SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 721: Severe Lines

Trafalgar stepped back through the doors and into the room where Valttair waited, pulling them shut behind him.

'Well. He caught me.' The thought carried more amusement than concern. 'For the record, I had no real interest in whatever he had to say to her.'

Which was true enough. What Trafalgar had wanted was an answer about the mission the patriarch meant to hand him, and so he had lingered near the hall rather than leaving with the rest of them. He had not expected to be noticed. He should have known better. A man did not climb all the way to Paradox by overlooking the person standing at the far end of his own corridor.

Valttair watched him cross the threshold. "How long were you listening?"

"I was not." Trafalgar kept his face even. "This room is reinforced. Nothing spoken inside it carries past these walls."

Valttair looked at him, let out a slow breath, and set the lie aside without heat. "There is no need for that. I know precisely how this room was built, down to the last stone. I also know that a man with any command of his senses can listen straight through it regardless." His grey eyes held steady. "So do not insult us both."

"Then I will not." Trafalgar inclined his head. "I heard all of it."

Valttair offered nothing to that. It did not appear to trouble him in the slightest, and after a beat Trafalgar understood why. Nothing had passed between the patriarch and Rivena that had not already been aired, in one form or another, in front of the whole family. There was no secret in it worth guarding, and so no cause to care who had caught the echo.

Trafalgar held his own tongue and waited. There was clearly a thing the man meant to say, and it carried the weight of the more important business in the room. The mission could keep. His question about who would brief him, and where he was being sent, could all wait for their turn. Whatever this was came first.

As he spoke, Valttair called his sword into his hand.

It came out of nothing, a blade longer than most men stood tall, over two meters of pale, faintly glowing steel that threw a soft white light across the table. He did not level it at anything. He reached up, gathered the overgrown length of his platinum hair in one fist, and cut it away against the edge in a single smooth motion, then set the same monstrous weapon to his beard, shearing off two years of neglect as calmly as another man might work a razor at his mirror.

There was something close to obscene in the ease of it. A blade that could open a war beast from shoulder to hip, put to the trimming of a beard. It was a display a man allowed himself only once he had stopped needing to prove anything to anyone in the room, and Valttair had crossed that line a very long time ago.

"You should understand something, Trafalgar." The blade whispered through the coarse hair along his jaw as he spoke, unhurried. "I am not blind to what has gone on under this roof while I was away. I came home to a number of things I did not care for."

Trafalgar watched the enormous sword do the work of a barber's knife and let none of the strangeness show. "You mean Rivena."

"In part. She is not the whole of it." Another pass of the edge, another fall of pale hair to the floor. "Since the day you began to gather real strength, and the admiration of the world along with it, the rest of this family has kept its eyes fixed on you. I expect that has already pushed one or two of them into hasty choices that end up costing the whole house. I cannot yet see the full picture of it. I only know it will be nothing good."

He let the sword vanish from his hand as smoothly as it had come, his hair and beard cut back to the hard, severe lines Trafalgar remembered.

"So while you stand here, I will give you fair warning." Valttair's voice never warmed. "There will be trouble inside this family before long. Every family has its share, and that much is ordinary. But when a Great Family turns on itself, the trouble is rarely small. Do you follow me, Trafalgar?"

Trafalgar nodded. "It would not be the first time the people I am meant to call family tried to put me in the ground."

"Good. It serves you to know it." Valttair studied him. "So if the day comes that something happens, I expect you to make the right decisions when it does."

Trafalgar kept quiet, because he understood exactly what the man was circling. Sons were sons and wives were wives, and none of that had ever stopped a soul from wanting more than they held. They might try something. It would hardly be the first house to eat itself from the inside out. He thought of the Myrrhvale, their matriarch lay cold in the ground now and a war of succession most likely already tearing through whatever she had left behind. Great families did not fracture gently.

And he was, whether the man across the table had grasped it yet or not, one more crack running through the foundation of this one. Valttair spoke of the house turning on itself as a threat to be watched and contained. He had no idea he was warning one of the very things he would eventually need to watch.

"You have gone quiet on me." A trace of dry humor moved under Valttair's tone, if such a thing were possible in him. "You need not fret over it as much as all that. Killing a Paradox is very nearly impossible."

Trafalgar said nothing, because it was true, and because the thought sitting under it was one he had no intention of sharing. Valttair dying would be an inconvenience. Not grief, nothing so soft as that. Trafalgar did not carry a single thread of a son's feeling for the man. But for what was coming down the road, a weapon the size of Valttair standing on his side of the board was worth keeping in one piece a while longer.

"I understand everything you are telling me." Trafalgar met his eyes. "But I do not want the seat. Not for now, at least."

"Good." A flicker of something almost like approval crossed the patriarch's face. "It would have disappointed me if you did not want my position at all. You would be no Morgain in that case." The approval cooled as fast as it had risen. "I will look into it and keep Rivena under watch, so nothing of this sort happens twice."

He tilted his head, and there was real curiosity in the question that followed.

"Though I confess I am curious about one thing. If House Morgain were to break, what choice would you make?"

Trafalgar did not hesitate.

"The same one Nym made."

If the house came apart at the seams, he would cut down the other heirs, every last one of them, if that was what the moment demanded.

Valttair went quiet for a breath. He did not look offended. If anything, the answer suited him well enough.

"I hope that day never arrives," he said at last. "As a father, I would mourn it. As patriarch of House Morgain, I would understand it completely."

His attention shifted to the door.

"You may come in, Moses."

Trafalgar went rigid.

He had not sensed Moses. Not a whisper of him, not the faintest weight of that enormous presence anywhere beyond the door, and it rattled him more than he let show. He remembered the man's grip from their first meeting, the one that could have ground the bones of his hand to powder if Trafalgar had been anyone else. A monster like that did not simply drop out of a Primordial's senses. Which meant Moses had been standing out there the entire time, holding every scrap of himself in check, folded down so small that even Trafalgar had walked past him and felt nothing at all.

That was the part that stayed with him. Raw strength he could weigh and plan around. A man who could stand a single pace away and simply not register was a problem of another order entirely, and it moved Moses several rungs up the short list of people in this house Trafalgar meant to keep both eyes on. The captain had greeted him as a servant greets a young master, and could apparently kill him as an afterthought. Trafalgar did not intend to forget either half of that.

The door opened, and Moses stepped inside.

Valttair looked at Trafalgar. "I told you the details of your first mission would reach you before you left."

His gaze moved to Moses.

"Moses was to be the one to deliver them. Since the two of you are already standing in the same room, there is no reason to wait."

Trafalgar said nothing.

Valttair let the pause hang before he finished.

"Very well. I will give you your first mission for House Morgain here, Trafalgar."