Extraction: Infinite Hunger

Chapter 58: So Be It

The walkway took Swetta to the next platform. He stepped onto it. Once the dust finally cleared, the figure made itself known.

Davos. Already on the island just above Ash’s.

There was less than two meters between them. Davos didn’t come with his coalition or any teammates. He was, for the first time, alone.

"To what do I owe the pleasure," Swetta said.

Davos didn’t respond. His shoulders were already loose, his weight distributed evenly, perfectly still.

Swetta extended a palm. Open, low, probing.

His other hand formed a tight grip around his own collar instead.

Swetta managed to release it, closing and opening the misbehaving hand several times in awe.

"That’s a new one," he said.

He went for a nonchalant sweep at Davos’s lead foot. It was the kind of move he had inadvertently used a thousand times. His lead foot went for the move. Instead he found himself doing the splits. He went to one knee, then stood entirely. The signal his leg had sent had been answered by someone else. He registered it as a clinical fact, no different from noting a change in the weather.

"You’re lucky I’m quite the flexible person, or that would have been dangerous."

Swetta tried a different angle. A straight jab toward Davos’s chest. Slobber and spit left his mouth as his jaw slammed into his own fist, his head snapping sideways from the force he’d meant to deliver. His jaw was hanging and dislocated. He reached into his mouth with both thumbs and snapped it back into place.

Swetta didn’t seem angry. If anything, Ash saw what could only be a smile on his face.

Davos had not moved.

Swetta sent a reaching hand, which turned into him gripping his own throat again. A step forward became a step that drove his shoulder into the railing. A low elbow became an elbow into his own ribs. Each correction was clean. The signal interception arrived at the moment of commitment, not before, not after.

He stopped trying. He looked at Davos with warm, genuine curiosity.

"I have found I prefer tea with warm milk. What do you like to drink?"

Davos stopped intercepting and began his own personal onslaught.

He took a step forward. His arms came up cleanly. His first punch caught Swetta by surprise, directly in the sternum. He managed to absorb the hit, but his eyes went wide and white in recoil.

His second punch went to his ribs, making a crunching sound as his fist dislocated from the impact.

And then, when Swetta tried to recover, he kicked him in the forehead.

Blood spread across his eyes and vision as he took a step back. The heel of his shoe found the walkway’s edge. He took one more step back and found empty air.

His planted leg struggled to make up for the difference. His whole body flew off the platform like a stone.

On the platform below, Ash saw it.

Two platforms up, Swetta’s teammates were at the railing. They had watched what happened. They looked across the gap. They looked at Ash.

The taller one nodded once. The other nodded just after him.

Both of them turned to the railing and stepped off it together. "We’ll be alright," the taller one said, his eyes locked onto Ash.

Somewhere above them, a platform hit its timer. The compression hit, and dust and grit moved sideways across the floating arena, settling over the walkways and the railings and the back of Ash’s hands. The vibration came up through the platform.

Ash looked up. A figure stood just in front of him.

Sheila.

She stood tall, looking at Davos just ahead of her without any urgency.

Sheila began walking slowly toward where he waited. But before she was gone from earshot, she said, "I’m still waiting for that answer."

She didn’t slow her approach, or look back to see if Ash would answer her. She kept walking toward the walkway that led to Davos.

Sheila got within two meters of him when her signature exploded out of her.

The fight-or-flight reaction spread across the entire arena. Students on the same team began to fight their own teammates, while others fled to the nearest railing and flung themselves off, their nervous systems screaming that the drop was safer than staying near her.

Davos’s head tilted, but he didn’t move otherwise.

"Was that supposed to do something?"

He intercepted the signal of her Dominion and fed it back into her own nervous system. The same fight-or-flight aura she had carried alone, now screaming at her to run from herself.

Her foot left the walkway in a step backward. Then she took two steps forward, before she stopped moving entirely.

Davos shifted modes, switching which of his legs were leading. The broadcast signal cut.

Sheila took a forward step. She knew where she had meant to move; instead, her body betrayed her and flung itself to the left. She managed to correct herself and drove her weight back to the straight line she had intended. Her shoulder instead moved in the opposite direction. Before it could finish its movement, she took another step, placing her back where she had started.

"Troublesome," she said.

She kept moving ahead.

Sheila drove a straight strike forward. Her elbow turned outward, cartilage tore under the redirected load, but she moved ahead. Another attack sent her knee buckling inward against her standing leg. Sheila caught herself on the walkway and used the catch to drive forward.

She was eating her own attacks, no matter the cost, so long as it kept her moving forward.

She managed to close to punching distance.

Her right hand went for a hook. The signal of the hook traveled. Davos’s interception fired and sent it back at her with full force.

The hook came back into her ribs instead. Her own committed force, full weight behind it. The impact was audible.

Sheila didn’t try to absorb it. Instead, she used the impact to pivot her closer to Davos. She disguised a hand that was flailing in the air, as if she was using it as a recovery. Instead, Sheila’s true target finally took her first hit. It landed clean against Davos’s ribs. The shockwave rippled through the walkway’s stone. A crack split open where his foot was planted, two fissures beginning to branch outward from her heel.

Davos’s exhale was audible across the walkway.

His rear foot shifted back by one centimeter. Davos looked down at his chest, rubbing his hand over his aching ribs. It was the first time he had ever felt pain. He had never unintentionally moved back for anyone before.

"You’re—"

Sheila’s second strike was already on its way to his collarbone. Davos didn’t have time to intercept the signal. His shoulder ate the full impact, slouching lower than the other one. The stone fractured further beneath her, dust rising off the walkway’s edge.

Sheila had a window and she was going to use every opportunity to finish this.

A third strike came within the span of three shallow breaths, this time at Davos’s abdomen, causing him to cough up the spit in his mouth. He was reading the separation now. The interception arrived where the second signal lived rather than where the first one fired.

It connected anyway. The hit was less powerful than the first two. Sheila scoffed. It was the cost of eating her own redirected strikes to land hers.

Davos didn’t retreat. His weight settled into a predatory stance.

He watched her left pivot. It had been overcorrecting the entire engagement, a fraction past where she had intended it, the unconscious corrections she’d relied on for years now stripped away.

He intercepted the next pivot and exaggerated the overcorrection.

Her weight kept going past where she had aimed it. She tried to catch it. The catch went past too, with the same residue.

Her foot found the platform’s edge. Then it found nothing.

Sheila was in the air, all but eliminated, when she managed to grip the platform with one hand. Davos slowly approached her, taking his time, enjoying Sheila’s struggle to fight his signal interceptions.

His shoe nudged her knuckles, and then he stomped as hard as he could on them.

Sheila didn’t wince. She gave him no satisfaction.

He kicked her again, again, and again. Each time, her grip seemed to grow stronger. Davos’s jaw tightened. A flicker of irritation broke through the calm. He was winning, and she was making sure he was humiliated.

"So be it," he finally said.

Sheila’s grip loosened, then opened entirely. She fell.

She didn’t look up at the person who had to use their Dominion to remove her from the floating island. Her eyes found the encroaching abyss instead.

Ash watched her fall. The weight of seeing Swetta, his teammates, and now Sheila fall compressed into a voice his body couldn’t hold.

Ash let out a feral scream as he pushed his weight forward against his ribs. He used both hands to push himself up. The pain was the worst it had ever been, but he was done letting it limit him.

He walked to the platform’s edge and looked down. Whatever was at the bottom didn’t show itself.

He didn’t care anymore what would happen to his body after this fight.