SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 793: The Only One Who Knows

Days went by. Real ones, counted the slow way time passed in that black place, where a hundred of them would cost the world outside a single sunrise.

Trafalgar spent them the same way, over and over. He set his feet, pulled the mana down into his legs, and fired, and for hours at a stretch he did nothing else, chasing the [Godstep] one ragged burst at a time. His body paid for every attempt.

The technique asked more of his muscles and nerves than they'd ever been built to give, and after enough repetitions it came apart under him, joints screaming, the fine control gone, until a burst that should have carried him five metres dropped him on the ground in a heap. So he'd drag himself to the pool, let the dark water knit him back together, and climb out to do it all again.

Caelvyrn had lasted about a day of watching before the boredom won and wandered off into the vast castle. Dravok had stepped away as well, not long ago, off to something of his own, leaving the training ground quiet.

Which left Rhosyn.

She'd stayed the whole time, through all of it, present at the edge of the pool or seated on the black ground nearby, watching him fail and recover and fail again with a patience that never ran dry. And she talked to him. While he lay soaking the ruin out of his body, she gave him conversation, and it had become the one part of the long grind he looked forward to.

"You know," he said, floating on his back in the dark water, staring up into the black nothing overhead, "there's no version of this that could exist where I come from. None. Not a laboratory on the planet, and not a thousand of them working a thousand years, could carve a pocket out of the world and slow time down inside it. Where I'm from, this is a story you tell children. It isn't a place you stand in."

Rhosyn tilted her head at that. She was the only person alive he could say where I come from to and have it mean the whole of what it meant, the only one who knew that the soul behind his eyes had begun somewhere very far from this world.

"It's genuinely impossible there," he went on. "No mana there. No cores, no skills, no bloodlines carrying the blood of creation, only people and the plain rules of a plain world, and not one of those rules bends. Somewhere like this would break every one of them at once."

"I'd like to be able to imagine it." Rhosyn's voice was quiet, and there was something almost wistful in it. "A whole world running with no mana in it at all. I've tried, when you've talked about it before. I can't make the picture hold. It's like being asked to imagine a colour that isn't there."

"That's about right." He smiled up at the dark. "You'd hate it. Nothing to absorb. You'd feel like you were suffocating."

"Perhaps." A dry note entered her voice. "Or perhaps it would be restful, for once. Nothing pulling at me. Nothing to hold together."

That was a sadder answer than she'd probably meant to give, and he let it sit a moment before he steered them somewhere lighter.

"Can I ask you something that has nothing to do with any of this?"

"You can ask."

"Have you ever had anyone? A partner. Someone." He turned his head toward the edge of the pool where she sat. "You've told me a great deal about a lot of things. Never once about that."

Rhosyn was quiet for a breath, and when she answered there was a wry, worn humour in it, the sort people reach for when the truth underneath isn't funny at all.

"No. I never had much luck there." She traced a slow ripple in the water with one fingertip. "It wasn't for lack of trying, when I was young. But I'd sit down to talk with some boy, and within the hour he'd be bored out of his mind, because all I ever wanted to talk about was the work. What I was learning. What your mother was teaching me back then, everything she was, everything she could do." A small, self-aware tilt of her mouth. "I idolized her. Completely. I couldn't hold a conversation that strayed off her for more than a few minutes, and boys tend not to stay for that. They'd find an excuse, and after that they'd avoid me."

"And so," she said, "everything that happened, happened. The rest of it. You know that part better than most." Her hand went still on the surface. "And that was more or less the whole of my love life. Such as it ever was."

Trafalgar turned that over, floating there in the dark. He had three wives waiting for him a whole dimension away, and he wasn't a man who threw pretty words around for the sake of hearing them. But there was a real thing sitting in what she'd just said, an old loneliness worn smooth with time, and he found he didn't want to leave it lying there untouched.

"For what it's worth," he said, "those boys were idiots." He said it plainly, like a fact rather than a kindness. "A person who cares about something that much, who throws herself at it all the way to the bottom, that's no flaw to run from. It's the most interesting thing about anyone. They were young and dull enough to miss that they were sitting beside something rare." He looked back up at the black. "Their loss. It usually is, with people like that."

Rhosyn didn't answer straight away. When he glanced over, there was something in her face she didn't usually let show, gone again almost before he caught it.

"That's a kinder thing than you had to say," she said at last.

"It's a true thing. They tend to overlap, now and then."

He let a few more seconds pass before he rolled over and got his feet under him, water sheeting off his shoulders. Something had shifted in him across the last stretch of days, under all the failure. He could feel it now, standing there, a readiness in the muscle and along the nerves that hadn't been there when he started.

"I think I've nearly got it," he said. "It's been more days than I care to count, but my body's caught up. It's ready."

"Good luck." Rhosyn said it simply, and meant it.

"Oh?" Caelvyrn's voice came drifting back ahead of the man himself, the dragon strolling out of the dark of the castle looking thoroughly under-entertained. "You're finally going to get the first skill down? I'll be honest with you, Trafalgar, you've made hard work of it."

"Caelvyrn." Trafalgar rolled his neck, the pool's warmth on his skin, and looked at the dragon with the first edge of a grin on him. "You wouldn't happen to want a spar, would you?"

Caelvyrn's whole face lit, and the boredom fell off it in an instant.

"Finally." He cracked his knuckles, delight spreading over him. "Something to keep me from dying of tedium."