SSS Awakening: I Gain a Skill Every Time I Die
Chapter 86 — The Eye Opens I**POV: Jace**
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Four of them went to the chains.
That is what the warning was for. Not Balor.
The four raiders standing around his knees, who all moved at the same moment toward rings set into the plate on either side of that head, with chain running up from each ring to a hook driven through the edge of the eyelid.
They took the slack out together.
Then they leaned back, all four, the way men lean back on a rope, and the lid came up about two centimetres and stopped and came up two more.
It is too heavy for him. That is the whole of it. Whatever is behind that thing, the man cannot open his own eye without four people to lift it for him.
The chain links went tight and started ringing against each other in a rhythm.
"Get inside."
The Bellkeeper did not argue with me. She went through the door and I heard her boots go down onto the chamber floor, and then the first wheel started turning with a sound like a building complaining.
I put myself in the doorway with my back to her.
---
Behind me the water was pressing on stone and above me a roof timber was burning through and letting pieces down into the street.
And in front of me the lid came up far enough for me to see under it.
There was no white. There was no iris. There was something in there with depth to it that light was coming out of rather than going into, and it was the colour of the inside of a furnace, and it moved.
Then every raider in that street got out of the way.
Not scattered. They stepped sideways, all of them, along the walls, deliberately, with the flat efficiency of men who have done it a hundred times and know exactly how much room to leave.
That was the only warning I was ever going to get and it was enough.
> **[Talaria activated.]**
---
I went right, into the mouth of an alley, and the street I had been standing in stopped existing.
Four metres of cobbles went. The frontage of the building opposite came off in a sheet.
A cart that had been abandoned against the wall was there and then was a shape of ash holding its own outline for about half a second before it went too.
Two raiders had not moved far enough. One of them left a hand behind on the wall.
The stone where I had been standing was glowing.
And the doorframe I was now crouched behind had a scorch across it that had come from four metres to the left of where the beam went, which meant that thing does not have edges the way a weapon has edges.
> **[Health: 176/410 → 158/410.]**
Something that came off the wall hit me across the back and I did not see what it was.
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Two things, and I had them both inside about a second and a half.
He cannot do it whenever he likes. It takes four men and a count of three to get that lid up, and while it is coming up he cannot see anything and neither can anybody in front of him.
And nothing on this street should ever stand in front of it. Not Antaeus. Not Lycaon. Not a wall.
So I was not going to fight Balor.
I was going to fight the four men holding his eye open.
---
> **[Ability Activated: Androphagos.]**
>
> **[Duration: 01:00.]**
The field went out and filled with bodies, which is the first time that has been useful instead of frightening.
Smoke was coming down the street in sheets thick enough to take my own boots away from me, and there were burning pieces coming off the roofs, and I could not see nine metres in any consistent direction.
But everything in that street was alive.
Balor’s weight going from one leg to the other, four metres out. Two raiders behind him on the left. The attendant nearest me, eleven o’clock, three metres from the chain ring, leaning.
It does not tell me where he is looking. It never has and it does not now.
His head is not a living thing separate from him and the beam is not alive at all, and I still had to keep my own eyes on that lid myself.
What it gave me was the attendant.
> **[Talaria activated.]**
---
I came out of the smoke at his back with my ankle taking the landing properly.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
>
> **[Mana: 110/250 → 98/250.]**
Six seconds. Into the base of the skull under the lip of that beaten helmet, and he had both hands on a chain and could not put either of them anywhere useful.
> **[Fomorian Raider — Level 12.]**
>
> **[HP: 0.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 60.]**
>
> **[EXP: 50/1,100 → 110/1,100.]**
The chain went out of his hands and the weight went onto the other three.
They could not hold it.
The lid came down about a third of the way in one drop and the beam went with it.
It came across the street at knee height and took the front off two buildings and the legs off a raider who had been standing in the wrong place.
I did not try to outrun that. Nobody outruns that.
I went behind a corner of masonry a metre thick and put my back into it and felt the other side of it go hot through the stone.
Then it was dark again and the lid was shut.
---
Balor came at the chamber.
He is not a creature that stands still while its eye is being repaired.
He put a hand into the wall of the building beside him for balance and started forward, and the whole of that street was too small for him, and he did not care.
Behind me the mechanism had started properly.
Counterweights I could not see were moving somewhere above the chamber roof.
Old chain was coming off a drum in the wall with the rust breaking off it in flakes, and there was a low grinding underneath everything that I felt in the floor rather than heard.
Water had started coming through the seams of the wall on the left. Not much. A dark line down the mortar and a smell like a cold cellar.
She had one gate open. There are nineteen.
And he was eleven metres from her door.
---
He plants before he pushes off. Everything that size does.
> **[Snare — S activated.]**
>
> **[Mana: 98/250 → 88/250.]**
I put it on the right foot at the moment the weight went onto it.
That foot stopped being his.
The rest of him did not stop at all, and that is exactly what the panel says it does. It fixes the contact. It does nothing whatsoever about the three metres of Fomorian above the contact.
His hips came round anyway and his shoulders went past his hips and his whole upper body arrived somewhere his foot could not follow, and he went down onto one knee with a hand out into a shopfront that came apart under it.
That did not hurt him. He could still reach. He nearly took my head off with the arm on the way down.
But he was not walking, and for about four seconds nobody was holding a chain.
---
I used the four seconds on the second attendant.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
>
> **[Mana: 88/250 → 76/250.]**
He saw me coming and he let go of his ring to defend himself, which is the same as not being an attendant any more, and I put six seconds of fire through his forearm and into his throat.
> **[Fomorian Raider — Level 12.]**
>
> **[HP: 0.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 60.]**
>
> **[EXP: 110/1,100 → 170/1,100.]**
Two down. Two left.
Then Balor’s arm came back the other way and caught me while I was still turning out of it.
I did not see it. Androphagos told me it was moving and I was already committed and there was nowhere for the information to go.
> **[Health: 158/410 → 96/410.]**
---
I went into a wall.
Shoulder first and then hip, about four metres up, and the masonry came in behind me and I came down in the rubble of it with my ears ringing and no air anywhere.
I could not get a breath for three seconds.
Then I got one, and it was full of dust, and I coughed the whole of it back out and had to start again.
My legs answered on the second attempt.
Not the first.
Endurance forty-one, and I want to be honest about what that bought me, because it did not buy me being unhurt. It bought me being able to stand up out of a wall instead of lying in it.
Snare had ended. He was up.
And he was going for the door.
---
There is nothing between him and that doorway except about nine metres of broken street and one eighteen-year-old.
I got to the middle of it and put both boots down on the flattest stone I could find.
> **[Ability Activated: Antaeus — SS.]**
>
> **[Antaeus consumes 3 Mana per second while active.]**
It came up out of the ground through the backs of my legs and settled across my hips and my spine, and my whole body got heavy in a way that has nothing to do with weight.
He hit me at a walk.
Not even a charge. Three metres of Fomorian commander walking into a boy with his hands up, and I did not go through the air and I did not fold.
I went backward.
Both boots ploughing, the stone cracking out in front of them in a chain of little splits, my knees at an angle knees do not like, and everything in my back from the belt to the shoulders taking it in one long line.
Two metres. Then another metre.
But he was going sideways now, because I had put myself on the wrong side of his line and he had to turn, and turning is the one thing he could not do quickly.
The door stayed behind me.
> **[Mana: 76/250 → 58/250.]**
>
> **[Health: 96/410 → 78/410.]**
---
Six seconds. That is what I got.
Then he stopped pushing and got a hand under my chest plate instead, and lifted.
> **[Antaeus deactivated: contact lost.]**
Both feet came off the stone and every bit of it went out of me between one moment and the next, from the ground up.
What he was holding stopped being a man who was part of the floor and became a thing that weighed eighty kilos.
He threw me across the street.
> **[Health: 78/410 → 42/410.]**
I hit the flooded gutter on my side and slid, and the water in it was black and cold and had weed in it
And it went straight into my mouth.
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