**POV: Jace**
---
> **[Challengers Remaining: 91.]**
>
> **[First Battlefield Contraction: 16:00.]**
Sixteen minutes.
I got about two hundred metres down the far side of that rise and then I stopped, and I stood there in the open with my hands out in front of me and looked at them.
Bare knuckles. Scarred across the second and third, one nail still black from a chamber floor.
No gauntlets.
I put both palms down my own sides. No plate at the ribs. No harness.
Nothing at the hip and nothing across my back, and the shirt I had put on after a bath the previous afternoon was still the thing between my skin and the world.
The bell was there. That was all.
The Tower had let me keep what the Tower had given me, and everything I had walked out of that house wearing had stayed in the house.
Sixteen minutes, and a long way to go, and I was going to walk into it dressed for supper.
---
So I turned round and went the other way for a while.
There was a structure about six hundred metres north-east that the board in the hall had marked as ordinary. Not contested, not rich, not worth a note. The kind of place four hundred people had gone through and left.
Ordinary was fine. Ordinary was gauntlets.
The ground rose slightly and then broke into slabs, and I came up on the ruin from the low side with my breathing under control and my eyes on the doorway.
---
Then something moved inside it.
Not loud. A shift of loose stone, somewhere at the back, and then nothing for about four seconds.
My whole body stopped before I had decided to stop. Weight came off my heels and onto the balls of my feet, both hands came up in front of my sternum, and I felt my own pulse arrive in my neck.
The second sound was closer.
Something dragged across grit, deliberately, and I got a shape through the gap in the wall. Low. Wide across the shoulders. A head that came round toward the doorway and stayed there.
I stepped back one pace.
It came through the wall.
---
Not the doorway. The wall, out of the dark at the side, and it was on me before the dust of it had finished coming down.
I got my forearms up and turned my hip and the first strike went past my face close enough that the air of it moved my hair.
The smell hit at the same time. Wet fur and old meat, thick, in my open mouth.
I went backward over broken stone and my heel caught something and I nearly went down, and it came again into the space where a man who had fallen over would have been.
> **[Ability Activated: Androphagos.]**
>
> **[Duration: 01:00.]**
---
Six metres of field, and the whole of it was full of one thing.
It came round the outside on my right and I knew it was coming round the outside on my right, and I moved before it committed and it went past me into the wall.
That is all that Ability has ever done. It does not fight for me. It tells me where a living thing is, and everything after that belongs to my legs.
My legs were fine. My hands were the problem.
Because it turned, and I had a clean opening at the side of its neck, and there was nothing on my knuckles at all.
---
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
>
> **[Mana: 244/250 → 228/250.]**
Eight seconds. Longer than I would have needed with the proper gear, and every one of those seconds went through skin.
The fire sat on the backs of my hands and up my forearms with nothing between it and me.
The heat came off it in the wrong direction as much as the right one, and the hair on both arms went in about a second and a half.
I could not close my fist properly by the fourth second.
I hit it twice under the jaw and once in the same place and it came apart around the third one, and its claws opened my left forearm on the way down.
> **[Health: 410/410 → 372/410.]**
> **[Monster eliminated.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 65.]**
>
> **[EXP: 865/1,100 → 930/1,100.]**
---
I stood over it with my forearms shaking and blood coming down my wrist into my palm.
Nothing on it. No weapon, no rack, no drop.
What it had was the building, and now I had the building, and that was the entire transaction.
I went in.
---
The ruin had three rooms and most of what was left in them was junk.
A short sword against a wall that somebody had bent and left. A spear with two-thirds of a haft. Something long with a hook on the end that would have been excellent for a man with four years of training in it.
I put all of it back.
I have never held a weapon in a fight that mattered.
My father spent six years teaching me to hit things with my hands and then Aten arrived and made that the correct decision, and picking up a sword today because a sword was available would be the fastest way I know to die holding one.
The second room had a crate on its side.
---
Reinforced combat gauntlets. Plain ones, scuffed across the knuckles, the leather at the wrists gone dark.
I put them on.
The left one was slightly loose so I pulled the strap through and set it a hole tighter, and then I made a fist twice and turned the wrist over and opened the fingers.
They worked.
I stood in a broken room on a Tower floor with my hands in somebody else’s gauntlets and something in my chest came down about four centimetres, and I went and looked for the rest of it.
---
Torso plate, front and back, buckled at the sides. Old and heavy and about a size too big, which I fixed with the straps and did not fix well.
One shoulder piece, light, on the left. There was no right one and I did not waste time looking.
And a healing draught in a squat glass bottle at the bottom of a box under two things that were of no use to anybody.
One. Not three.
I put it inside the plate where it would not swing.
---
There was also a pack with a chest strap, and I stood there for about six seconds with it in my hand and then put it down.
Everything in it was worth carrying and none of it was worth carrying today. Rope. A folding tool. A tin of something.
All of it useful across a long expedition and all of it weight on a floor with a timer on it, and weight is the difference between arriving and being caught by a contraction eleven metres short.
I took nothing else.
---
Then I looked at the corner by the far wall and stopped moving.
There was a rack bolted to the stone with four brackets on it and one weapon left in the fourth.
The dust on the floor under the first three had been disturbed in three separate patches, and there were boot marks in it, and the marks went out through the door I had come in by.
The crate I had taken the gauntlets from had already been opened. I had not thought about that at the time. Its lid was on the floor, not on the crate.
Somebody had been through here.
Not long ago, and they had not taken everything, which meant they had been in a hurry or already carrying better.
---
I went out with my back to the wall and my head turning, and nothing was waiting outside.
> **[First Battlefield Contraction commencing in 08:00.]**
The active region came up over the map in my panel and redrew itself.
The place I was going was still inside it.
Barely. It sat close enough to the new edge that I had eight minutes of farming available and not one minute more, and the rest of the distance was going to have to be walked with whatever I currently owned.
I started moving and checked the small places along the way.
A collapsed store with nothing in it. A stone hut with a broken door and a bench and dust.
> **[Challengers Remaining: 89.]**
I kept walking.
> **[Challengers Remaining: 88.]**
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