SSS Awakening: I Gain a Skill Every Time I Die

**POV: Jace**

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> **[Challengers Remaining: 60.]**

>

> **[Second Battlefield Contraction: 04:52.]**

I went south across the grass at a pace I could hold.

It came up at me the whole way.

The stone that had looked the colour of bone from two kilometres out went grey as I got under it, because the rain has been coming down that wall for a long time and has left the whole face streaked.

Thick. Two metres through at least, where the northern third has come down and you can see the section.

The blocks lie in the grass all the way down the slope with grass grown over the lower ones and not over the higher ones.

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Two towers stand up out of it, square, both of them open at the top where the upper floors have gone, so you can see straight up the inside of one of them and out through a window on the far side.

The causeway comes up the west and there is a gatehouse at the head of it.

One leaf of the gate is still there. Iron, black, hanging off a single lower hinge and leaning back against the wall at about twenty degrees, and it has been in that position long enough for grass to come up through it.

Inside the wall, roofless barracks along the eastern side, four of them, just gable ends and door openings now.

And a keep in the middle of the courtyard with three storeys of it left and nothing on top.

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The smell arrived about four hundred metres out.

Wet stone first, which that whole hill has. Then smoke, not woodsmoke, the flat scorched smell that comes off masonry when something has gone into it hard.

Then blood, thin and metallic, hanging in the grass on the approach where somebody had already been.

There was light going up over the walls in short bursts. Two white, one that put a long red shadow across the underside of the smoke and did not repeat.

And under all of it there was noise coming out of that fortress the way noise comes out of a stone room.

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There was a fight about eighty metres off my line, in the last of the field walls.

Two of them, and one had already lost it. He was down on his back against the wall with his weapon out of reach and his heels working at the ground, and the other one was taking his time getting round the stone to him.

Whoever won that was going to be worth about a hundred and thirty and would be standing in the open, breathing hard, with his back to the fortress.

I looked at it for about two seconds.

Then I looked at the timer, and at the two hundred metres of open slope still in front of me, and I kept walking.

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The noise changed while I was on the causeway.

Metal came off stone somewhere inside, three times, and the walls sent it back so it arrived twice.

Then something snarled. Not a dog. It went down at the end instead of up and it came out of one of the barracks and got answered from somewhere else.

Then a man screamed and stopped screaming.

A column of light went up above the broken section of the northern wall and stood there for about a second before it went out.

> **[Challengers Remaining: 59.]**

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The gatehouse had eleven people in the mouth of it and I did not go anywhere near it.

I went round the shoulder of the hill to the north face and up over the fallen blocks instead, and it cost me forty seconds and a great deal of the ache in my left side.

The last block before the breach is about my own height and I had to get a knee up onto it.

Something moved in my ribs going over that one and I put my forehead down on the stone for a moment and then finished it.

Then I was in.

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The outer courtyard is the whole width of the fortress between the wall and the keep, and there were perhaps twenty people in it, and it was not only people.

A Warg came out of the second barracks doorway at a flat run with its head low.

It took a man across the back of the legs before he had finished turning round and he went down on his face.

It went straight over him and kept going at somebody else, and the man on the ground got his hands under him and was not dead.

Two others were fighting beside the well and they stopped fighting because a second animal went between them at speed, and both of them jumped the same direction and had to sort themselves out afterward.

Something came in from the wall top, ranged, and missed the man it had been thrown at by about two metres and took a piece out of the barracks wall beside a third Warg.

The Warg turned round and went for the nearest person to the noise, which was neither of them.

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Under the eastern wall two of them had put their backs together and were holding off a pair of the animals with reach weapons.

They were doing it well.

They were also both watching the courtyard over the top of it, because the moment those two Wargs were down they were going to be two men standing very close to each other with nothing left to be busy with.

I went along the inside of the north wall.

---

The wagon was on its side beside the well with the axle up.

I was three metres past it when the Warg came out from behind it, and it did not run first. It was already at the top of a lunge when I got the first of it.

I went down and left and it went over my shoulder.

Same build as the one in the storehouse. Front-heavy, dark, wet, with the same wrong distribution across the shoulders.

Then it turned in about a third of the space I expected it to need.

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

>

> **[Duration: 01:00.]**

Six metres and everything living in it.

The animal was the loudest thing in there and it was not the only one. There were four people inside my range and two of them were moving toward me and one of those turned off.

It came from my left along the wall and I had the line before its shoulder was round.

I did not go backward. I went into the wall side, where it could only bring one shoulder, and it committed to where I had been.

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

Four seconds, and I did not need more.

The first hand went into the side of the neck and turned the head, and the second went into the same place while the body was still trying to follow the head.

It came down on the flags and slid about a metre on its own weight.

> **[Mana: 194/270 → 186/270.]**

> **[Warg eliminated.]**

>

> **[Experience acquired: 60.]**

>

> **[EXP: 55/1,300 → 115/1,300.]**

I had not straightened up when the second one came through the arch.

There is a broken arch in the north wall where a stair used to go up.

It came out of that at my right side, and I got it in the field about a fifth of a second before I got it in my eyes, and a fifth of a second was not enough.

It did not bite. It put its shoulder into me.

The whole of that animal arrived under my arm.

And I went off my feet and my back hit the fortress wall.

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