SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Kesh saw the original in Trafalgar’s hand and stopped working the plate.

The third bulkhead was halfway down. He left it there.

”Put that back.”

”No.”

Kesh came across the chamber without answering, and the mana came out of him in a way it hadn’t all night. [Black Depth]. The pressure went past heavy into something the body refused, and the emergency lamps dimmed to almost nothing as the air thickened and pushed down.

Zafira dropped to one knee under it. Rhosyn stayed upright and did not look comfortable doing it.

’That’s everything he has. He’s not pacing himself anymore.’

Trafalgar held the ledger against his chest and moved. [Godstep] took him behind the cabinet run, and the spear went through the place he had been and through the cabinet behind it and out the other side.

Kesh pulled it back and came again.

He was not fighting three people now. He was going at one target, and every technique in the man was aimed at the object in Trafalgar’s hands.

Rhosyn crossed the room and took the ledger out of his arms without asking. She had it through a passage before Kesh finished turning, and reappeared on top of the cabinets on the far side with the original held above her head, where the spear could not reach it without going through her first.

Kesh changed direction mid-stride.

Zafira caught him. [Scarlet Draw]. Every thread still anchored in that chamber pulled at once, and she had a dozen in him, and the combined force brought him around ninety degrees and put him into the wall shoulder-first.

He tore three of them out and kept moving.

”Trafalgar, I can’t hold this.”

”You don’t have to. Look at him.”

She looked.

Kesh’s left hand hung open at his side and had done for several seconds. The spear was in his right. He was breathing heavily and short, and his weight came down harder with each step.

The pressure in the room dropped by half without him deciding to release it.

That was the moment it turned, and none of them had done it.

Trafalgar went in. [Godstep] put him inside the spear’s reach and Maledicta took the shaft two-handed across the grain, [Ruin Pulse] going through the contact a fraction behind the steel, and the force reached the arm on the other side.

The spear came out of Kesh’s hand.

It did not vanish. It hit the floor and stayed there, which told Trafalgar more than the last eleven minutes had.

Rhosyn dropped off the cabinets behind him and swept his legs, and Zafira put four threads across his shoulders and pinned him down, and Kesh got one knee back under himself and tried to stand.

He tried for about four seconds.

Then his arm gave out and he went down onto his side on the floor of his own command chamber, and he did not say a word, and he did not stop trying to get up until his body stopped answering him.

Trafalgar stood over him with Maledicta low.

”Stay down.”

Kesh looked up at him with the flat expression of a man recording information. He was not surrendering and no part of him had chosen this. He had reached the end of what his body would do, and that difference showed in his face.

The lockdown released nine minutes later.

The door came off its locks with a heavy sound and Ithanne came through it first, with four Myrrhvale officers behind her and Corvyn behind them.

Ithanne stopped when she saw the chamber.

Two cabinets split open. The furnace burning with nothing in it. Kesh Varlan on the floor with his own spear beside him and a red thread still across his back, and three foreigners standing over him.

Corvyn said nothing at all.

”Lord Morgain.”

”Magistrate.”

”You’re holding something.”

Trafalgar could have been through that doorway and up two levels before anyone finished a sentence. Rhosyn could have put him anywhere in the castle district inside a second, and the ledger would have stayed in his own hands.

He walked over to Ithanne instead and put it in her hands in front of every person in that chamber.

”This came out of the last cabinet on that wall. Admiral Varlan had it under his arm and he was carrying it toward that furnace when I took it off the table.”

”You’ve read it?”

”The first four pages. I stopped when the door opened.”

Ithanne turned it over once and then held it flat while one of her officers opened a case and took out the registration seals.

”Recovered from this chamber, in my presence, from the hand of the Morgain observer.” She said it at dictation speed so the officer could write it. ”Handed over intact and unaltered. Note the furnace, note that it was lit, and note who lit it.”

The seal went on the cover and another went across the edge of the pages.

Trafalgar watched it happen and let out a breath he had been holding since the second bulkhead came down.

Every scrap of paper he had gathered in this city had been worth nothing because of how it reached him. This one was going to be worth everything, and the difference was four steps across a floor with witnesses on every side.

Ithanne read for a long time.

She read standing, with the officers waiting and Corvyn saying nothing and Kesh on the floor at her feet, and when she finally looked up her face had changed.

”This is the operation,” she said. ”Dates, quantities, the sector closures, the authorisations behind them. It runs for three years and it goes through this man on nearly every page.”

Corvyn closed his eyes for a moment.

”Nearly?” Trafalgar said.

Ithanne looked at him.

”You said nearly?”

”I did.” She turned back several pages and held one open. ”The instructions arriving from outside this city don’t carry a name. They come through codes, through an intermediary, and through channels that don’t originate with him.”

”Meaning what?”

”Meaning the Admiral ran this,” Ithanne said. ”And somebody was running it through him.”

Nobody in the chamber answered that.

Trafalgar looked down.

Kesh Varlan had not moved since he went onto his side, and he was not looking at Ithanne or at Corvyn or at the seals. He was looking at the ledger itself, at the closed cover with the wax across it, and whatever he saw there had arrived a long time before anybody else in that room worked it out.

He knew it was finished.