SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 750: By His Own Hand

He moved, and the world had slowed down to let him.

That was the first thing Ascend handed him, and it nearly made him laugh. The Deepmother swung for him the instant he came off his heels, that same foreleg that had thrown him through a wall a few minutes before, and this time he watched it come the way a man watches a door swing shut, with all the room in the world to step around it. He was under her guard before the blow finished falling.

Everything was lighter. His body, the blade, the air itself. Where he'd been dragging Maledicta through her hide by brute force an hour ago, now the sword went where he looked before he'd finished the thought of looking, and it bit.

That was the second thing, and it rewrote the whole fight. His opening cut went into the great flank wound and did not skate shallow across the crystal the way every strike had before. It sank. It carved. The Ascend behind it drove the edge down through plating that had turned his best blows an hour ago, and a slab of living crystal the size of a cart sheared off her side and burst on the frost.

She screamed, and there was something new under the fury this time. Not command. Alarm.

'Feel that?' he thought, already sliding off her flank as the counter came. 'So do I. You're not the biggest thing in this cave anymore.'

He'd been told the jumps were not even, and he understood it now with his whole body. The climb from Origin up to Prime had come in steps, one core to the next, each a shade more than the last. This was not that. The gap from the fifth to the sixth was no step at all. It was a cliff, a whole tier of power poured into him at once, and every jump past it would be the same again. He had crossed out of one kind of thing and into another, and the beast that had led him around this cavern by the nose was about to learn exactly what that meant.

So he showed her.

He stopped giving ground and started taking it. Where she had herded him minutes ago, now he closed her angles, faster than her, always inside her reach, his strikes falling heavier and quicker than any Prime core could have swung them. He put an inverted crescent through the joint of her good foreleg [Morgain's Final Crescent] and felt the joint break. He wrapped the blade in mana and drove a line straight up the center of her chest [Morgain's Linebreaker], and the cutting wave split her open where an hour before it would have scratched her.

She fought back. She was Apex, wounded and cornered and mad, and even now that kept her deadly. She threw her whole ruined weight into driving him off, claws and bulk and that lashing crystalline tail coming at him from everywhere at once.

He cut through all of it. He didn't dodge the tail this time. He met it with [Morgain's Requiem], six black arcs spinning off him at once, and the sweep of them shore the end of the tail away in a spray of shards and carried on into her flank.

When she reared to bring her weight down on him the old way, he didn't roll clear. He stepped in and drove [Morgain's Last Dusk] up through the softer crystal of her throat, the finisher tearing deep, and rode the recoil back out before her bulk hit the stone where he'd stood.

She was coming apart, and he was barely breathing hard.

No tricks in any of it. No caving floors, no borrowed weakness he hadn't earned, no clever use of the mine. Just a man who had been a rung beneath her an hour ago and was beneath her no longer, taking apart the thing that had nearly killed him on nothing but his own two hands and the new weight behind them. This was the fight he'd asked Moses to leave him. He was finally having it.

She had one last thing in her. Cornered and dying, the Deepmother quit defending and simply threw everything left at him at once, a final avalanche of claw and mass and desperation that would have flattened a house. For half a breath even Ascend was not room enough, and he felt the wind of a claw graze past his cheek close enough to burn. The surge spent itself, and she was open, and slower than she had ever been, and he knew it was finished.

So he decided to finish it, and reached for the thing he was never meant to have.

He gave himself the room, one hard push clear of her, and planted his feet on the churned frost in the middle of the wrecked nest, and brought Maledicta up and poured everything the new core would give him down into the edge.

The blade went dark.

It stopped giving the crystal-light back at all and began to drink it, the mana folding along the steel dense and low and heavy as a held breath. The frost at his boots crept toward the blade. The hum of the whole cavern dropped an octave.

He'd felt this exact thing try to crack his skull the first time, watching another man swing it. Now it poured out of him as though it had always been his.

[Sunder.]

He brought it down.

A single flat wave of pure cutting force ripped off the stroke and swept the basin end to end, low and wide and without mercy, the same annihilating cut that had scoured her hundreds off the stone.

Only now it was hers to swallow. It struck the Deepmother across the whole width of her and did not slow, shearing through crystal and bulk and everything the mountain had grown into her across all those long feeding years, and tore out the far side of her in a roar of grey and a storm of shards that rang every pillar in the cave.

For a breath she stood there, cloven, the light guttering out of a hundred seams at once.

Then the Deepmother came down.

She fell like what she was, a mountain that had lost its footing, that vast crystalline bulk toppling sideways and crashing into the floor of her own nest hard enough to buckle the stone and hurl a wave of frost across the cavern.

Pillars that had stood since long before the town above had a name cracked and went over in her wake. The whole mountain shuddered around the death of the thing at its heart.

The pale fire behind her eyes flickered, dimmed, and went out, and the grinding hum that had been the pulse of the deep since he first walked into it stopped. There was only the drip of melt off shattered crystal, two men standing in the ruin, and quiet.

She was dead, and he'd done it himself.

Across the basin, Moses was staring at him. The captain had watched the whole finish without a word, arms folded, and somewhere in the last ten seconds his composure had cracked right down the middle.

His eyes were wide, actually wide, an expression Trafalgar had never once caught on that weathered face, and he was looking at the dark blade in the young master's hand as though it had grown a second head.

"No fucking shit," Moses breathed.

It broke out of him a heartbeat later, rough and disbelieving and delighted all at once. "He's seen it one time. One. And he's already swinging it." He tipped his head back, and a great bark of laughter rolled up out of him and knocked around the dead queen's tomb. "Ahhahahaha. Gods above, the envy. The pure and honest envy of it. I bled forty years for that stroke, and he lifts it right off my shoulder on a single look."