SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Dravok moved.

There was no wind-up, no gather to it, nothing an eye could catch as a warning. One instant he stood with his hands at his sides five paces off, and the next he wasn’t there at all, and a breath of displaced air brushed Trafalgar’s face as the old man reappeared a body-length to his left, already at rest, as though he’d been standing there the whole time and Trafalgar had only just noticed.

And [Sword Insight] woke.

It came the way it always did, uninvited, driving in behind his eyes, but this time it was a pinch rather than the skull-splitting agony of the last technique he’d torn out of the air. A short, hot needle of pain, there and gone, and behind it a piece of understanding dropping into place. It wasn’t the whole of the thing, and it wasn’t mastery, only the beginning of it, the first bones of how the movement was built, laid open for him the instant he saw it done.

’So that’s how it opens,’ he thought, turning the fragment over. ’That’s nothing like ordinary movement.’

”You felt that.” Dravok had been watching his face. It wasn’t a question. ”Good. Then I’ll only have to say it once.” He held up a hand and spoke like a man laying tools out on a bench. ”When you move, ordinarily, it runs one way. Your mind decides. The order travels down your nerves. Your muscles answer, and you move. Brain, nerve, muscle, motion. Fast, to most eyes. Far too slow for ours.”

He let that sit before he went on.

”This skips the front of it. You don’t wait on the mind and the nerves to carry the message. You push mana straight into the muscle and fire it, all at once, the whole body contracting and releasing in a single burst before thought has any part in it. Mana, contraction, explosion. That’s the whole of it.” His mouth moved a fraction. ”From dead still to full speed with nothing in between. To anyone watching, you vanish, and you’re standing somewhere else.”

Trafalgar understood it at once, at least in outline. It was elegant in a brutal sort of way, cutting the slowest link out of the chain entirely. ”And the range?”

”Five metres, to start. No further. Push past it before your body’s ready and you’ll tear something you’ll regret for a while.” Dravok’s pale eyes held his. ”It grows as you do. Everything here does.”

Trafalgar nodded slowly. ”Does it have a name?”

”Godstep.” Dravok said it without any weight, the way old things are named by people who stopped being impressed by them long ago. ”That’s the low form of it. The one you can survive learning today.”

”The low form.” Trafalgar caught what sat under that. ”So there’s a higher one.”

”God Walk.” A rare, dry flicker crossed the old man’s face. ”When your body can carry it, I’ll teach you that as well. Godstep only moves you fast enough that the eye can’t follow you. God Walk doesn’t bother with speed at all. It carries you through the space between one point and the next, and you are simply elsewhere. A short jump, nothing grand. But it stops being movement. It’s leaving one place and arriving at another without ever crossing what lies between.” He let his hand drop. ”That’s a long way off. Your body has a great deal to get used to before it could survive the attempt. One thing at a time.”

Trafalgar didn’t mind hearing it. He’d learned the hard way, more than once, that trying to swallow a thing whole before you were built for it only broke your teeth. Step by step suited him well enough. Get the lesser form into his body first, and earn the greater one after.

”Fine.” He rolled his shoulders loose and set his weight the way he’d felt Dravok set his. ”Let me try it.”

He reached for the fragment [Sword Insight] had handed him and did exactly as it said. He drew mana down into his legs, dense and ready, held it a beat, and fired.

He moved. Faster than he had any right to from a standstill, the black ground smearing under him for half a heartbeat.

And it went wrong.

The burst came, but it came ragged and uneven, the power reaching his muscles a fraction out of time with itself, one leg firing harder than the other. He covered perhaps three of the five metres and came down badly, his balance gone from under him, catching himself hard on one hand against the floor before he could sprawl outright. A hot ache flared up through his thighs and his lower back, the plain complaint of a body asked to do a thing it had never been shaped to do.

He crouched there a moment, breathing, taking stock of what had failed. It hadn’t been the understanding. The structure was there, clear enough. [Sword Insight] had given him that much, and he could hold the whole pattern of the movement in his head like a diagram drawn out in full.

The problem sat underneath it. There were pathways in his own body that the technique wanted to use and that simply weren’t there yet, nerves that had never once been asked to carry a load like this and didn’t know how, muscle that answered a beat late because the road for the signal had never been worn in. He had the map. His body hadn’t built the roads.

The work, he understood, wasn’t in learning it. It was in growing into it.

He pushed himself back to his feet, already resetting his stance for another go.

Dravok watched him rise, and there was something close to satisfaction in the flat old face, the look of a man who had seen exactly what he expected to see and found it acceptable.

”Now you understand the size of the problem,” he said. ”The knowing was always going to be the easy half. The rest is your body catching up to your head, and there’s only one way in the world to buy that.” He folded his arms across his scarred chest. ”So. Again. Keep at it until it’s yours, however long that takes. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

Trafalgar set his feet, drew the mana down into his legs, and fired again.

It was the first of more attempts than he could have counted, in a place that would give him all the time in the world to make them.