SSS Awakening: I Gain a Skill Every Time I Die

**POV: Jace**

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> **[Challengers Remaining: 23.]**

>

> **[Final Battlefield Contraction: 02:51.]**

I went back up the slope I had just come down.

The last circle had put itself over the inner half of the fortress, which meant everything I had bled in was inside it and everything I had run through to get out was not.

I went at a walk with my left elbow held in against the strap, because that is the only way that side would let me breathe.

Every fourth or fifth stride the shirt pulled where it had dried into the edges of the skin and let go again.

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Twenty-two other people were doing the same thing from six directions and none of us went near each other.

The inner courtyard was smaller than I remembered it from twenty minutes earlier and there was a great deal more in it.

Half the keep. The three storeys that were left had lost a section of the western face, so you could see up into two floors of empty rooms with nothing in them.

A stairway coming off the eastern side with the top nine steps gone and the bottom eleven still there, going up to a landing and stopping.

Waist-high walls, in runs of five and six metres, which is exactly the wrong height. High enough to trip over and low enough to be no use.

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Two of the collapsed buildings on the southern side had come down inward, so what was left of them was three walls and a floor full of their own roof.

The paving between all of it was dark in patches and the patches were not water.

There was a Warg lying across the bottom of the stairway that somebody had killed and not moved, and the flies had not found it yet because there are no flies in there.

Smoke came off the western side in a thin flat layer at about head height and did not go up.

It smelled of stone dust and hot metal and the animals.

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The behaviour had changed entirely.

Two men went past each other at eight metres near the keep and neither of them did anything about it, and both of them turned round afterward and kept walking backward for four or five paces.

A woman with a spear got herself into the angle where a wall met the keep and put her back into it and stopped moving.

She was not hiding. She had a sightline down the whole southern half of the courtyard and she was simply not going to be attacked from behind while she used it.

A pair came in through the eastern breach together and they were still together and they were four metres apart, which they had not been an hour ago.

Neither of them let the other one get behind him. They rotated it, without discussing it, every time the ground made them turn.

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I got a glimpse of him on the far side.

He was working along the western wall with the blade down on the low carry and he stopped twice while I watched, both times without any obvious reason, and then went on.

The second time he stopped, a man came out of a doorway forty metres ahead of him and went the other way, and I understood what he had been looking at.

He was not looking for people to fight. He was looking at what would be behind him when he did.

Then a Warg came out of the western rubble at a group of three between us and all of it went out of my sight at once.

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Two of them were already going at each other beside the broken stairway.

They had been at it a while. Both of them were slow and one of them had a weapon he was holding wrong because of his hand.

And there was an animal working round the outside of them, in and out, snapping at whichever one turned his back, and it had already opened the calf of the one with the bad hand.

He was the one who won it.

He put the other man down against the bottom step and it cost him everything he had left, and he came off it with his mouth open and his hands on his knees.

The Warg took him in the shoulder before he got upright.

He got it off him. That is the part nobody would believe. He got his arm up into its throat and turned it off and it went past him.

But the air over the stairway went wrong while he was doing it.

He turned and ran and he had about four metres of margin and a shoulder that no longer worked, and the greyness came up his back before he reached the corner.

> **[Floor Protection activated.]**

> **[Challengers Remaining: 22.]**

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Somebody who had been behind a collapsed wall on the southern side finally decided that where he was would shortly not exist.

He came out at a run with his head down.

A man came off the wall to intercept him about fifteen metres out and there was nothing good about what happened next.

Both of them were finished. It went four exchanges and all of it was bad, and the ending of it was a man on the ground with his hands up and a man standing over him who could barely lift what he was holding.

> **[Challengers Remaining: 21.]**

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Twenty-one.

One more.

One more person leaves this floor and the twenty of us who are still standing have cleared it, and every single one of the twenty-one of us was doing the same arithmetic at the same second.

The whole courtyard changed in about two seconds.

People who had been keeping distance started closing it, and people who had been hunting stopped, and everybody looked at everybody else at once.

That is when he came round the end of the keep at me.

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Not tall. Broad across the shoulders and thick through the neck, the way a man is when he has been putting weight on for one specific purpose for a long time.

Red hair, copper, and it had gone dark and flat with sweat across the front of his skull.

Half his face was covered in blood from a split above the left eyebrow and it had run down and dried and been run over again, and his nose had been broken at some point before today and set badly.

His armour had been good and about a third of it was gone. Three plate sections missing off the left side entirely with the straps still hanging where they had been cut.

No weapon.

Heavy reinforced bracers up both forearms to the elbow, scored across the outside of both, and nothing in either hand.

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He came at a walk and he was looking at my side.

At the strap round my ribs and the panel sitting off them and the whole left half of my shirt, and he had already worked out what that meant, and he had picked me for the same reason twelve other people would have picked me.

Then he got to about six metres and his eyes came off my ribs and went down to my hands.

He stopped walking.

He looked at the gauntlets for perhaps a second and a half. Then he looked at where my feet were, and how far apart, and which one was forward.

And his shoulders came down about two centimetres and something went out of them, and he smiled with his whole face.

It was not a threat. He was pleased.

He came in.

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