SSS Awakening: I Gain a Skill Every Time I Die
Chapter 119 - 117 — Gone Ahead I**POV: Jace**
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> **[Challengers Remaining: 1.]**
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> **[Floor One Placement Complete.]**
Nothing moved anywhere.
I stood in the middle of it with my hand still half out and let it be quiet, and it took me a while to work out what I was looking at.
The western divider was down. Not damaged. Down, in courses, lying across its own footprint in blocks with the mortar still on their faces, and Krüger was not under them any more.
Two of the three fallen columns had come apart. One of them was in three pieces with a gap between each, and the third had lost its top two metres to the collision and those two metres were somewhere behind me.
The paving between all of it had split in six or seven places in long straight lines, and in one place there was a hole where four slabs had gone in together.
---
There was equipment everywhere.
A spear with the shaft snapped a hand’s width below the head, lying where she had been.
Two thirds of a rectangular shield. A short bow with the limb broken. A helmet on its side about six metres from anything.
A rectangle of hide armour with four claw lines across it and the shape of a bracer pressed into the middle, which was mine, twenty metres from where I was standing.
The scorching on the masonry went up the base of the second column in a wide black band where I had held the gold on my hands for four seconds too long.
And the animals were going. Not decaying. Going, from the edges in, the way frost comes off glass, and there was one at the foot of the rubble that was already only half there.
Dust came down through the air onto all of it and kept coming down.
---
My ears were ringing on one note and had been for some time.
I had stone dust in my mouth and in the back of my throat and nothing to do about it.
The gauntlets were hot. Both of them, from the wrist out, hot enough that I could feel it on the inside of my forearms through the lining.
The plates on the right had play in them that was not going to come out without a bench.
I could still breathe all the way in.
That was the thing I noticed, and it was the last thirty seconds of it.
> **[Unique Relic Duration: 00:03.]**
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> **[00:02.]**
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> **[00:01.]**
> **[Unique Relic effect ended.]**
> **[Strength: 330 → 33.]**
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> **[Endurance: 430 → 43.]**
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> **[Agility: 420 → 42.]**
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> **[Perception: 280 → 28.]**
> **[Maximum Health: 4,300 → 430.]**
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> **[Health: 350/4,300 → 35/430.]**
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Nothing hit me.
There is no penalty on the back of it and nothing came out of the ring and there was no moment where I paid for the minute.
That is the problem. Everything I had been carrying for nine hours simply came back to being the size it actually was, all at once, with nothing standing in front of it.
My knees went about ten centimetres.
I got a hand onto the nearest piece of column and locked the elbow and stayed there.
The left side of my chest arrived first and it arrived complete. Then the shoulder. Then the place under the ribs where the animal had been.
Then the forearm, where the plate had moved on the strap, and the back, where I had taken a course of stone.
My breath went a third of the way in and stopped, and I had to go at it three times before I got a whole one.
I put my head down and stayed like that for about eight seconds.
Thirty-five out of four hundred and thirty.
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> **[Floor One cleared.]**
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> **[Clear Requirement: Finish among the final twenty Challengers.]**
>
> **[Clear Requirement fulfilled at: 20 remaining.]**
> **[Final Placement: 1st / 100.]**
>
> **[Floor Two unlocked.]**
That is two different things and the Tower had the decency to put them on separate lines.
I cleared this floor the moment Kavanagh went out. Twenty of us cleared it at the same second and every one of them has Floor Two open tonight.
Everything after that was placement.
Everything after that was three more people and a man with a shield made of air, and none of it got me one metre further up the Tower than the other nineteen.
> **[First Place Reward calculated.]**
It got me this instead.
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> **[All Attributes +2.]**
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> **[Unassigned Attribute Points +5.]**
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> **[Special Reward acquired.]**
Something came down into the dust in front of me and did not bounce.
> **[Adamantine Ingot.]**
I got down on one knee to pick it up and getting down was worse than being down.
It was about the length of my hand and half that across and about two fingers thick, with the edges square and clean, and the corners had not been softened by anything.
Dark silver. Not bright. There was a sheen coming off the flat of it that moved when I moved it, and underneath the sheen the metal was grey enough to be almost the colour of the paving.
Cold. Colder than the courtyard, and it stayed cold in my hand instead of taking heat off it.
And it weighed considerably more than a block that size has any business weighing. I had to change my grip on it before I stood up.
> **[Adamantine Ingot.]**
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> **[Type: Forging Material.]**
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> **[An exceptionally durable material suitable for high-grade equipment forging.]**
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I looked at it, and then I looked at my own hands.
Bright metal across both sets of knuckles where the finish had gone. A groove across the back of the right one from a claw. The plates sitting loose on that side with the leather at the wrist gone dark and soft.
Four hours ago a man on a bench had brought those back and they had not survived a day.
I put the ingot inside my shirt where the pouch used to be and closed my hand round it once through the fabric.
Then the courtyard went.
Not fading. The far side of it stopped being far and then stopped being a side, and the light came up out of the paving instead of down onto it.
The last thing I saw was somebody’s helmet on its side about six metres from anything.
---
Then there was noise.
An enormous amount of it, at once, after nine hours.
Hammering somewhere ahead and to the left, single strikes with a pause between them. A long metal scrape. Forty conversations going at the same time with nothing pulling out of them.
Hot fat and pepper from the right. Leather and oil. That flat pressure in the back of the sinuses that active mana equipment puts there.
A floor that was flat and dry and level under both boots.
> **[Health: 35/430 → 430/430.]**
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> **[Mana: 66/270 → 270/270.]**
My body took a great deal longer than the number did.
I stood in the middle of that passage with my hand still closed round nothing and let people go past me on both sides.
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They had been coming back into that district for two hours.
That is the arithmetic of it and everybody in there had already done it. Eighty of them had come out over the course of the afternoon and the last one back is the last one standing, and I was the last one back.
The talking went down along about thirty metres of that passage and did not come all the way up again.
Somebody said a number out loud.
Two men at a result board looked up from it and then looked at each other, and one of them said something to a woman in a coat with a guild mark on the shoulder, and she wrote something down.
Nobody came at me. There were eighty other people in that district who had been on that floor today and most of them had their own afternoon to be furious about.
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"There he is."
He came off a bench outside the second repair bay with his arms out and I have never seen a man that annoyed look that pleased.
Somebody had already been at Rory Kavanagh. The eyebrow was closed with something clean and there was fresh wrapping round the left thigh and up over the hip.
The leg was taking his weight, which it had not been doing the last time I saw it.
The rest of him had not been touched. There was dried blood down the whole right side of his face and neck and into the collar.
The burn across his ribs had a dressing on it, and the shirt over the top was the same shirt, with the hole still in it.
"Twenty-first," he said.
"I know."
"Twenty-first." He said it again to make sure I had it. "One. One person. If somebody else had gone out anywhere on that floor in the four seconds before you got me, I would be standing here with Floor Two open."
"You would."
"And I would still have lost the fight." He grinned. It came up out of the annoyance without displacing any of it. "That is the part I keep coming back to."
---
"I had to be lucky," I said.
"You had to be lucky at the end. You were not lucky for the eight minutes before that." He put one finger against his own ribs, on the burn, without any particular care.
"You did that on purpose after you already knew what it was doing to me. Nobody does that."
"It seemed better than the alternative."
"It was not better. It was worse and you did it anyway." He was still grinning. "That is what I mean."
He was not angry with me. That is the thing I could not get past. He was angry with a number.
"Are you going again?"
"I have already registered." He tipped his head back down the passage toward the terminals. "Sixty-something in the queue. I will be in the next one."
Then his own panel came up in front of him and I could see the shape of it from the side, and the line at the bottom of his said the same thing mine had said at seven o’clock that morning.
Mine did not say that any more.
Neither of us mentioned it and both of us saw it.
"Next time you are in there," he said, "come and find me first. Before anything else has had a go at either of us."
"That is a terrible idea."
"It is a fantastic idea." He was already walking. "Kavanagh. Say it after."
---
Krüger was four bays down and he had not come over.
He was sitting side-on to the passage with the cuirass off and on the bench beside him, and the arm was wrapped from the wrist to above the elbow.
A technician had the cuirass turned over and was looking at the inside of the shoulder mounting.
He saw me and put his chin up two centimetres, the way he had before.
Then he said, "Sit down before you fall over," which was correct, so I sat down on the end of the bench.
Neither of us said anything for about four seconds.
"You gave me the front," he said.
"I did."
"You gave it to me for about a second and a half and I took it." He was not looking at me. He was looking at the middle distance the way people look at a page. "I have been going over that."
He turned his hand over. "It was not that you were faster. It was that the fast thing did not happen until after I had committed the mantle."
"That is what it is for."
"Yes. And I put everything into one side because I had nothing left to spread." He turned his hand over and looked at the wrapping on it. "That was forty minutes earlier. I was already losing at the aqueduct and I did not know it."
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"You had me at critical twice before I used it."
"Once," he said. "The second one was you letting me have a hit so you could get inside the follow-through. I have been going over that as well."
That was true and I had not expected anybody to have seen it.
"What was it?" he said.
He did not put any weight on the question at all. He asked it the way you ask a man what road he came in on, and he had already turned back toward the technician before he finished it.
"Something I found," I said.
"Right."
And that was the end of it. He did not ask again and he was not going to.
He tipped his head at the panel in front of him, which had the same line on it that mine did, and then he went back to watching the technician take the shoulder mounting apart.
Three of us walked into that hall this morning at Level Eleven and Twelve and Fifteen.
One of us has to do the whole thing again. Two of us do not. One of us gets a block of metal.
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