Moses watched with his arms folded and his blade at rest, and did not lift a finger.
He'd expected the young master to struggle. The thing at the heart of the nest was Apex, a full rung above where Trafalgar stood, and a rung was not a gap a man closed with cleverness alone. Moses had cleared enough of the world's monsters to know what a rung was worth. He'd half thought to watch the young master overmatched inside a minute.
He'd thought wrong, and it pleased him to be wrong.
Trafalgar fought like a scalpel with a grudge. Fast, precise, always low and moving, opening the great wound wider stroke by stroke, reading the beast's fury and living in the half-second of daylight it left him. It was clever work. It was more than clever. For a man on the wrong side of a rank, he was making the queen bleed, and doing it with a composure Moses hadn't credited him for.
But Moses had felt his own stroke land, and he knew what it had done to her, and he knew that would not hold.
