SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 722: A Good Excuse

"A little over a month ago, we lost contact with a mining post in one of the mines on our land." Valttair's voice held its usual chill. "You know mines well enough by now. Go, and put the problem right."

'Mines,' Trafalgar thought.

The word dragged an old memory up with it. He had gone to one years ago, alongside Lysandra, to hammer out the terms of a mining agreement with the Zar'khael and smooth over the friction between the two houses. He remembered how that trip had ended. A rift tearing open beneath his feet, the ground swallowing him whole, and a long stretch of surviving in the dark on the far side of it. He remembered the veiled woman who had found him down there, the one who had spoken to him in riddles, the one he now knew had been Rhosyn all along.

'A great deal of water has passed under the bridge in the years since,' he mused. The boy who had clawed his way out of that rift and the man standing in this room had almost nothing left in common but the name.

"Understood. Though I would like more detail, if it can be had," Trafalgar said.

Valttair looked to Moses, and the captain took it up.

"As the patriarch said, a little over a month back, in a stretch of territory that should have been under Rivena's watch, a monster outbreak broke loose." Moses laid it out without wasted words.

"They migrated toward one of the mines and took it. It has gone badly. The town above the mine holds thousands, a mining city much like Euclid, except it is miners and their families who fill it. The city itself is standing. The mining post is not. Somewhere near two thousand are dead, miners and the soldiers posted to guard them both."

He paused.

"The monsters are stronger than anything that outbreak should have thrown up. Something of that size, from a mountain like that one, should have been work for the garrison and a relief company at most. Instead it swallowed the post whole and keeps growing. That does not happen on its own, which is why I am going with you."

Two thousand. Trafalgar turned the figure over without letting it show on his face. The men who worked the Morgain highlands were not soft. No one soft lasted a season in this place.

For two thousand of them to fall, veterans among them who could never be replaced by warm bodies off the next caravan, whatever was crawling out of that mine was no ordinary vermin. Even by Moses's reckoning, it was a hard loss.

That post had held for three generations. It had weathered outbreaks before and put them down with its own garrison and whatever soldiers the house kept on hand. This was not that. Whatever came up out of the ground this time had gone through those men in under a week.

"The mine yields mana crystals of the highest grade, and in no small quantity," Moses went on. "Losing it is a blow to how quickly we can arm our own troops. And there is a fear that the beasts will tire of the mine, come down out of the mountain, and turn on the city below. That cannot be allowed. It has to be handled before it reaches that point."

Moses laid the whole of it out without a gap, and Trafalgar followed every word, yet a piece of it had been rubbing at him since the start. So he asked it outright.

"This outbreak. It would not happen to be a consequence of whatever Rivena left undone when she vanished, would it?" His attention moved to Valttair. "Her territory. Her responsibility. And yet the job falls to me, and not to her."

Valttair's manner cooled by several degrees. "I understand you might take offense at that. Do not turn it against me, Trafalgar."

The words came out quiet and hard, and Trafalgar felt his own posture straighten before he had decided to move it. 'He is the patriarch for now,' he reminded himself, 'and I need him on my side of the board a while yet.' There was no profit in a fight over this one. He was not wrong about the root of it, either. He would have staked Euclid on the outbreak being exactly what he suspected, a rot that had set in the season Rivena walked off her post and left it to fend for itself. But being right and being free to say so to the patriarch's face were two very different things.

He let out a breath. "My apologies. So. I get to scrub my sister's mess off the floor, and she is excused from it because you would rather keep her leashed in the castle."

"You do grasp it." A flicker of approval surfaced in the patriarch's face. "You see how little difficulty there was in that. And there is something in it for you, so the mission made a convenient excuse."

Trafalgar's ears all but twitched. Had he heard that correctly? There was a reward waiting in this. Valttair had never been stingy with him, for the plain reason that a man does not starve an SSS talent he means to grow, and Trafalgar was nothing if not willing to be bought on the right terms. Whatever grievance he had been nursing a breath ago evaporated on the spot. Principle was a fine thing to keep on a shelf, but principle did not pay, and he had worked out long ago precisely how much of his was for sale and at what price.

"Fine. In that case I suppose I had better come back with results worth the trouble and put the problem to bed."

"Precisely." Valttair inclined his head a fraction. "I expect a great deal of you, as I always have. For the present you run ahead of every expectation I set, so the least I can do is see you rewarded to match."

"Does it not occur to you," Trafalgar said, "that handing me special treatment the others never get only turns them further against me?"

"If any of my other sons or daughters managed a fraction of what you manage," Valttair answered, cold as the mountain outside, "they would have their share of it as well. That is not where things stand. So they may swallow every word they hold against my decisions, for now, until one of them shows me a reason to listen."

Moses shifted his weight. "If that is everything, patriarch, I will take Trafalgar and see the mission properly planned."

"Go. You will report all of it to me."

"As always, patriarch." Moses dipped his head. "You need not worry."

There was more behind the arrangement than the mission itself. Valttair wanted eyes on Trafalgar through what amounted to his first official task for the house.

His first true outing had come years earlier, of course, on the day he first crossed paths with Zafira, the day Valttair had opened a thirty-meter monster from end to end as easily as a hot knife slides through butter.

But that had been another thing entirely. This time the patriarch wanted a full and honest account of everything the boy could do, and Moses would give him one. The captain had no stake in overselling Trafalgar's worth, which made him the ideal witness.

It suited Moses just as well. He wanted to judge for himself whether Trafalgar measured up to the stories that had chased him across the territory. Caelum had already delivered his verdict, plainly and more than once, warning him in that quiet way of his never to underestimate their young master.

Even so, Moses had not decided where he would stand. Caelum had thrown his lot in with Trafalgar for whatever was coming. Moses had not. He was a traditional man, and tradition put the first heir in the seat, where the first heir was meant to be. It was not a foolish position, nor an illogical one.

Yet the captain held to something simpler underneath it. If a man came along with the worth to hold that seat, and a better claim to it than blood alone, that was the man who ought to have it.

He had simply not decided whether Trafalgar was that man. So he would watch, and he would weigh, and he would carry the truth of it back to Valttair whichever way it fell. It was as fair a trial as any man could ask for, and Trafalgar, whether it interested him or not, had at least been handed an honest judge.

With that, Trafalgar and Moses left the room, the doors falling shut behind them.

And out of the shadows along the far wall, where he had waited unseen through the whole of it, Caelum stepped into the light at last.

Valttair did not turn to look at him.

"What do you make of all this, Caelum?"