Chapter 14 - 13 — Sixty Seconds [I]
POV: Jace
The dark came, and the pain did not leave with my body.
I could not feel my arms or my legs or the floor, and my mind went on insisting that there was still something buried through the middle of me, thick and segmented and colder than it had any right to be.
The last thing I owned was the sight of that tail going past my shoulder into a place I could not turn my head fast enough to follow.
I never saw it. That was the part that stayed.
[Mimesis activated.]
[Killer identified: Manticore.]
[Three concealed Ability Cards generated.]
[Choose one.]
Three cards turned their backs to me in the dark, and this time they were blue, violet, and red.
The last set had given me gold, and gold had become Aten, which the System rates at SSS, and gold is also what a Resonance Sphere shows the world for SSS.
That was one match across one draw, so it proved nothing on its own, and it was still the only evidence I had.
Blue is C. Violet is B. Red is A.
No names came with them, and no descriptions or effects, exactly the way Aurelian’s three had shown me nothing until I had already committed.
I reached for the red.
[Selection confirmed.]
[Remaining Ability Cards destroyed.]
[Ability copied.]
[Androphagos — A acquired.]
[Androphagos — A]
[Type: Active Sensory Ability.]
[The predatory awareness of the man-eater.]
[For sixty seconds, the user senses the position and movement of living creatures within six metres, including creatures outside the user’s direct line of sight.]
[Hostile movement within the sensory field produces an instinctive directional warning.]
[Duration: 60 seconds.]
[Cooldown: 5 minutes.]
[Mana Consumption: None.]
[The cooldown begins when the Ability ends.]
[Androphagos does not increase Agility, reflexes, strength, or movement speed.]
[The Ability cannot detect mechanical traps, collapsing terrain, detached projectiles, or other non-living dangers.]
[The user may still be struck if their body cannot react quickly enough.]
I read the last three lines twice, because they were the ones that decided whether this Ability was worth anything to me.
It does not stop time and it does not show me the future. For one minute, nothing alive within six metres can move without me knowing where it moved.
It would have told me the instant that tail swung out wide behind my back.
It would not have made my legs quick enough to be somewhere else when the point arrived, and the System was careful enough to say so in writing.
[Ability source recorded: Manticore.]
[One Ability has been copied from this source.]
[Ability source exhausted.]
[Further deaths caused by the Manticore will not generate Ability Cards.]
So that was the whole of it.
If the Manticore killed me a second time, there would be no cards, no blue and no violet, and nothing waiting in the dark except the regression. One death per killer, and I had already spent mine.
[Ouroboros activated.]
[Regression point established: Twelve hours before death.]
[Memories, Levels, EXP, Attributes, unassigned Attribute Points, and acquired Abilities will be preserved.]
[Physical condition and Mana will be restored.]
[Now regressing.]
I came awake with both hands already clamped over my chest.
My fingers went flat against my sternum where the point had come through, and they would not accept what they were touching, so I dragged in three breaths that did not go anywhere near deep enough.
Then my right hand went around behind me, under the shoulder blades, feeling for the entry.
There was skin. There was nothing else.
I stayed bent over the edge of the bed with my elbows on my knees until the room stopped moving around me.
It was still dark outside, some hour before dawn, and I had died twice now, and the second one was recent enough that my body was still guarding a hole that had never existed in this version of the morning.
I did not think about the new Ability for a while. I just breathed.
When I could sit up straight, I opened what mattered.
[STATUS]
[Level: 2.] [EXP: 70/200.] [Health: 210/210.] [Mana: 150/150.]
[Strength: 19.] [Endurance: 21.] [Agility: 18.] [Perception: 17.] [Willpower: 33.]
[Unassigned Attribute Points: 3.]
[New Ability: Androphagos — A.]
The dungeon was gone. Every Goblin was alive again, the Hobgoblin was standing on its platform, and none of it had happened yet.
What I had taken out of it stayed with me.
The Level held, and so did the seventy EXP over the line, and the five points the level had given me, and the three I had not spent, and the Ability I had died to copy.
Only the injuries and the spent Mana had been handed back.
Then I thought about the last line of the description again.
Knowing which direction the tail is coming from is worth nothing if the body doing the knowing cannot get out of the way, and my body was eighteen years old with no six years of drilling in it.
[Three Attribute Points allocated.]
[Agility: 18 → 21.]
I stood up and it was there, faintly.
My weight settled more cleanly onto my feet, and the gap between deciding to step and the foot actually going seemed to have narrowed by some amount too small to measure.
Three points had not made me fast. They had made me slightly less slow.
I was not going to trust an Ability I had never used with four other lives, so I tested it in the bedroom.
[Ability Activated: Androphagos.]
[Duration: 01:00.]
No Mana moved.
Nothing changed to look at either, since the walls stayed exactly as solid as they had been and there were no glowing shapes burning through them.
What happened was underneath the seeing.
Awareness went out from me in every direction at once, and a guard was standing beyond my closed door, and I knew it the way I know where my own hand is without checking.
He shifted his weight from one leg to the other and I felt the shift.
A bird came down onto the outer ledge and became a second presence at the far edge of the field, small and quick and moving in short bursts.
Neither of them arrived as a picture. I could not have told you the guard’s face or what he was wearing or whether he was armed, and I could not have named the bird, because Androphagos does not show. It only places.
The curtain moved in the draught from the window and registered as nothing at all.
The clock on the wall went on turning and never entered the field once, which settled the question of what counted as alive.
Then the guard heard me moving around and reached for the door handle.
His arm came toward my position and something in the back of my skull pointed at it, sharp and immediate and gone as fast as it came, and it carried no weight of threat behind it because he was not attacking anybody.
The pointer was real. That was what mattered.
[Androphagos ended.]
[Cooldown initiated: 05:00.]
I tried to bring it straight back.
[Activation failed.]
[Androphagos cooldown: 04:59.]
And there was the actual price of it.
No Mana, no fatigue, nothing to spend, but once I opened that minute I was buying five more without it, and choosing the wrong moment would leave me blind at exactly the point where blindness kills people.
The rest of the morning ran the way it had run before.
The same headquarters, the same nine faces waiting to be called, the same three lines printed onto my licence, and the same pair of mana-conductive gauntlets off the same rack while an armoury officer told me again that a staff would give me distance.
They put me with Bria, Idris, Nia, and Tomas, exactly as before.
I let all of it happen and thought about one thing only, which was that the Bureau still believed both of those Gates were Green.
At the compound I stopped before they split us toward the containment zones and found the nearest officer.
"Can you recheck the readings on both Gates?"
He looked up from his tablet. "Why?"
I was not going to tell him that Aten was reacting to something, because Aten was not, and inventing a warning I could not explain would only make him look harder at me.
"You’re sending ten people who awakened three days ago inside them," I said. "Scan them again."
He held my eyes for a second or two.
Whatever he decided in that time, my rank and my surname carried enough weight that he keyed his radio instead of telling me to get in line.
The technicians ran the whole set again on both Gates, mana density and structural stability and threat estimate, and I watched the readouts come up on the field terminal.
[Gate One Classification: Green.]
[Gate Two Classification: Green.]
[No abnormal Mana activity detected.]
[No structural instability detected.]
"They’re stable," the officer said, and he did not say it unkindly. "If you don’t feel prepared, you can withdraw. Nobody will hold it against you on your first entry."
He was not being lazy and he was not being stupid. His instruments could not see a thing, because there was nothing there to see yet.
I looked at the green surface instead of at the four people standing behind me.
If I pulled out, the entry would go ahead without me, and the only person in the region who knew what was sitting behind that wall would be standing in the sunshine outside the barrier when it came through.
"I’m going in."
Before we crossed, I gave them one thing.
"If I tell you to move, move first. Ask me why after."
"That’s a strange thing to say," Idris said. "You’ve been in exactly as many dungeons as I have."
"I know."
"Then how do you—"
"I’d rather look paranoid out here than watch one of you die because you stopped to argue with me in there."
Nobody had an answer to that, which was not the same as anybody believing me.