SSS Awakening: I Gain a Skill Every Time I Die
Chapter 94 — Last Twenty II> **[Challengers: 89/100.]**
The counter had been climbing the whole time and people had stopped pretending not to watch it.
> **[Challengers: 94/100.]**
The noise went down again. The guild five came off the wall and moved to the middle of the floor where they would have room.
> **[Challengers: 98/100.]**
Somebody near me exhaled in a way that was not entirely under control, and the woman beside him put a hand on his arm for about two seconds and took it off again.
I checked my own panel while the last two arrived.
> **[Level: 11.]**
>
> **[EXP: 810/1,100.]**
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> **[Health: 410/410.]**
>
> **[Mana: 250/250.]**
>
> **[Unassigned Attribute Points: 3.]**
Three points, still unspent, and I am still not spending them until I have been in there.
The bell was under my shirt. I put my hand flat over it once through the fabric and left it alone.
---
> **[Challengers: 100/100.]**
>
> **[Participant requirement fulfilled.]**
>
> **[Floor One will commence in 60 seconds.]**
> **[Initial deployment will be randomised.]**
Nobody in that hall reacted to the second line.
That is the part that told me how well known all of this is.
A hundred people were just informed that whatever arrangements they have spent twenty minutes making will be scattered across a battlefield at random, and not one person made a noise about it, because everybody has read the same guide I have.
The alliances survive the deployment or they do not. That is the first thing the floor takes off you.
---
Sixty seconds is not long and I did not waste it.
The middle cluster spent theirs agreeing a rally point, which I could hear about a third of, and it was a sensible choice and it is the sort of sensible choice that eleven other people also make.
The guild five did not talk at all. They had already done it.
And a man about eight metres to my left, on his own, with a long weapon and a face I did not recognise, spent a good portion of that minute looking at me.
Not aggressively. He was learning my outline. Height, gear, the shape of the gauntlets, the way I stand.
He was memorising me so he would know what I was from a distance later, and he did not look away when I noticed him doing it.
I let him have it. It is not an unreasonable thing to do.
I looked at the far corner of the map one last time instead.
---
> **[5.]**
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> **[4.]**
>
> **[3.]**
>
> **[2.]**
>
> **[1.]**
>
> **[Floor One commencing.]**
The hall went.
---
Ground under my boots, and air moving against my face, and light.
I did not stagger. That is three of these transitions now and my knees have started taking them without being asked.
I turned a full circle before I did anything else and made myself count to four while I did it, because the single worst thing available to me in the first ten seconds is to start moving before I know which way is which.
Nobody within sight.
There was noise a long way off, in two directions, and neither of them was close enough to be about me.
> **[Challengers Remaining: 100.]**
>
> **[First Battlefield Contraction: 22:00.]**
Twenty-two minutes before the ground starts closing.
---
I put my back to something solid and worked out where I was.
Not perfect. It is not the deployment I would have chosen and it is not the worst one either, and I spent about fifteen seconds fitting what was in front of me to what was on that board.
Then I had it.
The place I want is a long way off, in the direction almost nobody is going to be moving, and there is a route to it that does not cross either of the two areas where the guides say early fighting concentrates.
It is going to take me a substantial part of this floor to get there.
That is fine. That was always going to be true.
I started moving, and about ninety seconds later something came out of cover at me.
---
I heard it before I saw it, which is the only reason it went the way it did.
The guide is very clear about how these move, and about the fact that they commit early and cannot correct.
I have read that sentence twice in two documents, and it turns out reading it and having it come at you are not the same experience.
It was fast. Nothing about the page had prepared me for how fast.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
>
> **[Mana: 250/250 → 244/250.]**
I did not go backward.
The page says they commit. So I went sideways and let it commit, and it went through the space I had been standing in and could not turn, and I put six seconds of fire into it from behind while it was still trying to.
That was the whole fight.
> **[Monster eliminated.]**
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> **[Experience acquired: 55.]**
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> **[EXP: 810/1,100 → 865/1,100.]**
---
I stood over it afterward for about four seconds and understood something I had not properly registered.
A month ago that thing would have taken me two minutes and a great deal of my Health.
Eleven days ago I fought a raider on a wall and it threw me four metres along a walkway and I needed two more exchanges to put it down.
This took eleven seconds and cost me six Mana, and I did it with one Ability, and I never once considered using anything else.
I am not the same Player who walked into that freight yard.
I have not had a single moment to notice that until now, because every fight since has been against something enormous, and you do not measure yourself against a Giant.
You measure yourself against a thing that used to be difficult.
---
Then the sound of everything else arrived.
Not one fight. Four or five separate ones, spread across the ground behind me, all inside about twenty seconds of each other, and one of them was close enough that I could hear individual impacts.
A hundred people have just been dropped onto the same battlefield and the first ones have found each other.
> **[Challengers Remaining: 99.]**
Then, about forty seconds later, before I had covered two hundred metres:
> **[Challengers Remaining: 98.]**
---
I stopped and did the arithmetic, because I have got into the habit and because it mattered.
Eighty people have to go out before this floor ends. Two are gone in the first four minutes.
If that rate held, the whole thing would be over in about two and a half hours, and I would still be walking.
It will not hold. It always starts fast and slows in the middle, because the easy eliminations are the ones that happen when people who cannot fight run into people who can, and after the first hour everybody left is somebody who won something.
But the shape of it is the point.
That counter is a clock and it is not my clock. It runs whether I am in a fight or not.
Every elimination anywhere on this map, by anybody, brings the end of this floor closer, and I am the only person here who needs the floor to last.
Everyone else wants this over at twenty-one.
I need to be somewhere specific before it gets there.
I moved faster after that.
---
About ten minutes in I came up onto higher ground and saw two of them fighting.
Maybe two hundred metres out, below me and to the left, and they had been at it long enough that both of them were slow.
I got down and watched, which cost me forty seconds and was worth it.
I was not going to interfere. I want to be clear about my reasoning, because it was not mercy.
If I go down there, I take on a fight against somebody who has already got a fight in him, in exchange for one elimination, at a point in this floor where eliminations are not scarce.
I would be spending Mana and Health on a thing the map is going to do for me anyway.
Then one of them got through.
---
It should have been the end of him.
Something went into the man’s chest and I saw where it went and I know what that does to a body.
> **[Floor Protection activated.]**
The strike did not land.
It stopped about four centimetres in, which is the strangest thing I have watched, because I could see the weapon inside his chest plate and there was no blood anywhere and his face was doing something a face does when the pain does not arrive.
Then he came apart into light. Not violently. He went from a man standing at an angle to a column of pale System light to nothing at all, inside about a second and a half.
The weapon that had been in him fell on the ground where he had been.
> **[Challenger eliminated.]**
>
> **[Challengers Remaining: 97.]**
---
I have watched eleven people die in front of me this month.
That was not that. Nothing about it was that. He is currently standing in a Bureau facility somewhere with a failure logged and a bruise he will not be able to explain, and he will be back here inside a fortnight.
And I found, lying on that ridge, that I did not entirely believe it in my body.
My chest had done the thing it does when somebody goes down in front of me. My hands had come off the ground.
It is going to take me more than one of those to retrain that.
---
The winner looked up and found me.
He had blood coming out of his hairline and he was breathing through his mouth and he had just won, which meant he was as tired as anybody on this map.
I stood up slowly and let him see all of me. Both hands. No approach.
Neither of us moved for about four seconds.
He does not want a second fight in five minutes with somebody standing on high ground who watched his whole last one.
I do not want to spend Mana and time on a man I have no reason to fight when the counter is at ninety-seven and I have most of a battlefield to cross.
He tilted his head about two degrees toward the ground on his left, which is where he intended to go.
I took a step back from the edge, which is what I intended to do.
Then we both did it, and nobody said one word, and that is the most sensible conversation I have had all week.
---
After that I moved and the floor got on with itself around me.
I heard a group of four go past about three hundred metres east, moving with purpose, probably a rally point.
I crossed the track of somebody who had been running and not fighting, and stayed off it.
Twice I heard something die that was not a person and once I heard something die that was, and both times I noted the direction and went a different way.
> **[Challengers Remaining: 96.]**
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> **[Challengers Remaining: 94.]**
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> **[First Battlefield Contraction: 04:00.]**
Nobody was going the way I was going.
That is not a figure of speech. In fifty minutes on that floor I saw the tracks of exactly one person heading in the direction I was heading, and they turned off it after about eighty metres and went back toward the middle.
Of course they did. There is nothing over here.
---
Then I came up over a rise and stopped walking.
Because I could see it, and it was exactly where I remembered, and it looked exactly as unremarkable as sixty-three years of Players had found it.
I want to be honest about how much of that was relief.
Everything I have done since last night has been built on a memory of a document I skimmed six years from now, in a life that no longer exists.
I have been carrying an unspoken possibility around all morning that I was going to walk over a hill and find nothing there at all.
There was something there.
Not the thing. I still have to get down there and I still have to be right about what it is.
But there was one physical detail, small and specific and completely unimportant to anybody who does not know what it means, sitting in the open in front of me the way it has been sitting there for as long as this floor has existed.
It matched the clause.
That man saw this nine years ago and wrote four paragraphs about his afternoon and put one word in about this and went home.
---
> **[Challengers Remaining: 91.]**
Nine gone. Seventy-one to go before this ends.
Behind me the whole of the rest of that hundred was moving the other way, toward the middle, toward each other, toward the ground that is about to start closing.
I checked the Mana, and the timer, and the ground between me and it.
Then I went down the far side of the rise, alone, toward a place nobody on this floor will think about for another six years.
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