SSS Awakening: I Gain a Skill Every Time I Die

The surge comes in pulses. It had been doing it since the master lock went, a heavier push every eight or nine seconds as something upstream emptied into something else.

I waited for the trough.

Then I took the eleven metres to his right side at a wade with the water at my hips, and I put it on the foot that was carrying him.

> **[Snare — S activated.]**

>

> **[Mana: 46/250 → 36/250.]**

The next pulse came through about two seconds later.

And it hit three metres of upper body that had both hands occupied with its own eyelid, standing on one foot that could not slide and one foot that could.

He went round.

Not over. Round, through about forty degrees, with the fixed foot as the pivot and the whole of that torso twisting against the water.

His face came off the chamber door and off the whole upper street and ended up pointing across the flood at a wall.

And the eye was open.

Open, and looking at masonry, and eleven metres from me at an angle where nothing it did could reach me before I got there.

---

> **[Ability Activated: Lycaon — SS.]**

>

> **[Mana: 36/250 → 24/250.]**

Three seconds of it. That is all I could afford and all I needed.

I do not run through moving water at hip height as a person. As three hundred kilos with claws, I did, and I put a shoulder through a floating cart on the way and did not slow down for it.

Six metres. Four.

He heard me coming and one hand came off the lid to swing.

I took most of it across the back and the water took the rest, and it put me under and I came up two metres closer than I had gone down, which was not the plan and was better than the plan.

> **[Health: 42/410 → 18/410.]**

Then I got both feet onto the base of a wrecked doorstep, which was the only solid thing within nine metres, and I planted.

> **[Talaria activated.]**

>

> **[Lycaon deactivated.]**

---

I came out of the water on a burst that took me up his braced forearm and across the top of it.

And I came out of Lycaon in the middle of the crossing, because there is no fitting three hundred kilos through the gap between a hand and a face.

I arrived at his head as myself, eighteen years old, with eighteen Health, and my gauntlets already coming up.

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

>

> **[Output increased.]**

>

> **[Mana consumption: 8 per second.]**

I put both fists into the socket.

---

It did not kill him.

That is the thing nobody tells you about a weak point.

I put a hand into an open furnace at four times the output I have ever used and it did not end anything, and the whole of that enormous body went into a spasm that nearly threw me off it in the first second.

I had one arm hooked over the lower edge of the socket and my boots on nothing and my whole weight hanging off a face that was trying to remove me.

So I stayed.

Four seconds.

The first second the light went from what it had been to something with dark in it. The second one my gauntlets stopped being metal I could feel through and became metal I could feel.

The third one the leather at my wrists went and my forearms took the heat directly and the smell of it came up into my own face.

Fourth second, my fingers stopped closing properly and I had to hold on with the crook of my elbow.

> **[Mana: 24/250 → 4/250.]**

Then something inside it went out.

---

He came apart at the knees first.

Three metres of Fomorian commander went down into moving water with his hands still up near his own face, and the flood took him about nine metres down the street and put him against the corner of a building and left him there.

> **[Balor — Level 32.]**

>

> **[HP: 0.]**

>

> **[Scenario Boss defeated.]**

>

> **[Boss experience: 640.]**

>

> **[Experience acquired: 640.]**

>

> **[EXP: 170/1,100 → 810/1,100.]**

> **[Mana: 4/250 → 0/250.]**

I went into the water with him and did not have anything left to swim with.

The Bellkeeper got a boat hook off a wall and put it out to me, and I got my elbow over it because my hands would not close.

She pulled me the four metres to the chamber doorstep and then sat down on the step herself.

Neither of us said anything for a while.

---

Getting back took eleven minutes instead of twenty, because we went with the water instead of through a district full of raiders.

There was nothing left to fight. That is not a figure of speech.

We passed two of them on the way and both of them were face down and moving with the current, and everything else in the Sixth was empty and running and full of floating furniture.

The main channel goes down. We were going up.

We went along the high ground on the terrace edge with our boots in about fifteen centimetres of overflow, and it took eleven minutes, and I could not have done it if the water had not already removed everything that would have stopped us.

The maintenance stair inside the Seventh Wall was dry.

---

The causeway was still there.

Two thousand people were still on it, and it was still going up at the pace of somebody with a limp, and there were still fires behind it.

But at the mouth, four hundred metres down, there was fighting rather than a battle.

I stood at the top with water running out of my armour onto the stone and watched sixty exhausted men holding a line against maybe thirty raiders.

Forty minutes ago there had been a column coming out of a street six hundred metres back with no end to it.

The column was in the sea.

---

Cian was still at the mouth.

I could see him from the top, because a man planted on a bridge is the only stationary thing in that whole picture, and he was where he had been when I left.

He looked up the road once.

Not at me. Past me, at the water coming down over the terraces behind the Sixth with the burning wreckage going with it, and he had about a second and a half to do it in.

Then his head came round and found me and the Bellkeeper standing at the top of the causeway.

He did not do anything with his face. He did not raise a hand.

He turned back to the line and shouted somebody’s section number, and that was the whole of it.

---

It took eleven more minutes to empty that road.

I went down and helped, because there was nothing else I could do with no Mana and eighteen Health and hands that would not close, and it turns out you do not need any of those things to put your shoulder under somebody.

The last two hundred were the worst.

That is when people had stopped being frightened and had started being finished, and there was a woman about forty metres from the gate who simply sat down, and two soldiers picked her up under the arms without breaking step.

Nobody made a speech about any of it.

They just kept walking people through a gate.

---

It was not clean.

There were bodies on that road. There were people who had gone down in the crush before I ever got back and had not got up.

There were four men on the mouth line who did not walk off it, and the healer at the gate had run out of everything hours ago and was working with strips of somebody’s coat.

I want that in here, because I have been in a version of this evening where two thousand people went into a channel, and I am not going to pretend this one was a miracle.

It was a worse ending than nobody dying.

It was an enormously better ending than the one that was written down in a cylinder on my chest.

---

Cian brought the last of the mouth line up at a walk and did not run any part of it.

Then he stood at the top with his shield still on his arm and looked back down the causeway at the fires, and the Bellkeeper looked at him, and he nodded once.

She went into the tower.

I did not watch her do it. I turned round and looked at the inside of the Seventh District instead, because I wanted to see it at the moment it happened.

---

The Seventh Bell is not like the others.

The first six arrive as sound. This one arrived as everything at once.

It came up through the stone into my boots and into my knees and into the bones behind my ears.

The dust came off every surface in that gatehouse in one motion and hung in the air, and my chest was pushed from the inside.

One strike. That is all it takes.

Somewhere above and behind us the great counterweight came off its catch, and I heard four hundred years of chain start running.

The inner gates came together.

And then the causeway went.

---

It did not fall. It was released, which is a different noise entirely.

A hundred and forty metres of stone road let go of both ends at once and went down into the channel in a single piece.

It made a sound with no top to it, and the whole of the Seventh District moved under everybody standing on it.

Water came up out of that channel higher than the wall.

When it came down there was no road.

There was a gap sixty metres wide between the Seventh District and everything that used to be the city, with a river in the bottom of it, and about thirty Fomorians on the far side of that gap with nowhere to go.

Nobody cheered.

Somebody sat down against the inner wall and put their head back against the stone and closed their eyes.

---

The Bell still rang.

That is the thing I keep coming back to.

Everything I did tonight and it still rang, at almost exactly the hour it was always going to ring, and the causeway still went into the channel, and the city still sealed itself with the Fomorians outside.

I did not change one line of that order.

I changed who was standing on the road when it happened.

I went along the inside of the wall and counted, because I have not stopped counting since the freight yard and I was not going to start now.

Families sitting against the stone in rows. A man asleep upright with a child across him. Somebody handing out water from a bucket with a ladle.

Two thousand people, near enough, who were in a channel the last time I stood here.

And a man on the gatehouse steps with a shield on his arm, alive, twelve metres from where he stood over me and told me to stay down.

---

> **[Tutorial clear condition fulfilled.]**

>

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

I sat down on the step where I was standing, because my legs had finished.

> **[Calculating Tutorial performance.]**

>

> **[Scenario deviation detected.]**

>

> **[Evaluating Challenger actions...]**

The panel sat there in front of me and did nothing for a long time.

Behind it, through it, a woman two metres away was checking her son’s arm for a break he did not have, and she checked it three times.

> **[Appraisal complete.]**

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