SSS Awakening: I Gain a Skill Every Time I Die

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. It was a sensible choice.

It was also the sort of sensible choice that eleven other people 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 stood.

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 was not an unreasonable thing to be doing.

I looked at the far corner of the map one last time instead.

---

> **[5.]**

>

> **[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 was the third of those transitions and my knees had 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.

The single worst thing available to a man in the first ten seconds is to start moving before he knows 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 started closing.

---

I put my back to something solid and worked out where I was.

Not perfect. It was not the deployment I would have chosen and it was not the worst one either, and I spent about fifteen seconds fitting what was in front of me to what had been on that board.

Then I had it.

The place I wanted was a long way off, in the direction almost nobody was going to be moving, and there was a route to it that crossed neither of the two areas where the guides say early fighting concentrates.

It was going to take me a substantial part of that 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 those move, and about the fact that they commit early and cannot correct.

I had read that sentence twice in two documents, and reading it and having it come at me turned out to be different experiences.

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.

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.]**

>

> **[Experience acquired: 55.]**

>

> **[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 was not the same Player who had walked into that freight yard.

I had not had one moment to notice it, because every fight since had 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 had just been dropped onto the same battlefield and the first of them had 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 had to go out before that floor ended. Two were 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 was not going to 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 was a clock and it was not my clock. It ran whether I was in a fight or not.

Every elimination anywhere on that map, by anybody, brought the end of the floor closer, and I was the only person on it who needed the floor to last.

Everybody else wanted it over at twenty-one.

I needed to be somewhere specific before it got 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.

Going down there meant taking on a man who already had a fight in him, in exchange for one elimination, at a point in that floor where eliminations were not scarce.

I would have been spending Mana and Health on a thing the map was 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, and I could see the weapon inside his chest plate, and there was no blood anywhere.

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 was standing in a Bureau facility somewhere with a failure logged and a bruise he would not be able to explain, and he would be back 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 was going to take more than one of those to retrain.

---

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 that 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 did not want a second fight in five minutes with somebody standing on high ground who had watched his whole last one.

I did not want to spend Mana and time on a man I had no reason to fight, with the counter at ninety-seven and most of a battlefield still 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 it was the most sensible conversation I had 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.]**

>

> **[Challengers Remaining: 94.]**

>

> **[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 was nothing over there.

---

Then I came up over a rise and stopped walking.

Because I could see it, and it was exactly where it should have been, 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.

I had 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 itself. I still had to get down there and I still had to be right about what it was.

But there was one detail in the open in front of me, small and specific and completely unimportant to anybody who did not know what it meant.

It matched the clause.

That man saw it nine years ago and wrote four paragraphs about his afternoon and put one word in about that and went home.

---

> **[Challengers Remaining: 91.]**

Nine gone. Seventy-one to go before it ended.

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 was 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 the one place on that floor nobody else had any reason to want.

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