SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

The last seven made the wrong decision.

Two broke for the north arch and the rest came at him together, which meant somebody had decided that dying forward read better in a report than dying running.

It took nine seconds. Maledicta opened a throat, split a shoulder down down to the sternum, and went through a stomach and out the spine. The two at the arch reached the threshold before he crossed the room and finished them there.

He shook the blood off the blade.

Under the plates his body was already working. The cut beneath his arm had stopped opening and started pulling closed, the muscle knitting from the inside out with a hot crawling ache, and the joints where the sub-comander had got through him were sealing at a rate no ordinary man would recognise.

He was still bleeding, but he was bleeding less than he had a minute ago.

Rhavel lifted the butt of his lance out of the floor.

”You left two of mine breathing earlier,” he said. ”Then you killed them with the rest. Which one was the lie?”

”Neither. They chose.”

”Good answer.” He rolled his wrists once, and the long grey haft turned over in his hands. ”Dain was faster than you. You worked that out in about four exchanges and then stopped caring, which is correct and which almost nobody manages.”

Trafalgar set his feet.

’He’s Ascend too and he’s been watching me for quite a while now... Whatever I’m about to see, he built it in the last few minutes.’

The first thirty seconds were comfortable, and that was the trap.

Xavier fought with a spear, and years of eating Xavier’s spear had given Trafalgar reads that did not go away. He knew the weight of a two-handed thrust. He knew that a lanceman’s hips tell you the line before his hands do. He turned the opening exchange aside, stepped in on a withdrawal, and got close enough to swing.

Then the haft was already there and the distance was gone.

Rhavel did not retreat. He moved on an angle, three quarters of a pace, and the reach came back with him, and Trafalgar’s cut found nothing but the air where a shoulder had been.

That was the shape of the next four minutes.

Thrust, withdraw, reposition. Rhavel never let the gap collapse and never chased anything he hadn’t already decided to chase. A swordsman has to arrive. A lance exists so that nobody arrives.

Trafalgar tried to solve it the way he solved everything. [Godstep]

The air cracked and he came out of it five metres left and behind, blade already falling toward the join of neck and shoulder, and the blade didn’t land.

[Breakwater] The haft was turning before he arrived, a moving envelope of grey wood and steel that covered every line into the man’s body at once. Maledicta hit it at an angle and skated off, and Trafalgar threw himself backward to keep his own forearm.

He tried it again from the right and got the same wall.

’He isn’t reading where I’ll appear. He’s making everywhere dangerous. He doesn’t have to see it coming if there’s already an edge moving through every point I could stand in.’

The third attempt cost him.

He came out of the fold under the man’s guard, low, and Rhavel dropped the haft and swept. [Undertow] The shaft took his ankles out from under him at speed and kept going, and Trafalgar felt the floor arrive against his back and the whole chamber tilt.

The lance came down at his sternum while he was still moving.

[Origin Guard]

He got the mana there before he got his arms up, all of it, packed into six centimetres over his breastbone, skin and muscle and the bone under it going rigid in the half-instant before contact.

The point hit. Something in him would have caved and didn’t. The impact drove him into the brick and split the floor under his shoulders, and he rolled off the line with his ribs screaming and nothing broken in them.

’That should have gone through me.’

He came off the wall with everything he had.

[Godstep] into the man’s left, [Crosswind Edge] chained out of the landing, and Maledicta finally touched him, a long shallow cut across the forearm that opened the sleeve and the meat under it and put blood on the haft.

It was the first mark anyone had put on Rhavel all night, and Trafalgar had one more thing ready for it.

[Ruin Pulse]

The second mass of mana arrived at the point of contact a fraction late.

It should have gone inward, through the cut, into the arm behind it. Instead it detonated across the surface with a flat snap that threw sparks off the lance and did almost nothing, and the backlash came up Trafalgar’s arm and locked his elbow for a full second.

One second was a great deal to give a man like this.

[The Ninth Wave]

The thrust came at his chest and he turned it, and it did not stop. It struck again in the same line before the first withdrawal finished, and again, and again, each impact arriving on the previous one, nine of them stacked into a single point on his guard in less than two seconds.

The first four he blocked. The fifth turned his wrist. The sixth went past Maledicta and put the point through the outer plate at his hip, and the seventh, eighth and ninth drove it deeper by turns.

Trafalgar got clear and left a strip of the armour behind him doing it.

He was bleeding from the hip and breathing wrong. Rhavel had one cut on his forearm.

”You’ve got a good body,” the commander said. He was not out of breath. ”Whoever built it knew what they were doing. That’s the second reason I waited.”

He came forward, and Trafalgar read the thrust, but the thrust was a lie.

The lance stopped halfway and Rhavel simply stepped through it and brought the haft around instead, a full body rotation, the grey wood coming at Trafalgar’s head from outside his vision.

It caught him across the temple.

The helm held. The rest of his skull did what skulls do inside a helm that holds, and the chamber went white, and Trafalgar’s knees folded under him without asking permission first.

He was face down on the wet brick with blood filling one eye before he understood he had gone down.