SSS Awakening: I Gain a Skill Every Time I Die

The watch came round and Declan started arranging it, exactly as before.

"Six of us. Three pairs, three hours—"

"Rook and Calder take the first."

I said it into the gap and I said it flat, and I did not look at Gideon while I said it.

Gideon put his cup down.

"Fine."

Declan’s stick stopped moving in the coals for about a quarter of a second.

Then it started again.

"And the second?"

"O’Rourke and Lind." I picked up a piece of wood and turned it over. "Third is Vogel and me."

Nobody objected, because there is nothing in that arrangement to object to. It is three pairs, it is three hours each, and it puts the two oldest men on the first watch and the two youngest on the last, which is what anybody would do.

What it also does is put Ewan Calder next to a Red Gate Player for three hours and Declan O’Rourke next to Erik Lind for three hours with Gideon Rook lying eleven metres away awake.

And there is no version of tonight in which either of them is alone with anybody.

Clara reached across for the cup and I let out a breath I had been holding since Declan opened his mouth.

---

Ewan took the northern side. Gideon went out about six minutes later and took the southern.

They were forty metres apart with a clear line between them, and Gideon put himself where the fire was behind his shoulder so that anything crossing that ground would be a shape against the light.

I lay between Gideon’s empty spot and Erik Lind and did not sleep.

The trick is the out-breath. Long and slow and slightly uneven, and eyes to a slit, and let the cold come up through the back plate into your spine without moving.

I ran it for three hours.

Nothing happened.

That is the entire event. At some point around the second hour I heard boots come past on a circuit and I let them go by.

Later I heard Gideon and Ewan change over, and Declan get up, and Declan walk north with Erik four metres behind him talking about something.

Nothing happened.

---

Erik Lind woke me at some point after the light started.

I had gone under about twenty minutes into my own watch, which Clara let me do and did not tell anybody about, and he was standing over me with his boot near my ribs and a piece of last night’s meat in one hand.

"Second packet," he said. "I said it was for today."

I sat up.

He was upright and rumpled and complaining about a strap, and there was nothing across his throat and no leaves under his shoulder gone dark, and he ate his own breakfast standing over the coals.

I did not say anything about it.

I got up and rolled my shoulders and asked him whether there was more, and he said no, and we walked out of that camp with six people in it.

---

The Giant came at us out of the northern treeline eleven hours later and this time we were all facing the right way when it did.

I do not want to write that whole fight out again.

What I want to write is the leg.

Because last time we spent four minutes putting cuts all over eight metres of muscle and watching them close.

The only reason we found the knee at all was that the same joint happened to get hit four times by four different people inside ninety seconds.

This time I said it before it had swung twice.

"THE LEFT KNEE. NOTHING ELSE. IT CLOSES EVERYTHING, IT CANNOT CLOSE WHAT WE KEEP BREAKING."

Nobody asked me how I knew that.

Gideon moved to the front left about half a second after I finished the sentence, and once Gideon moved, everybody moved.

---

There were six of us on it instead of five, and the sixth one was Ewan Calder.

> **[Durendal — A activated.]**

The mana narrowed down along that blade until the air behind the edge went out of shape, and he put it into the back of the knee crease at exactly the place I had been burning, and it went in about fifteen centimetres.

Then he did it again in the same line.

> **[Gram — S activated.]**

The second cut opened the first one to twice the depth, and I watched the joint stop being a joint about six minutes earlier than it did last time.

I had my fist in the crease beside his blade for most of it.

Three seconds at a time. Six Mana a punch. The smell of cooked hide going straight into my open mouth and my forearms shaking inside the gauntlets and my stomach turning over every time, and I kept doing it because the arithmetic works.

> **[Mana: 230/240 → 188/240.]**

Declan went to Lycaon for the last ninety seconds and tore the front of the joint out with both hands.

The leg folded. Eight metres of weight came down and took my feet out from under me for the second time in three days.

---

Nobody died.

Clara went up the fallen arm and put a blade in the left eye. Erik put an axe into the throat from eleven metres. Gideon got onto the shoulder and took the temple apart.

Ewan opened the other side of the neck with a cut nobody else in that clearing could have made.

Then it stopped, and I lay in the mud and watched its chest, and nothing rose.

> **[Giant — Level 37.]**

>

> **[HP: 0.]**

>

> **[Group Trial Guardian defeated.]**

>

> **[Contribution threshold met.]**

>

> **[Experience acquired: 185.]**

>

> **[EXP: 820/900 → 1,005/900.]**

>

> **[Level increased: 9 → 10.]**

>

> **[Excess experience carried forward.]**

>

> **[EXP: 105/1,000.]**

>

> **[All Attributes increased by 1.]**

>

> **[Maximum Health: 340 → 350.]**

>

> **[Maximum Mana: 230 → 240.]**

>

> **[Mana: 188/240 → 198/240.]**

>

> **[Three Attribute Points acquired.]**

>

> **[Unassigned Attribute Points: 12 → 15.]**

Ten.

I read it, and then I stopped reading it, and got up off my back and looked at the clearing instead.

Six people standing in it.

Erik had blood coming out of his hairline and Clara had lost most of the plating off one shoulder and Gideon was bleeding from three places, and all six of them were on their feet.

The mist pulled back off the north side about ten minutes later.

Six sets of boots went into that path.

---

The chamber was the same and the walk was the same and the ground went leaf to gravel to stone under us in the same order, and the air went from soil to something cold and mineral about four hundred metres before the trees ended.

Renard counted out loud when we came through.

He got to twenty, and stopped, and did it again from the beginning.

The other two groups had come out about forty minutes ahead of us and they were in worse condition than we were.

A man with his forearm wrapped so tight the fingers had gone pale. Somebody’s shield in three pieces. The healer with the shaved head working with her hands and a roll of tape.

But they were all standing, or sitting, and the count was twenty.

Nobody has ever brought twenty people to the second layer of Eastwick before.

---

Cormac Keane was in the third group, sitting on his heels near the edge of it with his jacket open down the left seam and a dressing taped over his forearm.

He looked up when we came out of the treeline.

Then he went back to the buckle he was working on.

That is the whole of it, and I want it written down exactly like that, because I had spent forty minutes walking that path wondering what his face would do.

His face did not do anything. Declan and Ewan walked out of a forest alive, which is what he expected, and a tired man looked up and then looked back down at a strap.

I made myself watch the other four.

Rhodri Griffiths was helping somebody get a gauntlet off a swollen hand and being careful about it.

Søren Juel was refilling a water skin.

Ewan went and sat down about six metres from Cormac and neither of them said one word to the other.

Declan asked the healer with the shaved head whether she needed anything carrying.

---

Five men in a stone chamber behaving like five exhausted Players who had just come through the worst day of their careers.

And I was the only person in that room who knew what all five of them were going to do in about four hours.

My hands had gone cold and I put them under my arms and stood there and looked at the far wall until the Dullahan came out of it.

---

The boss was not easier. I want that on the record before I write the rest.

It was still Level Thirty-Five, it still had forty dead Players in front of it, and the horse still crossed forty metres in under two seconds. Nothing about it had been reduced.

What was different is that nobody had to learn anything.

I did not command that raid. Renard commanded that raid. What I did was talk, four times, for about two seconds each, at the right moment.

When the corpses came up I said they still know how to fight, watch the hands, and the shield line was already braced when the first one levered up under a rim.

When Renard’s fastest fighter went out to bait the rider I said do not let it stop turning, and four people who would otherwise have chased it stayed where they were.

When the blue-black light came up around the head I said the head rots you, get off it, and three men came out of that radius with their skin intact.

And when the arm carrying it came forward I said now, and eleven people were already on it.

Nobody asked me how I knew any of it. Not one person, all fight.

I do not think Renard cared. He had a boy who kept being right two seconds early, and he used him, and he will ask his questions in a room with a door on it.

---

I did not open Androphagos once.

There is nothing living in that half of a chamber and there never was, and I spent the whole fight turning my head to check my own right shoulder instead.

The two things I did put my hands on were the same two I put my hands on last time, because the reset puts them back exactly where they stood.

> **[Zombie Player — Level 14.]**

>

> **[Contribution threshold met.]**

>

> **[Experience acquired: 70.]**

>

> **[EXP: 105/1,000 → 175/1,000.]**

> **[Zombie Player — Level 16.]**

>

> **[Contribution threshold met.]**

>

> **[Experience acquired: 80.]**

>

> **[EXP: 175/1,000 → 255/1,000.]**

I did not look at the second one’s face this time either.

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