SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 730: Time to Go Down

Morning came grey and mean over the mountains, and with it the day Trafalgar and Moses would climb to the mouth of the mine.

Trafalgar ran a last check on everything before he moved. The system window hung open at the edge of his vision, and the inventory tab laid it all out for him where only he could read it. The pieces that counted were there. His accessories first, the two rings that carried the heaviest weight of his loadout: the [Heirloom of the First Lord - Unique Rank] and the [Oathbinder - Legendary Accessory], the pair of them stacking a brutal amount of extra bite onto everything he threw. After the rings, his two oldest and most reliable companions. Obsidian Wings, the black armor that had carried him through worse than this. And Maledicta, his blade.

He looked out through the window of the room they had given him. The mine lay under fresh snow, and even from here he could read the ruin of it, most of the works caved or burned, and the outer post barely a post at all anymore, just the bones of one.

'Looks like it will be a hard day,' he thought, and the thought had nothing romantic in it. It had to do with the blizzard hammering the mountain outside. The wind up here ran strong on an ordinary day, and today was not ordinary. Today's wind could pick up a house of timber and scatter it across the slope without slowing down.

He left the room, and the building they had lodged him in, and found Moses already waiting for him outside.

The huge half-demon stood with his eyes shut and his head bowed toward the ground, motionless in the driving snow, and from the look of him he had not moved from that spot all night. Trafalgar understood the arithmetic of it at a glance. Moses had planted himself there against the chance that someone in this grieving city, drunk on loss and looking for a Morgain to blame, might try for the young master in the dark.

'Hm.'

The instant Trafalgar took a step, the captain's eyes opened, slow and certain. "Are you ready, young master?"

"I am. We can move."

Gerhardt had come to see them off, and he tried his luck one more time. "You are certain you would rather have me down here than up there with you? I know that ground better than any man alive."

"Do not make me repeat what I told you yesterday." Trafalgar did not dress it up. "Every soul down here leans on you. If something happened to you, it would tangle every part of this for me. Moses and I are enough. Though in all honesty, Moses alone is probably enough. Do not question my word on it again."

The old knight lowered his head and asked his pardon, and with that the two of them set off for the mountain.

They both carried high cores, and it showed in the plainest way there was. A man awakened and strong runs faster and leaps farther than any ordinary body could dream of, and these two ran and leapt on a level of their own. Ground that would have cost a caravan the better part of a morning fell away beneath them in minutes, the blizzard tearing past, the slope blurring under their feet until the mine rose up in front of them.

They pulled up on a cliff overlooking it from above, and there they crouched to read the thing before they touched it.

Below them, at the shattered mouth of the mine, the monsters moved.

Trafalgar's first thought was that someone had carved men out of the mountain itself and taught the carvings to walk.

They stood upright, more or less, on two legs and something like a man's frame, but stretched taller than any man and wrong in every proportion, limbs a hand longer than they should have been, joints bent a degree past where a body should stop.

Their hide was the grey-white of old glacier ice, and it did not so much wear frost as grow it, rime crusting along the ridges of shoulder and spine in blades and spurs. Where a face should have been there was a long, narrow skull and a pair of eyes lit from within, a pale burning blue that threw no warmth, only cold, the exact cold of the light off deep ice.

They did not shiver in the blizzard. They were a part of it. The wind that would have flattened a timber house broke around them as though it knew its own, and the snow that piled on everything else simply became more of them.

'Ice-born, of a sort,' Trafalgar noted, cataloguing without a flicker. 'And that is only the common stock.'

Because they were not all the same, and that was the piece that told him Gerhardt had spoken plainly the night before.

Through the taller grey ones moved lower forms on all fours, lean and quick, their spines lined with the same frozen spurs, circling the mouth of the shaft like hounds that had forgotten how to be dogs.

Farther back, half in the dark of the entrance, something bigger shifted its weight, too large to read fully from here, throwing off a haze of cold that bent the falling snow around it. A dozen sorts of thing, exactly as the old man had said, and every last one of them stronger than anything a routine outbreak had any business producing.

They held the mouth of the mine the way a garrison holds a gate, patient, unbothered, turned inward toward the deep at their backs as much as outward toward the world. Whatever waited below, they were keeping it, and they had all the cold patience in the world to keep it with.

Trafalgar took the measure of every one of them, counted them, marked the fast ones and the heavy one and the choke points of broken timber they would try to funnel him through, and felt nothing move in him but the quiet arithmetic of a hunt.

Beside him, Moses spoke low, his breath not even fogging. "Your call, young master. I can open the door, or you can."

Trafalgar rose from his crouch, drew his coat against the wind, and looked down at the grey things waiting on the ice.

"Time to go down."