SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

The ease went out of Trafalgar completely, and he came at Dravok like he meant it.

No more probing. He opened with [Morgain's Linebreaker], Maledicta sheathing itself in a skin of pure black mana as he drove forward in a dead straight line, the cutting wave running out ahead of the point, meant to bull through anything in its path and put the old man on his back. Dravok met it with his blade turned edge-on, and for the first time the two weapons came together in earnest.

The sound of it went through Trafalgar's arms and into his teeth.

It was nothing like striking another swordsman. It was like burying his edge in a mountain that had decided to hold. The shock of the block rang up both wrists and rattled the bones of his forearms, and where the mana-wave should have thrown Dravok back it broke apart against him instead, splitting around a man who had not surrendered so much as a boot-length of ground.

So Trafalgar quit waiting for any single blow to work, and started stacking them.

He flicked [Severance Step] to Dravok's off-side, the dash smearing him around in a blur, and came out of it straight into [Morgain's Requiem], the sword-dance opening in six curved slashes that flung arcs of black cutting shadow off the edge with every pass. High, low, cross, reverse, each one hunting a different gap and each meant to leave him bleeding. The dark waves tore across the space between them.

Dravok answered all six.

His plain sword moved in short, ugly, efficient little arcs with no flourish anywhere in them, meeting every one of Trafalgar's cuts at the join, iron ringing off iron in a fast brutal rhythm that filled the whole black emptiness with the sound of a forge under a hammer.

The impacts came so close together they blurred into one long tearing note, sparks of dark mana spitting off each contact and dying in the air. Trafalgar felt every block go into his shoulders. The old man wasn't dodging now. He was standing in it, meeting steel with steel, and giving nothing back on the far side of it.

Fine. If Dravok wanted to trade iron, Trafalgar had more of it than almost anyone alive.

He broke his own rhythm before Dravok could learn it, dropping his weight and bringing Maledicta down in [Earthsplitter], the heavy two-stage cleave built to crack the ground and drive a stunning shock up through whatever stood on it. Dravok stepped off the line half a beat before it fell. The strike hammered into the black floor where he'd been, the shockwave rolling out in a ring and doing nothing but throwing dust, because the target had already gone.

Trafalgar was moving through it before the dust rose. [Severing Fang] tore out of the follow-through, a diagonal pressure-slash dense enough to split stone and scale, aimed at the gap the old man's step had opened. Dravok caught it on his edge and turned it down into the floor, and the iron shrieked as the two blades ground past one another, close enough that Trafalgar felt the heat come off the contact.

He kept going, fighting better than he ever had and half aware of it, the skills flowing one into the next without a seam, [Crosswind Edge] threading between the heavy strikes, Maledicta passing hand to hand and angle to angle, the black blade never at rest. And even so, it wasn't enough. Every technique he'd spent two years grinding toward perfection, Dravok read and turned and answered, without once looking troubled by any part of it.

So he reached for the top of what he had.

Trafalgar planted, drew everything inward, and loosed [Morgain's Final Crescent], the whole of his power folded into a single inverted crescent of black force, the anti-armour burst that tears a core open and leaves nothing to mend with. It screamed across the gap like a falling moon turned onto its edge.

Dravok cut it in half.

One stroke, downward, dead through the center, and the crescent came apart around his blade and blew past him to either side, gouging two long curving scars into the dark ground.

Trafalgar bared his teeth and went for the one that had nearly killed him to learn.

He set his feet, and for a single heartbeat he poured everything he had down into the blade, the mana gathering dense and low and heavy along the black steel until the edge stopped throwing back the dim light of the place and started to swallow it whole. The air around him dropped an octave. The dust on the ground crept toward the sword.

[Sunder].

He brought it down in one flat descending stroke, and a wide low wave of pure cutting force ripped out across the entire span of ground in front of him, edge to edge, the technique that had opened an Apex queen when nothing else on that mountain could mark her. Wide enough that there was no stepping around it. Low enough that there was no clearing it.

Dravok met it head on, both hands on his plain sword, and stopped it.

He stopped Sunder.

The wave broke over his braced edge and split down the middle, roaring off past him on both sides to tear two long trenches through the black, and the strain of holding it drove him back at last, one boot grinding a short furrow into the floor. One step. That was the whole of what it bought.

And that was the moment Trafalgar made the mistake of believing he'd found the edge of the man.

He was already loading the next skill, weight coiling for another [Severance Step], his focus locked on the blade, on the iron, on the war of edges he understood better than almost anything in his life.

He never once looked at Dravok's feet.

The kick took him in the ribs like a battering ram.

He didn't see it coming. That stunned him more than the blow did. One instant he was mid-flow, and the next the whole world lurched sideways and he was skidding backward across the black ground, boots scrabbling for purchase, the breath punched clear out of him and a bright bar of pain blooming up his side.

He caught his balance, blade up on reflex, and for a moment he simply stared, honestly thrown.

'What was that?' His mind raced back over the last half-second and came up with nothing at all. 'He broke my whole flow with one movement, and I didn't see it. I didn't even see him shift his weight for it.' And beneath that, colder, the part that truly rattled him. '[Sword Insight] didn't catch it. Not a thing. Not a flicker…'

His whole life, that instinct had read every movement an enemy made that counted and filed it away. It had never once gone dark on him in the middle of a fight. But Dravok had just moved, plainly and physically, an arm's length in front of his face, and both his eyes and his instinct had come away with nothing. The old man stood that far above him. Far enough to break a man's rhythm with something as plain as a boot and leave no trace at all of how he'd done it.

Across the black, Dravok changed.

He rolled his shoulders once, set his plain sword out in front of him, and lowered into a stance Trafalgar had not seen him take all morning. Both hands on the grip. His weight dropping to his center. Everything about him going quiet and dense and terribly focused, a man folding down into himself the way Trafalgar folded his own power before Sunder.

He was, at last, about to go all out.

And something in Trafalgar's head began, very quietly, to scream.

It started as a pressure behind his eyes, a warning with no words to it, the animal part of him understanding that whatever came next would be worse than anything so far. And threaded all through it, waking for the first time since the fight had begun, came [Sword Insight], stirring, straining, reaching toward the man in the stance as though it had finally caught the first faint edge of a technique it was desperate to see.

Something was coming.

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