SSS Awakening: I Gain a Skill Every Time I Die

It plants a foot before it swings. That is the whole of it.

It has a shield of ship timber on one arm and a maul on the other, and the maul is heavy enough that it has to set the opposite leg or the swing takes it round with it.

I watched that four times in a previous version of this street and never once did anything with it.

> **[Snare — S activated.]**

>

> **[Mana: 234/240 → 224/240.]**

I fixed the foot.

Not the creature. Snare does not do creatures, it does contact, and the boot on the left went down onto the cobbles and stopped being something it owned.

Everything above the ankle came round anyway.

That is the point. It could still turn, it could still swing, it could still reach for me with the shield arm, and it did all three.

What it could not do was follow through, and a maul swung by a body that cannot rotate its hips goes somewhere the body did not intend.

It put its own weapon into a wall and opened its entire flank.

"NOW."

Eleven people went into that side at once.

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

>

> **[Mana: 224/240 → 212/240.]**

I put six seconds into the gap behind the arm and the spearman I remember hooked the timber down and the woman with the crossbow put two into its face from the first-floor window, and it was over in about nineteen seconds.

Nobody died in that street.

> **[Fomorian Brute — Level 18.]**

>

> **[Contribution threshold met.]**

>

> **[Experience acquired: 90.]**

>

> **[EXP: 645/1,000 → 735/1,000.]**

> **[Health: 400/400 → 362/400.]**

It still got me once. I am not going to pretend it did not.

---

I found them in the same courtyard about twenty minutes earlier than before, which meant the Bellkeeper was still on her feet and not on the ground with a hand in her coat.

Then the street between the buildings, and this time I knew what was coming and I used the thing I have been carrying around for a month and hardly ever get to use properly.

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

>

> **[Duration: 01:00.]**

Six metres of field in a four-metre street is the first time that Ability has ever had enough room to be worth its duration.

I felt the one on the roof before it came off the roof.

More usefully, I felt the second one that nobody had seen at all, moving down the alley on the left, coming round behind the group to arrive at the Bellkeeper’s back while everybody was looking up.

I did not know it was there last time. It got a hand into her coat and pulled her off her feet and I was six metres away with a man in between.

Knowing does not move my legs for me. I still had to get there.

But I started nine seconds earlier than I would have, and nine seconds is the entire difference between a warning and a funeral.

I met it in the mouth of the alley.

> **[Mana: 212/240 → 200/240.]**

>

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

>

> **[EXP: 735/1,000 → 805/1,000.]**

> **[Health: 362/400 → 341/400.]**

The one off the roof came down into four people instead of two and did not last.

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

>

> **[EXP: 805/1,000 → 875/1,000.]**

---

Then Cian came round the corner.

I had about a second and a half before he was close enough to speak to, and I spent all of it looking at his hands.

Big hands. Scarred across the backs. One of them broke my forearm about nine minutes ago from where I am standing, and then the same man put me into a flagstone and told me to stay down and did not enjoy any of it.

I made myself stop.

Because he is not Cormac Keane and this is not that.

He killed me over an argument about whether two thousand people outside a wall were worth the ten thousand behind it.

He was carrying that argument on his own, with an order in his hand and no time, and he was not wrong about the danger.

He was wrong about there being only two answers.

That is a completely different category of thing and I am not going to spend this run hating a man I need alive.

"Runner."

"Yes."

"Seventh?"

"Seventh."

"Then stay in the middle."

---

The Breaker came through the retreating line at the same point it did before.

Four metres and change, and it separated the two of us from the group inside about eight seconds, exactly the way it had.

"Left side," he said. "Do not be in front of it."

> **[Ajax — A activated.]**

He planted and the thing hit his shield and the street went down four centimetres under his boots.

I was already at the back of its knee.

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

>

> **[Mana: 200/240 → 182/240.]**

Nine seconds into the crease and my forearms were shaking by the sixth, and I came off it about a second and a half before he said the word this time rather than after it.

He noticed.

I saw him notice. He came off the plant, put his shield edge into its throat, and while it was going down he looked at me for exactly as long as it takes to decide something.

He did not ask me anything. He filed it.

> **[Fomorian Breaker — Level 20.]**

>

> **[Contribution threshold met.]**

>

> **[Experience acquired: 100.]**

>

> **[EXP: 875/1,000 → 975/1,000.]**

> **[Health: 341/400 → 302/400.]**

---

Then the door in the base of the Sixth Bell Tower, and the stairs, and the passage that stops being a passage.

Last time I walked through all of that looking at my own boots.

This time I put my hand on things.

The blocks are the length of a coffin and there is no mortar between them and the joints are still tight, which means whoever cut them was better at it than whoever built the wall above.

The channel beside us was two metres wide with black water going through it fast enough to make a standing wave against the corner.

There is white crust on the stone about a metre above the current level, in a band, all the way along.

And the chains.

Links the size of my head. Rust coming off onto my shoulders.

Going up into the dark on one side and down into the water on the other, and there were wheels set into the wall for them, wheels taller than the Bellkeeper, with teeth on the rims worn round from turning.

"How much water is up there?"

She looked at me.

---

"Why?"

"Because there is a mark on that wall a metre above the channel and the channel is nowhere near full."

She stopped walking.

"The reservoirs," she said. "Four of them, under the Seventh and Sixth. They were cut before the walls existed.

The whole hill is terraces and the sea comes up over the lower districts about once a generation, so somebody very sensible decided the city should be able to move water downhill faster than the sea can bring it up."

"They still hold?"

"They hold. They are full. They are always full, because they fill themselves." She put her lamp on the sluice we were passing. "That is a discharge gate.

There are nineteen of them between here and the harbour. Open the reservoirs and open the gates and everything in those channels goes down through the Sixth and the Fifth and into the sea in about four minutes."

"Through the streets?"

"Through the *streets*. The channels are not big enough for that volume. It comes up through every grate and cellar between here and the water."

---

"Why has nobody used it?"

"Because it would destroy four districts and drown anybody standing in them." She started walking again. "It was designed when the lower city was salt flats and boatyards. Twelve thousand people live down there now. Lived."

She heard herself say it and did not correct it.

"So it is a thing that exists on a plan and nobody will ever authorise."

"And the Seventh Bell?" I said. "Does that do it?"

"No."

She said it flatly and kept going, and I had to catch her arm.

"Say the rest of it."

---

"The Seventh Bell is modern. Two hundred years old at most." Her lamp came round. "It drops the great counterweight, and the counterweight closes the inner gates and releases the causeway. That is all it does. That is all it has ever done."

"Then what opens the reservoirs?"

"Men do." She was watching my face now. "There is a control chamber. Old, under the Sixth Bell complex, about four hundred metres from where we are standing.

Nineteen release wheels and a master lock, and every one of them has to be thrown by hand, and it takes two people about six minutes if they know the order."

"And the Sixth is being abandoned."

"The Sixth fell forty minutes ago in every way that matters. There is nobody left down there but them."

---

I stopped beside one of the wheels and put my hand flat on it.

Cold iron with grease still in the teeth. Somebody has been maintaining this. Somebody comes down here and greases a mechanism nobody is ever going to be allowed to use.

Then I looked back the way we had come, at the passage going off into the dark toward a district that had already been written off.

There is a third door.

Ring the Bell now and the causeway goes into the channel with two thousand people on it.

Hold the causeway open and the line breaks and everybody dies anyway, and I have already been through that one and it ended with me on a flagstone.

Or put four minutes of reservoir down the Sixth District while the Fomorians are standing in it.

"How long is it good for?" I said. "Once it goes."

"The surge, four minutes. The streets down there stay impassable for hours. Nothing walks up out of that."

Hours.

The causeway needs fifty minutes.

---

Then the ceiling shook and dust came down on all of us.

The Sixth Bell.

It arrived through the stone into my boots and into my teeth, one enormous beat and then another, and the black water in the channel went into ripples that ran the whole length of it.

Six.

Nothing I did today was big enough to stop that. I saved one officer on a wall and one woman in a courtyard and nineteen men in a street, and a district still fell on schedule.

The Bellkeeper had a hand on the chain and her knuckles went white on it.

"Keep moving," Cian said. "Nine minutes to the causeway. Keep moving."

---

The causeway was the same.

I am not going to describe it again. Thousands of people packed the full width, going up at the pace of somebody with a limp, and fires in the Sixth behind them, and sixty men at the mouth of it who could still stand.

The officer at the top had a face like a closed door.

Cian broke the wax with his thumb and read four seconds of writing.

"The Seventh Bell is to be rung immediately. Authority of the Council. Immediately, on receipt."

Nobody said anything.

Then he folded it once and put it inside his coat, which he had not done last time, and turned to look down the road at the people on it.

"Bellkeeper."

"There is another way."

---

I said it before she had taken a step and I said it in about eleven words, because I have watched this argument go the long way round and lose.

"The old reservoirs under the Seventh and the top of the Sixth. The discharge system. Put the whole thing down through the rest of the district while they are standing in it."

Cian did not turn round.

"That is not a thing."

"It is a thing." The Bellkeeper’s voice came out steadier than I expected. "It is on the survey. Nineteen gates and a master lock in the old chamber under the Sixth Bell. It has been maintained. I have been down there."

Now he turned round.

"It would take the Sixth."

"The Sixth is already taken."

"It would take the Fifth and the Fourth and anything in them."

"There is nothing in them," she said. "You rang the bell yourself."

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