SSS Awakening: I Gain a Skill Every Time I Die

Kessler still died.

I saw the horse coming from the blind side while he had a corpse locked out on his shield, and I had the field open on nothing and my mouth already going.

"KESSLER, RIGHT—"

He was committed. His shield was over there and his weight was over there and a man cannot un-commit a shield in a third of a second, and the weapon came out of him with him already going down.

Eleven metres, and I was two seconds early, and it was not enough.

That is the part of this I keep having to learn. I can tell people things. I cannot move their feet for them.

But when his fingers closed on his weapon on the floor, three people were already standing over him.

Renard did it inside about four seconds this time. There was no pause, and Ide did not have to look at his face, and nobody in that formation had to find out what a converted teammate does to a shield line.

One. Not two.

---

The rest of it went the way it goes. The head came off the fist and got destroyed against the wall, and the cold went out of the air, and the horse came apart at the shoulder mid-stride about four minutes later.

The armour folded at the left hip under eight people at once.

> **[Dullahan — Level 35.]**

>

> **[HP: 0.]**

>

> **[Boss Monster defeated.]**

>

> **[Boss experience: 500.]**

>

> **[Contribution threshold met.]**

>

> **[Experience acquired: 500.]**

>

> **[EXP: 255/1,000 → 755/1,000.]**

> **[Eastwick Orange Gate cleared.]**

>

> **[Exit forming.]**

>

> **[Gate collapse begins in 30:00.]**

Nineteen of us on that floor.

The healers still had something left. Nobody had gone down in the last four minutes. There were four people sitting and none of them were lying flat.

The pale light came up at the far end and put everybody’s shadow out long across the stone.

And I watched the whole room start to let go.

---

I got to Gideon before it finished.

"Not over."

He had a hand on his own ribs and he took it off.

"Say it."

"Five of them. Keane. O’Rourke. Calder. Griffiths. Juel." I kept my back to the room. "The moment the wounded start moving, Keane is going to walk to somebody who cannot stand and kill him, and the other four go at the same second."

"Why would they—"

"Twenty million. It splits between whoever walks out."

Something went across his face and got put away.

"You want Renard."

"I want Renard to hold formation until every single person is through that door. Not because of them. Because we are wounded and the timer is running and nobody should be sitting down in a Gate that is coming apart."

"That is true anyway."

"That is why he will do it."

---

Gideon walked over and said about nine words to Renard, and Renard did not even look surprised, because it was the correct instruction and he had been forty seconds from giving it himself.

"NOBODY SITS. Formation holds until the last man is out."

He got his breath.

"Wounded go first and they go in pairs. Healthy stay with the wounded. Ranged on the perimeter, not in the middle. We are not relaxing inside a collapsing Gate."

Nineteen people did it, because it is what you would do.

The four healthiest Meridian fighters ended up spread around the group instead of sitting together. Erik and Clara ended up beside the four who could not walk properly. Barre and Voss went to the exit side.

And Gideon Rook ended up about five metres from Cormac Keane, checking a strap he did not need to check.

I did not tell anybody where to stand.

I told one man, and one man told the captain, and the captain gave an order any captain would give.

---

The wounded started moving at about twenty-six minutes.

And Cormac stood up.

He did it the way he had done it before, at the speed everybody was moving, on a line that took him past two other people. He stopped once to step over somebody’s leg.

He was going toward a Meridian fighter sitting against broken stone with his armour cut away over the ribs and one leg straight out in front of him.

I did not move.

That is the hardest thing I have done in this dungeon and it is not close. I stood eleven metres away with my hands at my sides and let a man walk across a room toward somebody I had already watched him kill.

Three metres.

> **[Talaria activated.]**

---

> **[Adamant — S activated.]**

Gideon’s forearm was already there.

The strike went into it about forty centimetres from the wounded man’s throat and stopped completely, and the noise of it went out across that chamber and came back off both walls.

Cormac’s whole arm buckled.

He was thrown backward off his own acceleration and he had to take three steps to arrest it, and he came out of the third step looking at Gideon Rook with an expression I have never seen on that man’s face.

He was not frightened. He was recalculating.

Because Gideon had not reacted. Gideon had *started* before Talaria fired, and there is no reading of that which works.

---

The rest of it happened inside the same four seconds.

Rhodri Griffiths went for the man beside Renard and found Voss already turned toward him with a weapon up, and the strike went into a raised guard instead of into a neck.

Søren Juel came at the healer with the shaved head from behind, the way he did before, and there were three people between him and her back.

Erik Lind took the first attack on the haft of his axe and shoved.

Clara Vogel came round the outside and put both blades up in Søren’s face and made him stop walking.

And a Meridian fighter I have never spoken to in my life put a spear across the lane, and did not attack, and stood there looking at Søren Juel with his weight already set.

---

Then Declan and Ewan moved.

Not at anybody. That is what did it.

Ewan Calder came up off the stone forty metres from all three of those fights with his sword already out, and Declan O’Rourke turned toward Renard’s side of the chamber with his weight going forward, and neither of them had been near any of it.

Nineteen exhausted people watched two men who had spent all day carrying shields for them stand up at exactly the same second as three murderers.

Nobody had to say anything.

I heard somebody behind me draw a breath in and hold it. Weapons came up all over that floor. The healer with the shaved head got both hands off her patient and got her back to the wall.

Renard’s voice went across the chamber, and it was not loud.

"Five."

---

Cormac stopped moving.

He was eight metres from Gideon with his weapon still in his hand and his arm hanging wrong from the block, and he turned his head and looked at the room.

Rhodri, stopped, with three people around him.

Søren, stopped, with a spear across his path.

Declan and Ewan, standing forty metres apart, upright and visible and finished.

Nineteen armed people between all five of them and that door.

He looked at the wounded man against the broken stone, who was still alive and now had two people standing over him.

And then Cormac Keane looked at me.

I did not do anything with my face. I do not think I needed to.

He went over the whole of it while I watched him do it. The watch rotation nobody had questioned.

A Red Gate Player who happened to be five metres away checking a strap. A captain who happened to hold formation. Three separate ambushes that met prepared men inside the same second.

His face came apart very slowly and not very far.

Somewhere in there he stopped looking at a boy who got a place on a telephone call.

He was still looking at me when the chamber went quiet.

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