SSS Awakening: I Gain a Skill Every Time I Die

**POV: Jace**

---

> **[Floor One attempt failed.]**

My chest was still going.

It went on for about four seconds after there was nothing left to run from, pulling at the top of the stroke and never getting down to the bottom of it, with my mouth open and my throat raw at the back.

Both hands were still out in front of me at the height they had been at on the stone.

My right leg was forward in a stride with the weight already given to it, and there was nothing underneath that needed the weight.

And the whole back of me was braced for the line to arrive.

---

Then the air got to me.

It came across my face cold, and down the open front of my collar colder, and everywhere I was wet it found me before it found anywhere else, which was most of me.

Voices behind my right shoulder. Two of them, low, one answering the other without any hurry in it at all.

Something metal was being put down on something wooden, a long way off, three times.

The floor under my boots was flat and level and dry and had none of that hot grain in it that the contraction had been pushing through every surface for five minutes.

I made myself close my mouth and breathe through my nose, and it took two tries.

---

> **[Health: 420/420.]**

I put my palm flat on my own sternum and left it there.

Nothing under it was broken. Nothing under it was closing.

The last thing my body had done was go cold from the inside out with my fingers two metres short of a line, and I was standing upright in a corridor with my heart hammering and no hole in me anywhere.

That is the part that took the longest to land.

---

It was a hall.

Wide, low ceiling, grey stone the colour of a wet pavement, with light coming out of fittings sunk into the walls at about shoulder height so that everything had two shadows and neither of them was very dark.

There were maybe thirty people in it and about half of them were standing still the way I was standing still.

One woman near the far wall had gone down onto her heels with her forearms across her knees and her head hanging, and nobody was going over to her, and I understood why. She did not want it.

A man walked past me toward the doors at the end with his jaw set and his eyes fixed on the doors and nothing else.

---

> **[Stored equipment returned.]**

There was weight against my hip and across my shoulders that had not been there a second before.

My own harness, and my own chest piece with the buckle I have to do twice, and the bell on its chain under the shirt where the metal sat cold against my breastbone and then stopped being cold.

The floor gear had gone with the floor. The oversized torso plate and the one shoulder piece and the second bottle I never got to.

I had assumed all of my own things were lying on the rug in my bedroom.

I was wrong about that, and I made a point of noticing it, because I had walked into that floor with one wrong assumption already and I would rather collect them here than in there.

---

Then I looked at my right hand.

The floor gauntlet had gone off it and there was a dull grey band on the third finger with nothing cut into it and nothing set in it.

I turned my hand over. It did not catch the light.

> **[Unique Relic: KAIROS.]**

>

> **[All Attributes ×10.]**

>

> **[Duration: 60 seconds.]**

There was still text below that.

I did not open it, standing in a public hall with a hundred people coming and going and nothing else to look at.

---

I closed the panel and turned the ring once around the finger with my thumb, and I did it harder than it needed to be done.

Two metres.

Then I stopped turning it, and I went and found the terminals.

---

They were set into the wall by the doors, six of them, and four had people at them.

I put my hand against the plate on the nearest free one.

> **[Register for Floor One?]**

>

> **[YES.]**

> **[Registration confirmed.]**

>

> **[Registered Challengers: 54/100.]**

>

> **[You will be recalled when the participant requirement has been fulfilled.]**

Fifty-four.

Forty-six to go, and no way of knowing whether that took an hour or most of a day, because it fills at whatever rate people decide to walk in.

Standing next to the wall and watching a number go up is not a use of that.

I went through the doors.

---

It opens out.

That is the first thing and nobody had told me, because everything I read about Floor One is about the battlefield and the clear, and none of it is about this.

The passage beyond the registration hall was wide enough that four men in full gear went past me abreast and there was still room for the two of us coming the other way.

The stone had a shine down the middle of it. Not polish. It was worn lower along the centre line than at the edges, in a smooth trough about three metres across, and I could feel the dip through my boots.

Sixty-three years of people walking to the same doors.

---

The noise came at me in layers.

Underneath everything there was hammering, single strikes with a pause between them, from somewhere ahead and on the left.

Over that, a long metal scrape that went on for four or five seconds and stopped and started again.

Then voices, dozens of them, none of them shouting and all of them at once, so that the whole passage had a low pressure of talk in it that you could not pull one sentence out of.

And a chair leg going over stone, and a piece of armour knocking against the underside of a table, and somebody laughing twice.

---

The smell was worse organised than the sound.

Hot fat and something with pepper in it, coming from the right, in a wall of steam that I walked through and came out the other side of with my face damp.

Then leather and oil, immediately after, cold and thick.

Then the flat scorched smell that metal has when it has just been cut.

And under all of it the pressure that active mana equipment puts in the back of your sinuses, which is not a smell and which I have never heard anybody describe properly.

I had eaten nothing since a desk in my bedroom.

I made myself keep walking anyway, because my hands came first.

---

The counters started about forty metres in.

Boards hung over them on chains, painted, most of them repainted more than once so the older lettering came through underneath.

Behind a reinforced front on my left there were weapons on a rack in three rows, and a man was holding one of them up at eye level and turning it slowly and not saying anything to the person waiting for him to say something.

Further along, chest pieces hung off a frame on hooks with their straps down, six of them, all different sizes and none of them new.

Two technicians worked underneath a lamp with a mana fitting in it, one on a shoulder guard and one on something I could not see, and neither of them looked up.

---

There were people sitting on the floor along the wall opposite with their backs against it, in a line, the way people sit when there are not enough chairs and nobody is going to make them move.

Some of them were young and turning their heads at everything.

One of them had his own gauntlet off and was looking at his own hand and flexing the fingers and looking at it again, and he had come out of a Tutorial recently enough that he was still checking.

Twenty metres further on the condition of the people changed.

Bloodstains gone brown at the edges. A shoulder guard hanging off its lower strap because the upper one had parted. A woman with the whole side of her face swollen sitting perfectly still with her hands in her lap and her eyes open.

Nobody in that stretch was talking.

---

Four of them had a map open on a table between them and were leaning over it with their heads close.

One had his finger down on the board and was holding it there while the others looked at where it was.

"If it puts me out past the northern break I am not coming back across," he said. "I will go around."

Nobody argued with him. One of them moved his own finger to a second place and left it there, and they all looked at that instead.

Making the arrangement that the deployment takes away from you. They knew that and they were doing it anyway, because an agreement that survives one time in three is still worth more than nothing.

---

I found the repair counter by the hammering.

It was a deep bay rather than a shopfront, open to the passage, with three benches in it and the heat coming off the far wall where the work was actually done.

I put both gauntlets down on the wood.

They looked worse on a clean surface than they had looked on my hands.

---

The plates across the knuckles had been ground back on both, more on the right, so the front edges were bright where the finish had gone and the metal underneath had come through in flat patches.

There was scoring along the outside edge of the left one, four or five parallel lines about as deep as a fingernail, from something at the freight yard that I had not felt at the time.

One plate on the right sat about two millimetres proud of the one beside it and had done since the Giant.

The mana channels had gone dark brown either side of the wrist join, in two long stains where the heat had come back out of them.

And the leather inside both palms had worn down until it went shiny and took the shape of my grip.

Four weeks. That is the whole of it.

---

The technician turned them over twice, put a thumb on the proud plate and pressed, and watched what it did.

"Channels want stripping," he said. "The seat under that plate is spread."

"Can it be done?"

"It can be done. Not quickly." He was already reaching for something behind him. "Come back."

"Thank you."

That was the entire conversation and it was the correct length.

---

I got about ten metres before it started behind me.

Two hard taps and then a crack as a plate came off, and the sound a small tool makes when it goes into a fixed join and the metal argues with it.

Then a smell I could taste, sharp and mineral, that arrived before I worked out what it was.

Then three short sparks, one after another, and a sound like water being put on a hot pan, and I knew without turning round that he had put current through the first channel to find out where it was failing.

I did not turn round.

> **[Registered Challengers: 63/100.]**

---

My hunger arrived properly about six paces after that.

It came all at once, the way it does when the thing that has been holding it off stops being there, and it went through me hard enough that I put one hand on the wall.

The last thing I ate was at a desk with two documents open in front of me, on the night before all of this, and everything between then and now had been either a Tower or a corridor.

I turned round and went back toward the steam.

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