SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 748: A Fraction of Him

Trafalgar came the rest of the way out of the wall onto one knee and stayed there, chest heaving, and let the cavern pour itself into him.

That was the mercy of this place. The mana hung so thick in the air that his body could gulp it down faster than the fight had spent it, and even slumped in a crater with his ribs singing he felt the well filling back, the ache draining out of his arm, the torn edges of him knitting closed. A minute. Give him a minute and he'd be whole. So he took it, and while he took it, he watched.

He braced for the pain first. Last time the captain had reached for the bottom of himself, the sight of it had tried to split Trafalgar's skull, his gift clawing to carve the technique into him whether he wanted it or not.

His head stayed quiet, and that told him something before Moses had thrown a single stroke. The captain wasn't reaching deep this time. Whatever he meant to do lived close enough to Trafalgar's own reach that his gift could watch it without tearing at him, which meant the old man had left the bottom of himself firmly where it was.

Then the Deepmother came for the new thing in her nest, and Trafalgar got the difference between them laid out in full.

She hit Moses the way she'd been hitting him moments before, the whole crushing weight of her behind a foreleg that could throw a man through stone. Trafalgar had spent everything he owned not to be where those blows fell. Moses didn't give an inch. He set his feet, a shell of dense purple pressure folded shut around him [Warbringer's Stand], and her strike broke against it like surf against a cliff, splashing force in every direction and shifting him not at all.

She reared back, and he answered without hurry.

His blade came down in a single dropping stroke, and the demonic pressure folded along its edge crushed the crystal of her shoulder before the steel even reached it [First Fang Descent], frost blasting from his boots in a ring across the churned floor. She shrieked and swung. He was already turning inside the swing, and a wide half-moon of purple force peeled off his edge and kept traveling after it [Cleaving Tide], plowing a long trench through her flank at the height of a man's chest.

Trafalgar watched from the broken stone and felt something close to awe.

Everything that had nearly killed him, Moses treated as furniture. Her size, her weight, the rank she held over the both of them, the ground she'd turned against him. None of it reached the man.

Where Trafalgar had needed to be perfect in every half-second only to keep breathing, the captain stood in the open, let her spend herself against him, and carved her apart at his leisure. This was not a better swordsman winning a hard fight. This was a grown man disciplining an animal.

'That,' Trafalgar thought, dragging blood off his lip, 'is the size of the gap. Prime to whatever he is. I fought her with everything I own. He's fighting her with his off hand.'

And he was. That was the part that sank in slowly, watching. Moses wasn't extended. He wasn't near it. Every stroke came measured and unhurried, spent from the top of a reserve he had not touched the floor of, and it was more than an Apex beast could survive standing in front of. Had the old man wanted her dead, one turn of that blade would have done it.

He didn't turn it that way.

He'd watched that same blade take the outer brute's head and half its shoulder in one wheeling pass, back at the mouth of the mine. One stroke like that across the queen's neck and this whole fight became a corpse on the frost.

Moses kept it holstered in his grip and used everything around it instead, and the withholding said more than any of the blows did. This was what mercy looked like from something far enough above you, a hand strong enough to choose down to the inch how much of you to leave standing.

Trafalgar caught the instant he understood what he was really watching, and it changed the whole scene. Moses had her at his mercy, and instead of ending her, he was working her. A cut to open the great flank wound wider. A stroke across the tendon of a hind leg to bleed the speed out of her. A crushing blow to the jaw that killed the cunning she'd only just gathered and drove her back into blind pain. He wasn't slaying the queen. He was dismantling her, piece by careful piece, and leaving the pieces alive.

'He's cooking her for me,' Trafalgar thought, and couldn't decide whether to be grateful or insulted, and settled on both. 'Wearing her down to something a Prime core can put in the ground. Not a cut more than that. Enough to make her killable, and not one stroke past it, so she'll have teeth left when he hands her over.'

It was a strange thing to watch a man do him a kindness with a blade, and stranger yet to know exactly why. This was the whole reason Valttair had sent the captain along. Not to kill the monsters for him. To stand back, and let him bleed, and step in only far enough to keep the lesson from killing the student, and set the table so the student could finish what he'd started. The old man was doing precisely that, down to the inch.

When she tried to swing wide around him, Moses drove his blade into the floor and a ridge of stone and force ripped up beneath her [Gravewall], flipping the front of her bulk into the air and slamming her onto her side in a crash that shook grit from the ceiling. She thrashed there, dazed, one foreleg buckled under her, the fight in her scattered loose again.

She was open. She was leaking light from a dozen wounds that would not close. And she was still, without any doubt at all, deadly.

Perfect.

Moses stepped back off her and let the blade rest, not so much as winded, and half turned his head toward the crater without taking his eyes off the wounded mountain.

"She's about as ready as she'll get, young master." A dry note ran under it. "Much more and I'll spoil the fun for you."

Trafalgar was already on his feet. His ribs had quit screaming, the well inside him ran full to the brim, deeper than it had started the day, the rich dark mana of the place having poured him back together while he watched a master work. Maledicta rose into his hand out of nothing. The blood on his face had dried, and every ache the wall had put in him was gone.

He looked at the reeling, ruined, lethal thing Moses had laid out for him, and climbed up out of the broken stone.

"My turn again."