Extraction: Infinite Hunger

Chapter 63: Two Years of Proximity

Two days later, the main bracket tournament started without apology.

Students who were still in the competition were excused from their day classes. Other students who had decided against participating had to balance their class schedule with viewing the matches they wanted to see.

As Ash approached the arena, he saw what he would be fighting in.

The arena floor was a single disc of poured stone, cool underfoot and ringed by the low hum of the seeded sections. He looked up to the other side of the arena. Seth was already standing in wait, and somewhere between them stood a phase officer, present to stop the fight at his own discretion.

Seth began walking slowly to the center. Ash followed, letting the phase officer take his position to their right.

Seth had spent two years across tables from him, in the dormitory corridors at hours when the building had gone quiet, and finally on the seeded benches through every phase of this tournament.

He knew how Ash stood when a rib had gone wrong and Ash was lying about it. He knew which of Ash’s silences meant nothing and which ones meant Ash was deciding whether to lie.

That was the trap.

Not the field, not the range, but the person carrying it and everything he had already learned to read. Ash had built that certainty on the walk down and carried it onto the floor like it would hold.

And that was where Ash had landed on the walk up. Seth’s danger was the two years of proximity to him which now meant nothing with him as his direct opponent, standing in the way of him staying in the academy and being expelled.

The phase officer might have said "Begin," but Ash’s internal thoughts crowded out any outside noise. The only signal their match had started was their arm lowering, then retreating ten paces away from them.

Ash felt the air begin to change before anything visible.

Warmth spread upward from the center of the floor, a purposeful heat distinct from the ambient warmth of packed bodies. Ash felt it reach the back of his hands, then kissed his lips. The corners of his eyes and then his nose.

Every part of him where water pooled inside his body was now under the complete control of Seth.

The air above Seth began to change, bending under the light. Mirages formed around the perimeter, shimmering just at the edge of Ash’s legibility. Ash let his Shade-sense run across the floor, and the field came back as a single flat pressure at every angle.

Seth hadn’t taken a single step since the fight began, as he spread his Dominion throughout the arena. Every instinct of Ash turned against himself, but the most disloyal of them all was his hunger.

His hunger wanted to know what a piece of Seth would taste like once Ash entered Seth’s Shade realm. His feet moved before he realized it, driving a gravity inversion beneath Seth’s footing.

The poured stone shrieked as it cracked. A ten-foot crater ripped open, jagged slabs wrenching free through a rising layer of dust. Ash snapped the gravitational vector flat, the debris field blasted forward like a horizontal avalanche, the cracking rock going straight at the target in front of him.

Seth didn’t brace, he just stepped directly into it.

The first slabs reached the perimeter of the field Seth created. The thermal shock hit it before they could. The superheated air sheared the stone apart mid-flight. Moisture trapped inside the slabs flash-boiled, the pressure shattering them into smaller fragments before they could reach him.

Seth merely walked around the incoming small stones like they were a fixed post. Slag and fractured concrete hammered the floor behind him.

Seth walked out of the dust cloud, his chin only dropping by a fraction. The smoke from the stone curled up around him. Seth looked at either side of him, giving no indication this was where he had intended to end up.

Seth advanced, and his field rose with him, climbing past warmth toward the temperature where water boiled.

Ash crossed the floor before the field could close the distance.

The world slouched into long frames. The heat shimmering above Seth’s position froze mid-ripple. The mirages around Seth’s perimeter stopped shimmering and turned into stationary mannequins. Seth’s next step was arriving in halves, his heel touching down first, the rest of his foot not sure if it wanted to commit fully yet.

Ash was already at the far arc of the arena before his single step finished landing. The cost came back threefold, his vision graying at the edges, before the world snapped back to real-time. Ash opened the distance faster than Seth’s advance could account for. Seth simply stopped pursuing.

He stood at the center of the arena, his field humming around him. Then he processed the speed Ash had just crossed the arena at. His heat field closed inward briefly, then radiated outward stronger.

Ash circled the perimeter. The heat pressed back at different intensities as he moved, stronger near Seth’s line of sight, thinner at the far arcs. He tested three angles in quick succession, each step into the field answered by a spike that drove him back. Seth wasn’t reacting. The field was simply reading him, distributing heat where his body wanted to go.

There was no weak angle. There was only through.

Ash re-entered the field, not waiting for it to reach him. It was better to walk through the door himself than let it catch him unprepared.

He closed the distance at full load, the center of his gravity dropping with each step he took. His whole body locked into a dense heaviness, his heel making larger cracks in the stone with each step he took. Then, when he was no more than a whisper’s distance from Seth, he torqued his hips and threw a right hook at Seth’s jaw.

Seth didn’t flinch. He raised a forearm, the collision hitting like a bat striking wet concrete.

The weight should have folded his arm inward. Instead, he rolled his shoulder backward at the exact moment of impact, bleeding the force off into the air behind him. Ash used the deflected momentum to spin into a descending back-fist, dropping the full density of his body toward the bridge of Seth’s nose.

Seth pivoted flat on his left heel, and Ash’s back-fist only brushed against his hair. The displaced air snapped loudly enough to ring in Ash’s ears.

Ash planted his lead foot and drove his knee straight into Seth’s exposed ribs. His hip rotated with it, every pound committed to the attack. But Seth’s heat flared at closer range, and the sweat soaking through Ash’s collar scalded the skin beneath instantly.

Seth took two steps back and looked at Ash the way he looked at a homework question he’d already solved before finishing the sentence.

Ash let the loaded density out of him. He needed a full breath, but he could only take in half of one. His hand brushed the worst of the burn and came away slick with fluid from blistered skin, steam rising off him like jet exhaust.

Seth’s field kept widening outward.

It pushed outward in uneven increments, the perimeter closing toward the walls of the arena, the bands of survivable floor space narrowing with each breath Ash attempted. He moved without a plan, focused only on keeping his skin from burning.

His back foot found the edge of the arena. His other foot found it again.

The heat had finally reached the inside of his lungs. With each inhale, the warm air displaced more of the cool patches he still had inside his body. The pressure behind his eyes rose from discomfort to insistence. He tried to take another step back, only to feel the wall at his spine and no more space to move behind.

It felt cool to the touch. That was the only positive, and even that wouldn’t last.

Seth came up again on Ash. His pace and gait hadn’t changed since the first step Ash ever saw him take. It was patient and methodical as it ever was, always one step ahead of everyone else.

But in that step, Ash saw it: Seth was just one step ahead of where the field radiated outward.

The spectator stands above Ash had gone quiet. The only other movement in the arena was the rubble still smoking at the center. The mirages above Seth had grown taller as the field’s intensity spiked with his approach.

The wall pressed against his spine. The heat settled in front of him, and now it was coming from behind him too. His brain counted how long it would take the field to reach him at its current rate, and stopped once it reached an uncomfortable number.

Ash let his hands drop to his sides, the burns on his neck weeping under his collar.

It was time for the things he hadn’t shown.