SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 812: Enough

He went out onto the black ground the next morning the way he had a thousand mornings before it, and inside the first minute he knew something was wrong.

It wasn't his body. His body answered him fine. He'd come out of the pool whole, the bruising gone, the ribs solid, nothing anywhere in him that hurt worse than usual. The trouble sat somewhere behind his eyes, in the place where all of this actually happened.

Dravok opened with a low feint into a high cut, and Trafalgar raised [Origin Guard] in a rush to meet it, hauling the mana up out of the blade the way he had done in his first weeks here, the exact habit the old man had drilled out of him with a fortnight of bruises. He caught the mistake as he made it. That was worse than not catching it, because by the time he knew what he'd done there was nothing behind Maledicta to answer with, and Dravok's sword took him across the hip and put him on the ground.

'What the hell was that? I fixed that. I fixed that weeks ago.'

He got up and went again, and it kept happening. His timing on [Godstep] came out a fraction late twice in a row, the burst firing after the line had closed instead of before it opened. His footwork drifted. A cut he had thrown ten thousand times came out with his elbow in the wrong place, and he felt it go wrong halfway through the swing and could do nothing about it.

'Shit. What is happening to me? Nothing is coming out the way I want it to.'

Dravok pressed him harder, and Trafalgar answered slower, and every part of it felt like moving through deep water. That was the thing that scared him. He wasn't tired in his arms or his legs. He could go all day on those. He simply could not make his head do what it had been doing effortlessly for years in this place.

'Tch. I feel slow at everything. I don't understand the difference between this and yesterday.'

Dravok stopped mid-exchange and lowered his blade. "When did I correct your guard?"

The question sat there, and Trafalgar opened his mouth to answer it and found nothing waiting behind the words. He knew it had happened. He could see the room, the ground, the old man's hand on his forearm showing him where the layer should sit. He could not for the life of him say whether that had been three days ago or three months, and the harder he chased it the further away the answer went. "Recently," he said at last.

"You've been in here two and a half years since I did it."

Trafalgar heard that, and the number went through him without touching the sides. Two and a half years. He knew it was true. He'd known the arithmetic for a long while now, and it had stopped connecting to anything he could feel, because inside these walls there were no seasons and no sunrises and no faces changing, only black ground and the same four people and one more exchange after another. Somewhere in the middle of it he had quietly lost his grip on how much of his life he had spent standing here.

"How long have I been in this place?" he asked.

"You tell me."

He tried to work it out, and the number would not come to him at all. "There it is," Dravok said, and left it there.

Caelvyrn called something over from the couch, some remark about how it had taken him long enough to crack, and Trafalgar turned on him harder than the joke deserved, with a sentence he regretted before it was finished. The dragon put his hands up and let it go, which was the loudest thing he could have done.

That night, in the room he'd been given in Caelvyrn's castle, Trafalgar slept for what the clocks would have called a full night and woke up feeling exactly as he had when he lay down. His body was rested. Whatever it was underneath that ran the rest of him hadn't been touched at all.

The next morning Dravok took one look at him crossing the black ground and lowered his sword before either of them had thrown anything.

"We stop here."

"I can keep going." Trafalgar had Maledicta in his hand already. "I'm not hurt. Nothing's broken. Give me the pool and an hour and I'll be back out."

"No, you can't." Dravok cut through it without raising his voice at all. "You have mental fatigue, and it's been eating at you for a while now. It's why the guard came up wrong. It's why you can't tell me whether a thing happened yesterday or a month back." He let his blade come apart into light. "We have been in here for years, Trafalgar, whatever it feels like to you. The pool mends muscle and bone. It doesn't take months of experience back out of a man's head. Everything you've lived through in this place is sitting in there, all of it, with no nights and no seasons in between to file it away."

Trafalgar's grip on Maledicta loosened, and he found he had no answer ready for any of it. "You've a family out there waiting on you as well," Dravok added. "That's not a thing you should let yourself neglect."

Trafalgar looked up at him. "I wasn't expecting that sort of advice from you, of all people."

"I only don't want my student making the same mistakes I did." The old man said it plainly, and offered nothing further, and the way he said it made it clear that nothing further was coming. "We'll leave it here."

He turned and looked out over the black expanse, at the pool and the little island of furniture and the emptiness running away past both of them further than anyone had ever bothered to walk.

"Understand what this place is, because you'll be back in it. Your body can keep going. Your mind cannot." He glanced back. "Push it far enough and your mind will fracture long before your body does. Once that happens, no pool in this place will put you back together. There's no coming back from that, and I've seen it happen to better men than either of us."

"How long is far enough?"

"Further than you've gone. Not as far as you'd think." Dravok started toward the shimmering door in the distance. "You've been walking toward the edge of it for the last while. That's precisely why we're leaving now, and not in another month when you'd have found out where it is."

Trafalgar let Maledicta come apart into motes and stood there a moment, looking around the black. Years of his life had happened in this room. He'd walked in as somebody who thought he understood what a fight was and he was walking out as something else, and none of the world outside would have any idea, because out there barely more than a week had gone by. He nodded once.

"All right."

"For now, this is enough." Dravok paused ahead of him. "It isn't finished. This was the first part of it, and when you're ready we'll come back and start the next. Until then, live in the world for a while. It'll do more for you than another year in here would."

"Right."

"And Trafalgar." The old man didn't turn round for it. "You've come further than I expected of you, and I expected a great deal. Take that with you."