SSS Awakening: I Gain a Skill Every Time I Die
Chapter 89 — SSS Appraisal I**POV: Jace**
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I turned round to find Balor before I understood there was nothing to turn round for.
That is the only thing I remember doing in the first three seconds. My body put my hands up and moved my feet apart and got my chin down, and then it stood there in a grey nowhere with its guard raised at absolutely nothing.
No smoke.
No salt. Nothing burning. No water going downhill under any of it, and no bell, and no crowd, and no gulls.
I could hear myself breathing, and that was the whole of the sound in that place.
My gauntlets were still hot. My forearms had the leather burnt off them and my hands would not close and there was floodwater running out of my boots onto a floor that was not wet where it landed.
I put my hands down.
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> **[Assigned Role: Auxiliary Runner.]**
>
> **[Primary objective completed.]**
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> **[Predetermined sacrifice rejected.]**
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> **[Hidden scenario mechanism discovered.]**
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> **[Ancient flood system restored.]**
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> **[Scenario Commander defeated.]**
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> **[Major population loss prevented.]**
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> **[Scenario conclusion altered.]**
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> **[Calculating Tutorial Appraisal...]**
Eight lines.
Not one of them was a number. Nothing about how many raiders I put down, nothing about Levels or Mana or how close I came to dying in a gutter.
It only wanted the places where the story bent.
---
Every Tutorial ends with one of these.
F at the bottom, then E and D and C and B and A, then S, then SS, then SSS at the top, and the Bureau has been collecting accounts of them for sixty years and still cannot tell you the formula.
What they can tell you is that it has nothing to do with the grade on your sphere.
There are Silver and Black Awakeners on record who cleared their Tutorial with a C and never understood why. There are men who woke up White and came out of theirs with an A because they worked out what their scenario actually wanted from them.
The Tower does not seem to care what you are.
It cares what happened in there.
---
> **[Final Tutorial Appraisal: SSS.]**
I did not do anything for a while.
I had expected high. I had a dead scenario commander and a flooded district and two thousand people who should have been in a channel, and I would have taken an S and thought it was fair.
I read the line four times.
The third time I read it, I was thinking about a bronze cylinder with somebody else’s thumbprint in the wax, and the fact that the whole of my job had been to carry it up a hill and hand it to a man.
> **[SSS Tutorial Reward unlocked.]**
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The appraisal decides what you are offered.
That is the part guilds actually care about. A D gets you one thing and no say in it.
An A gets you a small choice of decent things. And an SSS generates three rewards at SSS grade and lets you keep exactly one of them.
They are not drawn out of a pool. Nobody has ever had the same three as anybody else.
They come out of the scenario you were in, the role you were given, and the specific things you did that produced the grade, which is why two Players can both come home with an A and have nothing in common to compare.
Three things formed in front of me about a metre apart.
Not cards. Objects, standing in the air at chest height, turning slowly.
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The first was a lantern.
A bronze shutter-lantern with a hinged front and a lens behind it, and the lens was not glass. It had depth in it that light came out of rather than went into.
> **[THE LIDDED LANTERN — SSS Relic.]**
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> **[Generated from: Scenario Commander defeated.]**
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> **[The bearer’s flame Ability may be channelled through the lens and projected as a directed beam.]**
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> **[The shutter must be opened by hand and cannot be opened during the same action as an attack.]**
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> **[Mana consumption while projecting is greatly increased.]**
I looked at that for longer than I should have.
I have no ranged attack. I have never had one. Every single thing I own requires me to be inside two metres of the problem, and I have died twice this month because I could not reach something in time.
That lantern is a fire Ability with a barrel on it.
---
The second was a bell.
Small. About the size of my fist, bronze gone brown, on a short chain meant to hang at the chest, with a clapper inside it and a bell tower stamped into the crown.
The same stamp that was on the shoulder of that borrowed armour.
> **[TOCSIN — SSS Relic.]**
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> **[Generated from: Predetermined sacrifice rejected.]**
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> **[When struck, a barrier forms along a line designated by the bearer, up to twelve metres, anchored where it forms.]**
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> **[For eight seconds, nothing crosses it in either direction.]**
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> **[The bearer is not exempt.]**
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> **[Once struck, it will not strike again until it has hung silent for one hour.]**
I read the last two lines twice.
Nothing crosses. Not attacks. Not bodies. Not me.
Once an hour.
---
The third was the cylinder.
The actual one. Bronze, the length of my forearm, with wax still on both caps and a thumbprint pressed into it that was not mine and never had been.
> **[THE RUNNER’S SEAL — SSS Relic.]**
>
> **[Generated from: Assigned role completed and exceeded.]**
>
> **[While borne, all arresting force generated by the bearer’s own movement Abilities is transferred into the ground rather than into the body.]**
That is it. That is the whole description. Two lines, and it is the single most tempting object I have ever been shown.
Because Talaria has hurt me every time I have used it, and I mean every time, from a courtyard wall to a chamber floor with a man standing over me.
I put five attribute points into Endurance a week ago specifically so that my own movement would stop breaking my ankle, and it *helped*, and it did not fix it.
That cylinder fixes it.
---
I stood there in a grey room with no floor sound and I did the arithmetic on my own build, which is a thing I have never had the time to do properly before.
Aten burns anything I can touch.
Lycaon lets me go into a fight at three hundred kilos.
Antaeus lets me be part of the ground.
Talaria puts me anywhere within about nine metres in less time than it takes to see.
Snare takes a foot away from somebody. Androphagos tells me what is alive within six metres.
Eight Abilities.
Six of them are ways to hit something or ways to get to something.
Every single time I have died, it has not been because I could not reach the problem or could not hurt it.
It has been because something reached *me*, or reached somebody I was standing in front of, and I had nothing between us except my own forearms.
Ewan reached a man I could have covered. Søren reached my leg. Cormac reached a wounded man on broken stone eleven metres away while I was standing there with my hands down.
The lantern makes my best thing better.
The cylinder makes my second-best thing cheaper.
The bell is the only object in this room that does something I cannot currently do at all.
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And it is the right one for the other reason too, which I am going to write down because it is true.
Twelve metres of absolute stop for eight seconds is nothing in a duel. In a duel I would rather have the lantern every day of the week.
But I have not been in a duel since I awakened.
I have been in a shield line at a causeway mouth, and a corridor with a healer behind me, and a doorway with a Bellkeeper at my back and three metres of Fomorian coming at it.
Eight seconds is an evacuation. Eight seconds is a healer getting her hands out of somebody. Eight seconds is a formation closing a gap that would otherwise have cost four people.
Once an hour is not a defence. It is a decision you get to make once.
I have been in exactly the sort of situations where I would have given anything for one.
> **[Reward selected: Tocsin.]**
>
> **[Unselected Tutorial Rewards forfeited.]**
The lantern and the cylinder went out like somebody had closed a door on them, and I felt something about the cylinder going that I did not expect and did not examine.
> **[SSS Tutorial Relic acquired.]**
---
The bell came down into my hands.
It was heavier than a thing that size should be and it was cold, which surprised me, because everything in that scenario had been either burning or under water.
The chain went round my neck and the weight of it settled just below my collarbone, on top of the plate, in the exact place the message cylinder had been strapped for the whole of two runs.
I put my thumb over the stamp on the crown.
Then I did not ring it, because I have no idea how long an hour is in a room with no clock in it, and I am not going to find out by wasting the only strike I have.
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> **[Tutorial completed.]**
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> **[Tower Challenger status confirmed.]**
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> **[Floor One unlocked.]**
> **[TOWER]**
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> **[Tutorial: Cleared.]**
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> **[Tutorial Appraisal: SSS.]**
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> **[Floor One: Available.]**
That is the last time I will ever see the word Tutorial with anything after it.
You get one. It is not a floor and it is not repeatable and it does not exist on a map, and once it is cleared, that door is closed for you permanently.
The floors are the opposite.
They are actual places, and they stay where they are, and other people can go into them.
That is why there are guides you can buy for Floor One and why the Bureau has diagrams of it and why nine hundred people have walked the same ground.
And why Floor Three has two conflicting reports and a folder full of casualties.
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> **[HUMANITY TOWER PROGRESSION]**
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> **[Highest Verified Clear: Floor Two.]**
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> **[Current Frontier: Floor Three.]**
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> **[Floor Three: Unconquered.]**
Three lines I have never been allowed to see before.
They put my father’s east hall into one sentence. Everything down there, the cases and the spare plating and the medic opening the same crate twice, is those three lines and the word at the end of the last one.
> **[Return Challenger to point of entry?]**
>
> **[YES.]**
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My bedroom.
No transition worth writing about. The grey went and there was wool under my feet and warm air on my face and a rug that has been in this room since I was nine.
The light through the window had barely moved.
I checked myself first, and I was whole.
Not healed. Restored, the way Ouroboros does it, except no dying was involved this time. Both forearms had skin on them. My hands closed when I asked them to.
There was no floodwater in my boots because there were no boots, because I was standing on a rug in the clothes I had put on after a bath.
That is twice today that something has handed me back a body I had already spent.
I put my hand flat on my chest and the bell was there under the shirt, cold, on its chain.
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> **[Level: 11.]**
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> **[EXP: 810/1,100.]**
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> **[Health: 410/410.]**
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> **[Mana: 250/250.]**
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> **[Unassigned Attribute Points: 3.]**
I left the three where they were.
I have a specific reason and it is not indecision.
I have just come out of a scenario that showed me exactly what my build cannot do, and I have just put an object on my chest that changes the shape of the answer.
I would like to be in one fight with it before I spend anything permanent.
The Ability list had nine lines on it now.
Eight Abilities and a Relic, and one of those Abilities belongs to a man who is currently alive in a city that does not exist, who broke my arm and then told me to stay down.
---
The clock on the wall said twenty past five.
I had gone in at about half past four.
Fifty-one minutes, and inside it I had spent the better part of two days, twice over, in a city under siege, and died once, and stood in a flooded street with a boat hook under my elbow.
I sat on the end of the bed for a second and let that be strange.
Then I went downstairs, because my father had asked me to.
---
The east hall had not stopped.
They had got further, which is the only difference. The first row of cases was sealed and stacked and tagged. The trestles had gone from the middle of the floor and been replaced with two long tables of paper.
Somebody was reading aloud from a report and three people were writing.
The medic with the second case had that case open again.
And I stood in the doorway with a bell under my shirt and thought about the difference between the two things happening in this house today.
Twelve of the strongest Players in this region. Three hundred kilos of equipment. Two spare sets of everything. Nine days of preparation and a folder built out of other people’s dead.
And me, on the end of a bed, pressing YES.
---
My father came out of the side corridor about ten minutes later and stopped when he saw me.
He looked at what I was wearing, which was what I had been wearing this afternoon, and then at my face.
"Already."
"Fifty-one minutes."
"That is not what I asked."
"I cleared it."
He put down the folder he was holding. He did not do anything else with his hands.
"Appraisal."
"SSS."
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