Extraction: Infinite Hunger

Chapter 67: He Put It Down

The world advanced two days. Most students had already finished their second-round matchups.

All but three of them.

Ash stood in front of one of the many brackets posted around the academy. Alina and Alexis walked up on either side of him.

"Art thou prepared?"

Ash swallowed, looking at the name above his.

"It’s just one round. Treat it like any other."

"Thanks," Ash said. "Good luck on your matches."

Alexis theatrically walked away. Alina stayed staring at the bracket.

"What’s on your mind?" Ash asked.

"Nothing—It’s actually—" She stopped herself, then started again. "Your dominion, from the way you described it, you can enter where a person’s Shade is. Am I getting that part right?"

"Yeah..." Ash trailed off.

"So why can you also use mine? Those other Dominions? I definitely saw you use Alexis’s, and I don’t think I need to mention the time you dropped two floating islands on Davos."

Ash was silent. His heartbeat pounded.

"We all have reasons to keep our abilities concealed. I just thought we had reached the point where we could be upfront about everything we are."

Ash turned away from the bracket to face Alina. "I’m still learning what I am. You’re more whole than me." He pinched his temple, trying to figure out how to phrase this next part correctly. "Depending on how it goes inside, I can... recreate to a certain extent that person’s Dominion."

"Is that all?"

Ash nodded.

Alina placed one hand on his shoulder. "You were honest earlier about the first part of your Dominion. I’m going to believe you’re being honest with me now. But please, Ash. No more secrets like that from now on between us, or I don’t think I can or want to consider you a friend again."

She turned and walked away from the arena.

He headed the other way, toward the arena, before the morning sessions filled the corridors.

Walking up on the arena floor, he saw Phoebe, already waiting for him on the other side. She had arrived exactly at the time they told her to, and didn’t come one second earlier or after. Her weight was spread evenly between both feet, hands loose at her side, and her eyes focused only on the space in front of her.

The gravity around them, just waiting to be inverted. Phoebe’s memory, available to be wiped clean. The blood that would run along his forearm, ready to be drawn into a blade.

Any of these were answers to any person.

Any person but Phoebe.

He put all of those ideas down. Not from doubt, from a feeling deeper than he could express in words. He had memorized her posture across weeks of watching her move through the academy’s corridors, the perfectly even paced distance between each step she took.

Now he had seen what it looked like when a person dissolved entirely into their own weapon.

Whatever fight Phoebe had prepared for, Ash had no intention of giving it to her.

His hunger settled and stayed dormant in the presence of a Shade he had already consumed once before.

The phase officer’s arm dropped, retreating ten paces across the stone.

Phoebe moved first.

She had closed half the floor’s distance before Ash had finished choosing his first step. It didn’t come in a sprint, it was much more quiet and deadly than that, her center of gravity dropping incrementally with each stride, making herself smaller and harder to read as she came. Her read was already running ahead of his intent, her body answering a decision he had only started to make.

Ash raised his arms to guard.

Phoebe was already inside it.

Her first strike hit the hinge of his jaw with the flat of her knuckle, not her fist. A deliberate choice.

She wasn’t trying to end it. She was trying to figure the person in front of her out.

Turning Ash’s head with the recoil to see how fast it came back, how much he let the impact travel through him versus how much he ate. How his neck snapped back mapped out exactly how much punishment he had left in him.

He reset anyway, bringing his chin back down, resetting his elbows.

She had already moved to his right.

Ash pivoted to track her and his weight committed a fraction too early. His right heel came down before his hip had finished turning, and the timing gap opened like a door. It didn’t come with power. It was planted and precise, finding the space between bones rather than hitting the cage flat.

He rolled off the hit, trying to make his footwork irregular, changing the rhythm she was reading.

Phoebe adjusted in the same breath.

Her weight shifted off her front foot, redistributing without a tell, tracking his change before he had finished making it. She wasn’t reacting to him. She was watching him build the intention and stepping to where it ended. Ash feinted left and pushed right for a basic misdirection.

She was already on his right.

Between the feint and his push, she had slipped her hips back from a gravity inversion that never came. Her lead foot had sidestepped a spatial tear Ash hadn’t opened. She was fighting a version of him that wasn’t there, dodging attacks he hadn’t thrown, and she was winning against those too.

Her elbow connected at his temple, not swinging through but landing short, all the force staying in the point of contact. Ash’s vision blurred, the stands smearing into a single pale band of light before sharpening back.

He dropped to one knee, feeling the cold stone run through his nerves. He was doing anything he could to buy the half second it took for the world to stop moving.

He looked up at her from the knee. Phoebe had not moved from where the elbow landed. Her feet were where they had been, her hands returning to the same loose position at her sides, her breathing coming back to baseline before Ash had even stood up.

She was waiting.

Not impatiently.

It was like she stood in front of a door she knew would open.

Ash stood.

Each half-instant where a counter should have followed, her weight had already shifted with it. She backed off a surface he might have inverted, drifted from the air beginning to distort around her without making it look like retreat. She was responding to the shape of his abilities without him using them, reading the grammar of how an extractor moves and denying every sentence before it was finished. She kept her angles open, waiting for a response that didn’t come.

This was the first part of the match that was not what she had prepared for.

Above them, the stands had started to turn on Ash.

"Is this really the person that beat Seth?"

"End the fight, we didn’t skip class to see a statue!"

The chants arrived before Ash fully processed them. The first extraction he ever did had been the answer to every fight before this one. He could feel it thinning now, the supernatural weight bleeding out of his tissue with each hit he absorbed without drawing on it to recover. What was underneath was just a body. Bone and muscle and no particular resistance to speak of.

Phoebe’s next strike confirmed it.

The density was gone. The strike didn’t spread across his frame the way the first exchanges had. It found the bone directly, arriving sharp and total, nothing left to distribute the force through. His opening exchanges had barely moved him. This one rocked him back a full step, the heel of his shoe scraping a clean line into the stone. He didn’t look down.

He set that foot down and came forward into the same range Phoebe had just hit him out of.

There was an easier answer to all of it.

Both of them knew what it was. A quick inversion of the floor beneath her, one single pull on the space around her and the exchange would be in Ash’s favor.

His hunger leaned toward it the whole time, every door to his abilities opening, then closing shut. If this didn’t reach her, nothing in his arsenal would have either.

Ash kept walking into her range with his hands open, the spectators now seeing him as a fighter without any answers.

Phoebe saw his change before Ash did.

She didn’t have a use for a counter when there was nothing to counter. The cognitive enhancement that let her move ahead of Ash’s choices dropped away, being replaced with raw physical power past her baseline.

Her next step ate the distance whole.

The strike hit his guard and cracked through it.

Another came before the first had finished landing.

Then a third, arriving at the ribs she had already mapped.

The weight behind each one was absurd for her tiny body, carrying a force Ash had only ever felt when he fought Kasz. Phoebe had disregarded the fight she had planned. She was building a new one on the fly regardless of whether Ash would keep up with her.

A palm caught him under his ribs. The air left his lungs in a single compression. He folded back, resetting his feet, trying not to let the distance between them open.

The fight had become hers to win alone.

Each strike landed heavier than the last. The doubt pressed at the edge of Ash’s read, as heavy as Phoebe’s fists. Whether any of this reached her at all. Whether the girl who had stopped smiling and talking to him was so far gone that putting his hands down was pointless.

His guard was already low, and with each punch it was only dropping further. He was losing by every count, faster than an observer in the stands could keep up with.

But he didn’t stop.

He didn’t reach for the floor, the air, or the blood already drying along his forearm.

His legs had started to struggle to stay upright, his vision pulling inward at the edges. A punch from Phoebe landed directly at his sternum, and he spat blood onto the tile just beside her heels.

Phoebe set her feet back, readying herself for the next barrage, while Ash stood there, waiting for it to come.