Extraction: Infinite Hunger

Chapter 68: Don’t

Phoebe’s fingers curled into a fist, striking before Ash could react.

It drove straight into the bone of his forearm. He felt the force inside the joint before the pain receptors reacted. He survived on self-confidence and dominance, and the arena had bled them dry. The armor that had kept him alive for every fight was gone, punched and talked out of him until nothing was left but a second skin pulled thin over his body.

Every hit she landed went all the way through.

A hook hit his ribs. The bone ground against itself. A strike at his temple rang with a tone that had no source in the room. The punches bypassed the old density entirely, sinking deeper into Ash’s muscle and bone with nothing left between them.

A punch to his stomach knocked the wind out of him, sending him back down to one knee. One palm grabbed his stomach; the other rested against the cool stone of the arena. His breath was coming slower than he needed it to be.

He got up, wiping blood from his mouth.

His toolkit was begging to be opened the entire time. He could disperse the gravity around her faster than she could react. All the doors were his to open, waiting for his choice.

He left them all shut.

The humanity he still had inside was asking Phoebe to recognize what he had refused to abandon all match long. He was not breaking, he was keeping count. Paying whatever it cost to keep standing in front of her. His reserve tank was empty, not because he couldn’t access it, but because he’d refused to.

Phoebe found the opening her preparations had been pointing toward since the first exchange.

Her output had never dropped once. Ash’s guard had, well past the point any confident fighter would ever let it fall, and he kept it there. The option to end the match was available to either of them to take.

Phoebe took it.

Her weight shifted back before she lurched at a defenseless Ash. The whole of her Dominion gathered into one singular blow meant to end the match for good. The stone under her pivot foot cracked from the compression alone, dark fracture lines splitting outward from her heel before she had even released the punch.

Then, when her hand was all but a fingernail’s distance from Ash’s jaw—

Phoebe stopped.

The kinetic force packed behind the punch had nowhere to go. It shuddered back up through her shoulder, wrenching the joint hard against its own momentum. All of the stored output redirected violently into dead air, recoiling back through her.

The displaced air snapped outward from the held strike, throwing Ash’s hair across his face.

He didn’t move. He couldn’t tell if that was choice or his body finally running out of answers to give. Phoebe’s fist was close enough that he could feel the heat coming off her knuckles, the compressed air between them still settling. His hunger stirred once, a single instinct reaching toward the space between them, and then reluctantly went quiet. It didn’t find a weapon in front of him. It found a person making a decision.

He watched her read him the same way she had read him all match. Not his guard or his feet this time. His face. Whatever she was looking for, she was taking her time finding it.

She stood over the opening she had built across the whole match, doing nothing with it now that it was finally hers.

Phoebe’s eyes went across Ash’s face, then his body.

She unclenched her hand, letting it come down at her waist.

Then she reached up behind her head. Her elbow rose in a single clean line, her fingers finding the tie without searching for it. The ponytail held for a moment against the pull, the tension running all the way down to her ends, before it released all at once.

It fell around her shoulders in a final, slow auburn weight.

Ash’s breath came out of him. He hadn’t known he was holding it. The blood from his lip was still running, and he didn’t reach to wipe it. He just stood there while her hair finished settling, like he was waiting to make sure it was real.

What stood in front of Ash was no longer the person who had kept her distance from him, not making eye contact or responding. It was Phoebe, the one he had come to know.

Ash saw her chest move up and down, taking harder breaths than the ones he was taking.

Above them, the spectators’ roar peaked, the noise compressing into a single sustained want. They had come for the punch. They had watched it load across thirty exchanges and they understood what it meant when a fighter’s guard dropped that far. Every person in the stands knew what was supposed to happen next, and the held fist had taken that from them.

Ash stood in the noise and watched her instead, the crowd’s frustration rising around both of them like a tide finding two people who had already decided not to move. The distance between them was the same distance it had been at the start of the match, the stone between their feet unmarked except for the crack that ran from her pivot foot and the line his heel had left earlier.

The phase officer crossed into the space between them, looking at both of them once before settling on Phoebe.

"I forfeit," Phoebe said, once the phase officer looked at her.

"Are you sure?" The phase officer sounded less convinced than Ash had been the entire fight.

She did not answer him.

Phoebe turned, letting her loose hair shift across her shoulders as she walked. Not toward the officer or toward Ash, but to the dark tunnel’s mouth that was at the edge of the arena. Each step she took was uneven and deliberate, leaving the officer’s question on the stone behind her with no one left to pick it up.

The phase officer cleared his throat before saying, "The winner is Ash."

He gestured with his hands to Ash for him to leave the arena floor, though it was mostly for his own safety before a spectator threw an object at his head.

Ash took the cue and walked as best he could in a straight line toward the tunnel Phoebe had disappeared into.

When he entered the dark tunnel, he saw Phoebe sitting at the top of the stairwell, her auburn hair a stark contrast to the academy’s tailored navy military jacket. Despite just being in a fight, her uniform didn’t look the least bit scuffed.

Ash took a spot just to the side of her, letting each hand fall where they wanted to. His left hand momentarily touched her right, feeling the cold and the beaded sweat before he pulled back, leaving their hands just inches apart.

For a moment, the only sound in the stairway was their ragged breaths. A student came from the floor above, saw the two students who had just fought each other sitting so close together, and retreated back the way he’d come.

Then—

The scratch of Phoebe shifting echoed through the stairwell as she pulled herself closer. Her right hand went on top of Ash’s left hand, not forcefully, but wanting to be acknowledged.

"I was afraid," Phoebe finally said. "I was afraid of the person I was seeing you become."

Ash turned to look at her. Her face was still carefully composed, her eyes showing no sign that she was about to cry.

"I’m so—"

"Don’t!" Her voice became loud and high-pitched. "Don’t be," she said in a softer tone.

Ash felt her hand press harder for a moment, then relax. He took a deep breath.

"I’m trying, Phoebe," Ash said earnestly. He slipped his left hand out from under hers and placed it on top.

Phoebe didn’t react at first, processing whether she wanted to put her hand back on top.

She quickly turned toward Ash and softly kissed him on the forehead for a second before pulling back.

Her lips were cold against his skin; she radiated cold like the inside of a freezer. He stayed still for the full second she gave him, not wanting to be the reason it ended sooner.

Ash moved his hand off Phoebe’s, then slowly pulled his hoodie off with both hands. He placed the hoodie over Phoebe before she could protest, the oversized fabric swallowing the academy’s military jacket beneath it.

"Come on," Ash finally said, extending a hand. "Let’s go support my teammates."

"Ash," Phoebe said as she took his hand and stood, not bothering to straighten the hoodie. The sleeves fell past her hands completely, but she didn’t try to push them out or roll the sleeves up. "You’re facing Vivian next."

"You don’t know that," Ash responded.

"If you do—" She took a breath, and finally let herself smile at Ash. "You can always use mine, right?"

"I will."