SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 716: Paradox

Valttair took in the whole table from the head of it, unhurried, letting them feel the pause before he spoke.

"Before I hear what any of you did with the last two years, you will hear what I did with mine." His voice carried without effort. "My seclusion was not a rest, and it was not a retreat. For a long time my progress had crawled. I had reached the point where piling on more mana bought me almost nothing. What I lacked was never power. It was a way to carry that power any further."

No one needed it drawn out. They knew the wall he meant. Valttair had been pressed against the barrier between the eighth core and the ninth for years, and no weight of mana had ever cracked it.

"That wall is no longer there." He let the words hang. "I have entered Paradox."

The hall took a breath to catch up with him.

Trafalgar let the number sink in. 'Paradox. The ninth core, one step below Divine.' The first core was where a high-level awakened truly began. He stood at the fifth himself, Prime, the sixth almost in reach. The tenth was Divine, the ceiling of the living world, and Paradox was the last stair beneath it. Whatever distance had already stood between his father and nearly everything alive, Valttair had just stretched it wider than anyone at this table could dream of closing.

He did not raise his aura to prove it. He lifted one hand off the arm of his chair and let a sliver of what he held slip free.

The room changed in a heartbeat. The long table groaned down its length under a weight nothing had set on it. The flames in the sconces leaned toward him as though the floor had tilted. Every core in the hall flinched on instinct, and even those carrying several felt their mana shrink and cower inside them. He closed his hand, and it was gone.

He had not done it to frighten anyone, only to put any doubt to rest and prove the presence at the door had been no trick of the nerves. For Trafalgar it proved something further. What he had felt was not a deeper well of the same water. Valttair's power had changed in kind, heavier and wrong to stand near, a sea where there had been a river.

Trafalgar watched the news land differently on every face.

Maeron read it fastest, and it cost him the most. As first heir he had surely spent years measuring the walk to his father's chair, counting the time until he could take it. Paradox tore those numbers apart. Valttair was not weakening. He was not nearing the end of anything. He had thrown the gap between himself and every heir far wider in a single step. Maeron kept his face blank, but Trafalgar caught the stiffness locked through his shoulders. Whatever the man had mapped out for the years ahead, he would be redrawing all of it tonight.

The rest sorted through it in their own ways. Lysandra took it with open respect and a flicker of real pride, since she knew the cost of that barrier. Seraphine's mind ran to position, a stronger husband propping up the first wife while handing him the power to rule them all more tightly, her lifted punishment suddenly looking thin. Verena dipped her head like a soldier to a ranking officer. Helgar burned at the sight of the summit he wanted and had the sense, barely, to keep it banked. Naevia stayed quiet inside her grief, and Nym folded smaller under the last of the pressure. Ysolde was already recalculating, every line of it telling her to hold close to Trafalgar and rush toward no one. Darion had gone pale; Elira had not.

At the foot of the table, Rivena wore her calm like a mask cut to fit. She even gave her father a smooth, correct word of congratulation. Only Trafalgar, who had not let that earlier smile go, weighed how much this announcement complicated whatever she had hauled back from those six months in the dark.

Trafalgar did his own arithmetic without their alarm and without any pride to soften it. He could not touch Valttair. Not now, not near it. That was simple fact, and pretending otherwise served nothing.

But the gap had stopped being a thing beyond measuring. Valttair had reached Paradox near the age of fifty, with an SS-ranked talent and decades of war at his back. Trafalgar carried an SSS talent, a Primordial body, nineteen years, and a rate of growth that had rattled men far steadier than Helgar. Three decades stood between him and the age his father wore now. The point was not that he stood anywhere close to Valttair. The point was that he could reach where Valttair stood, and reach it far younger.

Which was worth remembering, since Helgar had plainly forgotten it. The Academy had been no idle stretch. Trafalgar stood at the tail of the fifth core, Prime, the sixth, Ascend, near enough to touch. The time had not gone to hoarding mana. He had grasped early that climbing a core without honing the rest of his kit would leave him full of gaps, so he had driven every skill that grew by levels to its ceiling: Arc Slash, Severing Fang, Severance Step, Earthsplitter, Crosswind Edge, each of them maxed and past ordinary leveling, and each now quicker, tighter, cheaper to throw, and far deadlier for the core and body behind it.

The Morgain techniques were another animal. They had never carried levels to raise; he had learned them already complete, their structure finished the day they reached his hands. What changed was the man wielding them. Every gain in his mana, his body, his control, and his reading of the blade forced more power through forms that had started out perfect.

Two years. Valttair had spent his breaking one monstrous wall to stand near the roof of the world. Trafalgar had spent his laying the base beneath his own: Ascend in reach, five skills maxed, the Morgain forms hitting harder, his Primordial nature better understood, Euclid stronger, the Academy done. Both had grown, only from opposite ends of the same climb.

'Untouchable today,' he thought. 'Not even a contest. But the road runs the whole way there now, and for the first time, I can see the end of it.'

Valttair drew his presence back into himself, every thread of it, until the room was only a room again. He looked over his children, one by one.

"You have seen what these two years gave me. Now we will see how much each of you has grown."

His gaze came to rest on his eldest son.

"We will begin in order. Maeron."