SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 752: Let It Out

For a breath the whole crowd held where it was, caught between hope and dread, not one of them daring to be the first to guess.

Gerhardt broke first, and came forward, and the words tumbled out of him half in relief and half in fear. "Oh, my lord. You're all right." His old eyes ran over the blood and the exhaustion and found the man whole beneath them. "Thank the deeps, I'm glad to see you on your feet. How did it go down there?"

Trafalgar dragged in a breath of the cold air and gave it to them plain, because they'd earned plain.

"It's done. All of it." He let that reach the back of the crowd before he went on. "You can go down and get to your work now. There shouldn't be a single thing left alive in that mountain that wants you dead." A tired, dry edge crept into it. "But if something slipped off into a side tunnel while I wasn't looking, you'll have the captain down there with you. Nothing's getting past him."

It took a breath to land, and land it did, all at once.

The dread that had weighed on this settlement since the wave broke came off it like a held breath finally let go. Somebody near the back made a rough choked sound. Somebody else started laughing, the loose, disbelieving laugh of a man who'd braced for the worst and been handed the opposite. A cheer went up, ragged at the start and whole by the end, spears and picks thrust against the pale sky, and the sound of it rolled down off the mountain toward the town below.

Gerhardt didn't cheer. His jaw worked, his eyes went bright, and he gripped the haft of his spear like it was the one thing holding him upright. "Two thousand," he said, low, only for Trafalgar. "And you walked back up out of it. Both of you." He shook his head slowly. "I'll not forget this, my lord. None of us will."

"Forget the part where I bled all over your mountain, if you can manage it." Trafalgar's mouth twitched, too worn out for a proper smile. "Keep the rest."

That startled a wet laugh out of the old man.

Moses came up out of the mine mouth behind him, unhurried as ever, not a mark on him that hadn't been there at dawn, and the miners' noise dropped a notch at the sight of the captain. He looked the gathered crew over with the flat assessing eye of a man counting tools.

"Right." His voice carried across the slope without effort. "The thing's dead, but a dead mine is still a mine, and there's a season of loose stone and bad footing down there on top of a queen's worth of carcass to strip. You work in pairs. You don't wander off alone, and you keep me in sight." He jerked his chin toward the dark. "I'll walk the deep with you while you haul it out. Anything's twitching down there yet, I'll deal with it before it deals with you."

That put the steel back into them. A monster hunter of the First Squadron standing watch over the work was worth more than any promise, and Trafalgar watched the last of the dread bleed out of the crew and something like purpose fill the space it left.

Gerhardt was already sorting them into pairs before Moses had finished, the old foreman settling back into the rhythm of his job like a man pulling on a coat he knew by feel.

They'd find it for themselves, in time. Down in the dark, once they got past the carcass and into the tunnels, they'd turn up what he'd already read in the stone, the staked bones and the old blood and the swept floors, the fingerprints of a hand that had done all this on purpose.

Better it came up out of the ground in their own hands than out of his mouth. Men believed what they dug up with their own shovels. He'd let the mine tell them, gather the proof when they carried it into the light, and lay the whole ugly picture in front of Valttair once there was something solid to put on the table.

But that was tomorrow's problem, and half a dozen others besides. Right now Trafalgar had exactly one thing left in him, and it was the walk to a bed.

"The captain has it," he told Gerhardt, already turning downhill. "Send word to the town if you need me. Otherwise, don't. I'm going to go fall over for a while."

Gerhardt's face creased with worry. "You'll want someone to see you down, my lord, in your state. And a healer, and hot water, and..."

"I'll want a door that closes and nobody on the other side of it." He softened it with a look back. "I mean that kindly. It's been a long morning. Point me at a room and forget I exist until I come and find you."

The old man knew better than to argue with a lord who'd just cleared his mountain. He sent a boy running ahead to ready a room, pressed a fur-lined coat on Trafalgar that he didn't refuse, and let him go with a bow deeper than any highland foreman owed a soul.

Trafalgar walked down off the mountain alone, the cheering thinning behind him, the town's lights coming up small and gold in the blue shadow of the valley. Every step cost him something he no longer had.

His body had run on the mine's borrowed mana the whole day, and now, with the vein at his back and the last of that flood draining out of him, the full weight of everything he'd done since dawn came down and rode his shoulders the entire way in.

He reached the settlement in a fog. Someone walked him to a small plain room over the common hall, and he caught the vague warmth of a fire already lit in it, and a bed, and a door that shut. He peeled the blood-stiff undersuit off and got himself horizontal, and the mattress rose up to meet him like the floor of the deep.

He was asleep before he'd finished deciding to be.

So he never heard it begin. Down in the settlement under his window, as word ran house to house that the lord had killed the thing in the mountain and the mine was theirs again, the fear that had owned the place for a season started, quietly, to turn into something else entirely. By the time he woke, it would be standing at his door.