SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 807: Through the Scales

"Make the impact carry it."

Trafalgar kept his eyes on Caelvyrn's outstretched hand. Simple enough words, annoyingly simple considering how many days he'd spent failing to do exactly that, though something in the way the dragon put it made the problem sit differently in his head. He pulled Maledicta free of the black ground and rolled his wrist once.

'Stop waiting for the hit. The pulse isn't a second attack I add on afterward.'

That had been the mistake from the beginning. He'd treated the first impact as a signal. Maledicta touched the target, his mind registered the contact, and only after that did he tell the mana to move. Even with his reactions that delay ruined everything, because the window was never wide enough to hold it.

'The mana has to already be there. Compressed, ready, riding the strike. The contact only gives it somewhere to go.'

He adjusted his grip and turned the whole thing over one more time, until it locked into place. 'Blade bites. The path opens. Mana follows it through before the steel can leave. That's the whole of it.'

He looked up at Caelvyrn. "Again."

The dragon lowered his hand and turned, presenting his side. "Go ahead. Try not to spend another week decorating my scales with useless flashes of mana."

Trafalgar ignored that and moved. [Godstep] fired beneath him and five metres disappeared in an instant, Maledicta coming around with the momentum of his arrival, black steel cutting for Caelvyrn's ribs. Scales spread over the dragon's side before the blade got anywhere near it. He compressed the mana as he swung, steel met scale, and he released.

The pulse burst outward, dark mana washing across Caelvyrn's side and scattering into the air, leaving the scales under it untouched.

Dravok shook his head. "Still early. You're afraid of missing the moment, so you're letting it go before the path even exists."

"I felt that."

"Then fix it."

Trafalgar backed off, reset, and tried again. This time [Godstep] put him behind Caelvyrn, and [Morgain's Linebreaker] drove Maledicta forward hard enough to snap the air around the point. The scales appeared. Steel hit scale. He held the compressed mana a fraction longer, and that fraction was too much, because the pulse discharged as the blade was already sliding away, cracking against the surface without going into it.

Caelvyrn glanced over his shoulder. "Closer. Still useless, but closer."

Trafalgar drew the blade back. "Your encouragement is invaluable."

"I know. People have been telling me that for centuries."

Dravok stepped in before Caelvyrn could get properly going. "Forget speed for a minute. You're forcing the timing because you know there's almost no room for error."

"There isn't," Trafalgar said.

"No. But thinking about how narrow the window is makes you tense up before every contact." Dravok nodded at Maledicta. "Let the strike happen the way it wants to happen. Don't build the whole attack around Ruin Pulse. The pulse lives inside the cut, not the other way round."

That made sense as well, which was the irritating part. Trafalgar was starting to hate how many different ways there were to explain something he already understood.

They kept at it. Days went by inside the dimension, broken up by stretches of rest outside whenever the pressure behind his eyes grew too heavy to work through. He slept in Caelvyrn's castle, ate, let his head clear, and came back to the same black ground to start over.

The failures changed, and that was how he knew he was getting somewhere. He stopped throwing the pulse out wildly ahead of contact, and stopped missing the window altogether. The mana began arriving in the right place more often, though it spread too wide once it got there, bleeding across the scales instead of driving inward.

Caelvyrn became the measure of every attempt, because those scales of his didn't lie. Maledicta could hit them with [Morgain's Requiem], with [Morgain's Linebreaker], with a plain honest cut, and leave little more than a scratch behind. Ruin Pulse was supposed to make that outer layer count for a good deal less. So far the dragon stood there looking irritatingly comfortable about the whole thing.

Ten days further on, or somewhere near it, Trafalgar faced him again with sweat running down his temple and Maledicta hanging low at his side.

Caelvyrn studied him. "You look annoyed."

"I am."

"Good. You fight better annoyed."

"That's not remotely useful, you know?"

Trafalgar breathed out and dropped his stance, and stopped listening to any of them, Caelvyrn and Dravok and the small ache behind his own eyes included. He put everything he had into the sequence.

'Godstep.'

Mana fired through his body and he vanished, and the next call came before his boots had come down anywhere.

'Morgain's Requiem.'

Maledicta was moving the instant he appeared at Caelvyrn's flank, the first curved slash cutting high. Scales rose to catch it, and Trafalgar let the blade rebound into the second motion rather than force Ruin Pulse into a bad opening. The second slash was blocked. The third brought Caelvyrn shifting his weight, and Trafalgar went with him. The fourth came up from below and forced the dragon's arm high to take the blade on fresh scale along the forearm.

He felt the impact, and this time he hadn't waited on it. The mana was already compressed behind Maledicta, travelling with the cut, and the moment steel met scale he let the contact pull it forward.

'Now.'

The release felt different. There was no outward burst, no flare washing over Caelvyrn's arm, only a deep compact thump passing through Maledicta, so small that Trafalgar half wondered whether anything had happened at all.

Caelvyrn's arm moved. Barely, but it moved, and the dragon stepped back and looked down at it. Trafalgar did the same. The scales over his forearm were whole. Maledicta hadn't cut them, and there wasn't so much as a crack running across the surface. Then Caelvyrn let the scales recede.

A dark mark sat underneath, small and round, deep enough in colour to look like the beginning of a bruise beneath the skin. For several seconds nobody said a word. Trafalgar stared at it, Dravok's attention narrowed in from behind him, and even Rhosyn leaned forward a little from where she'd been watching beside the pool.

Caelvyrn pressed two fingers to the mark. The grin he'd been wearing all morning went out of his face for a second before he looked back up.

"That one I felt."