SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Trafalgar raised his own hand, and answered in kind.

The motes gathered over his palm, dark where Dravok’s had been pale, drawn out of the air in a slow spiral, and the weight of Maledicta dropped into his grip. His sword. The blade had climbed to Legendary rank the day he broke into Ascend, and he’d felt the difference in it every day since, the edge hungrier, the mana in it deeper, the whole weapon answering his intent faster than it ever had. It drank the cold light of the place and gave nothing back, a line of pure black laid against the black ground.

He rolled his wrist once to loosen it, and let his weight drop low.

”All right.” He set his eyes on Dravok. ”Here we go, then.”

He moved.

[Severance Step] took him first, the curved dash tearing him sideways off his mark, the world smearing at the edges as his speed climbed past what an eye could follow, a distorted afterimage peeling off the spot where he’d been standing. He came up on Dravok’s flank in the space of a breath, brought the black blade around, and out of the turn he loosed [Arc Slash], a compressed wave of dark-blue mana cutting flat and fast across the gap, angled to open the old man from hip to shoulder before he could set himself.

Dravok didn’t set himself. His plain sword came across in a short, economical arc with no wasted motion in any part of it, and met the [Arc Slash] at the one angle that turned it.

The wave broke against his edge and split, both halves shrieking off past his shoulders to carve two long gouges into the black ground behind him, the sound rolling out across the emptiness like a struck bell. His feet had not moved from where they stood.

Trafalgar came out of the exchange already reading it, and what he read troubled him.

’Strange,’ he thought, resetting his stance. ’He’s turning me aside without spending a fraction of what he has. And Sword Insight hasn’t so much as stirred.’

That was the part that gave him pause. [Sword Insight] was the deadliest gift he owned, a thing that woke the instant it saw a real technique and hauled the whole of it into his head whether he wanted it there or not, rewriting the form into his own mind in a rush of agony that felt like his skull being pried open from within, driving spikes of pain behind his eyes for the privilege.

It had nearly killed him the day he tore Moses’s strongest technique out of the air with a single look. Right now it lay perfectly quiet, because Dravok was giving it nothing to copy. He carried a hundred lifetimes of technique and was choosing, with plain deliberate care, to spend none of it, because Trafalgar had not yet earned the sight of even one. He only read him the way he’d read his body, let him come, turned it aside, and learned.

Fine. If the old man wanted to study him, Trafalgar would give him more to study.

He flipped Maledicta across into his left hand mid-step, the grip finding his off-hand as easily as it ever found his right, and cut in again from an angle no right-handed swordsman should have been able to take. [Crosswind Edge] rode the air current off his own movement, a fast crossing slash that came in low and from the wrong side, the sort of strike that punished a fighter for watching only what stood in front of him.

Dravok’s eyes tracked it without his head turning. He gave a fraction of ground for the first time, half a step, and let the crossing slash hiss past his ribs by a finger’s width, close enough that it parted the loose fabric of his rolled sleeve and nothing more. His blade was there again a beat later, waiting, having somehow arrived before Trafalgar’s follow-up did.

Trafalgar pressed him anyway. He chained [Severance Step] again into a second angle and a third, flickering from Dravok’s flank to his blind side to a hair past his guard, and each time Maledicta came for a gap he’d have sworn was open, and each time it wasn’t, the old man’s plain blade already sitting in the line of the cut as though he’d read the intent off Trafalgar’s spine before the muscles fired. He wasn’t faster. That was the galling part of it. He only ever arrived earlier, off nothing but understanding.

To anyone watching, the whole of it would have looked like a duel. Trafalgar knew better. He was fighting. Dravok was taking notes.

Some way off, at the edge of the furniture, Caelvyrn watched with his chin propped on one hand.

”He’s not half bad, actually.” He sounded almost put out about it. ”He’s beaten what I gave him credit for. I’d expected something nearer an insect.”

”I think you underestimate him.” Rhosyn’s eyes stayed on the fight. ”For who he is, and all that carries with it, he may have a long road left in front of him. That’s no reason to think so little of what’s already there.”

Caelvyrn turned a lazy grin on her. ”Defending him now, are we? What’s this. Are you his woman, or is he simply paying you well enough to talk him up?”

Rhosyn didn’t rise to it. ”Watch the fight.”

Back in it, Trafalgar drove another exchange and got nothing for it, and finally let some of the edge into his voice.

”You’re honestly still not trying?”

For a moment Dravok said nothing. When he answered, his voice had changed, gone flat and cold and very old, the voice of the man a whole age had called the God of War and meant every letter of it.

”You aren’t fit to warm me up, Trafalgar.”

The words hit exactly as they were built to. A vein stood up at Trafalgar’s temple, the whole thing striking him like a gauntlet thrown at his feet, and he felt his focus draw down to a hard, bright point in a way it hadn’t done all morning.

”Right.” He shifted his grip on Maledicta, and the last of the ease went out of him. ”I suppose it’s time I started taking this seriously.”