SSS Awakening: I Gain a Skill Every Time I Die

It was a long counter with four pots going behind it and a bench arrangement in front, most of it full, and the woman working it did not ask me anything except how many.

What came was hot meat off the bone in a shallow bowl over rice, with the broth ladled over the top so the rice went dark at the edges and stayed pale in the middle.

Something green and pickled on the side of it. A cup of water so cold that the outside of the cup went wet in about ten seconds.

The steam came straight up into my face when I sat down and I sat in it for a moment before I did anything else.

---

The first mouthful told me exactly how bad it had got.

It was too hot and I ate it anyway, and the salt in it hit the back of my tongue and my jaw did something on its own.

I had gone through a third of the bowl before I registered that I was not tasting any of it.

So I slowed down.

The meat came off in threads. The broth had pepper and something sour underneath the pepper. The water was cold enough to hurt across the front of my teeth and I drank half of it in one go anyway.

Then I put the cup down and looked around properly, because I had a bench and a wall behind me and nothing to do for a while.

---

Four tables along, five of them had a map out beside the food and were doing the same thing as the group in the passage, except further on.

One of them had a stub of something and was actually marking the board.

"Second contraction, though," the woman on the end said. "Second one is where it goes wrong. First one you can be anywhere."

"Then we say the second one and not the first."

They went quiet and looked at it.

---

Directly opposite me a man sat with a full bowl in front of him going cold and a shoulder strap across his knees, working a needle through the torn end of it with his hands turned in toward his chest.

He had not touched the food. He got the needle through, pulled, and made a face, and pulled it out and started that stitch again.

He had come out of there recently. Everything about the way he was sitting said so.

Two men behind him had their sleeves up and were comparing forearms, and one of them said something I did not catch and both of them laughed, and the one with the worse arm laughed harder.

---

And on the far side of the room a group of six were being loud about it.

"Thirty-one," one of them said. "Thirty-one left when they took me."

"You are not counting the ones that went at the same time."

"Thirty-one on the board. I looked at the board."

Somebody else said a lower number and somebody else said he was lying, and the whole table went up.

That is what it is here.

A hundred go in. Eighty come out with a failure and their gear ruined and their evening free, and they get a bowl of something and argue about the number on the board, and they register again.

I put my elbows on the table and finished the rice.

---

The passage went on for a good deal further than I expected.

I walked it with the counters on my left and the wall on my right and let it come at me.

A bay with six low beds in it, all occupied, and a woman going along them with her hands out over each one for about fifteen seconds and moving on.

The man on the third bed had his leg out straight and his teeth together and did not make a sound while she was over him.

A counter selling nothing but consumables, the squat bottles in racks four deep, and a queue at it of eleven people.

Somebody at the front of that queue was arguing about the price and everybody behind him had already decided to pay it.

---

Then a board.

Public, four metres of it, the battlefield laid out the same way it is laid out in the hall and in Rev. 41, with the contraction rings drawn on and the timings printed underneath in a column.

Notices pinned down the side of it. A recruitment card from a guild I had heard of, with a name and a meeting place and nothing about terms.

Two more cards under it from guilds I had not heard of.

Nobody came near me while I stood there, which was a change, and it took me a second to work out why. Half the people in this district had been eliminated today as well. Being one of them is not interesting.

---

Past the board the passage widened into a floor with reinforced blocks along the far end.

A man had a long weapon up on its point and was turning it in his hands, letting it fall through his fingers a few centimetres and catching it, over and over, finding where it wanted to sit.

Beside him a woman was putting something into one of the blocks in short bursts.

Not a long output. Two seconds, stop, look at the block, two seconds.

The face of the block went white where it landed and faded back down over about four seconds, and she was watching how fast it faded rather than watching what she was doing.

That is somebody measuring, and she was doing it properly.

---

I went back to the board and stood in front of it again, and this time I looked at it as a battlefield instead of as a map.

The far corner meant nothing to me now. I had been there and I had what was in it, and it is on my right hand.

What was left was simple enough that I did not need long with it.

Stay in until the counter says twenty. Take what EXP the floor gives me on the way, out of monsters where I can and out of Challengers where they make me.

I was Level Twelve going into a room of people who had mostly been eliminated by other people rather than by the floor.

That is the whole plan and it does not need any more of me than that.

> **[Registered Challengers: 87/100.]**

---

The district kept moving the entire time.

They came out of the registration doors in ones and twos, and every so often in a group of five or six all at once.

It took about two seconds to tell which of those had come out of a Tutorial and which had come out of the floor.

The Tutorial ones stopped just past the doors and looked up.

The other ones did not look at anything.

They came out at a walk with their heads down and went straight for either the repair bays or the food, and one of them went for the consumables queue and joined the back of it without breaking stride.

I walked the length of it twice more and then went back for my hands.

---

They were on the bench with a cloth under them.

The proud plate sat flush. The channels either side of the wrist join had gone from brown back to the dull grey they are supposed to be, and the seam where he had gone into them had been closed up and left visible.

The scoring on the left one was still there. Four parallel lines, slightly shallower.

He had not tried to make them look new and I would have thought less of him if he had.

---

I put my right hand in first.

The lining took my knuckles in the place it has taken them for four weeks, and the leather in the palm went into its own shape without being asked, and I got the wrist strap through and pulled it and set it two holes down.

Then the left. Then I made a fist twice with each and turned both wrists over.

Then I put mana through them.

> **[Mana: 260/260 → 258/260.]**

The plates came in.

That is what it feels like from inside. They draw down across the back of the hand in a sequence, four small metallic clicks running from the wrist out to the first knuckles, and the pressure arrives all around the fist at once and holds.

The channels came up a dull orange under the plate edges, both hands, even the whole way along, with nothing hesitating at the wrist join.

I held it for three seconds and let it go and the light went out of them evenly.

---

"C 240," the technician said.

I put my hand on his plate.

> **[Account debited: C 240.]**

A man loading freight takes home three thousand a month. Two hundred and forty is a little over two days of that, for two hours of work on a pair of gauntlets.

Every person in the queue behind me was going to pay something like it and register again anyway.

I was still working the left strap down another hole when the tone went.

---

It came through the whole district at once, one clear note, from no direction in particular.

Four tables along, a man stopped in the middle of a sentence with his hand still up.

Three chairs went back over the stone in about a second and a half, one of them hard enough to go over onto its side, and nobody picked it up.

The man with the untouched bowl folded the cloth over the top of it and put it inside his coat.

Weapons came up off tables all down the passage in a long ripple of wood and metal, and the noise underneath everything changed pitch, because the talking had stopped and the walking had not.

The consumables queue turned into eleven people all reaching for the counter at once.

---

Then mine.

> **[Floor One registration complete.]**

>

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

>

> **[Registered Challengers must report to the Deployment Hall.]**

>

> **[Deployment begins in 10:00.]**

I got the strap set, and stood up, and went with it.

---

The passage ran the other way now and it ran full.

The woman who had been measuring the fade on the training block came past me on the left with the weapon already across her back and her chin up, and she was not measuring anything any more.

The man with the torn strap went by on my right with it fastened and his shoulder guard sitting where it should sit, and he was eating out of the cloth with one hand while he walked.

The six who had been arguing about thirty-one were four abreast ahead of me and none of them were saying anything.

And the young one who had been sitting against the wall flexing his own fingers was up and moving with everybody else, and he had his gauntlet back on, and he was still opening and closing that hand.

---

The registration hall took us and pushed us through into a bigger one behind it.

Higher ceiling. Same grey stone. No windows and no weather and no smell, which is how I have learned to tell that the System is holding a space rather than borrowing one.

A hundred people came in over about four minutes and sorted themselves out the way a hundred people do.

Some of them went straight to somebody and stood with them without discussing it.

Others put their backs to a wall and made sure there was floor in front of them.

---

I got looked at.

Four or five of them, at different times, in the way people do it when they have decided in advance not to be caught doing it.

One woman held it a good deal longer than the others and then turned round and said something to the man beside her and did not look at me again.

Nobody came over. Nobody moved out of my way either.

There were three or four people in that room the rest of it was doing the same thing to, and I was one of them, and that was all.

---

I flexed my fingers inside the gauntlets once and felt the plates go with them.

The ring sat under the leather on the third finger of my right hand with the plate over the top of it, and I could feel the band against the finger next to it when I closed the fist.

No far corner this time. No four hundred metres of open ground with a five-minute clock on it and a labyrinth pulling me toward the edge of the map.

Just the floor and ninety-nine other people and a counter that had to get to twenty.

---

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

>

> **[Deployment sequence initiated.]**

The doors went.

All of them, around the whole of that hall, in one movement, and the sound they made came back off the ceiling twice.

> **[Random deployment commencing.]**

I closed both fists.

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