Extraction: Infinite Hunger

Chapter 69: Thou Wast a Worthy Foe

After walking down the staircase, Ash and Phoebe found themselves in the academy’s concourse outside the fighting arena.

Ash scanned the area. Lucia was anchored at the far end of the hall, dressed in her usual immaculate uniform: glossy thigh-highs, a pleated black mini skirt, and a cropped blazer over a crisp white blouse. One heel rested against the concrete wall as she scrolled idly through her phone.

Her eyes flicked up from the screen. She registered Ash, then Phoebe standing beside him in his hoodie. A razor-thin smirk flashed across her face as she pocketed the phone and vanished into the foot traffic.

"We should get some food," Phoebe said, having entirely missed Lucia in the crowd.

"Huh? Yeah. Sure, that sounds great."

They got popcorn and drinks from a vendor outside the entrance. Ash had already eaten half of his before they found two open seats in the front row of the upper spectator tier.

"Want a piece of gum?" Phoebe asked, gesturing with a foil packet.

"Not right now, thanks."

Ash was more focused on looking at the arena from above.

The cracks his shoes had driven into the stone were too small to see from up there. The fighting disc looked more compact and terrifying from above than it had at ground level. The phase officer between Alexis and Evelyn looked like a thumbnail.

Alexis was at the far end of the arena, already in position.

Her posture had changed since Ash last saw her. She didn’t look nervous, but she didn’t look like she was about to recite a two-hundred-page play backwards from memory, either.

The field opened up the moment the phase officer stepped back.

Alexis’s severed field spread across the arena floor in a single expanding wash, applied to all areas of the fighting disc at once. Each step Evelyn could take was now one that couldn’t be trusted. From the stands, no one could tell anything had happened yet. What was visible was what it produced.

Evelyn faltered on her next step.

She caught her balance early, only to over-correct and stumble onto her back foot. It was agonizingly authentic. It genuinely looked as though her nervous system had completely decoupled from the floor beneath her.

Alexis closed the distance with calculated precision.

Compared to Evelyn, she was much shorter, barely above five feet in heels. Her punch drove Evelyn back two steps, arms waving as she stumbled to catch her balance. Alexis moved in again, going for a jab wherever she could do the most damage to Evelyn. Her next one landed just below Evelyn’s shoulder, which recoiled in response.

The crowd was stirring.

Alexis was putting on an extraordinary clinic of spatial dominance and making absolutely zero effort to hide it. The severed field was absolute. Her timing was flawless. Every time Evelyn tried to establish a firm stance, the floor betrayed her.

Then, Evelyn stopped.

She didn’t stumble or brace or overcorrect a step. She was upright in the middle of the arena of her own accord, without any apparent difficulty. As if everything up until then had been a cost she had already accounted for.

Evelyn walked forward. The severed space could have been tilted at a ninety-degree angle, and her stride wouldn’t have degraded by a single millimeter.

"Let us see if thou canst still walk through this."

Alexis threw both arms upward, manipulating the spatial corruption like a frantic puppeteer pulling invisible strings.

The field warped to a lethal degree, but Evelyn didn’t even blink. She had completely lost interest in indulging the performance.

The soft scuff of a heel on stone sounded directly behind Alexis. Her breath caught in her throat.

Evelyn didn’t unsheathe her blade, instead tossing it to the other hand in a swift motion.

Alexis finally looked panicked, frantically throwing her arms and body around to ward Evelyn off.

It was no use. Evelyn raised the sheathed katana and brought the kashira crashing down onto Alexis’s nape.

Alexis didn’t make a further sound. She went perfectly still.

Then her body fell forward like a severed puppet.

One palm slapped flat against the stone, her other arm crushed beneath her stomach. She wasn’t critically injured, but the total paralysis of her motor functions and her absolute unwillingness to stand back up told the phase officer everything he needed to know.

"Thou wast a worthy foe indeed," Alexis said, looking up at Evelyn.

Evelyn straightened the cuffs of her pristine military uniform, then lowered herself gracefully and hauled Alexis back to her feet.

Ash hadn’t realized he was holding his breath. He pushed off the metal railing and sank back into his seat.

"You think she knew how to deal with that the entire time?" Phoebe asked through a mouthful of popcorn.

"Yeah," Ash responded. "I think she knew."

Below them, Alexis was walking on her own toward the tunnel. She glanced once at the spectator section before disappearing through it.

The bracket on the jumbotron above the arena updated. Alexis’s portrait grayed out. Evelyn’s appeared in the semifinal slot, positioned directly above Lucia’s.

Vivian came out with her katana slung over her shoulder.

From this far up, it looked far too thin and unremarkable to do any real damage. She unsheathed it, tossing the saya without concern for whether it got dented.

"She dulled her blade," Phoebe said.

"How can you tell?"

"Some people actually go to class y’know. Besides..." Her voice went quiet. "You don’t bring a razor to cut iron. You bring a battering ram."

Alina emerged from the opposite tunnel. She didn’t wait for the match to begin. She lifted her right arm and sank her teeth directly into her own forearm, tearing the flesh open.

Thick crimson blood pooled from Alina’s bite wound. She forced the blood to coagulate into a dense, jagged iron spike.

The clash of Vivian’s katana and Alina’s spike happened the moment the phase officer dropped his arm. He had barely taken two steps before shards of metal sparked from the clash.

Vivian swung the dulled katana in a brutal horizontal arc. The unsharpened steel slammed into Alina’s spike, and the concussive physics took over. The blood-iron didn’t cut; it detonated. The blunt force pulverized the brittle construct, sending a spray of metal shards backward. The fragments dissolved into harmless liquid the second they hit the arena floor.

Alina bit deeper into the torn flesh. She bled herself dangerously fast, forcing the fresh crimson to thicken into a heavy broadsword.

She needed mass to distribute Vivian’s blunt-force trauma. Alina raised the heavy crimson blade over her head and brought it down in a desperate execution arc.

Vivian’s amber eyes remained completely unimpressed. She stepped into the strike, swinging the dulled katana upward in a crescent arc.

The broader surface of Alina’s weapon only gave the blunted edge a larger target to shatter. When the blood-iron finally hit its stress limit, the explosion was catastrophic. Razor-sharp shrapnel blasted backward before it could dissolve. One hardened fragment gouged deeply into Alina’s chest; another slashed across her jawline before her hands could come up to guard.

Alina crashed to both knees. She forced herself back up, gasping for air, just as Vivian’s next strike hammered into the tile where Alina had been kneeling, instantly cratering the stone.

Ash’s hand tightened around the railing.

Alina’s forearm was completely dry. Her biological reserves were tapped out, her face pale and drenched in cold sweat. She tried to force the extraction anyway, her trembling fingers clawing at the wound to build a third weapon. The blood was sluggish and dark, failing to crystallize, unable to form so much as a pushpin-sized blade.

Phoebe’s hand brushed against Ash’s arm, but he was already gone.

He vaulted the railing, plummeting twelve feet to the arena floor. The impact shot a violent spike of pain up his shins, but he killed the momentum with a forward roll and exploded into a dead sprint, abandoning the rules entirely.

Evelyn was already closing the distance from the opposite side of the disc.

Ash hadn’t seen her jump. He recognized her strictly by the terrifying efficiency of her closing stride. Vivian loomed over Alina, raising the katana for a final, crushing downward swing aimed directly at her compromised guard.

She swung her katana directly at Alina’s eyes.

The arena echoed with a deafening, concussive crack.

A shockwave of pulverized stone dust erupted from the floor, blinding the front rows.

When it cleared, the spectators saw what had happened. Two apex fighters had crossed the boundary, intercepting a killing blow in perfect, unspoken synchronization.

Once Vivian finally lowered her weapon, acknowledging the unofficial end of the match, Ash and Evelyn released their grips on the katana.

Ash immediately dropped to his knees beside Alina. "You’re alright. You don’t need to force it anymore."

Her eyes were completely glazed over, brimming with tears as she desperately tried to force the sluggish, half-coagulated sludge on her arm to turn into iron.

Slowly, the tension left her shoulders. She released her focus. The ruined material dissolved harmlessly over her shorts. She sat on the cracked stone, pulling in shallow, ragged breaths until the medical team flooded through the tunnel and loaded her onto a stretcher.

Ash followed the medics out through the competitor’s exit.

Evelyn waited at the top of the first concrete stairwell. Her back rested against the cinderblock wall, one polished heel slightly raised. Her attention wasn’t on the medical chaos unfolding behind him; she stared intently at the empty space at the top of the stairs, waiting for Ash to fill it.

"Thank you," she said, uncrossing her arms.

She pushed off against the wall, going down the stairwell, leaving behind only the faint smell of her icy perfume.