SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 642: No Pressure

Caelum did not begin with a blade.

Esmond noticed that first, and so did Trafalgar. A knife would have been simple — brutish, honest in its own ugly way. Caelum reached for something finer.

He loomed behind the chair, one hand resting on Esmond's shoulder with almost fatherly weight, while the other spun a thin filament of pale mana between two gloved fingers. The thread looked harmless, barely thicker than a hair, until Caelum laid it against the inside of Esmond's wrist and coaxed it beneath the skin.

Esmond's breath snagged in his throat. The scream stayed locked behind his teeth, for now.

Caelum cocked his head and studied the old man's face with the idle attention of someone straightening a cufflink. The thread vanished into the flesh, threading along channels no surgeon was ever meant to reach from the outside. Esmond's fingers hooked against the restraints, his jaw clamped, and the veins down his neck stood out like drawn wire.

"Pain is not the point," Caelum said. "Pain is the tool of people who never learned where the body hides its doors."

Trafalgar stood a few paces off, Maledicta hanging loose at his side. He said nothing. He let Caelum work.

Two years ago, this would have emptied his stomach onto the floor.

The version of him who had landed in this world — confused, half-naked, terrified, still reasoning like a man from Earth — would have buckled at the smell alone: blood, sweat, scorched mana, the sour reek of fear leaking out of another man's pores. Esmond's suffering would have closed his throat like a fist.

Now he only watched.

He took no pleasure in it, and that distinction held; some stubborn corner of him gripped it with both hands. But he did not look away either. Esmond had turned living bodies into cages, carved up thinking people, and called the wreckage progress. If the old bastard spoke any language at all, it was not the language of mercy.

Caelum shifted the thread.

Esmond's spine bowed against the restraints. A strangled noise scraped out of him, ugly and unwilled, his feet kicking at the bands around his ankles.

"There," Caelum murmured. "You felt that."

Esmond forced a laugh past clenched teeth. "Is this meant to impress me? I endured the Vaelion."

"I know," Trafalgar said.

Esmond's bloodshot eyes cut to him.

"That's why I'm letting him warm up."

Caelum's fingers moved again. The thread bored deeper, and Esmond's laugh splintered into a hoarse cry as his shoulders crashed into the chairback. The cuffs flared and swallowed the mana his body tried to summon on reflex.

What was left to him was flesh, raw nerve, and the chair.

Caelum eased off before Esmond could black out, drew a small vial from his coat, and tipped a few drops past the old man's lips.

Esmond coughed, swallowed on instinct, and glared at him. "Mercy?"

Caelum corked the vial. "Maintenance."

The potion worked fast. Color crept back into Esmond's face in a sickly tide, the worst of the tremor draining from his hands, his breathing evening out just enough for the insult to register. He was being repaired, not spared.

Trafalgar stepped closer. "Were you working for the Vaelion?"

Esmond licked his cracked lips. "Go to hell."

Trafalgar looked at Caelum. "His hands."

Something in Esmond's face finally shifted.

Caelum circled the chair and lifted Esmond's right hand, laying it across the broken armrest with insulting tenderness, spreading the fingers one at a time. From his sleeve slid a narrow black instrument, hooked at the tip, etched with runes fine enough to pass for scratches.

Esmond's gaze tracked it.

"You like working with bodies," Trafalgar said. "You understand how valuable hands are."

Caelum slid the hook beneath the first nail.

Esmond's face tightened. "You think this makes you different from me?"

"Yes," Trafalgar said. "I know when to stop."

Caelum pulled. The nail came away with a wet rip, and Esmond screamed.

It came out raw and unstrung, nothing elegant or controlled in it. The cry tore through the ruined room and ricocheted off the shattered wards, loud enough to rouse something primal in the air. Blood welled over the exposed bed of flesh while Esmond's fingers scrabbled at the armrest, and Caelum held the hand down with the patience of a man stopping a child from spilling tea.

Trafalgar held his eyes on the old man's face.

"If you want my aide to leave your fingers useful," he said, "you should start talking, Esmond."

He leaned in. "No pressure."

Esmond dragged air through his teeth, spit glinting on his chin. "Morgain blood," he rasped. "There it is. You dress it up in purpose, but sooner or later every last one of you reaches for cruelty."

Trafalgar's face gave him nothing. "Were you working for the Vaelion?"

Esmond laughed again, weaker now. "I told you. I endured them."

Caelum spilled a measured drop over the ruined nail bed. The flesh knit closed, and the nail began to push its way back up.

Esmond's breath hitched as the understanding arrived ahead of the pain. The potion gave back enough — not all of it, only enough to make the finger whole, tender, and ready again.

Caelum set the hook beneath the same nail.

"No," Esmond said, the word slipping out before pride could catch it.

Caelum pulled. The second scream came worse than the first, because this time he had watched it coming.

Trafalgar watched the old man buck against the chair, blood flecking Caelum's glove, the dark runes of the restraints, the armrest already slick under his palm. One part of him registered the horror with glacial clarity. Another simply counted the questions still trapped behind Esmond's teeth.

"How did you reach Icarus?" Trafalgar asked. "How did he know you'd be useful to him? How did you turn up at the precise moment a Void Creature project needed exactly what you offered?"

Esmond shuddered, breath breaking into little wet gasps. "I won't—"

Caelum healed the nail again.

Esmond was already shaking his head before the tool touched him. "Wait."

Caelum took the second finger.

This time he left the nail alone. He looped a thread of mana around the knuckle and drew it tight until the joint seized. Esmond's whole body went board-stiff. The thread burrowed under the skin, and Caelum gave it a small, economical twist of the wrist.

Something popped.

Esmond screamed until his voice unraveled into a rasp.

Caelum uncorked the potion, fed him three drops, and waited while the finger straightened under forced healing. It did not come back perfect — only functional. That was the crueler outcome.

Esmond's breath came in ragged hauls. His eyes streamed. Snot ran from one nostril, humiliating and human, gutting the old scholar's grand performance more thoroughly than any insult could have.

Trafalgar crouched in front of him. "Were you working under Vaelion custody?"

Esmond's lips quivered.

Caelum laid the hook against the third finger.

"Please," Esmond whispered.

Trafalgar's eyes narrowed.

The word had come out small. No theater in it now, no smugness, only a man who had finally found something to fear.

"Please," Esmond said again, voice cracking. "Please, stop it."

Caelum paused, the hook already seated beneath the nail.

Trafalgar studied the old man's face — the blood, the tears, the mucus, the terror. It might be real. It probably was real. Pain undressed people fast once pride stopped paying its way.

But Esmond had stripped others first.

"I don't know if you're sincere," Trafalgar said. "I heard you experimented on the living and the thinking — humans, vampires, beastkin, anyone useful enough to cut open."

Esmond's pupils shrank to pinpricks.

Trafalgar's voice dropped. "Did you stop when they begged?"

Esmond stared, and the terror in him changed shape, sinking past the pain into somewhere older. He looked at Trafalgar now as though the boy in the chair's shadow had become something he could no longer safely predict.

Caelum's hand hovered steady over the third finger.

Esmond broke.

"I'll tell you," he choked out. "I'll tell you everything. Please. Please, make him stop."

Trafalgar held the old man's gaze a few breaths longer.

Esmond shuddered in the chair, his ruined pride running off his face with the blood and tears. The room reeked of iron and potion fumes. Matteo slept slumped against the wall, oblivious. Beyond the broken door, Selara worked over the homunculus, stitching one person back together while this room came apart at another.

Trafalgar raised a hand. Caelum went still.

"Go get Selara," Trafalgar said. "He's ready to talk."

He straightened, eyes never leaving the wreck breathing in the chair, and something cold turned over in his chest — because whatever name Esmond was about to give up, Trafalgar already knew it would be one he'd wish he had never gone digging for.