SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Trafalgar’s mind turned over slowly, unmoored. He didn’t know what had happened or where he was, only that some strange sensation was running through the whole of his body, root to fingertip.

It was a good feeling, though. Restful. He felt comfortable in a way he hadn’t in some time, and it was that, more than any pain, that told him he was safe enough to open his eyes.

He cracked them a little at first, then wider. He was floating. The pool from before held him, shallower than he’d have guessed, deep enough only to lie back in and keep his face above the surface, the dark liquid warm against his skin and drawing the ache out of him a fraction at a time. Wherever the stuff touched him, it worked. He could feel it moving under his skin, patient and thorough, knitting at the torn places deep in his chest that Dravok’s cut had left behind, and the longer he lay in it the more the pain there dimmed, until it was less a wound than the memory of one.

Rhosyn sat at the edge beside him, her bare feet in the water.

”Morning,” she said. ”How are you feeling?”

For a moment he only looked at her, muddled, and his head began to work again, and the last of it came back in pieces. Dravok’s stance. That plain, impossible cut. He hadn’t dodged it, hadn’t turned off the line, he remembered that much and was even a little proud of it, but afterward the lights had gone out. Not from the blow. His mind had run too hot holding what he’d seen, and the pressure of it had folded him where he stood.

”Fine.” He worked his jaw, tested his voice, found it rough but his. ”My head’s a complete mess, I’ll give you that. But I’m feeling all right.”

”Truthfully, you surprised me more than I’d have guessed.” Caelvyrn drawled it from the couch, stretched out flat on his back, shirt gone somewhere. ”I had you pegged for something softer. A good deal softer, if I’m honest. I suppose I can admit I misjudged it.”

”High praise, coming from him,” Rhosyn murmured, without turning her head. ”He’s called things he admired dull and things he despised fascinating. You never quite know where you stand.”

”I heard that,” Caelvyrn said, eyes shut.

”You were meant to.”

Dravok said nothing through any of it. He sat with his elbows braced on his knees and his head bowed a little, turning some thought over behind his eyes, sunk so deep in it that he might not have heard the others at all.

Caelvyrn noticed, and grinned. ”Oi, old man. What’s got you thinking so hard over there?”

Dravok lifted his gaze at last and found Caelvyrn sprawled and shirtless across the couch.

”Nothing worth mentioning,” he said, and looked away again.

Which was, of course, precisely what a man said when he was turning over something worth a great deal indeed. The trouble was that no one alive could have told you what. The old God of War had a long memory and a longer war behind him, and a head like that could be holding anything at all.

He let it go, whatever it was, and turned to Trafalgar where he lay recovering in the water.

”When you’re steady on your feet, we’ll begin. The first lesson.” A pause. ”Your skills are bad.”

Trafalgar blinked at him. ”Bad. That’s honestly the word you’re going with.”

”Let me finish.” Dravok’s voice hardened, and the easy air went out of the room. ”Don’t interrupt me. Your family’s techniques, the Morgain skills, those are good. Those you keep.” He said it plainly, a builder sorting what was worth saving from what wasn’t. ”The rest are too obvious, and they aren’t at the level you’ll need. Those we scrap. You’ll forget them, and I’ll hand you better. And you’ll want a proper movement skill besides.” His pale eyes stayed level on Trafalgar. ”That [Severance Step] of yours, I don’t care for it. I’ll teach you ours. The one our bloodline used.”

Trafalgar didn’t argue.

He’d spent two years grinding those skills to the edge of what they could be. There was a version of him that would have bristled at hearing half of it waved off in a breath. But he’d felt fifty percent of what this man could do go through his own bones an hour ago, and there wasn’t much left in him that wanted to debate the point. If Dravok said the ground he’d built on sat beneath what he needed, it did.

And there was something almost freeing in it, if he was honest with himself. He’d carried those techniques as the ceiling of what he could do. To be told they were the floor, that everything he had bled for was only the starting line of what this man meant to make of him, wasn’t an insult at all. It was a door.

He pushed himself upright in the pool, water sheeting off his shoulders, the last of the fog thinning out of his head, and climbed out onto the black ground.

”All right.” He rolled the stiffness out of one shoulder. ”We start now, then?”

Dravok rose from where he sat, unhurried, and the size of him filled more of the space than it had a moment before. He stepped out to open ground and set himself.

”Do you want me to bring Maledicta out again?” Trafalgar asked.

”No. Don’t summon your sword, and I won’t summon mine.” Dravok let his weight drop, hands empty at his sides. ”For now, I only want you to watch.”

Trafalgar squared himself and fixed his eyes on the old man, and steadied his breathing without being told to, because he already knew what was coming. If Dravok was about to show him a real technique, [Sword Insight] would wake in his skull any second now, whether he wanted it there or not.

And it would hurt. It always hurt, worse the further the technique sat above his own level, and he had no illusions left about how far above him this one would sit. He set his jaw, and waited for it to begin.