SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 732: What a Captain Is For

The grey things learned, in their dim and freezing way, that the larger of the two intruders would not be moved, and they did what cornered numbers have always done. They threw the whole of themselves at him at once.

Moses let them come. This was the work he had been forged for, and there was a look close to peace on his face as the tide closed over his head. He swept the greatsword level through the press in front of him [Demonic Warblade Art: Second Fang, Cleaving Tide], and a wide crescent of purple pressure rode off the edge and kept traveling long after the steel had stopped, shearing through a full rank of the ice-born at the waist and folding a dozen of them into the snow in one pass. The ones behind clambered over the ruin of the ones in front, and he met them coming with the return swing.

When they tried to flank him, to pour around his sides and drown him from three directions at once, he drove the blade down into the frozen ground. The earth answered [Demonic Warblade Art: Third Fang, Gravewall].

A ridge of raw force erupted along the line of the strike, a wall of churned stone and howling pressure that pitched the flanking creatures off their feet and bought him the half breath he needed to turn and take the next wave head-on. He held the mouth of the mine the way a fortress gate holds a road. Nothing that came at him crossed the reach of that sword and lived to boast of it.

The tide tried him one more way. The runners, quicker than the rest, gathered at the edges and came at Moses all at once, a dozen of them converging low to drag him down by the legs the way hounds pull down something larger than themselves.

Moses set his stance and did not give a single pace [Demonic Warblade Art: Warbringer's Stand]. A dense shell of demonic pressure closed over him, and the first runners to reach it broke against that pressure as though they had flung themselves at a wall of iron, their charges stopped dead, their frozen frames cracking under the recoil. He carved them apart at his leisure while they reeled, and the mouth of the mine held.

Across the field, Trafalgar found himself ringed.

A dozen of the tall grey ones had broken off to bring him down by sheer weight, closing the circle from every angle at once, and for the span of a breath there was no open line out of it in any direction.

Good, he thought. He had been looking for an excuse to stop paying himself out in small change.

He planted his feet at the center of the ring and let Maledicta come fully awake. What followed was less a run of separate strikes than one unbroken dance [Morgain's Requiem]. Six cuts flowed out of him in a spiral, each throwing a curved black wave off the blade, and the shadows raked outward in every direction at once, tearing through the ring of ice-born where they stood.

The creatures came apart in a wheel of shattered grey and thin dark spray, every one of them opened by wounds that refused to close, and when the last curved shadow guttered out Trafalgar stood alone at the center of a circle of ruin with not one of the dozen left upright.

'Two years,' he thought, turning the blade once in his grip. 'It shows.'

At the back of the mine mouth, the big one finally moved.

It had held its ground through all of it, its hide plated in overlapping slabs of glacier ice, and when it came forward the ground took its weight in deep shuddering steps. It waded through its own dying kin without a glance at them, its attention nailed to Trafalgar alone, and the haze of cold pouring off its bulk bent the falling snow into curling white rivers around it.

'Armored. Heavy. It believes that hide is a wall.' Trafalgar catalogued the thing in the time it took to close half the gap between them. 'Let us correct that.'

He tested it first. A diagonal slash of compressed pressure ripped off Maledicta and caught the brute across the chest [Severing Fang], and where a lighter cut would have skated off those ice plates, this one bit deep, splitting the armored hide along a seam and leaving a thread of cutting pressure hanging in the wound behind the edge. The thing bellowed, the first true sound of pain the pack had made all morning, and hurled a fist the size of an ore cart at the place where he stood.

Trafalgar was not standing in it.

He read the swing in the roll of its shoulder and was already gone, sliding past the blow on a curved dash [Severance Step] that set him at the brute's flank, and the fist buried itself in the snow where he had been, deep enough to split the frozen ground. He came out of the dash into the opening it had torn for him and drove a strike up the creature's exposed side [Crosswind Edge], the cut riding faster for the movement behind it, raking a long tear through the gap in its armor before it could haul the arm back.

The brute was hurt now, and hurting made it reckless. It rounded on him faster than a thing that size had any right to, a backhand sweep of one armored arm meant to swat him out of the air, and this time he did not dodge so much as refuse it. He met the sweep with a rising cut into the already-open wound [Severing Fang], and the compressed pressure drove up through the split in its hide and forced the arm wide, the blow howling past a hand's breadth from his skull. The thing reeled, one arm hanging wrong, and for the first time it hesitated.