SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

He found out what that meant inside the first exchange. Every fight before this one had come in waves. Dravok would press, Trafalgar would answer, and there would be a beat afterward where both of them reset, and in that beat he could think. He’d never noticed how much he relied on the beat until the old man took it away from him. Dravok crossed the ground and kept coming, and the attack that opened the exchange ran into the next without a seam anywhere in it, and there was no point in any of it where Trafalgar was allowed to stop and choose.

He lasted about six seconds. His guard came up a fraction late because his head was still working out what was coming, and Dravok’s plain sword went over the top of it and hammered him off his feet.

”You paused,” Dravok said, walking after him. ”Don’t think. Answer.”

The first days were the worst of everything the old man had put him through. Trafalgar had believed he was fast. He was fast, faster than nearly anyone he’d ever fought, and it counted for nothing when the problem wasn’t his body but the fraction of time his mind spent choosing. Every hesitation got punished. Every decision that took a heartbeat too long left an opening in front of a man who existed to find openings, and by the end of each session he was crawling to the pool with something broken in him.

The days piled up after that, the way they did in that place, and the pressure began to do its work. His body stopped waiting for permission. It started as small things, a guard raised before he’d decided to raise it, a step fired off an instinct he couldn’t have explained, and it spread from there until the pieces stopped being separate at all.

A strike came in high and hard, and [Origin Guard] formed over his forearm to meet it without a single thought behind the act, the dense layer of mana taking the impact and turning what should have broken bone into an ugly jolt up to his shoulder. Dravok rolled off the block and changed the angle, coming at him from the outside where the guard couldn’t follow, and [Godstep] fired under him before the new line had finished opening, mana punching through both legs and dropping him five metres away at the angle the old man’s sword wasn’t covering.

The change of position pulled Dravok’s weight out of true for a fraction, and Trafalgar went into the gap with [Morgain’s Requiem], the black arcs tearing off the edge one into the next, high, low, reversed, hunting the place where the guard had to come from. The fourth cut caught the old man’s forearm, and the mana that had been riding compressed behind Maledicta the whole exchange went in on contact, [Ruin Pulse] passing through with that small deep thump that never made any sound worth hearing.

Guard, step, cut, pulse. Four answers to four problems, and not one of them had gone through his head on the way out. That was the day it stopped being five tools.

Dravok made him do it again ten thousand times after that, and made it harder every time. He came in faster. He attacked from angles that gave Trafalgar nothing to guard. He began lying with his body, opening a strike he had no intention of finishing to see whether Trafalgar would spend a guard on it, and for a long stretch of days Trafalgar spent guards on all of them and paid for it. He learned to read the lie the way he’d learned everything else in that place, by being wrong until he wasn’t.

Time went strange somewhere in the middle of it. He’d stopped tracking the days early on, because a hundred of them inside cost the world outside a single sunrise, and there was no point counting to numbers that meant nothing to anyone but him. The days piled into weeks, the weeks turned over into months, and the months kept going. Somewhere along the way he understood that he had been fighting Dravok for longer than he had spent at the Academy. Longer than he’d been Lord of Euclid. Somewhere back beyond the point he could remember, the arithmetic had crossed over into years.

His body was untouched by it. That was the design of the place, and it held. He’d walk out of here barely older than the morning he stepped in, with the same face and the same hands and a core that had crept along at the pace Dravok had promised and no faster.

His head was another thing entirely. He didn’t feel old. He felt exactly as he always had, which was the part that took him a while to see through. What he’d gained wasn’t age. It was time in front of one particular man, thousands upon thousands of exchanges against the fighter an entire era had called the God of War, and there was no shortcut anywhere in the world that bought what that bought. Every trick he’d ever have used on someone had been tried on Dravok and taken apart. Every mistake he had in him had been drawn out, punished, and drilled away.

He thought about the version of himself who had walked into this dimension and thrown eight techniques at the old man in a row. That one had been proud of his arsenal. He’d swung a Legendary blade and every skill he owned at a man who read all of it and never once needed to move his feet, and he hadn’t so much as seen the kick that ended it. That version of him wouldn’t survive a minute now.

The strange part, the part he turned over on the quiet nights in Caelvyrn’s castle, was that he wasn’t much stronger than that boy had been. His core sat where it had sat. His mana output had climbed, though not by any figure that would frighten anyone. The gulf between the two of them wasn’t power at all. It was that the boy had owned pieces, and he had become a whole.

On a day like all the others, Dravok drove him back across the black ground, and Trafalgar answered the pressure without a single conscious decision in any of it, guard flowing to step, step flowing to blade, blade flowing to pulse, until he read a lie in the old man’s shoulder that he would have bought a year ago, left the guard where it was, and put Maledicta through the opening the lie had cost him. Dravok took the strike on his blade, and it drove him back two full steps.

He looked down at his own boots and the pair of short furrows they’d cut through the black dust, and when he raised his head there was something on his scarred old face that Trafalgar had not seen in the entire time he had known him.

”Good.” Dravok rolled the sword over in his hand. ”Now put it away and get some rest, because tomorrow I’ll be using both hands.”