SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 811: Stronger Than Before

Dravok came out onto the black ground the next day with both hands on the grip, and the whole feel of the place changed with it.

Trafalgar had fought the old man one-handed for longer than he could count. He'd learned every angle that came off that single arm, every lie the shoulder told, the exact width of the ground Dravok would give before he took it back.

All of that stopped being worth anything the moment the second hand closed on the hilt. The strikes came heavier and faster and from lines that had no business existing, and for the first exchange he was a beginner again, catching a blow across [Origin Guard] that drove him back three paces with his boots ploughing furrows through the dust.

He held, though, and that was the thing he noticed first, in the small part of his head that still had room for noticing. A year ago that strike would have gone through his guard and put him on the ground with something broken. Now the mana layer along his forearm took it, spread it, and let him keep his feet, and the pain that reached him was a bruise instead of a break. He'd stopped having to think about where the guard went. It went where it was needed, because his body had been asking that question ten thousand times a day for longer than he'd been Lord of Euclid.

Dravok changed the angle, and Trafalgar moved with it rather than after it. [Godstep] fired under him and carried him out of the line of a cut that would have opened him from hip to collar, and he came out of the burst with Maledicta already moving into the first arc of [Morgain's Requiem], the black cutting shadow tearing off the edge before his boots had properly touched down. The second slash came from the reverse. The third fired another Godstep out of its own recovery, taking him around to the outside, and the fourth arrived from a place the old man had to turn his whole body to answer.

He turned his whole body to answer it. Trafalgar saw it happen and something in his chest went tight, because two years ago in this room that man had ended a fight without moving his feet at all.

He pressed. He had no illusion that he could win, and he wasn't fighting to win. He was fighting to see what he had, and what he had was more than he'd realized. Dravok's boot came around low and fast for his knee, the same kind of plain physical strike that had once broken his rhythm and dropped him without warning, and this time Trafalgar saw the weight shift a fraction before it moved and was five metres away before the leg finished travelling. He heard Caelvyrn make a sound from somewhere off at the edge of the ground.

"Well now." The dragon had come up off the couch without either of them noticing. "It's been a long while since I've seen the old man go properly serious. Trafalgar came further than I gave him credit for."

Rhosyn didn't answer him. She was watching the ground with her hands loose in her lap, and there was a quiet pride sitting on her that she'd have denied if anyone put it to her out loud. She had known what he was from the beginning. This was the first time anyone else was going to have to admit it.

Out on the black, Trafalgar drove into the next exchange and started building. Every strike he threw was a question, and he was reading the answers the way he'd been taught to. Dravok blocked high, and Trafalgar noted where the elbow went. Dravok gave ground on the left and took it back on the right, and Trafalgar noted the count of it.

He worked the old man's guard with [Morgain's Linebreaker], with the sword-dance, with plain honest cuts thrown from angles that Godstep opened for him, and none of it was going to get through, and he'd known that before he started. He wasn't trying to get through the guard at all. He was trying to get Dravok to use it.

'He blocks everything I throw with the same edge. Every single time. And I've spent all this time putting the pulse into skin and scale, because that's where a target is.' Maledicta rang off the old man's sword again, and the shock of it ran up his arms, and he let it. 'But contact is contact. His steel touches mine. Steel carries.'

He set it up over four exchanges. He gave Dravok a pattern to trust, three heavy strikes to the same side, each one taken on the same braced parry, each one thrown with the mana behind the blade left slack so there was nothing to feel coming. On the fourth he compressed it, all of it, everything he'd learned to hold behind the edge for a whole exchange without spilling a drop, and he threw the strike into the exact same parry the old man had answered three times already.

Steel met steel, and Trafalgar let the contact pull the pulse through. [Ruin Pulse] went into Dravok's blade, ran the length of it, and came out the other end in his hands.

The old man's eyes opened wider than Trafalgar had ever seen them open. It lasted the smallest fraction of a second, and in a fight that had gone on for years it was the first time he had put anything on that face at all. His fingers jolted loose. The sword dropped a hand's width in his grip, the whole guard going soft for one beat, and Trafalgar was already inside it with Maledicta coming around for his ribs. It got further than anything ever had.

The black edge crossed the last of the distance, and Dravok's answer came anyway, faster than a man with a loose grip had any right to manage. He rolled the falling sword back up into his palm and got it across in time, and Maledicta hit the flat of it and skated off, and the cut that should have opened his side tore the shirt across his ribs and drew a line of blood along the skin beneath.

It was blood. Trafalgar had drawn blood from the God of War, and for one full breath he let himself feel it. That breath was the mistake.

Dravok stepped forward, and everything changed. There was no announcement, no gathering of power, nothing to see. He simply moved at the speed he actually possessed, and the fight Trafalgar had been having stopped existing. The first strike took Maledicta out of his hands. The second broke through [Origin Guard] as though the layer weren't there at all, and the pain that came through it was the kind that shuts a body down before it can decide anything. He tried [Godstep] and fired it late, and the old man was standing where he arrived, waiting, and put an elbow into his chest that lifted him off the ground.

He came down on his back with the black dust rising around him and every part of him screaming, and by the time his vision cleared, Dravok was already standing over him with the sword pointed down at the floor.

"Better," the old man said.

Trafalgar lay there and laughed, which hurt everywhere, and got the word out through his teeth. "That's all?"

"For now."

Dravok let the sword come apart into light and looked down at him, and there was no cruelty anywhere in the flat old face, because there never had been. He'd spent years taking Trafalgar apart for exactly one reason, and this was it.

"You drew blood today. Nobody has done that to me in a long time, and you did it with a trick I've never had used on me before." He said it without weight, the way he said everything. "So take this next part properly. What I let you fight for the last hour is more than I've given you before. It isn't near what I have. If an average one of us stood where I'm standing, you'd be dead already, and they wouldn't have needed to try as hard as I did."

Trafalgar stared up at the black nothing overhead and let that sit on his chest along with the ache.

"How far off am I?"

"Closer than you were." Dravok put a hand down for him. "Which isn't the same as close. You've built the fighter. Now we have to build what's underneath him, and that's the part that takes longer than any of this did."