SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 790: Fifty Percent

"Good." Dravok's voice came low and even over the edge of his blade. "I like that you've focused. It'll make you worth the trouble of training." His weight dropped another fraction into the stance. "Take this one now."

Trafalgar set his feet, brought Maledicta up in both hands, and watched.

He saw the whole of it. That was the strange part. There was nothing hidden in what Dravok did, no blur, no speed his eyes couldn't follow. The old man simply drew his plain sword back and brought it down in a single stroke, a plain overhead cut, the sort of thing a first-year student learns in his opening week.

But the stroke didn't feel like it was cutting the air. It felt like it was cutting the world.

It pulled something loose in Trafalgar's memory, a thing he hadn't reached for in years. His first days in this life, standing in Morgain territory as a boy, watching Valttair take a thirty-metre beast and part it straight down the middle with one motion. Watching the clouds above the strike split and slide away to either side, opened like water, because the space they hung in had been divided along with everything else. This was that. The nearest thing his mind could put beside it.

And even that comparison sold it short. The Valttair he'd seen do that had been years ago. This was worse. This was higher. The gulf between them was not one Trafalgar had words for. An hour ago he'd believed he understood roughly where the ceiling of power sat in this world. He'd built the whole idea of it around Valttair, around Paradox, around the strongest thing he had ever stood near. Dravok had just reached up past every part of that with a beginner's cut and shown him the idea was a child's drawing.

He met it head on anyway. There was nothing else to do, and running was not in him.

The cut fell.

It was simple.

It was a movement anyone could have copied.

And what stood behind that movement broke every rule of what Trafalgar had believed a sword could do, a weight and a finality poured into a single ordinary stroke that his whole understanding of combat bent and cracked trying to hold. He didn't so much block it as stand beneath it and refuse to move. The force went through Maledicta, through his arms, through the floor, through him, and for one blinding instant it felt as though the cut had passed straight through the middle of him as well, and only politely declined to finish the job.

His knees went out from under him.

He didn't lose consciousness. His eyes stayed open, fixed forward, and he was aware of the black ground coming up to meet his hands and of the ringing that filled his skull, but his body had simply stopped answering him, dropped where it stood as though every string in it had been cut at once. Maledicta slipped from his fingers and dissolved back into motes on the floor beside him. He knelt there, upright and blinking and utterly unable to move, a warm line of blood running from the corner of his mouth.

For a moment nothing in the great black space made a sound.

"Oh." Dravok lowered his blade, and something that was almost approval crossed his scarred face. "You've dropped. And yet you met it head on all the same. You didn't flinch off the line, didn't turn away from it." He nodded slowly. "You have gone well past anything I expected of you."

Across the way, Rhosyn and Caelvyrn were already on their feet.

"You didn't kill him, did you?" Caelvyrn called, and for once there was a genuine edge under the lazy voice. "He owes me a debt still. You can't go killing him before he's paid it."

Rhosyn didn't answer either of them. She was already crossing the ground toward Trafalgar, fast, and she dropped to a knee at his side and took his face in one hand, turning it toward her, reading him the way she read everything. He was alive. He was breathing, and his eyes tracked her, and there was no worse damage on him than she'd feared. But the blood at his mouth told its own story, the kind that came from something torn on the inside rather than out, and her expression tightened at the sight of it.

She looked back over her shoulder at Dravok.

"Could you not have held your power back a little?"

"I did." Dravok let his sword break apart into light and dropped his arm to his side. "I held a great deal of it back. That was half of what I have, Rhosyn, and you know it as well as anyone here." He said it without heat, a plain fact set down between them. "I could have shown him a tenth of it and he'd have felt nothing worth remembering. I gave him fifty, because he'd earned the sight of what he's actually walking toward. He met it standing. Most men twice his age would be a stain on the floor."

Rhosyn's jaw stayed tight, but she didn't argue the point, because there was nothing in it to argue.

"He's bleeding inside," she said instead.

"He is. The pool will see to it faster than anything you or I could do for him." Dravok tipped his chin toward the dark water sitting low in the black some way off. "Take him, if you're this worried. Put him in. He'll come out of it whole, and a good deal wiser than he went down."

Rhosyn was already sliding an arm under Trafalgar's shoulders.

He managed to move his eyes to her, and his mouth, and after a moment, with an effort that cost him, a few cracked words.

"...Fifty percent," he breathed. It wasn't a complaint. It was closer to wonder, and to the cold clear understanding of exactly how far he had to climb. "Right."

"Save it." Rhosyn got her feet under her and took his weight, and for all that she was worn to the bone she lifted him like he weighed nothing at all. "You can be impressed once you can stand up on your own."

And she carried him toward the pool.