood-light spilling down her crystalline hide, and he was sliding off her flank before the limb could answer. He carved a line up the joint of a foreleg. He rode the current of his own dash across her front [Crosswind Edge] and split a seam under her jaw.

None of it went deep enough.

That was the thing that gnawed at him as he fought. His edge was surgical, his openings precise, his timing a hair off perfect, and every cut he landed skated shallow anyway, across a body that was half living crystal and all mass. On the brood a stroke like that was a killing blow. On her it was a scratch that only stoked her. He was drawing a hundred small wounds and not one of them was the one that counted.

The cavern strobed as they fought. The crystal light flared blue-white with every blow that split her hide and guttered dark between, so the whole battle reached him in flickers: her vast crystalline face lit from within one instant, darkness the next, a flash of Maledicta’s edge between

She shrieked whenever he bit deep, that glass-tearing sound raking down every tunnel at once, and the cold pouring off her frosted his own breath to ice on his lips.

She fought like weather. There was no reading a single strike of her, only the whole storm, and it came from every angle her size could reach, claws and bulk and that lashing crystalline tail, each blow heavy enough to fold him in half if it caught him square.

He lived in the gaps between. He spent [Severance Step] like water, blinking through her reach, punishing every opening with a burst of cuts and gone before she could close it.

He took to the pillars when the floor grew too dangerous, kicking off a crystal column to come at her from above, raining a barrage of compressed slashes down onto her crown [Arc Slash] before the great head could rise to meet him.

Each one burst against the crystal in a spit of blue sparks. He landed on the slope of her shoulder, ran three steps up the ridge of her spine cutting as he went, and flung himself off into empty air as she bucked to throw him loose, the whole cavern tilting under him while her bulk heaved.

The frost lay ankle-deep and churning now, kicked up by every stride of the running duel, and the floor of the nest had split into a spiderweb of fault lines under her weight. He was fighting on breaking ground, in a strobing dark, against a mountain that wanted him dead, and he was starting to understand it might take all day.

Once she nearly had him. He misjudged a dash by a breath and the edge of her tail caught his shoulder in passing, and even that glancing clip flung him three staggering steps and rang through his arm like a hammer struck on an anvil. It told him plainly what a full hit would do. One solid blow from that bulk and there’d not be enough of him left to carry home.

When she reared and brought her whole weight down to crush him under it, he didn’t run. He met the drop, driving a rising strike into the softer crystal of her underbelly [Morgain’s Last Dusk], the finisher splitting deep where the plating thinned, and he hurled himself clear as the impact cratered the basin floor and blew a wave of frost and shards clear across the cavern.

He came up on the far side of it breathing hard, and took stock.

She was hurt. Genuinely hurt now, leaking light from a dozen seams, the great wound down her flank gaping wider than before. But she wasn’t slowing, and he was the one whose chest heaved, whose sword arm had begun to feel the weight of the blade again. The rich mana of the place flooded into him as fast as he burned it, his body drinking the cavern dry to keep him upright, and even with that on his side she was a wall he could not bring down fast enough.

’She’s built to outlast an army,’ he thought, dragging frost from his eyes. ’Because she has. I need to cut something that doesn’t grow back, and she’s made of the stuff that does.’

He set his feet for another pass, and that was when he felt it change.

Until now she’d fought blind, all fury, the pain of Sunder and her scoured young driving her into a thrashing rage he could read and slip and punish. That rage was still in her. But something under it had begun to cool.

Her next swing didn’t flail. She quit hurling her whole weight at where he was and started sealing the gaps he liked to vanish into, that huge head turning to track him now, the cold pale eyes narrowing on his movements as though she were only now troubling to learn them. The storm was pulling itself together into something with a mind behind it.

Trafalgar slid to a halt on the frost and looked up at the thing as it drew its bulk in and fixed him with a stare that had not been there a minute ago.

’...Oh,’ he thought. ’You were only warming up.’