Extraction: Infinite Hunger

Chapter 59: A Second

"Ash!" Alina’s voice was frayed, nearly swallowed by the roar of the crumbling arena and the spectators on their feet. She scrambled across the stone and slid to her knees beside him.

"No, I’m not," Ash answered truthfully. "We are all unable to do anything to him. We need—"

He stopped thinking aloud. His palms pressed flat against the platform.

"This just might work," he whispered, clutching his ribs.

"The knave speaks pure folly!" Alexis yelled, her cape whipping in the updraft as she landed behind them, eyes wide with the manic adrenaline of a survivor. "He mocks us from his stage! A sinner to the script!"

"I’m starting to agree with you," Alina responded, keeping an eye on Davos’s current location.

He still stood on the platform just above them, taunting them to approach.

"Alina, Alexis, you two had a better view of his fights with Sheila and Swetta," Ash began. "What’s your read on his range?"

"Close," Alina said quickly, turning to Alexis.

"Very close," Alexis said, not looking at Alina.

Ash let out a ragged exhale. A slow, dark realization settled in his expression.

"Then we need to take the fight to a space he can’t reach us." Ash’s eyes moved up to the remaining floating islands. Besides the one Davos occupied, there were only two more above them.

"And how, exactly, do we reach the rafters?" Alexis demanded, her voice pitching up. "The bridges are a slaughterhouse!"

"Your vision isn’t that bad," Alina said. "You can see we’re directly connected to those walkways."

Alexis looked up to where Ash was looking. "If you want to take the fight above—"

"We have to go through him regardless," Alina cut in, finishing her sentence.

"Not through," Ash began. "Around."

"We can’t move a floating island, Ash," Alina said.

"You can’t. But I just might if we all work in tandem. Alina, can you start by breaking the walkway connecting us to Davos?"

"He truly speaks folly," Alina said to Alexis.

"He speaks not of madness!" Alexis cut in, sweeping her arm toward the sky. "He demands ascension! Sever the tethers, and let us rise to the great beyond!"

"Are you absolutely sure this idea of yours will work?"

Ash looked down and gave a brief nod. "Yes. It has to."

Alina didn’t hesitate again. She tore the bandages away from her forearm. The wound was already open, but she dug her fingers into the raw edge, forcefully expanding the laceration. Blood poured out in a heavy sheet, pooling violently on the stone before flash-solidifying into the dense, jagged shape of a broad blade.

She gripped the hilt with both hands and drove a sweeping strike into the walkway’s anchor point.

The stone shattered. The entire connecting bridge collapsed, the debris raining down into the abyss like heavy artillery. Davos’s head snapped up at the sound, the first break in his composure.

"You people are idiots." Davos’s voice carried over the gap, cold and echoing. "You’ve isolated yourselves. If you want to jump, be my guest."

Alina dragged her bloody broad blade back to the center. "What’s next?"

"Jab it as deep as you can into the island." Ash grinned. "We’re about to fly."

Alina drove the blade down. It bit deep into the stone, cracking the surface and locking tight. She wrapped both arms around the hilt. "Hold onto me. It’ll be fine," she told Alexis.

Alexis crashed into her from behind, wrapping her arms around Alina’s waist.

Before Alexis could change her mind, Ash placed his palms flat against the platform. He grabbed the localized gravity vector and inverted it.

The island shot upward like a ballistic missile.

"You’re supposed to be a Null rank!" Davos’s yell carried through the air. "That’s what the academy said you were!"

The immediate G-force was catastrophic. The air slammed down on them like a physical weight. Alina screamed, her heels skidding against the stone as the platform tore upward. Alexis’s feet left the ground for a heartbeat before the acceleration pinned her flat, her cape snapping violently. She wrapped her arms around Alina’s waist hard enough to bruise.

They tore past the mid-tier platforms in a blur of gray stone and wind, finally decelerating as they reached the absolute apex of the arena, hanging directly above the two remaining upper islands.

"I thought your Dominion was entering people’s Shades!" Alina yelled over the wind, her hair a frantic, frizzy halo around her face.

"That’s one part," Ash said, walking toward the platform’s edge. He looked down at the sheer, terrifying drop. "The rest doesn’t matter unless Davos is gone. I need a rope, Alina. I need everything you have."

"We got up here, now how do we eliminate him?" Alexis asked, straightening her outfit, making sure her cape was still attached.

"Alina, start making a rope with your blood. Alexis, make sure she doesn’t pass out from blood loss by any means necessary."

"How much do you need from me?" Alina asked.

"I need everything from you two. The most you have ever given and then some."

"You heard the boy!" Alexis yelled, her voice raw and cracking. "Bleed for the final act! That is an order from your captain!"

"You’re both out of your minds," Alina muttered. A weary, defiant smile cracked across her face. "But I’m glad we are a cast together."

She slashed her bare arm against the edge of the broad blade still buried in the stone.

She didn’t go for a shallow cut. She opened the veins entirely, and her blood gushed from her arm. She knew she was approaching the limit of what her body could survive. The blood thickened, twisting and weaving into a dense, muscular cable of crimson fluid.

Alina dropped to her knees. The color drained completely from her face. Her vision blurred, unable to see where objects started and ended.

Alexis lunged forward, catching Alina by the shoulders just before she hit the stone, bracing her against her own chest. Alexis wrapped one end of the rope tightly around the blood broad blade. The other end she threw at Ash. "Take it and do what you must!" she screamed.

Ash grabbed it, tying his end securely against his forearm. Without a second thought, he jumped off the island into thin air.

The wind roared against his ears, tearing at his clothes as the arena blurred around him. The blood rope snapped taut, halting his fall. He swung in a wide arc that carried him directly beneath the first of the two islands positioned above Davos.

His hands found the platform’s gravitational anchor. He ripped it out and inverted it.

The massive stone island stopped floating and instead snapped downward, converting thousands of tons of static mass into a terminal-velocity projectile.

Davos looked up.

For the first time in the entire engagement, his clinical personality was replaced by absolute clarity. He recognized exactly what was happening, and now, he was watching it come crashing down onto him.

Davos held his ground, planting his shoes deep into the island’s stone, his eyes locking onto the descending crushing mass.

The falling island slammed directly into Davos.

The shockwave shattered every remaining walkway in the quadrant. The air exploded outward in a deafening sonic boom. The dust settled to reveal the island had been stopped, hovering mere inches above Davos’s head. The stone beneath him had spider-webbed, and dust scuffed his pristine suit.

But he had stopped their attack.

A ragged, bloody smile broke across Davos’s face.

"Is that all your—"

Above him, a second island was already falling. Ash had severed the rope the moment the first island dropped, letting himself fall to the next one below. He’d caught its underside, inverted its gravity, and sent it hurtling after the first.

The second island slammed into the first. The combined force shattered Davos’s platform and drove the wreckage downward, punching through each remaining platform below until nothing was left but falling debris.

For the first time since the event started, the arena was completely quiet, until—

"The final three contestants of the tournament have now been decided!" The phase officer’s voice rang through the arena like an emcee.

The island that had carried Alina and Alexis upward had dissolved the moment the phase ended, and now all three of them were falling.

"If this is the last time we speak," Ash began. "Thank you for everything."

"Don’t say that," Alina muttered.

"This fall is but a small ledge for a person such as myself," Alexis began.

Alexis was dropping faster than the other two. Just before hitting the arena floor, she somersaulted in the air, killed her momentum, and landed perfectly on her feet.

She raised both arms up as she prepared to curtsy. "You may app—BWAH!" the words and air left her mouth as Ash landed directly on her.

Ash didn’t check where Alexis was below him, instead he scrambled to his feet, his eyes entirely locked onto Alina and catch her fall.

"Thou madest the noble error of—"

Ash had completely missed his perception of where Alina was falling. Instead she landed on top of Alexis herself.

The two girls groaned in pain, rubbing their heads and arms as they tried to make sense of how they were still alive.

Ash extended a hand to each. "Are you two good?"

They grabbed his hands, and with a mischievous grin, yanked him down onto the ground with them.

"Now we are," they said, laughing together.