SSS Awakening: I Gain a Skill Every Time I Die

He stopped.

He was standing in the middle of his own east hall with twelve of his people around him and he stopped completely, for about two seconds, and the man reading aloud from the report noticed and trailed off.

Then he picked the folder back up, and did not open it.

"Come away from the door."

We went about nine metres down the corridor, which is as private as that house was going to get this week.

"You understand what that is."

"I understand what it is not," I said. "It is not my sphere."

"No, it is not." He was watching me carefully now. "I have put four people through that in eleven years. Two Reds and a Silver and a man who woke up Green."

"And?"

"The Green came out with an A and the two Reds came out with a C and a D." He said it flatly. "Rank gets you through the door of the Tutorial.

It does not get you a grade. The grade is what you did in there when nobody was telling you what the room was for."

---

"So what was it?"

I gave him the version that fits in eight sentences.

A coastal city under siege from the sea. Seven walled districts and a bell for each one, rung as each district was abandoned. I was assigned as a runner and given a sealed order to carry to the last tower.

The order was to ring the last bell immediately.

Ringing it closed the inner city and dropped the causeway, which would have killed everybody who had not crossed yet, and there were about two thousand people still on the road.

There was an old flood system under the districts that nobody had used in two hundred years.

I went back out into the ground we had already lost, opened it, and put four minutes of reservoir down through the enemy assault. Their commander was in the way and I killed him.

The bell still rang. The causeway still went.

The people on it were behind the wall by then.

---

I did not tell him about the first attempt.

I did not tell him that a man called Cian broke my arm and put me into a flagstone and told me to stay down.

Or that the reason I knew about the flood system at all was that I had already been through that city once with my eyes shut.

I did not say the word Antaeus.

He would not have needed much. My father is not a stupid man and he has been watching me get inexplicably good at things for four weeks.

But there is nothing in what I told him that is untrue, and there is nothing in it he can pull a thread out of, and I have got extremely practised at that in a very short space of time.

I am aware of what that says about me. I am putting it in here anyway.

---

"Two thousand," he said.

"About."

He was quiet for a moment.

"That is why."

"Why what?"

"Why it gave you the grade." He turned the folder over in his hands. "Everybody clears their Tutorial by doing what the scenario asks. The ones who score are the ones who work out that the scenario is asking the wrong question."

He looked back toward the hall.

"Nobody knows what those places are, incidentally. Before you ask. The Bureau has forty years of accounts and they can sort them into shapes.

Sieges. Escapes. Escorts. Hunts. Nobody has ever proved whether they happened somewhere, or were built for the challenger, or are something else entirely."

"The people in mine had names."

"They always do." He said it without any particular weight. "That is the part that stops people sleeping. Do not go looking into it. Four separate researchers have made careers out of finding nothing."

---

"You will have taken a reward."

I pulled the chain out from under my shirt and let the bell sit in my palm.

He looked at it for a long time and did not touch it.

"What does it do?"

"Twelve metres of line. Nothing crosses it either way for eight seconds. Once an hour."

"Including you."

"Including me."

Something moved across his face and got put away.

"There are guilds that would put a Level Thirty on a retainer for a decade to get that into a raid formation," he said. "That is not flattery, it is a procurement decision.

Tutorial Relics do not scale with your Level and they do not stop working when you outgrow them. A man can carry the thing he got at eighteen into a Red Gate at forty."

He handed the folder to somebody without looking at who.

"Which is the entire reason a guild will pay for a promising Awakener’s Tutorial preparation and then charge it back against his first four years. They are buying the grade."

"Nobody paid for mine."

"No," he said. "They did not."

---

"You are still going in nine days."

"Eight, now." He was already turning back toward the hall. "The Bureau has moved the window twice and I have stopped believing either date."

"Twelve people."

"Twelve people."

He stopped at the door and looked back at me, and for about a second and a half he was not a clan head standing in a room full of equipment.

"Floor One is documented," he said. "Every metre of it. There are four different published routes and two of them are good.

If you go, you will read all of them first, and then you will read the one Myrmidon keeps that is not published, and I will have it sent up to you tonight."

"You are not going to tell me not to go."

"I stopped being able to tell you not to do things approximately one month ago." He put a hand flat on the doorframe.

"And you have just come back from somewhere in fifty-one minutes with the highest grade the Tower gives out. I am not going to stand in a corridor and pretend the useful thing to do is argue about it."

Then he went back into his hall, and somebody had a question for him before he had crossed four metres of it.

---

I went upstairs.

The house was doing its evening. Somebody was closing shutters two floors down. There was a smell of cooking coming up the back stair that I had not registered on the way down.

I sat on the end of the bed in the same place, which is now the third time today, and put the bell on the blanket beside me and looked at it.

The stamp on the crown is a tower with a bell hanging in it, worn round at the edges from being rubbed against something over a long time.

Somebody wore this.

In a city that may or may not have ever existed, somebody had this at their chest and rubbed the stamp smooth with a thumb over about twenty years.

And then a Tower gave it to an eighteen-year-old in England because he stopped a road being dropped.

I have decided not to think about that too much.

---

Then I opened the last panel.

> **[TOWER]**

>

> **[Tutorial: Cleared.]**

>

> **[Tutorial Appraisal: SSS.]**

>

> **[Floor One: Available.]**

And underneath it, where the entry had said something else this morning:

> **[Attempt Floor One.]**

Four weeks ago I could not lift a card off a table.

A month before that, in a life nobody else remembers, I was twenty-four and standing in an office reading a preliminary Floor Five assessment that everybody in the world wanted a copy of.

Fifty-one minutes ago the Tutorial was the whole of what I was allowed to do.

It was never the Tower. It was the door.

I sat there with a bell in my hand and looked at the line that had replaced it.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!