SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 745: Sunder

They went down into the nest together, boots crunching frost and shattered shell, and the blue-violet glow of the place swallowed them whole.

The clutches spread out below in a wide crystal-lined basin, and the soft-shelled young crawled thick across every inch of it, hundreds of them, chewing at the shards their dead elders had left and hissing as the two men dropped into their world. At the far end, over the largest of the broods, the Deepmother lifted her vast crystalline head and watched them come.

Moses walked out a few paces ahead and stopped. "Stay back for this one, young master." He rolled the great warblade off his shoulder and down into both hands. "You'll want the room."

Trafalgar stepped back and let him have it, curious in spite of himself. He'd fought at the captain's side for two days and watched him fold whole ranks under with a swing, but a swing was still just a swing. He had not yet seen the man reach for the bottom of himself. He was about to.

Moses set his feet, and the air changed.

Mana poured off the black blade in a way Trafalgar hadn't felt from him yet, dense and low and heavy as a held breath, gathering along the edge until the steel drank the crystal-light and gave nothing back. The frost on the ground crept toward it. The hum of the cavern dropped an octave. Even the young sensed it, some animal part of them going quiet across the whole basin at once.

"Sunder."

He said the word plainly, without ceremony, and brought the blade down.

Trafalgar had no name for what came off it. A single flat wave of pure cutting force tore out of the stroke and swept the basin end to end, low and wide and without mercy, and it did not so much kill the hundreds of young as erase them.

Whole swaths of the brood came apart between one breath and the next, shell and frost and body scoured off the stone in a spreading roar of grey. And the wave did not stop at the clutches. It ran on across the floor of the nest and struck the Deepmother full across her lower bulk, and where nothing on this whole mountain had left a mark on her, the old captain's single stroke tore a long deep wound clear through the living crystal of her hide.

The mine screamed with her. Stone groaned overhead, dust sifting down in sheets, the whole mountain flinching around the blow. It held, the way Moses had promised it would, and when the roar guttered out there was almost nothing left of the brood but scoured rock and a drifting haze.

The Deepmother shrieked.

It came out of her high and piercing and mad, a sound with no throat's warmth anywhere in it, closer to glass tearing than any beast's cry, and it drove needles into Trafalgar's skull and rang down every tunnel of the mountain at once. Even Moses narrowed his eyes against it.

And that was the moment Trafalgar's own head tried to split itself open.

It hit him with no warning at all, a white spike of agony driven straight in behind his eyes, and the world went bright and wrong. Something moved in his skull without his leave. The stroke he'd just watched, the old man's stroke, was writing itself into him, cutting itself into his mind thread by thread and burning out whatever lay in its path, and it hurt in a way he had felt exactly once before, on the far side of Valttair's idea of training. His nose ran hot. He tasted iron. When he blinked, red came away on his lashes, and a thin warmth traced from one ear down the line of his jaw.

He locked his knees and stayed on his feet. He would not go down for this. He clamped his teeth and rode it, breathing through the blood, and let the thing finish carving itself home.

A pane of familiar blue lit the dark behind the pain.

[You have learned a skill: Sunder]

'...OH SHIT! There it is,' he thought, through the fog of it. 'It's been a long time since something like this happened to me; I've learned Moses's strongest skill... I can't believe it.'

Because it hadn't happened before. Days at the captain's shoulder, watching him cut, watching those fangs of his open whole ranks, and his gift had never so much as itched.

He'd read every one of the man's swings on sight, matched them in his own head, filed them away without a drop of blood spilled. He understood now why. In the raw craft of the blade, in form and edge and instinct, the two of them stood on the same rung, and that much his talent could take in stride.

The skills were another animal. Moses's techniques lived a full tier above his own, Sunder most of all, and reaching up to steal a thing that far over his head had very nearly cracked his skull open to make it fit.

He filed that away too, under the blood, and did not miss what it meant. He was holding the old man's strongest stroke now, the same one that had just laid open the single thing on this mountain nothing else could touch. When the time came to put her in the ground, he would not have to wonder how.

"You're bleeding."

Moses had turned, the great blade lowered, and stood looking at the red on his face. There was no alarm in it, only a question he hadn't quite decided to ask.

Trafalgar dragged a gauntlet across his mouth and it came away dark. "The pressure off that thing." He tipped his head at the drifting haze where the brood had been, holding his voice flat and bored. "Rattled something loose. It's nothing."

The captain held his eyes a beat past what the answer was worth. He knew better, plainly, whatever he meant to do with knowing it, and Trafalgar could all but watch the man decide the boy's secrets were the boy's to keep. He let it go, and turned back toward the wounded mountain at the end of the cavern.

"As you say."

The haze thinned between them and the far wall and drifted off, and the basin lay empty of everything that had crawled across it. The hundreds were gone, scoured off the world in a single word. Only she was left.

The Deepmother hauled her bulk half around to face them, that long wound weeping light down her flank, her shriek fallen to a low grinding note that shivered the frost off the pillars. Her eyes came down and fixed on the two small things standing in the wreck of her children, and she began, very slowly, to move.

Trafalgar dragged the back of his hand under his nose one last time, spat red onto the stone, and brought Maledicta up level. The pain was already fading. What it had put in his head was not.

"My turn," he said.