SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 877: Trafalgar vs Rhavel [I]

The lance came at his sternum and Trafalgar turned it off the flat of Maledicta. The shock of the parry travelled up his forearm and lodged in his shoulder.

He gave ground one step. Rhavel didn't follow.

The commander withdrew instead, three paces backward, grounded the butt of the lance and stood there with his head slightly tilted. That told Trafalgar more than the thrust had. The man had spent one attack measuring him and had already got what he came for.

'He's not going to fight me yet. He's going to watch his men do it.'

Trafalgar pulled mana through his chest and called the rest of it. [Obsidian Wings]

The plates formed around him in less than a second, black obsidian closing over his spine, ribs and forearms. The surface swallowed the lamplight instead of reflecting it, each section locking into the next with a series of low clicks.

The helm came last. It sealed across his face, and two narrow vanes swept back from the temples, one on either side, neither longer than a hand.

Somebody in the ring swore.

'Sixteen. Two of them are different.'

He found the signatures without having to search for them. Fourteen soldiers at Prime or below, trained soldiers with decent control and nothing unusual beneath it. Then Rhavel, steady and restrained. And one more to Trafalgar's right, compressed tight and burning far hotter than anyone in a commander's escort had any reason to.

Two Ascend in a brick room under the yards. Nobody brings two Ascend to frighten someone.

The ring closed.

Trafalgar went left before the first of them finished lifting his blade. [Godstep] Displaced air slapped both walls, his body arrived four metres out at the flank of the line, and he came out of it with Maledicta already descending.

The edge went through a collarbone and down into the chest and he wrenched it free in a hot spray that went black against his gauntlet.

The second soldier swung at where Trafalgar had been standing.

"Where did he go?"

"Behind you, he's behind—"

Trafalgar was not behind him. [Godstep] He was inside the man's guard, close enough to feel the exhale, and he drove the pommel up under the jaw and felt teeth break.

That one he let drop breathing, because the soldier had swung wide and slow and there had been a choice available.

'That's one alive.'

Four came together from the north arch. Trafalgar planted his heel, let them commit, and opened. [Morgain's Requiem]

Six cuts in a running sequence, black waves curling off the blade at the end of each arc. The first opened a man from hip to sternum and his insides came out onto his own boots.

The second took an arm above the elbow, and it landed two metres away with the hand still closed around the grip.

The third and fourth hit the same soldier, chest and throat, and he went down drowning in himself. The fifth caught a retreating man across the back of both thighs and put him on the floor permanently. The sixth found brick and cut a channel in it.

Blood ran off the walls and started for the drain grating in the centre of the chamber.

"That's not— nobody moves like that!"

"First time I've ever seen anything like it, sir, he's not even—"

"Shut up and hold the line!"

They couldn't hold the line. The line required them to know where he would be.

[Godstep] into the gap behind three of them, [Crosswind Edge] chained straight out of the landing, a crossing slash at an angle no standing man expects. It took the nearest one across the eyes and the bridge of the nose. He went to his knees clawing at his own face, and Trafalgar stepped around him and left him there.

A spear came at his kidney and he let the armour eat it. The point skidded off the obsidian with a shriek, and the man behind it had half a second of confusion before Maledicta came back over Trafalgar's shoulder and took the top of his skull off.

Nine down. Seven left, and they were breaking.

Then something hit him in the side hard enough to fold him.

He went into the wall and the wall lost, brick shattering out in a cone behind him. His ribs reported the damage a moment later. The armour had killed most of it, and most of it had still been enough.

She was already on him.

The Sub-Commander fought with two short blades and no wasted motion anywhere, and she was the only person in that chamber who looked pleased to be there. She had waited at the edge of the fight since it started, watching him work, and come in the instant his weight committed.

The blades came in a pattern he could not read fast enough. He blocked the first, ate the second on the pauldron, and the third went in under his arm where the plates met and came out red.

'Faster than me. She's genuinely faster than me. But Sword Insight didn't activate...'

She was faster and she was Ascend, and in the next exchange he found the rest of it. Her core did not run as deep. Her body had never spent a year being taken apart by a Primordial and put back together.

She cut him twice more while he worked that out.

Then she overreached by a hand's width on a thrust at his throat, and Trafalgar stopped defending.

[Godstep] He arrived inside her reach with his shoulder already turning and his blade already rising, and there was nowhere for her to go. [Morgain's Final Crescent]

Maledicta came up in an inverted crescent and the air along the edge hummed and folded. It went in below her ribs and came out through her shoulder, and the core-tear took hold as it passed, and the Sub-Comander was dead before her knees understood it.

The pieces of her hit the floor at two different times, and the surviving soldiers stopped.

Trafalgar stood in the middle of a chamber running with blood, the drain grating choking on it, brick dust sifting down through the lamplight from the ruined wall.

He was bleeding under his arm and through three other joints of the armour. He counted the bodies. The count of the ones he had left alive was two.

Rhavel had not moved from where he grounded his lance.

He had watched every second of it, from the first parry to the last exchange with Dain, and at no point had he lifted a hand for any of them.

He was learning.