SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 734: Descent [I]

The mouth of the mine swallowed the wind in three steps, and past that there was only the dark, and Trafalgar walking down into it alone.

He did not need a torch. His eyes took the black and made a grey twilight of it, every edge of the tunnel laid out plain to him where another man would have groped along the wall with a hand and a prayer.

The crystals lit the way whether he needed them to or not. They ran through the rock in thick veins, blue shading into violet, and they threw a cold glow across the broken tunnel that pulsed faintly as he passed, as though the mountain kept a slow heartbeat somewhere under all that stone. He had seen mana crystal before. He had never seen it grown this dense. Down here the veins ran fat and close-packed and bright enough to read by, the highest grade he had laid eyes on, the sort of seam a house went to war to hold.

'And this is what they gutted a city to reach,' he thought.

That was the part that would not leave him be. Two thousand men dead. A mining town wiped off the mountain. A vein of the finest crystal in Morgain land left choking on its own dead. Every step he took carried him past more of the ruin of it, and the ruin told its own story in a language he had learned to read a long time ago.

The tunnel was wrecked in ways a cave-in did not wreck a tunnel. Support beams lay snapped and flung aside rather than crushed straight down. Ore carts had been torn off their rails and folded like tin, the rails themselves ripped up and twisted into forms iron does not take on its own. Dried blood blacked the stone in long smears where men had been dragged, and the tools they had dropped running lay scattered and rusting where they fell. He crouched once beside a pick half-buried in frost and turned it over. The haft had been bitten straight through.

'Beasts do not tidy up after themselves,' he thought, rising. 'And they do not choose the richest seam on the mountain to make a nest of, out of every hole in this range. This did not happen. Someone made it happen.'

He kept the thought where it lived, cold and quiet, and did not let it run any further than that. He had no proof yet, only a pattern, and he knew exactly whose hand liked to work in patterns like this one. Naming it in his own head changed nothing. Naming it out loud, on a suspicion, changed less. He filed it with the rest and kept moving down, and the further he went the more the tunnels stopped looking like something men had dug and started looking like something that had been lived in by whatever had taken them.

He was not left to walk in peace for long.

They came at him in the dark the way the outer ones had come at him in the snow, and down here in the close stone they had the advantage of walls to crawl on. A pair of the four-legged runners peeled off a fissure overhead and dropped for his shoulders.

He heard the scrape of frozen claw on rock before they moved and was already turning, Maledicta answering his hand out of the air, and he opened the first across the skull before its feet touched the ground [Arc Slash] and took the second out of the air on the backswing [Crosswind Edge]. They came apart into grey shards that skittered down the tunnel and went dark.

Farther on, three of the tall grey ones tried to bottle him in a narrow stretch, wedging themselves across the passage to hold him while more came up from behind. He did not give them the time. He blurred forward through the gap they had left too wide [Severance Step], came out among them where they had meant to keep him out, and cut the three down in a single flowing pass before the ones behind had closed half the distance. He was through the choke and past their dead while the frost was still falling off his blade.

'They are learning to use the ground,' he noted, flicking dark blood off the edge. 'Slowly. Not fast enough.'

A few years ago this would have been a hard night's work and an honest chance of dying in it. Now it was closer to a walk taken at a brisk pace, interrupted now and again by something that wanted killing.

He could feel the difference in his own hands, in how little he had to spend to end each thing, in how far ahead of every strike his eyes already ran. He had not stopped to admire the change before. There had not been time. Down here in the glowing dark, with nothing but the work and the walls, he let himself register it for exactly one breath, and then set it down and went on.

He rounded a bend where the tunnel folded hard to the left, and the fright caught him before the thought did.

One of the tall grey ones stood pressed into the corner of the turn, motionless, waiting, close enough that he was inside its reach the instant he came around the stone. He did not decide to act. His body decided for him. Maledicta was in both hands and moving before his mind had finished flinching, the air along the edge beginning to hum as he poured everything he had into the strike, and he brought a diagonal ascending cut up through the creature that split the space it stood in [Morgain's Last Dusk].

There was nothing left to prevent from regenerating. There was hardly anything left at all. The finisher tore the ice-born apart from hip to shoulder and kept going, opening a bright gash up the tunnel wall behind where it had stood, and the crystal veins there flared and shattered and rained blue-violet light down onto the frost.

Trafalgar lowered the blade and let out a slow breath through his nose.

'Overkill,' he admitted, mildly disgusted with himself. 'That was a training-hall reflex against a single startled beast. I have used less on things ten times its size.'

It had been the surprise of it, that was all. One thing waiting in a corner in the dark, and two years of instinct had answered a paper cut with a guillotine. Better to waste the effort than to guess wrong and bleed for the guess. He would not lose sleep over the extravagance.

The noise, though.

The strike had not been quiet. The crack of splitting stone and the crash of shattering crystal had rolled off down the tunnel ahead of him, into all that waiting dark, into whatever else was down there keeping the deep. He held where he stood and listened, and felt the mountain listen back.

'Please tell me,' he thought, 'that nothing was awake to hear that.'