SSS Awakening: I Gain a Skill Every Time I Die
Chapter 82 — The Seventh Bell IVThe Captain had not moved.
I want that on the record too, because it would be very easy to write him as a man who was pleased.
He was standing with the order in one hand and he had not folded it and he had not put it away, and he was looking down the causeway at the crowd on it, and his jaw was working.
"How long to clear it?" he said.
The officer did some arithmetic he had clearly already done.
"At that rate. An hour. Perhaps fifty minutes."
"And how long before the Sixth District is theirs entirely?"
Nobody answered him.
He turned round and looked at the smoke, and I looked with him, and there was a column of raiders coming out of a street about six hundred metres back and turning toward the causeway mouth.
"Fifteen minutes," he said. "If that."
---
"Then we hold the mouth."
I said it and everybody looked at me.
"Runner—"
"You have got a bottleneck twenty metres wide and a hundred and forty metres of wall to fight from. That is the best defensive position in this entire city and you are about to drop it into a channel."
"With four hundred defenders." The Captain’s voice was still level and it had gone very quiet. "There are perhaps sixty of us at that end who can still stand."
"Then it is sixty and a wall against a street."
"And when the sixty break, they come up this causeway into the last district in the same hour, and everything behind that gate goes with it.
Every person on that road. Every person already inside." He turned. "This order exists because somebody with more information than either of us has already done this arithmetic."
"Somebody who is not standing here looking at it."
"That is exactly why it is his order and not mine."
---
We did not get to finish it.
Somebody at the mouth of the causeway started shouting, and then a great many people started shouting, and the front of that raider column came into the bottom of the road.
The Captain was moving before I was.
"HOLD THE MOUTH. SHIELDS TO THE MOUTH. Bellkeeper, gate side, keep them walking, I do not care if you have to hit them."
He went down that causeway against the flow of four thousand people, and about sixty men went with him, and I went with them.
---
It was a good line for about six minutes.
Twenty metres of frontage. Shields across the mouth two deep with the parapets protecting both flanks. Whatever ranged they had left up on the walls above, dropping bolts into the crush behind the front rank.
Behind us the crowd kept going up and it kept not going up fast enough.
I put myself where the line got thin, which turned out to be everywhere in rotation.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
>
> **[Mana: 192/240 → 150/240.]**
Twenty-one seconds of fire in about four minutes, in six and nine-second pieces, into whatever was coming over the top of somebody’s shield.
> **[Talaria activated.]**
Three times when something got through, I crossed the gap before it reached the second rank, and every one of those landings went through my ankle and every one of them held.
Then the left of the line went.
---
A section of the barricade they had thrown across the mouth came apart, and about nine raiders came through the hole at once, and there were fourteen people on that side.
The Captain was on the right with the heaviest pressure and could not leave it.
I could see the whole thing happening and I could count the seconds it was going to take, and I was not going to be enough with fire and a pair of gauntlets.
So I stopped worrying about who was watching.
> **[Ability Activated: Lycaon — SS.]**
>
> **[Lycaon consumes 4 Mana per second while active.]**
---
Going in is not pleasant and it is worse when you do it standing up in a fight.
My spine went over and I made a noise about it. My shoulders came out through the borrowed armour and split the straps on both sides. My hands stopped being hands and my jaw came out of my face and the teeth came down.
Then I was three metres tall on a burning causeway with my breath going in and out of a chest that was not built for the shape.
Somebody in the second rank shouted something and got out of my way.
I went into the hole in the barricade.
---
I did not have a clean account of the next fifteen seconds.
I know that the first one I got had a hooked bar coming up and I took its arm off at the shoulder with both hands and used what was left of it to knock the second one off the parapet.
I know that their armour is wet and beaten and it does not stop claws, because it is made to turn a blade and it comes apart when something gets into the seams and pulls.
I know that I went through the hole and out the other side of it and turned round and came back through, and that the third time I did it there was nothing in the gap to come back through for.
There was blood all over that stone and steam coming off it in the rain.
My own breathing was the loudest thing in my head and it was not my breathing.
> **[Mana: 150/240 → 90/240.]**
---
It cost us anyway.
We lost eleven men holding that mouth and I watched four of them go.
The spearman from the street two rings back, the one who told me *same side, it cannot turn the shield fast*, went down under two of them about nine metres from me.
I was tearing a third off somebody else, and by the time I got there he had stopped.
The Captain had to abandon the right flank entirely to save the centre and we lost the parapet on that side for good.
The crowd behind us kept moving.
And there were still, at a guess, two thousand people on that causeway.
---
He came back up the line to me and there was blood coming out of his hairline.
I dropped out of Lycaon to talk to him because there is no talking in that shape.
> **[Lycaon deactivated.]**
>
> **[Mana: 90/240 → 66/240.]**
Coming out is worse than going in. Everything went back the other way while I was still moving and I ended up on one knee with my ribs heaving and what was left of that armour hanging off me in pieces.
> **[Health: 318/400 → 205/400.]**
He looked at what I had just been and did not ask one question about it.
"It is going faster than the road empties."
"Give me ten minutes."
"I have given you nineteen." He had gone hoarse. "The right parapet is theirs.
In ten minutes they will be on the road behind us and the road will be a slaughter with four thousand people packed on it, and then they walk up it behind the last of them and through the gate."
I did not have an answer to that.
"Bellkeeper." He did not raise his voice. "Ring it."
---
She started for the tower and I got in front of her.
I did not touch her. I stood between her and the door and put my hands out, and there was still blood on them that was not mine and had never been mine since the moment I arrived here.
"Not yet."
"Move."
"There are two thousand people on that road."
"I KNOW HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE ON THAT ROAD."
---
That was the first time he shouted, and it came out of him from somewhere a long way down.
He stopped himself. I watched him do it. His whole chest went in and out twice before he said anything else.
"I have walked that causeway every week for eleven years." His voice came back down. "I know what the market at the bottom sells on a Tuesday. I know the woman with the blue shutters. She is on that road."
He came a step closer.
"And if that line breaks with the road full, they do not stop at the road. Do you understand what I am telling you?
Everyone you are standing here trying to save dies anyway, and so does everyone behind that gate, and the difference is that I will have had the chance to stop it and not taken it."
"Ten minutes."
"There is no version of this where you are right," he said. "There is only a version where you feel better."
"Ten minutes."
He looked at me for about two seconds.
Then he hit me.
---
There was nothing formal about it.
Nobody stepped back and nobody made room. Forty metres away sixty men were still holding a mouth and things were still coming through it.
And the two of us started trying to kill each other in the middle of that, because each of us thought the other was about to murder a city.
His first strike came from a plant and I was not there for it.
> **[Talaria activated.]**
I came out four metres left and put a burning fist into his ribs before my heel had finished skidding.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
>
> **[Mana: 66/240 → 60/240.]**
It landed. It landed properly and I felt it go in.
And he turned into it and took the rest on his shoulder and hit me back so hard that my feet came off the ground.
> **[Health: 205/400 → 148/400.]**
---
I want to be fair to myself here, because I lost.
I made him work.
I made him work for about forty seconds, which is longer than I have ever made anybody at that level work, and I did it with everything I have collected out of six graves.
Talaria kept me off the plant, and off the plant he is a man rather than a wall.
Aten went in three times and every one of them was into somewhere it mattered.
> **[Ability Activated: Lycaon — SS.]**
And when I came back at him in Lycaon he had to give ground for the first time, and I saw his stance change, and he stopped trying to end it and started actually fighting me.
He did not compliment me. He got both hands onto his shield and put his back foot into a doorway.
Which is the only warning I got, and I did not know it was one.
---
> **[Interdict — SS activated.]**
I was mid-crossing when it happened.
Talaria was carrying me across nine metres of stone toward his open side, and every part of that was going correctly, and then the ground stopped being mine.
That is the only way I can put it.
I was not blocked. Nothing hit me.
The floor of the world simply stopped accepting that I was moving across it, and all of it, every single kilogram of nine metres of acceleration, arrived inside my own body at once with nothing underneath me to take any of it.
Everything Talaria was going to put through my landing foot went through me instead.
My knees. My hips. Something in my lower back let go with a sound I felt rather than heard, and my shoulder came apart at the joint, and I hit the stone from about a metre up without ever having crossed the gap.
> **[Health: 148/400 → 42/400.]**
>
> **[Mana: 60/240 → 12/240.]**
>
> **[Lycaon deactivated: insufficient Mana.]**
---
Coming out of it while broken is a thing I would not wish on anybody.
I went back down to my own size on a wet flagstone with my face turned sideways and my mouth full of blood, and the world came back in pieces.
The bells first. Somebody was ringing something in the Sixth District and it was arriving through the stone, muffled, wrong.
Then heat on one side of my face from the buildings burning off to the left.
Boots. A lot of them, running past above my head, and something with claws on it going across stone about nine metres away.
Rain on the back of my neck.
I tried to get my arm under me and the arm did not exist.
---
The Bellkeeper was four metres away and moving toward the tower door.
I could see the rope.
That is the thing. I could actually see it through the open doorway.
A hand-thick length of it hanging down out of the dark with a wooden grip spliced into the end at chest height, and a Bellkeeper walking toward it, and about two thousand people still on that road.
I got my right hand flat on the stone.
I got about eleven centimetres.
The Captain came and stood over me.
---
He did not gloat and he did not explain himself again.
He looked down at me for about a second and a half, and I got my head far enough round to see his face, and there was nothing on it that was pleased.
"Stay down," he said. "I will not do it again."
I put my palm flat and pushed.
I got my chest off the stone and about a third of the way onto my elbow, and my shoulder gave out and I went back down, and I did it again anyway.
"Stay *down*."
I did not have any air to answer him with. I got my hand under me a third time.
He looked toward the tower door, and back at me, and something went across his face that I have decided not to describe, because I am not sure I read it correctly and I am never going to be able to ask.
Then he finished it.
> **[Health: 0.]**
>
> **[You have died.]**
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