SSS Awakening: I Gain a Skill Every Time I Die

Forty-two.

I lay in that gutter with my face in it and did the number and it did not take long.

Behind me the two remaining attendants had got their chains back and the lid was coming up again, two centimetres at a time.

I could not reach both of them. I could not reach either of them before that lid cleared.

So I stopped trying to stop the eye and started watching where his face was pointed instead, which is what I should have been doing since the second minute.

---

Then the ground went.

Not shook. Went, one enormous soft impact under the whole district, deeper than the Sixth Bell had been, and it came up through the water in the gutter and made rings in it.

The Bellkeeper had opened something large.

Somewhere under four hundred metres of stone, water that had been standing still since before this city had walls started moving, and I felt it arrive in the channels under my own ribs.

Balor turned toward it.

The whole of that head came round toward the chamber door, and the lid was three quarters up.

---

I did not shout at him.

There is no version of this where a Fomorian commander is drawn off by an eighteen-year-old with an opinion.

I hit him instead.

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

>

> **[Mana: 58/250 → 46/250.]**

I came off the gutter and crossed the street and put six seconds of fire into the back of his knee, which did approximately nothing to a leg that thick and did exactly what I needed it to do, which was be unignorable.

He came round.

And I ran, and I kept running, and every stride I took was away from that doorway at an angle, and he turned to follow me because I was the thing that had touched him.

Behind me the lid finished coming up.

---

The raiders on the walls got out of the way and I saw them do it out of the corner of my eye, and I counted.

He needs about a second to bring that head onto a target once the eye is open. I have watched it twice.

I let him get all the way to the end of it.

> **[Talaria activated.]**

I went at the last possible moment and I went low and sideways rather than back, and the beam came through the space where my chest had been.

And it kept going.

Into eleven metres of street behind me, and into the six or seven of his own raiders who were standing in it because the ones on the walls had cleared and the ones in the middle had not been told.

Four of them went. Not fell. Went.

The other three came apart in ways I am not going to write down, and one of them was still standing afterward with most of a body.

His own eye did that. He put it through his own force to reach me and he did not adjust and he did not stop.

---

And while it was open, I finally got a proper look at it.

Everything else on that creature is covered. Wet plate lashed on in overlapping pieces down the chest and the shoulders and the outsides of the arms, and where there is no plate there is hide like the sole of a boot.

The eye has nothing.

It is an open socket in the front of his head with something burning inside it, and the only thing that ever covers it is a lid that takes four men to lift.

While it is up there is not so much as a rim of bone in front of it.

That is not a weak point. That is a hole in him.

I could not reach it. He is three metres tall and the thing that comes out of that socket owns every metre of ground directly in front of his face, and getting to it means crossing exactly the space that kills me.

But I knew what I was looking for now.

---

Then the district ended.

I heard it before anything else. A roar coming down through the stone from the direction of the Seventh Wall, low at first and then not low at all, and it did not stop building.

The Bellkeeper had thrown the master lock.

Water came up out of every grate in that street at once.

Not from the harbour. From above, from behind me, from under the wall I had walked out of an hour ago, and it came down the hill because that is the only direction it has ever been built to go.

A cellar door forty metres up the street came off its hinges and went past me end over end.

Then the street itself filled.

---

It was not clean and it was not surgical and it did not sort anybody.

It took carts, and shutters, and doors, and the burning timber that had been coming off the roofs all night, and it carried all of that downhill in the same wave as everything else.

It took the bodies out of the lane where the retreat had passed.

It took the raiders. All of them, the ones still standing and the ones the eye had ruined.

They went down that street backward with their arms out and their weapons gone, and the ones who tried to stand up in it went under and did not come back up.

The water was brown and it smelled of old cistern and cold minerals, and where it went over the burning debris it hissed and put out four hours of fire in about eleven seconds.

I got my arms round a cast-iron post outside a shopfront and held on and it went up my chest to my throat.

The Bellkeeper was in the doorway of the chamber with both hands on the frame, looking at it.

She has read about that system her entire adult life. Nobody alive had seen it work.

---

Balor did not wash away.

He is too big and too heavy and the first surge came up his legs and stopped at his waist, and he braced against it with both arms out and stayed exactly where he was.

But his feet went.

I watched them go. The cobbles under him were being dragged out from underneath by the water and he had to keep readjusting, one heavy step and then another, and he was no longer a thing standing on a street.

He was a thing standing in a river.

His two remaining attendants were not.

They went past me on the flood with their chains still on their wrists, and one of them hit a corner about thirty metres down and the chain caught and the rest of him did not.

The lid came down.

Slowly, and heavily, and all the way, because there was nobody left in that street with a hand on a ring.

---

The noise from the Seventh Wall changed.

I could not see it. I was four hundred metres away with a post under my arms and a metre of moving water on me and no view of anything except the street I was in.

What I had was sound.

There had been a continuous thing coming from that direction all night, a low mixed noise of fighting that you stop hearing after the first hour, and it thinned.

It did not stop. It thinned, and went ragged, and started having gaps in it.

And nothing new came up the street toward us. That is the part I noticed most. For nineteen minutes there had been something arriving every forty seconds, and after the water there was nothing arriving at all.

Their assault was behind us and the water was going through it, and I could not see one second of it and I did not need to.

---

Then Balor put both hands up to his own face.

He got his fingers under the edge of the lid and started lifting it himself.

It was slow.

It was very slow, and it visibly cost him, and he had to brace both legs against the current to do it, and the whole of his upper body was locked into holding that weight up with nothing else available to fight with.

Which told me the last thing I needed.

He was going to open it whether anybody helped him or not. And he couldn’t walk or use his arms while he did it, and he was standing in a river.

I let go of the post.

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