SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Chapter 681: The Shadow Against the Warblade [III]

[Demonic Warblade Art: First Fang Descent]Moses brought the sword down.

The chamber did not hear a cut. It heard a judgment.

Demonic aura came down with the blade, raw pressure hammered into an edge, heavier than any flame or lightning. The smoke clinging to the floor flattened at once. Frost burst outward from Moses's boots. The cracked stone between him and Caelum sank beneath the force before the blade even reached it, and the mana crystals overhead trembled hard enough to shed pale dust from their sockets.

One of Caelum's half-formed clones broke where it stood.

Another tried to slip out from behind a pillar and failed. The purple pressure wrapped around its limbs and crushed the mana into a trembling outline before the strike ever passed through. It burst into black fragments, and the backlash drove through Caelum's connection like a thin blade slid beneath the ribs.

He did not move.

The greatsword fell less than two meters from him, close enough for the wind of it to rake his coat and pull a fresh line of blood from the cut already marking his mouth. His daggers stayed in his hands. His boots stayed planted. His pale fingers never tightened on the hilts.

Caelum had already read the attack.

Not because Moses had shouted it, and not because the technique announced itself with any mercy. Moses had told him with his feet, with the slope of his shoulders, with the way the aura loaded along the right side of the blade before the swing. The strike had never been aimed at the man standing in front of him. It had been aimed at the escape Caelum was supposed to choose.

A rogue would slip away.

A cautious man would bolt from the line.

A lesser assassin would trust his speed and die in the exact space Moses had already claimed.

Caelum did none of those things.

The sword crashed past him.

The floor split in a violent line, black stone tearing open from the impact and racing toward the far wall. The cut did not stop at the chamber's carved boundary. It climbed. Stone screamed. Dark metal veins buckled under the force and ripped free of the wall like snapped ribs. Ancient frost exploded into white powder, and a whole section of the mountain's inner shell gave way beneath the blow.

For the first time in ages, the chamber opened to the outside.

A huge wound tore through the wall.

Cold daylight knifed in.

Not the dim glow of mana crystals. Real light, white and brutal and full of snow. It poured through the broken stone in a slanted sheet, dragging flakes and raw mountain air into a space that had been buried too long to welcome either. Dust and frost spun together until the gap between Caelum and Moses became a pale storm.

Moses rode out the end of the swing with both hands on the hilt, the blade buried deep in the ruined wall. Beyond the jagged opening, snow tore across the peaks, and the world outside flashed bright enough to paint the side of his armor silver.

Caelum stood exactly where he had been.

The light caught him from one side, finding the blood at the corner of his mouth and the thin cuts across his bare fingers. His coat was torn near the hip. His left sleeve wore three pale lines where snapped mana threads had bitten through cloth and skin. Past that, he had the air of a man waiting for tea to be poured in a room where someone else had just made an embarrassing amount of noise.

Moses turned his head, slow.

His purple eyes fixed on him.

"You did not move."

Caelum lifted one dagger a fraction, barely enough to call it acknowledgment. "You did not aim at me."

Moses stared for a breath, and the grin that came after was not like the ones before. Less mockery in it. More interest. The look a soldier gives a battlefield that has finally stopped pretending to be simple.

"You read that from the stance?"

"The stance, the shoulder, the pressure on the hilt, and the aura gathering along the outer edge." Caelum's voice stayed even. "Also, you enjoy punishing habits. Mine would have been to leave the line."

"Would have been."

"Had I grown careless."

Moses wrenched the sword free of the wall. Stone cracked around the blade before it let go. More daylight spilled through the opening, crawling over the broken floor and catching the smoke that dragged low across the chamber.

"You are still an irritating bastard."

"You keep mentioning it. I assume it comforts you."

"It does." Moses rolled one shoulder, and the poison wound near his collar leaked a thin thread of dark blood before his demonic mana burned the numbness back down. "You know the ugly part? That would have killed almost anyone who did the correct thing."

"Yes."

"And you did the incorrect thing on purpose."

"The correct thing changes the moment the enemy expects it."

Moses laughed under his breath, rough and pleased in spite of himself. "There. That is exactly why people hate fighting you."

Caelum did not answer.

He did not need to. While Moses had been busy dragging his weapon out of the stone, Caelum's fingers had already moved. Barely. Three mana threads lay across the broken floor, near invisible in the washed-out daylight. One ran through the long split the first strike had carved. Another hooked around a ridge of dark metal torn loose from the wall. The last vanished into the smoke near Moses's left boot.

There was a needle waiting in that smoke.

There was another tucked into the torn cuff of Caelum's sleeve.

Two pellets waited in reserve as well, one against the inside of his wrist, the other beneath the band at his forearm. Moses had force, aura, reach, endurance, and a sword that had just opened a mountain. Caelum had distance, terrain, poison, wire, false bodies, and the deeply unpleasant habit of making every inch of a room cost something to cross.

It was the only way this fight lived past the first exchange.

Moses caught at least part of it. His gaze dropped once, not toward any single thread, but to the ground lying between them. The cracked floor. The ridges. The smoke. The spots where a man that fast should have stepped, and had refused, because the better trap was the one you did not spring too early.

"How many little doors have you put between us?" Moses asked.

"Enough."

"Enough to stop me?"

"Enough to make continuing annoying."