SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 707: Curiosity

Moses was not a man built to be overlooked. He stood closer to two and a half meters than to two, and every inch of that height came wrapped in muscle earned across decades of war.

His armor was Morgain steel of the finest grade, dark and heavy, the crest hammered across the breastplate: two swords crossed beneath the eye of a wolf. Purple eyes studied Trafalgar from under a fall of long black hair dragged back and knotted with a soldier's indifference to how it fell.

Two horns rose from his skull, open proof of the demon blood woven through his human half. He wore all of it the way old campaigners did, as though the ground owed him the courtesy of holding still beneath his boots.

Trafalgar knew the important part before a word passed between them. This was Moses, captain of the First Morgain Squadron, the strongest blade in the family's direct service. In a head-on fight the man outmatched even Caelum, though Caelum held the higher place at Valttair's side, and anyone who understood the family understood exactly how much an arrangement like that grated on someone like Moses.

Three years away on a mission at the edge of the map had kept him from every rumor worth hearing, the Thal'Zar war among them. Whatever he knew of Trafalgar had reached him secondhand, in stories, and stories were what he had come out into the cold to measure against the real thing.

"Welcome home, Young Master." His voice came out rough and amused, in no hurry to sound respectful. He offered his hand, a palm broad enough to cover Trafalgar's face. "The tales that found me on the road painted quite a picture. I have wondered ever since whether any of it would hold up once I stood in front of it."

So that was the game. Trafalgar took the offered hand.

The grip came down like a press. It was no handshake at all, but a question asked in raw force, demonic pressure pouring through the contact to learn what the noble son wore beneath his reputation. That squeeze had buckled harder men to their knees and taught them their place without a single word.

Trafalgar did not move.

He met the pressure without surrendering an inch, and something beneath his own skin woke and pushed back. Moses felt it before he could understand it.

A cold that had nothing to do with the mountain air climbed his arm from the joined hands, sank past the muscle, and closed around something far deeper. His body locked. For one breath the captain of the First Morgain Squadron, stronger than this boy by several full mana cores, could not force his own hand to release.

And he loved it.

Under the shock, the part of Moses that had spent thirty years chasing stronger opponents lit up like a struck match. He had walked out here expecting a pampered heir coasting on his father's name. What had seized him back through that grip was something else, a presence he could not name, and the not-knowing thrilled him far more than any easy answer would have.

Trafalgar held the grip a breath longer, letting the cold do its work, and kept his voice unhurried.

"Curiosity I understand, Captain. In the right hands it is a useful thing." He tightened his fingers by a fraction, and Moses felt the bones under them protest. "But you appear to have forgotten where you stand. You are a sword in this family's hand. Do not confuse yourself with the ones who wield it. Test me again the way a stranger tests a horse at market, and I will start wondering whether the First Squadron needs a captain who forgets himself this easily."

Trafalgar released his hand.

The cold drained from Moses's arm as fast as it had risen. He flexed his fingers, rolled the stiffness out of his shoulder, and inclined his head. This time the courtesy in it was real.

"My apologies, Young Master Trafalgar. Curiosity got the better of me." A low sound rumbled out of his chest, closer to satisfaction than to shame. "It will not happen again."

"See that it does not." Trafalgar's tone stayed level and cold. "A mistake, I can forgive once. Twice, it stops being a mistake. I would remember that, if I were you."

A grin split Moses's face, all teeth. "Perfectly, Young Master. My memory, I would like to think, is one of my finer qualities."

He meant it, though not for the reasons a wiser servant would have. As Trafalgar turned back toward his sister, Moses weighed the boy one more time and turned a private thought over where none of them could read it.

'I have yet to see whether he measures up against Maeron and Rivena,' he mused. 'But he has left a good first impression, and that is worth something. Perhaps it is time I gave some thought to whose claim I want at my back when the seat of this family finally comes open. There is time yet before that day. And whichever side I choose, I will have to earn its favor before the choosing begins.'

When Trafalgar looked for Caelum, the man had vanished. The shadow had folded back into wherever it was he went, leaving neither a word nor a print in the snow to prove he had stood there at all. Somehow that unsettled Trafalgar more than Moses did at his full, monstrous height.

Moses caught the glance and answered it. "He left a message before he slipped away, Lady Lysandra. Lady Seraphine asks that you come to her before Lord Valttair arrives. She would rather speak with you first."

Lysandra's shoulders dropped a fraction. She nodded, because there was no version of this in which she did not, and let a low, bitter curse slip out under her breath.

Trafalgar heard it. So did Moses. And somewhere out of sight, Caelum had surely heard it as well. None of the three remarked on it.

With that, the group broke apart. Lysandra squeezed her brother's arm in passing, a quiet promise to find him inside, and turned toward the wing where the first wife waited. Moses gave a short nod and strode off toward the barracks, or wherever a man like that went once he had finished taking someone's measure.

Trafalgar was left to make the walk alone. The path from the landing platform to the main gate ran long and open, lined on both sides by soldiers of House Morgain holding their posts against the wind.

Four years ago they would have looked straight through him, or worse, let their contempt show plainly on their faces where the least wanted son could not miss it.

Not today.

As he passed, one after another, they lowered their heads. These were not the shallow nods owed to any noble with the right surname.

They were the bows soldiers give to a man who has earned them the hard way. Trafalgar walked the length of it without slowing, his coat snapping at his heels, until he reached the great gate standing open ahead of him, tall enough to march a war band through shoulder to shoulder.

He stepped through it alone, back into the house that had broken Trafalgar once already—so completely that the boy born within its walls had died. But the man who came after had never bent for them. Two years of answers waited somewhere in the dark ahead, and he intended to drag every one of them into the light.