SSS Awakening: I Gain a Skill Every Time I Die
Chapter 100 - 98 — Five Minutes I**POV: Jace**
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> **[Second Battlefield Contraction: 05:03.]**
The air changed four steps in.
Cold, and completely still, and old in a way that got into the back of my throat immediately. Nothing had moved through that passage in a long time and it had a taste.
The walls came in to about a metre and a half and stayed there.
My boots started coming back at me off the stone, a half-beat behind, and by the fourth junction there was a second set of footsteps in that corridor that were mine.
Somewhere ahead and below, something was moving.
Not close. The sound arrived flattened and without a direction, the way sound does underground, and it stopped when I stopped and started again when I did.
I did not check every passage.
I took the turns that went down and inward and I took them at a run.
When a corridor split I went with the one that had the colder air coming out of it, because cold air was coming from somewhere and somewhere was where I was going.
> **[Challengers Remaining: 78.]**
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The floor moved under my left boot.
It went down about two centimetres with a grinding underneath it, and my whole body threw itself forward before I had worked out why.
Holes opened along both walls at hip height, all the way down, in a line.
I was already going and I put my head down and kept going.
Something went across the corridor behind me and into the opposite wall with a noise like a hammer on a nail. Then another one.
Then eleven more in a stuttering row that chased me down the passage and did not catch me.
The last one caught the back of the shoulder piece and spun me into the wall.
> **[Health: 349/410 → 331/410.]**
I came off the stone at a run without stopping to look at what had hit me.
> **[Second Battlefield Contraction: 04:21.]**
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It came round the junction while I was still six paces short of it.
Long body, low to the ground, four legs and something wrong about the number of joints in them, and it came out of the side passage at full speed with its head already turned toward me.
I got a gauntlet up and took the first snap on the forearm and felt the plate under the leather flex.
> **[Ability Activated: Androphagos.]**
>
> **[Duration: 01:00.]**
It went round me on the left and the field had it the whole way, and it came back at my hip because that is where a man who has just turned his shoulder leaves a gap.
I did not turn my shoulder.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
>
> **[Mana: 184/250 → 172/250.]**
I took the second snap on my forearm on purpose, which put its head inside a metre of me, and I put six seconds of fire straight down through the top of its skull while it was still closing.
It went over sideways and slid two metres and stopped.
> **[Health: 331/410 → 308/410.]**
My forearm was going to be one solid bruise from wrist to elbow by evening, and that was the trade, and I took it because going round would have cost me eleven seconds and this cost me two.
> **[Monster eliminated.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 60.]**
>
> **[EXP: 1,065/1,100 → 1,125/1,100.]**
>
> **[Level increased: 11 → 12.]**
>
> **[Excess experience carried forward.]**
>
> **[EXP: 25/1,200.]**
>
> **[All Attributes increased by 1.]**
>
> **[Strength: 31 → 32.]**
>
> **[Endurance: 41 → 42.]**
>
> **[Agility: 40 → 41.]**
>
> **[Perception: 26 → 27.]**
>
> **[Maximum Health: 410 → 420.]**
>
> **[Health: 308/420 → 318/420.]**
>
> **[Maximum Mana: 250 → 260.]**
>
> **[Mana: 172/260 → 182/260.]**
>
> **[Three Attribute Points acquired.]**
>
> **[Unassigned Attribute Points: 3 → 6.]**
Twelve.
I registered it while I was already moving and did not stop for it, and I did not look at the six points, and the corridor kept going down.
I stepped over the thing I had killed and left everything on it where it lay.
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The next split had two of them in the passage I wanted.
I heard them before I saw them. Two sets of the same dragging click going out of time with each other, and then in time, and then out again.
There was another way round. I could see it going off to the right and I could see roughly where it came out.
It was going to add somewhere between forty seconds and a minute and a half depending on what was in it.
I did not have forty seconds.
So I went into a corridor a metre and a half wide with two of them in it, which is a thing my father would have hit me for.
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The first one came at me down the middle at a flat run and the second one came behind it, and that was the whole reason it worked.
A metre and a half does not let two of those arrive side by side.
I put my back into the left wall and my shoulder against it and made the front one come at me on an angle.
Which meant its head had to turn to reach me, and a head that has turned cannot see the arm coming up under it.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
>
> **[Mana: 182/260 → 158/260.]**
It came in with its mouth open and I got the heel of my gauntlet into the underside of its jaw and held it there.
Six seconds. It went up on its hind legs trying to get off my hand and its shoulders hit the ceiling, and I could hear its claws going on the stone on both sides of me.
The heat came back off the walls into my own face, because there was nowhere else in that corridor for it to go.
Its throat opened and it dropped straight down where it was standing.
---
Which was the point.
It fell across the passage with its body against both walls, and everything behind it was suddenly on the wrong side of a metre and a half of dead weight.
The second one tried to come over the top.
It got its front half up onto the body and its shoulders went into the ceiling the same way the first one’s had.
For about a second and a half it was jammed between the two, with its back legs still on the floor and nothing to push against.
I went up onto the first one’s ribs and hit the second one under the jaw before it had worked out how to get down.
The wall took the skin off my right elbow on the way through. Its back claws came up off the floor and opened my hip through the plate.
> **[Health: 318/420 → 276/420.]**
Both of them were dead inside about eleven seconds and neither of them ever got to be two.
> **[Experience acquired: 130.]**
>
> **[EXP: 25/1,200 → 155/1,200.]**
> **[Second Battlefield Contraction: 02:47.]**
I ran.
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