SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 751: What's Left

Moses's laughter rolled around the dead cavern and faded, and after it there was nothing left to fill the space at all.

That was what struck Trafalgar first, standing in the wreck of the nest. The quiet. For hours and more the deep had been all grinding hiss and shriek and the crash of his own strikes, a wall of noise he'd stopped hearing because it never let up. Now it was gone, and what took its place was the small steady drip of meltwater running off shattered crystal, and his own breath, and nothing else. The mountain had gone quiet around what he'd done to it.

He let his eyes travel the ruin while his heart came down.

The hollow had become a graveyard of crystal. Slush and a dark drying red spread across the whole basin, littered with the scoured leavings of a brood and the great split blocks of a queen.

She lay where she'd dropped, a mountain tipped onto its side, frost still smoking off her in thin lazy sheets, the inner light dead behind her eyes.

The crater he'd been driven into gaped in the far wall. Pillars leaned broken where Sunder had torn through them, and over all of it the mana crystal glowed on, though weaker now, its pulse gone faint and slow with nothing left alive to gnaw at it.

The vein hung there in plain view, rich and bright and indifferent. The finest crystal in Morgain land, the thing two thousand men had died to reach, lying open at last and caring nothing for any of it.

'There it is,' he thought, worn out past giving the sight more than that. 'Worth a whole town, apparently.'

He let Maledicta go. The black blade dissolved out of his grip back into the dark it came from, and the plate of Obsidian Wings unmade itself off his frame a breath behind it, the small wings folding away last of all, until he stood in the cold in nothing but his undersuit and whatever the fight had left on him.

Which was plenty. Now that the killing was done and the mana of the place had quit pouring through him to hold him up, the bill came due all at once.

His legs ached down to the bone. Sweat had soaked him through and was going cold on his skin. He was streaked head to foot in blood, most of it the beast's and a fair share his own, and every breath dragged at a chest that had been thrown through a wall not long ago.

The endless rich mana that had knitted him back together mid-fight was a low hum now, no wound left to pour into, and the exhaustion it had held off all this while finally caught up with him. He didn't fight it. He'd earned every ounce.

'Broke a core, killed an Apex, and lifted a man's best technique off his shoulder, all before lunch,' he thought, dragging a bloody hand down his face. 'Even for me, that's a full morning.'

Across the basin, Moses had put his blade away and his composure back on with it, the laughter gone as though it had never slipped loose. The captain came across the churned frost toward him, unhurried, and stopped a few paces off to look him over the way a farrier eyes a horse that has just done something a horse should not be able to do.

"Sixth core," he said. It wasn't a question. "At nineteen, in the middle of a fight, against a thing over your head." He gave a slow nod, a weight of grudging respect in it he didn't bother to dress up. "That'll put a few whispers to rest back home. Not all of them. But a few."

"I'll take a few." Trafalgar's voice came out rougher than he'd meant it to. "It's more than I woke up with."

Moses's gaze went to the dark spot at Trafalgar's hip where the blade had vanished, and held there a beat, and Trafalgar knew precisely what was coming.

"Later," the captain said. "When we're back and you're on your feet, you're going to tell me how you did that."

He didn't say which that. Trafalgar met the look and gave him nothing but a tired shrug, one that said plainly he had no intention of answering and that they both knew it. Moses weighed that for a breath, and let it lie, exactly as he had the first time.

"Later," Trafalgar agreed, which meant never, and they both let the word stand where it fell.

Neither of them touched the queen. There was work in her yet, a mountain of it, hide and crystal and Apex-grade stuff worth a fortune to whoever carved it loose, and there was the whole story of the nest to haul up into the light with them, the fed beasts and the swept floor and the hand behind all of it. But the digging was for the miners, and the weighing was for Valttair, and none of it was a job for a man running on fumes at the bottom of a mountain. It could keep.

"Come on, young master." Moses tipped his head toward the long dark of the shaft climbing away above them. "There's a town up there that's been holding its breath since dawn. Let's go tell them they can let it out."

They started up.

The climb ran longer coming than it had going, the way climbs always do with the fight bled out of a man's legs, and Trafalgar took it one slope at a time and let the deep cold drop away behind him by degrees. The blue glow thinned. The air shed its animal reek. The frozen miles unspooled in reverse, past the caved floor and the choked throats and the drifts of grey dead, until far ahead the black finally paled into something that was not crystal at all, thin and raw and real.

Daylight.

He walked up out of the mountain and into it, cold wind hitting his face, the white glare off the snow forcing his eyes to slits after so long down in the dark.

And they were all there.

Gerhardt at the front of them, spear in hand, and behind him a crowd of miners packed against the shoulder of rock where they'd been told to wait, every last face turned toward the mouth of the mine.

They'd been waiting since morning for one of two things to walk out of that dark, and now one had, and it was their lord, on his own two feet, soaked to the skin in drying blood.

For one long beat nobody moved, and nobody made a sound, and Gerhardt only stared at the ruined, bloodied figure of the man coming out of the mountain, with no way yet of knowing whether he was looking at a victory or a disaster.