SSS Awakening: I Gain a Skill Every Time I Die

**POV: Jace**

---

> **[Challengers Remaining: 77.]**

I went out onto the crossing with about thirty other people.

Not with them. At the same time as them, in the same direction, on the same three metres of ledge beside the open channel, because there was one way across and the ground behind us was closing.

Boots came down on wet stone all round me and none of them were in step.

Somebody behind my left shoulder was shouting a name over and over and getting no answer, and he kept shouting it while he ran.

---

The mist over the ravine lit up twice while I was on the second arch.

The first one was blue and came from somewhere down among the storage sheds, and it went through the mist and made the whole underside of the crossing visible for about a quarter of a second.

The second was orange and much closer, off to the right and below, and it came with a crack that arrived through the stone under my boots before it arrived through the air.

A woman four metres ahead of me went down on one hand at the noise and was up again without stopping.

---

The channel beside us had water in it.

Not running. Sixty years of rain sitting in a stone trough, black, with a skin on it, and every impact anywhere on that structure sent rings across the surface.

The ledge was wet from it and there was moss in the joints and no rail on the ravine side.

Two men went past me on the outside, on the narrow strip between me and twenty metres of nothing, because it was the only gap available and they took it.

---

He came onto the crossing from the far end while I was on the fourth arch.

I saw the notch in the ear before I saw anything else, at about thirty metres, because he had his head turned.

Then the rest of it. A head taller than everybody around him, that plain dull cuirass with nothing cut into it, the dark hair tied back off his neck, the long single-edged blade carried low on his right with the point behind him.

He was not looking at me. He was looking at where the ledge narrowed.

There was one gap in the crowd on that crossing and it was between us, and we were both walking into it because it was the only place either of us could put our feet.

---

He got there first by about half a second.

The blade came up off the low carry without any preparation in it at all, no shoulder, no turn, and it came across at the height of my collarbones while he was still finishing a stride.

I got both gauntlets up and turned them and took it on the plates.

The whole thing went through my forearms and into my shoulders and out through my spine, and my boots went back across the wet stone about forty centimetres without either foot leaving the ground.

> **[Health: 351/420 → 329/420.]**

My left arm did not want to come back up straight away.

He was already bringing it round the other way, low, at my hip, and I did not have the arm for it so I gave him the ground instead and went back another metre and let it go past.

The point took a chip out of the stone parapet behind me the size of my fist and put it into the channel.

Then I went at him.

I got inside the length of that blade while the swing was still finishing on his left, and I put the right hand into the cuirass over the short ribs, and it was like hitting the aqueduct.

He did not fold. He took it with his ribs and brought his elbow down on my shoulder and stepped back off me, and he did it in one movement.

Then he stopped.

He did not come in again, and that is the part I did not like. He was two metres off with the blade back down on the low carry and he was looking at where my feet were.

I gave him an opening.

I let my left hand drop about fifteen centimetres, on the arm he had already jarred, and left it there for a full second.

He did not take it.

> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**

The gold came up across the ledge and put both of our shadows out over the ravine, and I went at the low carry side, because a blade held down on the right has to come up before it can do anything.

> **[Mana: 228/260 → 220/260.]**

He brought it up.

He brought it up faster than the mechanics of it should have allowed, into a guard rather than a strike, and my first hand went into the flat of the blade and the heat went off it into the air between us.

But the second one got through underneath and landed on the cuirass under the arm, and this time he moved.

One step back and then a second one, and his heel found the edge of the ledge and he had to look at where it was.

That is the whole of what I got.

He was already coming off it when the support went.

---

Something arrived from further along the crossing.

I did not see what threw it. It went past behind me at about head height and hit the top of the third support on the far side, and about a metre of that support stopped existing.

The stone came out in a spray and most of it went down into the ravine, and what did not go down came across the ledge at both of us edge on.

I got my forearm across my face and turned my shoulder into it.

He went the other way.

When I could see again there were four people in the space where he had been, all of them moving toward the near end, one of them fighting somebody as he went, and the notch in that ear was somewhere behind them.

---

Then the crossing filled up properly.

Everybody who had been holding a position out in the settlements arrived at the same time, because the map had told all of them the same thing at the same moment, and the only route in was under my feet.

I got put against the parapet twice by people who were not attacking me and did not know I was there.

Somebody’s shoulder guard opened the back of my hand between the plates.

I stopped trying to find him and started trying to get off that arch.

---

The near end of the crossing is where the geography turns against everybody.

The ledge along the open channel is about three metres wide for six arches and then it is not, because the cover over the channel has fallen in across the seventh and eighth and taken half the width with it.

For thirty metres you go single file along the ravine side with the trough open on your left and the drop on your right.

Then it comes down onto the near footing in a set of broad steps, and around that footing there is a spread of low walls and two broken guard buildings and a road.

Cover everywhere, and about sixty people trying to use it at once, which means it is not cover.

---

I came down the steps with the noise going up around me.

Metal on metal off to the left, three impacts and then nothing. Somebody shouting one word repeatedly from inside the nearer guard building, which was a warning and not a threat.

A section of low wall about twenty metres ahead came apart and a man came through the gap it left, backward, and he did not get up.

> **[Floor Protection activated.]**

> **[Challengers Remaining: 75.]**

Two crossed in front of me at ten metres moving together, one covering the other’s back and neither of them looking at me, and they went through and past and were gone into the walls.

A wounded man went by on my right at a dead run heading for the road, not fighting anybody, holding his side.

> **[Challengers Remaining: 74.]**

---

Then a man came out of the gap in the low wall and landed in front of me.

He had not chosen to. Somebody had put him there, and he came out sideways with his feet crossed and hit the ground on his hip about three metres from my boots.

He was up faster than he had any right to be.

Segmented plate over the chest, a good piece, and it had failed on the left where three of the segments had been driven in and one had come off its rivet and was hanging.

There was blood down the inside of that arm from something above the elbow, enough that it had got to his glove.

A hand axe in the right hand and nothing in the left, and the left was not being used.

He saw me and he came, immediately, and he did not say one word.

I got the axe on the outside of the right gauntlet and let it slide off rather than stopping it, and it went past my hip and he came with it.

He was quick and he was finished, both at once. Everything in the right arm still worked and there was nothing underneath it.

I did not go for the head or the good side.

I put the left hand into the hanging segment on his chest.

The plate went in and the whole assembly moved and he made a noise and his shoulder dropped, and the axe came round anyway because he was going to swing it whatever happened to his ribs.

> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**

I took the axe on the plates and put the right hand into the same failed section, the ability scaling its draw to match the exact kinetic force required.

> **[Mana: 220/260 → 214/260.]**

> **[Health: 329/420 → 314/420.]**

> **[Floor Protection activated.]**

> **[Challenger eliminated.]**

>

> **[Level 11.]**

>

> **[Experience acquired: 110.]**

>

> **[EXP: 775/1,200 → 885/1,200.]**

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