SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 731: Down the Slope

Trafalgar went off the cliff without a word, and Moses went with him.

They came down the broken slope in long bounds, and as he fell Trafalgar called his gear out of the empty air. Obsidian Wings poured over him from nothing, black plate knitting itself across his shoulders and arms between one stride and the next, and Maledicta formed in his grip an instant behind it, the hilt filling his hand as though it had never been anywhere else. To his side Moses reached into the air and closed a fist, and a greatsword answered the gesture, a slab of dark demonic steel longer than a tall man, hauled out of nowhere and laid across one shoulder as if it weighed no more than a walking stick.

Below them, the grey things at the mouth of the mine turned as one.

They had kept their patience through a month of grief and a mountain of the dead, and some instinct in them read the two figures coming down the slope as a threat of a wholly different order. The tall ice-born drew themselves upright.

The low four-legged ones flattened, the frozen spurs along their spines rising like hackles. A sound went up out of the pack, not a roar but a long grinding hiss, the noise a glacier makes when it splits somewhere deep and unseen.

Trafalgar hit the flat at the foot of the slope and did not slow.

The first of the tall ones reached for him with an arm that could have opened an ordinary man from throat to hip. He read the line of the blow before the limb had finished unfolding, shed a half step off the angle, and answered it.

A compressed wave of dark-blue mana tore off Maledicta and crossed the gap faster than the creature could recoil [Arc Slash], and it passed through the thing's middle without the slightest argument. The two halves fell already breaking into shards of grey ice, the pale light guttering out of its eyes before the pieces reached the snow.

He did not watch it drop. There were nine more inside a single breath of him, and he was already moving to the next.

To his left the ground jumped. Moses had waded into the thickest knot of them and did not trouble himself with footwork of any sort. He brought the greatsword down. The slope did not hear a cut. It heard a verdict [Demonic Warblade Art: First Fang Descent].

Purple demonic pressure came down folded into the edge, heavier than any flame or bolt of lightning, and where it fell three of the tall grey ones stopped existing as upright things, mashed flat into the ice before the steel ever reached them. Frost burst outward from the captain's boots in a white ring ten paces across, and the blast of it flung broken monster and powdered snow clear across the mouth of the mine.

'He was not overselling himself,' Trafalgar noted, taking a fourth creature apart at the shoulder as he slid past it. 'Moses on his own was very likely enough.'

None of which was going to keep Trafalgar from earning his own share of the work.

Two of the four-legged ones peeled off the pack and came at him low and fast, quicker than the tall grey ones by a wide stretch, jaws of jagged frost snapping for his legs from opposite sides at once. He let them commit to it. The world smeared sideways around him [Severance Step], and he came out of the blur standing in the gap between the two of them, where an instant earlier there had been only open air, their charges carrying them past the space he had vacated. Before either could correct its line he opened both across the flank on his way through [Crosswind Edge], two fast crossing cuts that rode the wind of his own motion, and the beasts spilled into the snow in a tangle of broken ice and thin dark blood.

The cold pressed at him from every direction, a raw bite that pulled at any skin the armor left bare and reached for the speed in his hands. He let the mountain's cold break against him and gave it no more of his attention than that.

Another of the tall ones lunged for his back while he was low from the last exchange. He did not turn to look. He read it in the drag of its feet through the snow and answered over his own shoulder without rising [Crosswind Edge], a fast crossing cut from an angle no ordinary swing could have found, and the creature folded around the wound and came apart before it hit the ground. He had fought in worse cold, in worse company, against worse odds, and he found the rhythm of it the way a smith finds his place at a familiar forge.

The pack had numbers, and it used them. Where one of the tall ones fell, two more clambered over the wreck of it to take the space, and the four-legged runners darted in and out at the edges, worrying at the ground around both men like wolves that had learned patience from something colder than hunger. It would have swamped a squad of ordinary soldiers in under a minute. It broke against the two of them like surf against a cliff.

Trafalgar caught a runner mid-lunge and split it lengthwise [Arc Slash] without breaking stride, pivoted off the kill, and cut a second tall one from hip to collar as it came in behind.

'They are strong,' he admitted, straightening at last. 'Far stronger than any brood this mountain should have produced. A normal garrison never had a chance.'

That was the piece that kept nagging at him even here, even with his blood up and the snow filling with the dead. These were not the vermin the highland miners put down between shifts. Something had made them into this. But that was a question for the deep. Up here there was only the work, and the work was going quickly.

At the back of the mine mouth, where the dark of the shaft began, the big one had not yet moved. It only watched, a hulking mass of frozen muscle half again the height of the tall grey ones, waiting with a patience the smaller creatures did not have. Trafalgar marked it, filed it, and kept killing. It would keep.