SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Boots came across the wet brick toward his head.

Trafalgar heard them through the helm and through the ringing. Four unhurried steps, a man walking to a piece of work rather than closing on an enemy. He could see out of one eye, and what he could see was the grey haft coming down point-first at the back of his neck.

He didn’t get up. Getting up took a full second and he had less than that.

He rolled onto his shoulder, drove Maledicta’s point into the floor, and poured everything left into the steel until the air above the blade vibrated and the dust started hopping. [Morgain’s Last Dusk]

The cut went up from the floor on a rising diagonal.

It split the space in front of it with a thin rising note, and the lance point that should have gone through his spine met the edge of it and stopped being a lance point. Six inches of head sheared off and spun into the dark. The rest of the cut kept going.

It opened Rhavel from the left hip across the ribs and out under the arm.

The sound he made was the first noise he had produced all night that wasn’t a word. He went backward into the brick pier behind him, and the pier cracked base to capital, and blood ran down the black stone and pooled around his boots.

Trafalgar got his knees under him, then his feet.

’Last Dusk. He isn’t closing that one. Not tonight.’

Rhavel put a hand flat against the wound, looked at what came away, and threw the broken lance aside. He called a second out of nothing before the first hit the floor.

”That,” he said, and there was gravel in his voice now, ”was a very good strike.”

Then they stopped being careful.

Trafalgar came at him with the blade held low. [Morgain’s Linebreaker] Maledicta sheathed itself in a casing of mana and he went forward in a straight line, six metres of driving force, and the wave running ahead of the charge chewed a trench half a metre deep out of the brick.

Rhavel didn’t sidestep it. He met it.

[Riptide] The new lance came in low and hooked the outside of Trafalgar’s leading wrist, and instead of resisting the charge the commander pulled with it, dragging his own momentum past the line he wanted and hauling him into open air. Linebreaker’s wave went wide and took out a support column.

The column came apart at knee height and the top two metres of it dropped straight down. Everything above it sagged.

He turned the stumble into a cut. Rhavel was already gone, three quarters of a pace out, resetting.

[Godstep] He took the angle behind him, arrived with Maledicta descending, and this time didn’t aim at the man. He drove the blade into the floor where the front foot was planted. [Earthsplitter]

The cleave went through the brick into the fill beneath it, and the shockwave tore outward in a ring.

Two metres of flooring lifted, broke into slabs and dropped into the void underneath. Rhavel’s forward foot went with it. He kept his balance, because he was very good, but he kept it by moving, and moving meant choosing a new place to stand.

A lance needs a planted rear foot. That is all a lance is: a long weapon held by somebody who is not going anywhere. Take the ground away and the triangle stops working.

Trafalgar hit the same floor twice more.

[Earthsplitter] to the left of him, then [Earthsplitter] again behind, and the chamber began to fail properly. The vault overhead opened along a seam and rained a hundred years of dust down on both of them.

A second pier folded. The north passage sagged at the mouth and came down in a rolling collapse that filled it to the ceiling and pushed a grey wall of dust across everything.

Rhavel came out of the dust with the lance already moving.

[Trough] He didn’t thrust. He brought the whole weapon down overhead in a two-handed hammer blow with his entire rotation behind it, and Trafalgar got Maledicta up crosswise and [Origin Guard] into both forearms in the same instant.

The impact drove him to one knee and cratered the brick underneath him.

His left forearm broke. He felt the bone go, a clean hot snap through the radius, and Origin Guard had taken enough out of the blow to make it a break and not a ruin.

He came up out of the crouch swinging one-handed. [Crosswind Edge] The slash caught Rhavel across the thigh and opened it to the bone, and the commander’s leg dropped out from under him for half a step.

[Morgain’s Requiem]

Six cuts, close range, one-handed and faster for it. The first two Rhavel turned on the haft. The third went through his shoulder and grated on the joint.

The fourth opened his forearm to the elbow and his grip failed. The fifth took the top of his ear and a strip of scalp with it. The sixth hit the lance dead centre, and the shaft split lengthwise and came apart in his hands.

He called a third one before the halves hit the floor.

”How many,” Rhavel said, spitting blood onto the brick, ”how many fucking skills do you have?”

”Enough.” Trafalgar shifted his grip. His left arm hung, and was already trying to knit. ”Shouldn’t you be dead by now? I’ve used most of them on you. You’re exhausting.”

Rhavel laughed, and it cost him because of all the damage he was carrying around.

They went at each other across a floor that had stopped being a floor. Lance against sword through falling brick and standing dust, Godstep and Breakwater and Undertow and Crosswind Edge traded at a speed nothing in that chamber could have followed.

Another pier went. Then the eastern arch. Then a run of vaulting forty feet long came down in one piece and shook the ground hard enough to put both of them on their backs.

Trafalgar got up first.

His arm had stopped hanging. The bone had pulled itself back into line while he was on the ground, the pain of it doing that was its own event, and he could close the hand now.

Rhavel got up second and slower, leaking from seven places, and the one under his arm hadn’t slowed since Last Dusk opened it.

Trafalgar planted his feet in the wreckage and let the mana pour into the blade.

It came heavy and low and dense. Maledicta stopped reflecting the lamplight and began to drink it. Frost crawling out of the broken floor bent toward the steel. The hum in the chamber dropped an octave, and Rhavel went still, because bodies decide that before minds do.

’Once. Down here I get this once.’

He knew exactly what he was doing.

[Sunder]

The descending cut released a flat wave of cutting force that swept the chamber wall to wall, low and wide, and nothing in front of him stayed where it was.

Rhavel got the third lance across his body.

The wave took the weapon at its centre and split it, split the arms holding it, and opened him from the point of the right shoulder down across the chest to the left hip in one continuous furrow that went through the leather, through what was under it, and showed bone in two places.

It threw him eleven metres. He went through the remains of the eastern pier, and the pier went with him.

The wave kept going and took the far wall out at waist height.

Then the whole structure screamed.

He felt it through his boots before he heard it. A deep grinding shift above and behind, brick settling onto brick, a groan that travelled out through the floor toward the dome wall, and dust came down from everywhere at once for four solid seconds.

Then it stopped, and held.

He stood in a chamber with no ceiling left and waited for the air to clear.

Rhavel Sorn came up onto one knee inside the ruin of the pier.

He should not have been able to. His right arm didn’t work. There was a channel across his chest deep enough to see into, and blood was leaving him faster than any man can afford. He put his remaining hand flat on the rubble and forced himself upright anyway.

”Why are you doing this?” Trafalgar asked.

Rhavel breathed, and it whistled.

”You’ve killed sixteen men tonight over a warehouse,” Trafalgar said. ”Why are you trying to hide the truth?”

”Why are you trying to find something that doesn’t exist?” The commander lifted his head. ”You’re a human. You’re not our race, you’re not our blood, and you’re not our family. Whatever happens in this city was never yours to touch.”