SSS Awakening: I Gain a Skill Every Time I Die

**POV: Jace**

---

Salt.

That is what came first and it came into my open mouth, thick and cold, off water I could not see yet.

Then my boots were sliding.

Wet stone under me, running with rain, and I got a hand onto something and it was a parapet, and the parapet was shaking.

Burning pitch somewhere to my left. That smell goes into the back of the throat and stays.

A man went past me.

Not running. Off the wall, sideways, with his arms out and his shield still on one of them, and he went over the inner edge and down into whatever was below and I heard where he stopped.

Screaming underneath us. A lot of it, spread wide, the kind that comes from a crowd rather than a person.

And something enormous hitting masonry somewhere off to the right, once, and then again about four seconds later, so hard that the stone came up through my boots into my knees.

My hands were red to the wrist.

I looked at them for about half a second because they had blood on them and none of it was coming out of me anywhere.

There was armour on me that I have never owned. Scale over leather, wet through, cut open across the left hip and mended with somebody else’s hand.

Something bronze strapped hard across my chest, cylindrical, the length of my forearm, and it did not move when I moved.

Then the parapet in front of me went dark.

---

A hand came over the edge of it. Grey going blue, with the webbing gone hard between the fingers.

The rest of him followed and seawater came off him in sheets.

Two metres and a half of it, broad through the chest, wearing plate that had been beaten out of something rather than made, with weed still caught in the straps. Flat wet eyes with no lid movement at all.

The weapon in his hand was a hooked bar of metal about as long as I am tall.

He came over the parapet at me before he was even properly on the walkway.

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

>

> **[Mana: 240/240 → 234/240.]**

My hands knew what to do before any other part of me had caught up.

The bar came down and I was not there for it.

I went inside the swing rather than away from it, because a weapon that long has nothing at half a metre, and I put my fist up under the edge of that beaten plate where it stops covering the ribs.

*FWOOM.*

The wet on him turned to steam against my knuckles and I heard it happen before I felt anything.

He did not go down.

He got a hand into my shoulder and threw me four metres along the walkway and I hit a step with my back.

But he had a hole in him now, and the second time he came at me I went low and put the other fist through the same hole.

He came apart around it.

---

I got up on the wet stone with my chest going and looked along the wall.

They were coming over it in twelve places at once.

The defenders were not losing exactly. They were being reduced. Every section I could see had men in it fighting properly, with shields and spears and somebody shouting timing, and every section had fewer men in it than the section next to it.

Below and outside, the sea.

Black ships pulled up hard against a broken harbour, thirty or forty of them, most with their hulls into stone rather than tied to it. The water between them was full of things swimming.

And it was raining, and everything was on fire anyway.

Nobody looked at me. Nobody asked me why I was standing there. Two men went past at a run and one of them put a hand on my shoulder to move me out of the way and kept going.

Then the interface came up.

> **[Tower Tutorial initiated.]**

>

> **[Scenario: The Seventh Bell.]**

>

> **[Role Assigned: Auxiliary Runner.]**

>

> **[Clear Condition: ???]**

I read the last line twice and shut the whole thing.

---

There was a mark on the shoulder of the armour I was wearing.

A tower with a bell hanging in it, stamped into the scale, worn down at the edges from being rubbed against something over a long time.

The men going past had it too. Different shoulders, same stamp.

And the cylinder across my chest had wax on both caps, and a thumbprint pressed into the wax, and the print was not mine.

I am standing in somebody’s kit.

Somebody had this job this morning, and put this on, and had this thing sealed and strapped to him, and I am now inside whatever was left of him.

---

"Runner."

A hand got the front of my armour and pulled.

He was an officer, or had been.

He was on the walkway with his back against the inner parapet and his legs out in front of him, and the whole of his middle was wrong, and somebody had already tried to do something about it and stopped.

His fingers kept slipping off the scale. He would get a grip and then the blood would take it and he would have to find the plate again.

"Seventh."

"What?"

"Seventh Bell. Tower." He got some air. There was blood in his teeth and more of it came when he spoke. "Inner.

You take it to the inner. Not the Sixth. They will tell you the Sixth is closer and it is and you do not stop there."

"Who do I give it to?"

"Whoever has the—"

He stopped and breathed twice, badly, and his hand came off me altogether.

"Do not open it."

"I was not going to."

"They will ask you what it says." His eyes had gone somewhere past my shoulder. "You do not know what it says. That is the whole of your job. You do not know."

"I do not know what it says."

"Good lad."

He said that, and then he did not say anything else, and his hand stayed where it had fallen on my forearm for about four seconds before it went off it.

---

Then the bell rang.

Deep, and a long way inside the city, and so large that the first strike arrived in my chest before it reached my ears.

Once.

Twice.

Everybody on that wall stopped. Not for long. For about a second, all of them, in the middle of whatever they were doing.

Three.

A man eleven metres from me put both hands on the parapet and put his head down.

Four.

Five.

Then it stopped, and the silence after it was worse than the sound.

"FIFTH IS DOWN. FIFTH IS DOWN, FALL BACK BY SECTIONS, DO NOT RUN."

Somewhere below us, in the streets, the noise changed completely.

Five. That is a number and it means something to every single person here except me.

---

I went inward, because it was the only instruction I had.

The stairs off that wall came down into a street and the street was already moving.

Not fighting. Leaving.

People with bundles and people with children on their shoulders and one man dragging a handcart with a wheel that had lost its rim, all of it going one direction, all of it going *up*, because the city climbs as it goes in.

I had to fight the current for the first fifty metres and then I found the edge of it and ran along the shopfronts instead.

The city is rings.

I worked that out in about four minutes and I worked it out from doorways.

Every so often the street went through a gate in a wall, and the wall was not a boundary between neighbourhoods, it was a wall, four metres of it with a firing step and murder holes.

And on the keystone of every gate there was a number.

I came through a gate with a **VI** cut into it, and behind me the wall was already being held by men who had come off the wall above it.

Behind that, a **VII**.

Seven rings. Five bells rung. Which means there are two walls left in front of the people running past me and the second one is the last.

---

Above the roofs on the seaward side, more raiders were coming through a breach in the outer wall in a column, and they were not all the same.

Most were the size of the one I killed. There were bigger ones among them, half again as broad, moving at the front of groups rather than in them.

Not a boss. A hierarchy.

And below the noise of everything else there was another sound going on constantly, which took me a while to identify, and it was the sea.

The harbour was still working. Ships were still arriving.

---

I got two rings in before the street closed.

Something came through a barricade about thirty metres ahead of me, and it came through it rather than over it, and the beams went out into the crowd and put four people down.

It was one of the bigger ones. Three metres, a slab of a thing, with a shield of ship timber on one arm and a maul on the other.

The street behind it was full of people who could not now go forward, and about nine defenders had got between it and them and were dying at a rate of roughly one every ten seconds.

I could have gone round.

There were alleys. I could see two of them.

But the alleys go where the alleys go and this street goes to the Seventh Bell Tower, and every second that thing stands in it is a second nobody behind it gets through.

> **[Talaria activated.]**

---

I arrived on its blind side and my ankle held.

That is the first thing I noticed and it should not have been, in the middle of a street with people screaming in it.

I had put that joint through four days of this. The landing went up through it and into my hip and stayed manageable.

The maul came round at where the sound came from.

I was already low and moving and it went over me and took the front off a shop.

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

>

> **[Mana: 234/240 → 222/240.]**

One of the defenders saw what I was doing.

He was maybe forty, with a spear and half a shield, and he did the exact right thing without being asked. He went in at the timber shield and hooked the top edge and pulled it down and out.

That opened the armpit.

I went through the gap he made and put six seconds of fire into it.

It screamed and turned and the maul came back the other way, and I did not get all the way clear.

> **[Health: 400/400 → 341/400.]**

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