SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Chapter 686: What Walked There First

Valttair's eyes did not leave him. "Speak.""We found traces of passage," Moses said. "Recent ones."

That pulled Caelum's full attention to the map.

Moses tapped one armored finger against the lower edge of the stone, where a knot of marks had formed near a narrow corridor between two ridges. "Camps cleared with tools. Stone cut from the wrong side of a sealed entrance. Ash buried under snow that had not had time to harden. Something moved through parts of the Meridian before us, and not centuries ago."

Caelum's voice came quiet. "People, then."

"Yes."

"Not ordinary travelers."

"No." Moses's mouth twisted. "Ordinary travelers would never reach the barrier. Even if they reached it, they would not cross. Anyone who entered the Dead Meridian before us was either strong enough to force the passage, informed enough to know the right route, or carried through by something that did the work for them."

Caelum's fingers rested together behind his back. "Did they leave anything that points to a bloodline? A crest, a token, any trace that names one of the other Great Families?"

"Negative," Moses said. "No banners. No tokens. No blood we could test. Whoever went in knew how to erase a trail, and that by itself says plenty. A man hiding from wolves does not sweep his own footprints unless he already knows the wolves are coming."

Valttair's expression did not move, but the mana around him pulled tight again.

Moses continued. "It could be another Great Family digging into the Dead Meridian. Resources, ruins, old wards, unclaimed land: there are reasons enough for greed to crawl that far. It could as easily be something outside the houses. A mercenary company with a patron behind it. A private expedition under someone strong enough to count. I will not claim what I cannot prove."

"Good," Valttair said. "Do not."

Caelum's eyes went back to the shifting stone. "If another party crossed that barrier, the possibilities are few. Either they hold someone of a particular Core, someone with unusual blood, or they carry a method taken out of the Meridian itself."

Moses looked at him. "That was our conclusion as well."

Valttair finally moved. He stepped nearer the map, close enough that the dark stone caught a thin line of gold off his eyes.

"You said you brought something else."

Moses folded the stone with care. It shrank between his hands, routes and rivers compressing back into the dark sheet until the lines turned unreadable. He stored it with another pulse of mana, and it was gone.

"Yes, my lord. This one could not be stored the same way."

He reached for a layered section of his armor at the waist, where the plate locked under two clasps and a thin chain of runes. He had to unfasten part of it to reach inside. That alone made Caelum watch more closely. Moses did not make anything hard to reach without a reason.

From the hidden compartment he drew out a wrapped object.

The cloth was thick and dark and stitched over with containment sigils. Even through the fabric the thing felt wrong. The mana near it bent away, reluctant to touch. The pressure in the chamber changed, not because Valttair moved it, but because whatever lay in Moses's hand offended the air around it.

Caelum's gaze hardened.

Valttair's eyes narrowed.

Moses unwrapped it.

A fragment of claw lay across his gauntlet.

It was long, blackened along the edges, curved enough to say it had come off something large. The surface drank the light near it and gave back a faint, sickly shimmer, as if it had been cut from a wound instead of a body.

Caelum knew it at once.

Valttair knew it as well.

Moses looked between them. "I see you both recognize it. The two of you dealt with them recently enough. It is a fragment from a Void Creature. There is no mistake. The aura alone is proof, and the structure matches the corpses we pulled out of the Dead Meridian."

There were several conclusions to draw from that claw, and not one of them sat easy. The Dead Meridian was hard enough to reach on its own. A dense mana barrier wrapped the whole of it, one ordinary people could not cross and stronger forces could not force without the right conditions. If Void Creatures were inside, either they had been there all along, sealed off beyond the mapped world, or something had let them in. Neither answer was the one a sane man wanted.

Worse, people had walked through that same region, and walked through it lately.

That narrowed the field in a direction Caelum did not enjoy. Anyone able to cross such a barrier would not stay nameless for long in the known world. Power left rumor in its wake. High Core warriors, famous mercenary captains, old bloodlines, private forces leashed to great houses, none of them moved thousands of kilometers into dead land without leaving money or bodies or fear behind to mark the road.

And still Moses had come back with traces and not names. That was the part that itched at him. A force loud enough to manage all of this should have left a name somewhere; this one had gone to the trouble of leaving nothing at all.

Valttair looked at the claw for a long while.

No anger touched his face. That was not mercy. It was calculation with nothing wasted on feeling.

At last he spoke.

"There is more than ruins living in that far place."

Moses closed his gauntlet around the wrapped cloth, keeping the claw bare across it. "Yes, my lord. And if people reached it recently, they either stumbled on the Void traces after they were inside, or they went in because of them."

The chamber held the words a breath.

Valttair's gaze moved from the claw to the fresh cuts carved across his training room, and from there to Caelum.

"Send word to no one."

Caelum inclined his head. "Understood."

Moses's grip tightened around the Void claw.

Valttair's voice dropped lower.

"Show me where you found it."