Chapter 558: Trafalgar vs. Stalker [II]
That was all Trafalgar needed.
He went in before the assassin could recover his footing, Maledicta already descending with enough weight. The man raised both knives by reflex and caught the strike high, though the impact bent his arms and drove him half a step back across the cracked tiles. Pri Core gave him enough power to stay upright. It did not give him grace.
'Pri. The thought ca instantly.
One rank above Flow. Annoying, especially with poison chewing through his body. Yet [Sword Insight] stayed silent, giving him only a flat absence where pressure should have been. Fast hands, ugly timing, useful feet, worthless technique.
Trafalgar pressed harder.
Maledicta rose again and he drove straight into [Morgain's Requiem], black arcs unfurling around him in a chained sequence that gave the roof no safe corner. The first slash forced the assassin to guard high. The second ca from the opposite side. The third carved low. The fourth crossed back across the centerline. The fifth clipped stone and sent shattered tile upward. The sixth bit flesh.
The assassin abandoned any pretense of trading. He survived instead.
One black wave shaved cloth from his shoulder. Another tore across his upper arm. One passed so close to his neck that the chimney behind him split where his spine should have been. By the end of the sequence, he had been driven almost to the roof's edge and left bleeding from more than one place.
He spat blood and laughed once through his teeth.
"What kind of Flow Core are you supposed to be?"
Trafalgar advanced another step, armor black as wet obsidian, Maledicta humming with rough mana. "The kind standing in front of you."
The assassin's face tightened.
He vanished through [Shade Skip] and reappeared along the higher ridge, trying to steal the angle again before Trafalgar could fully turn. Trafalgar denied him both and cut across the roof with [Severing Fang], a diagonal burst of pressure splitting tile from crest to gutter and forcing the man to throw himself over his own footing just to avoid being torn open.
He cleared the line, though badly.
Trafalgar entered [Severance Step] and crossed the gap in one blurred curve, reappearing close enough that the assassin barely managed to bring both knives up before Maledicta crashed down again. The clash rang hard enough to shake dust from the chimney stacks.
The man twisted with it, trying to spill the force away through his wrists, but Trafalgar stayed on him and drove a boot into his side before he could peel off. The kick hurled him into the chimney stack.
Stone broke. Blood spread lower across his clothes. One knife almost slipped from his hand.
The assassin caught himself, though the recovery lacked the smoothness it had before. The poison in Trafalgar's body had not disappeared, but the pace of the fight had changed enough that the man no longer owned it. That truth made him uglier.
"Your information was garbage," Trafalgar said.
The assassin answered with silence this ti.
His hand dipped to the pouch. Pale green dust slipped through his fingers again and settled over the roof in a finer veil than before, clinging to broken tile, chipped stone, damp wood, the edge of his own sleeve. [Deadman's Pollen] spread patiently, turning the space between them into sothing fouler with every breath.
Trafalgar felt it imdiately.
The air itself had turned treacherous. Every step demanded more care than before, and every exchange carried the risk of dragging more of that filth into his lungs. The poison already inside him chose the sa mont to press deeper, tightening across his chest and leaving a faint drag in his limbs that only made him want to cut the bastard down faster.
The assassin read the shift at once.
"There you are," he murmured. "I was waiting for that."
Trafalgar's grip hardened around Maledicta.
His body asked for a clean breath and found none. The roughness in his chest stayed there, refusing to loosen while the mana in him moved with that sa faint impurity the poison had left behind.
And in front of him, that bastard was still standing there with torn cloth over his mouth, knives ready, and poison spread across the roof as if he had any
right to dictate the pace of this fight.
So he made his own opening.
Maledicta swept out again in a broad horizontal line and [Arc Slash] tore forward in a dark-blue wave that ripped through the pollen field and blew broken tile into the air. The assassin slipped aside through [Shade Skip], but the wave stole his ground and forced him farther than he wanted. He landed on the ridge and ca back instantly, aiming to catch Trafalgar in the mont after
the release.
He was late.
Trafalgar t him halfway, sword and armor carrying through the exchange with brute certainty now that all the asuring had ended. One knife scraped harmlessly across black plating. The other snapped for his throat and found Maledicta in the way. Steel scread. The assassin tried to flow around it, tried to make the clash ugly again, but Trafalgar drove forward and denied him the room to fold the fight back into his shape.
Below, Zafira reached the wall beneath the building and climbed without wasting motion.
A crimson thread anchored above. Another fixed near the ledge. A third stretched through the window fra to her right, feeding her the roof's pattern through the faintest vibrations. She had no need to see them clearly. The web told her enough. Trafalgar's pressure. The assassin's bursts. The places he favored when cornered. The route he would choose if forced to
break away again.
"There'
By the ti her boots touched the roofline, the threads were already where they needed to be.
Up above, the assassin gave up any thought of retreating cleanly and committed.
He lowered his center of gravity, knives close, shoulders coiling around one final murderous line. Whatever he had planned, it was not a feint. It was a finish, built to burst through the gap between one poisoned breath and the next. The kind of attack ant to leave before the body it hit had ti to understand what had happened.
He launched.
[Pale Execution].
Trafalgar saw it. Maledicta was already rising to take the line apart by force.
The assassin never reached him.
Crimson threads snapped tight across the roof.
One cinched around his right wrist. Another caught his left ankle. A third
wrapped his other arm and dragged it wide. A fourth bit across his torso and tore the structure out of his lunge before the knives got close enough to beco a problem. His body jerked sideways in mid-step, attack ruined, balance erased in a single ugly instant.
Zafira stepped fully onto the roof behind him, one hand slightly raised, the new
ring faintly red against her finger while the threads obeyed with rciless
precision.
The assassin's expression changed.
That was enough for Trafalgar.
He stepped in and drove Maledicta to the man's throat, stopping the blade at
skin instead of through it.
A thin red line appeared beneath the edge and stayed there, enough to settle the question without ending it. That was all he needed, especially now that both knives had already slipped from numbed fingers and skidded uselessly
across the tiles.
The assassin tried to move anyway.
The threads answered at once.
They tightened around wrists, elbows, shoulders, knees, ankles, and chest, turning the smallest struggle into pain and the larger ones into nothing. Another line bound his neck just high enough to warn, not kill. Zafira had not
rely caught him. She had sewn him into place.
"You should stop," she said.
The assassin breathed harder through his teeth and tested one wrist again,
subtler now, trying to find give in the weave. He found none. The ring had done
its work well. Her control held clean, taut, and exact even with the roof wind dragging across them.
Trafalgar crouched without moving Maledicta from the man's throat and began
stripping him of anything useful.
A pouch of powder.
A second pouch.
A needle hidden at the wrist.
A thin blade in the boot.
A vial sewn into the sleeve. Another tucked inside the belt.
Prepared, thorough, and irritating right to the end.
"I ca ard," the assassin said with a faint rasp. "You sound surprised."
Trafalgar tossed the last vial out of reach. "No. Just disappointed."
Sea wind crossed the rooftop, carrying salt, blood, poison, and dust from
shattered chimney stone. Sowhere beyond these buildings the port kept moving, carts rolling, sailors shouting, trade changing hands by the minute, with no idea what had almost happened above them.
Zafira kept the threads steady.
"Alive?" she asked.
"For now," Trafalgar replied.
He searched the assassin once more, checked the sleeves again, the collar, the
boots, the seams, every place a careful killer would trust more than his own
manners. Only when he was satisfied did he stop.
The fight was over.
What ca next would be far more useful.
Trafalgar leaned in a fraction, Maledicta resting cold against the man's throat,
and spoke in a voice so even it left no room to misunderstand.
"Now let's talk."
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