SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 631: Dura Lex

Matteo was alone in the study of his house when he wrote the letter.

The room had been built for a man who trusted paper more than people. Tall shelves pressed against the walls, every one of them loaded with old research notes, sealed records, alchemical treatises, and legal volumes no sane person would read for pleasure. A private ward hummed beneath the floorboards, muffling the house from outside interference. Even the ink on his desk had been prepared by his own hand, because Matteo di Ravelle had always believed that if one wanted something done properly, relying on others was the first mistake.

The letter itself was short.

Only a few words.

Dura lex, sed lex.

Matteo stared at the sentence for a while after writing it.

The law is harsh, but it is the law.

Those had been the last words he had said to Selara's master more than a century ago, before the Vaelion took him away and the world lost sight of him. Matteo still remembered the expression on the man's face when he heard them. Not fear. That would have been pleasant, perhaps even satisfying. What he remembered was colder than that, a look filled with such murderous clarity that any lesser man might have taken a step back. Matteo had not.

He had helped the Vaelion capture him.

He had helped close the net because someone had needed to do it, and because all the brilliance in the world did not erase bodies, blood, or the screaming ruin left behind when a man treated law as an inconvenience beneath his intellect. Selara's master had broken too many lines by then. The Vaelion victim had only made it impossible for powerful people to keep pretending they did not see the trail.

Matteo folded the letter with careful fingers.

He added the address beneath the phrase, his own personal residence in Aurevane, written in the same firm hand. Nothing else. No plea, no explanation, no insult. If Selara's master had even half the memory Matteo credited him with, he would understand the message at once.

Perhaps he would be amused. Perhaps he would come furious.

Either would do.

Matteo sealed the letter and returned beneath the Glass Atrium.

Getting back into the restricted chamber was unpleasantly easy. That alone confirmed too much. Aurevane had surrounded the place with guards, wards, and procedures, but all of them were built to stop outsiders. Men already woven into the event's old networks, men with names, records, influence, and the sour patience to survive three decades of committees, could still slip through the permitted cracks.

That was how rot survived in civilized places. It learned the paperwork.

The homunculus remained in the center of the chamber when Matteo entered.

The elven child-shaped vessel stood exactly as before, barefoot within the containment circle, dressed in that plain gray cloth that made her appear less protected than displayed. The chamber light rested along her pale skin and white hair without warming either. Silver fluid pulsed through the tubes beneath the floor. The wards breathed. The guards outside believed they were protecting a masterpiece.

Matteo approached the circle and stopped at its edge.

For a breath, he did nothing.

She did not move.

He stepped closer, lifted one of her feet with precise care, and placed the folded letter beneath it.

Her skin was cold.

The contact startled him more than he liked. There was no living warmth against his palm, not even a small shift of discomfort from being touched. She did not draw back nor did not react at all. Her body accepted the motion as though touch were merely another external condition to be recorded and ignored. Matteo's fingers stayed around her ankle for longer than necessary.

"Poor girl," he murmured.

He lowered her foot over the letter and withdrew his hand.

He could wait here. That was one option. If Selara's master came to retrieve the message or inspect the homunculus, Matteo might speak with him inside this chamber. It would even be fitting in a miserable way, two old men standing beside the latest proof that genius, when left unsupervised, often learned to feed on anything smaller than itself.

But it was not viable.

Selara's master was cautious. He had sent the homunculus into Aurevane, allowed others to praise it, and kept his own face away from the public stage. That alone said enough. He would not walk into a chamber full of Aurevane witnesses without preparing several exits and twice as many excuses.

The second problem was worse.

If anything happened below the Atrium, guards would descend from every side. Aurevane would flood the lower levels with uniforms, questions, panic, and the useless competence of men who arrived after the first mistake and decided shouting counted as repair. Matteo had no desire to turn the entire investigation into a public disaster before Selara even had the chance to meet him.

So he left the message.

A phrase from the past.

An address.

A simple hook to draw its prey.

By the time Matteo walked out, the homunculus stood with the letter beneath her bare foot, unmoving and silent, carrying an invitation she could not understand to a man who had never deserved the right to make her.

That same day, Selara met Trafalgar and Caelum.

Caelum was still wearing Orven von Halbrecht's skin, posture, coat, and sour dignity with such accuracy that the disguise had already stopped feeling like a disguise unless one knew better. Trafalgar did not bother commenting on it. There were stranger problems on the table now.

Trafalgar was the first to speak.

"Well? How did it go?"

Selara sat across from them with the expression of someone who had swallowed something bitter and refused to give it the satisfaction of showing. "Well enough. In two days, we should be able to meet my master if everything goes properly. I do not trust the situation completely, since too many things have happened at once, but Matteo became useful."

Trafalgar's attention sharpened at the name.

Selara continued, "You already met him when you were pretending to be my assistant, so you know more or less what he is like. Thanks to him, we may get that meeting. I should also tell you that Matteo has history with my master as well, and he placed one condition. He will be present for whatever happens."

Selara rubbed lightly at her brow, irritation cutting through her exhaustion. "I did not tell him there would be more people. In two days, we will go to his house. If luck feels unusually cooperative, my master will appear. If he does not, I will have to act on what I saw below the Atrium."

Trafalgar leaned forward slightly. "Then summarize it."

So Selara did.

She explained that Caelum had been right about something alive being hidden in the lower levels. She told them about the homunculus, the elven form, the body like a girl of around ten, the gray one-piece cloth, the absence in her reactions, the coldness of the chamber, and the way Aurevane spoke of her as if a designation could make the shape of a child easier to exhibit.

Trafalgar listened without interrupting.

At first, he focused on the information itself. Homunculus. Elven vessel. Hidden creation. A so-called masterpiece meant for the main event. But the longer Selara spoke, the more his attention shifted to her. She was an elf. Her master had created an elven homunculus with enough resemblance in form and bloodline concept to make the choice feel personal.

That had not been accident.

A man that careful did not choose a form without reason.

Maybe he wanted Selara to see it. Maybe he wanted her to find him. Maybe he had built an insult, a confession, and a lure into the same small body and trusted his old student would understand all three.

Trafalgar's jaw tightened slightly.

Caelum listened as well, though surprise did not touch his face. Of course it did not. He was Caelum. For something to truly shock him, Trafalgar suspected it would need to be the kind of revelation that broke the frame of his entire understanding: that his young master had come from another world and awakened inside this body, or that the bloodline inside him was truly Primordial.

Those were things Trafalgar had not told him. Not yet at the very least.

He would need to, eventually. Caelum was too close, too useful, too loyal in that cold, terrifying way of his. And honestly, Trafalgar would be more surprised if the man had not already smelled part of the truth and politely decided to wait until his young master stopped pretending the door did not exist.

For now, the hidden room came first.

"It's fine if Matteo is present," Trafalgar said. "But when we reach the part we truly need, he has to leave. I will not be Tom at that point."

Selara understood immediately. "When we ask why my master helped with the Void Creatures."

Trafalgar gave a small nod. "Yeah. Matteo has no place in that. If he knows too much, he might die for it. Right now, this is known by us three and two other people I trust."

Selara studied him. "You are not giving me their names."

"No."

"That means I probably do not want to know."

Trafalgar offered her a faint smile and nothing more.

Selara sighed, leaning back as the weight of the situation pressed down over the room. "You are a student in my Academy, Trafalgar, so I feel obliged to say this. You are involving yourself in problems far larger than someone your age should be handling. You are legally an adult, yes, but you are still young."

Trafalgar answered without changing expression. "No ordinary person with the Morgain name survives by staying ordinary, Director Selara. Let's hope nothing happens during the two days we have to wait."

Selara did not answer.

She looked up at the ceiling instead, her face caught between anger and the kind of regret that arrived too late to be useful. She had stepped into this fully now. All of it could have been avoided if she had lied to Trafalgar that day, if she had pretended not to recognize the potion, if she had denied knowing anyone capable of creating something that had turned a Void Creature into something worse.

But she had recognized the hand behind it.

And now, in two days, that hand might finally reach back.