SSS Awakening: I Gain a Skill Every Time I Die
Chapter 101 - 99 — Five Minutes IIThe corridor opened out and the ceiling went up and I came into it at a run and had to stop.
Not a hall. A room, maybe thirty metres across, round, with a floor that was flat all the way over and nothing on it.
Nothing except the two things at the far side.
There was a low stone block at the very back with something small sitting on it, and even at thirty metres in that light it was catching what there was of it and putting it back.
And eleven metres in front of the block there was a shape that came off the floor when I came through the door.
---
It came up off the floor in one movement without using its hands.
Three metres, near enough, and there was nothing on it that could be called armour, because it did not need any.
Grey skin, and dry, and cracked across the shoulders in a pattern like something left in the sun. No hair anywhere.
Arms that came down past its knees and hands at the end of them that opened and closed twice while I stood in the doorway.
It had a face and the face had nothing on it. Two eyes set flat and a mouth that did not move, and it did not look at my hands or my feet or the door behind me.
It looked at the middle of my chest and kept it there.
And it smelled of nothing at all. That is the part I was not expecting. Everything I have fought in a month has arrived on a smell, and this thing crossed eleven metres of stone and brought none with it.
It did not roar and it did not posture.
It came straight at me.
---
I went right and it went right with me, and its feet made no more noise on that floor than mine did.
The first swing came across at chest height. I went underneath it rather than back, because back was thirty metres of nothing and underneath was inside, and I put both gauntlets into its ribs on the way through.
They landed properly. I felt the impact go from my knuckles up into my shoulders the way it is supposed to.
Underneath the skin there was nothing that gave. It was like hitting the trunk of something.
It did not react at all. Not a grunt, not a check in the step.
It came round with the other arm before I had cleared and caught me across the back and put me eleven metres across that floor.
> **[Health: 276/420 → 174/420.]**
---
I came down on my shoulder and slid and came up on one knee with my ears ringing and my whole back on fire.
There was blood in my mouth from where my teeth had gone into my cheek.
> **[Second Battlefield Contraction: 01:34.]**
The block was seven metres behind it.
Seven metres, and a door twenty-eight metres behind me, and a minute and a half.
There was a version of the next four seconds where I turned round and ran and made the boundary with time to spare and came out of Floor One having found the place and touched nothing in it.
I got up and went at it again.
---
The second exchange lasted about nine seconds.
I got inside twice and put six strikes into the same place under its arm.
By the fourth one the skin there had gone black and split, and there was something underneath it that was not blood and was not anything else I have ever opened.
Then it turned its whole body and I went into the floor again.
> **[Second Battlefield Contraction: 01:11.]**
---
The third exchange lasted about six seconds and I did not get inside at all.
That is when I worked out what the actual problem was, and it was not the damage.
Aten was going in. There were two black patches on that thing now and it had stopped being able to bring the left arm all the way up.
The problem was the accounting.
Four seconds to get in past the arms. Half a second to get thrown out. Two seconds on the floor. Two more to get back to a distance where I could start again.
Eight and a half seconds a cycle, and I was hurting it about a tenth of what it needed, and there were sixty-eight seconds left.
That does not close. It does not matter how correct every individual thing I did was, because eight and a half into sixty-eight is eight more cycles and it needed thirty.
> **[Second Battlefield Contraction: 00:58.]**
It came at me a fourth time and forced me back toward the door.
So I stopped trying to get to it, and made it come to me instead.
---
I put both boots flat on the stone about four metres from the wall and let it come.
> **[Ability Activated: Antaeus — SS.]**
>
> **[Antaeus consumes 3 Mana per second while active.]**
>
> **[Mana: 158/260 → 149/260.]**
It came up out of the floor through the backs of my legs and settled across my hips, and the stone under both boots split out in a short ring.
It hit me at a run.
I did not go eleven metres.
I went back about a metre and a half with both heels ploughing and my knees at an angle knees do not enjoy.
Then it stopped, because it had put everything into a man who was part of the floor and the floor had taken it.
And for the first time it was standing still, four feet from me, with its weight forward.
> **[Ability Activated: Snare.]**
>
> **[Mana: 149/260 → 139/260.]**
---
I put it on the leading foot.
The contact stopped being its own. Everything above the contact kept going, which was most of three metres of it, and its own forward weight came round over an ankle that could not follow.
It went down onto that knee.
I let Antaeus go, because what I needed next was reach and not a floor.
> **[Antaeus deactivated.]**
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
>
> **[Mana: 139/260 → 115/260.]**
Twelve seconds through the gauntlets, into the black patch I had already made under its arm, with my whole hip behind every one of them and my feet moving.
Its free hand came round twice and I took one of them on the shoulder piece and the shoulder piece came off.
> **[Health: 174/420 → 131/420.]**
On the eleventh second something inside it stopped holding together and my fist went in past the wrist.
It came down on the stone and did not get back up.
> **[Elite Monster — Level 22.]**
>
> **[HP: 0.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 220.]**
>
> **[EXP: 155/1,200 → 375/1,200.]**
---
> **[Second Battlefield Contraction initiated.]**
I was already running before the line had finished appearing.
Seven metres to the block. The thing on it was a ring, plain, a dull grey band with nothing cut into it and nothing set in it, sitting on stone that had been worn smooth in a circle around it.
I picked it up.
> **[Unique Relic acquired.]**
>
> **[KAIROS.]**
>
> **[Upon activation, all Attributes are multiplied by ten.]**
>
> **[Duration: 60 seconds.]**
There was more text under that line.
I did not read it.
---
Ten.
Strength thirty-two becomes three hundred and twenty. Endurance forty-two becomes four hundred and twenty, and Health is Endurance times ten, so that is four thousand two hundred.
For one minute.
I stood in the middle of a stone room with my hand shaking and did that arithmetic in about two seconds, and then I put the ring on my right hand under the gauntlet and turned round and ran.
---
> **[Warning.]**
>
> **[Current location outside Active Battlefield.]**
>
> **[Return to Active Battlefield immediately.]**
The warning came up in front of my vision and stayed there, red at the edges, and it did not move when I moved my head.
I went back up the way I had come and I did not slow down for any of it.
Over the second one I had killed, which was still across the passage. Past the first one at the junction.
Through the trap corridor, which I took at a flat sprint down the middle with my head down, and nothing came out of the walls the second time.
The plate had come loose down my left side where the shoulder piece had gone, and it swung and hit the same place on my ribs at every stride.
After about forty of those it stopped being an annoyance and started being a thing I could not think past.
My breath had gone to that ragged noise you make going uphill.
> **[Challengers Remaining: 72.]**
---
The passage got colder behind me.
That is the only warning that place gave. There was a temperature at my back that had not been there, and it was closer at every junction, and once I looked round and the corridor behind me was not there any more.
Not dark. Not collapsed. Simply finished, about nine metres back, with a face on it that had nothing on the other side.
I stopped looking round after that.
---
I came up out of the opening into daylight and it went through my eyes like a hand.
The boundary was ahead.
I could see it, a change in the air about four hundred metres out across the broken ground, and everything on the far side of it looked normal and everything on this side looked exactly the same, and there was a line between the two.
Four hundred metres.
I had a hundred and thirty-one Health, both legs, and downhill ground.
I put my thumb against the ring under the gauntlet for about half a second and then took it off and ran, because four hundred metres is nothing and I was not going to spend a one-minute window on a walk.
---
The zone came over me at about a hundred and eighty metres.
There was no impact. That is what I had not understood about it from any of the reading.
It arrived as cold, everywhere, all at once, into the skin of my face and hands and then straight through the plate into my chest, and about a second later something underneath the cold started taking.
> **[Warning: Restricted Zone.]**
>
> **[Health: 131/420 → 108/420.]**
I kept running.
---
I got my right hand inside the chest plate at about a hundred and fifty metres.
There were two bottles in there and I could feel neither of them.
My fingers were still moving. I could see them going in and I could see the sleeve of the gauntlet against the plate.
What I could not do was tell whether I had hold of anything until I pulled my hand back out and looked at it.
The first time I pulled it out empty.
> **[Health: 108/420 → 71/420.]**
The second one was worse and it came faster than the first.
It went into my legs and the front of my thighs stopped answering properly, and my stride shortened without me deciding to shorten it, and I was still moving forward but the ground was going past slower.
Two hundred and forty metres.
Second time I got a bottle.
---
The cork was the problem.
It is a squat glass bottle with a cork driven into it and I have opened one of them today, in a wrecked building with a torn leg and forty minutes to spare, sitting on a block with both hands working.
I got it between my teeth at a dead run with my hands white to the second knuckle.
It came out on the third pull and I took most of it in one swallow and the rest went down the front of the plate.
Then I started counting, because I know exactly what that draught does.
It goes down cold and sits there. Ten seconds. It went cold in my stomach in a wrecked building this afternoon and it did nothing at all for ten seconds and then it pulled the leg shut from the inside.
Ten seconds.
*One.*
---
*Two.*
*Three.*
The next one took the whole of my chest.
> **[Health: 71/420 → 38/420.]**
>
> **[Health: Critical.]**
*Four.*
My right knee went out from under me and I caught it on the heel of my hand and did not go all the way down.
Ninety metres.
*Five.*
I could see the line. I could see individual stones on the other side of it.
I got my rear foot down on something flat.
> **[Talaria activated.]**
---
Every centimetre of it was crossed and I was not fast enough to be present for the crossing.
The arrest went up through the right ankle into the hip and the knee did not hold this time, and I came down onto both hands about thirty metres from the boundary with my chin four inches off the ground.
*Six.*
Thirty metres.
That is fifteen strides. I have done fifteen strides ten thousand times.
I got one foot under me and pushed, and my leg took it, and I got the second one under me and I was moving again, and the cold came through the back of my neck.
> **[Health: 38/420 → 12/420.]**
*Seven.*
---
Eleven metres.
There were stones on the other side of that line with light on them and I was looking at the shadows they were throwing.
*Eight.*
I got four more strides.
I do not know what happened to the fifth one.
My leg came forward and the ground did not come up to meet it and my shoulder went down first, and I put my hand out and it went out flat and slid, and my fingers finished about two metres short of the line.
*Nine.*
The cold went through my chest one more time and did not come out the other side.
> **[Health: 12/420 → 0/420.]**
There was still one bottle inside the plate. I never got to it.
And the one I had already drunk was one second short.
---
> **[Fatal threshold reached.]**
>
> **[Floor Protection activated.]**
My hand was still out in front of me on the stone with the ring on it under the gauntlet.
Then it was not.
> **[Challenger eliminated.]**
>
> **[Floor One attempt failed.]**
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