SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

”That’s enough of him.” Dravok walked out onto the black ground and waved Caelvyrn back toward the couch. ”My turn.”

Trafalgar lowered Maledicta. ”You?”

”He stands there and lets you hit him.” Dravok raised his hand, the pale motes gathering over his palm until his plain sword dropped into his grip. ”His scales do the work and he doesn’t move his feet. That’s a target, not an opponent.” He rolled his shoulders once. ”I’ll be moving. If you can put that pulse into me, it’s yours. If you can’t, you go back to hitting the dragon for another week.”

”Charming as always.”

”I’m not here to charm you.”

Trafalgar shifted his weight and looked the old man over, and the difference in the problem hit him straight away. Caelvyrn had given him openings for free. He’d let the strikes come, let him work the timing over and over, because he had scales and nothing Trafalgar owned could get through them anyway. Dravok wouldn’t hand him anything. Every opening he got here he was going to have to build himself.

’So I make one.’

He moved first. [Godstep] fired under him and put him at Dravok’s flank in an instant, Maledicta already coming around. The old man turned into it and caught the cut on his edge without any trouble at all, and the shock of the block ran up Trafalgar’s arms. Before he could pull back, Dravok’s boot took him in the thigh and dumped him sideways onto the ground.

”Too straight,” Dravok said. ”You showed me where you were going before you went.”

Trafalgar got up and tried again, and got the same result twice more. The second time the flat of Dravok’s blade caught him across the shoulder blades hard enough to put him on his knees. The third time he never got inside at all. He backed off, breathing hard, and worked it through.

’He reads the step. He’s been reading it since the first day, so I stop trying to hide it. Let him read it. Give him something bigger to look at.’

That was the piece he’d been missing. Ruin Pulse needed contact, and contact needed Dravok committed to something. If the old man was going to answer every attack correctly, then the answer to a big obvious attack would pull him out of position for a small one.

Trafalgar set his feet, and this time he came in loud. [Godstep] carried him in from the front, and out of it he opened straight into [Morgain’s Linebreaker], black mana wrapping the blade as he drove forward in a dead straight line with the cutting force gathering ahead of the point. It was the most obvious technique he owned. It was also the one that would go through Dravok if he ignored it, and both of them knew it.

Dravok answered it correctly. He turned his body off the line and brought his sword across to take the charge at the angle that would break it, weight shifting onto his front foot, committed.

Trafalgar killed the technique mid-motion. He let the mana die out of the blade before it reached anything, dropped his shoulder, and threw Maledicta across into his left hand, the grip finding his off-hand as easily as it ever found his right. Dravok’s guard was set for a strike coming from the other side. The cut came from where his sword wasn’t, and the mana was already compressed behind it, riding it in.

Maledicta caught Dravok’s forearm above the wrist, steel against skin, and Trafalgar let the contact pull the pulse forward.

’Now.’

There was no burst, no flare washing over his arm. Only the small deep thump he’d felt against Caelvyrn’s scales, going in where the blade touched and stopping there.

Dravok’s arm jumped. His hand opened a fraction, enough that his sword dropped a hand’s width before his fingers closed on it again, and his front foot skidded back through the black dust. The notification came a heartbeat later, bright across the corner of his vision.

[You have learned Ruin Pulse]

He had exactly as long as it took to read it. Dravok’s elbow came round and caught him under the jaw, and the world went white at the edges. Trafalgar’s legs were swept out from under him before he understood he’d been hit, and his back met the ground hard enough to empty his lungs. By the time he could see straight, the point of a plain old sword was resting a finger’s width above his throat. He lay there and breathed for a moment, and started laughing, which hurt more than the elbow had.

”You stopped.” Dravok didn’t move the blade. ”You put a good strike in and your whole body celebrated it. For half a second there was nobody home behind your eyes at all.” He lifted the sword away and let it come apart into light. ”That half second gets people killed. It’ll get you killed, if you’re lucky enough to be fighting someone who only wants you dead.”

”I noticed.” Trafalgar wiped the blood off his mouth with the back of his hand and pushed himself up onto his elbows. ”That was the plan, though. All of it. The Linebreaker, the switch.”

”It was.” Dravok looked down at his own forearm, where the skin over the bone had gone dark in a small round patch, and worked his fingers open and shut once. ”It was a good plan. You built the opening instead of waiting for one, and you got the pulse through a guard that had no business letting it through.” He dropped his arm. ”That’s the first thing you’ve done in here that I couldn’t have talked you out of beforehand.”

Coming from him, Trafalgar was fairly sure that counted as a compliment, so he took it and asked the only question left. ”So it’s mine now?”

”It’s yours.” Dravok put a hand down and hauled him up onto his feet with no visible effort. ”Which means we’re finished with it. You’ll keep drilling it until it stops needing your attention, and you’ll do that while we work on something else.”

Trafalgar rolled his jaw where the elbow had come in, testing it. ”Something else being?”

”The reason your plan worked at all,” Dravok said, already walking back out to the middle of the black ground. ”You’ve been fighting me with your eyes for weeks, and you’ve been getting away with it because I’ve been letting you. That stops today.”