Extraction: Infinite Hunger

Chapter 70: Twelve

Another two days passed, and now it was the day of the semifinals. Both matches would be fought on the same day, one after the other.

Ash’s match was second.

A phase officer brought him through to the competitor’s viewing section, a closed-off space directly on the ground level. It was large, clearly meant to hold all of the students from the first round.

Now it was all but vacant except for him, an idle person attending, and Vivian, who stood practically glued to the glass to get a closer look. A single bored attendant lingered in the shadowy corner looking at his phone and not the students.

Ash took a seat slightly to the right of her and waited for the match to begin.

Over time, he slowly felt the presence of Lucia’s twelve bodyguard Shade signatures fill the arena.

Then, in a snap, they vanished, only to reappear on the arena floor, coalescing around the center.

Lucia emerged from the eastern tunnel.

Evelyn crossed from the west, her heels striking the stone in a perfectly metronomic rhythm until she reached the center mark and stopped.

"Where are they?" Ash murmured.

The phase officer cleared their throat with a nervous cough, then backed well away before signaling the start.

One second, the arena floor was pristine stone.

The next was as if a rupture had happened. Abstract figures in black and red bled upward from the pores of the stone, coagulating into dense physical mass, until the shapes fully pulled themselves clear of the floor, dripping strands of black and red ichor that sizzled on the tile.

Their shape was finally beginning to form.

Lucia.

Each one a perfect ghostly replica of her down to the millimeter. Twelve of these figures matched her height, her predatory gait, and balance.

Ash counted how many there were.

Twelve.

Twelve flawless replicas, calcifying from liquid to solid matter in a single, terrifying breath.

Two of them immediately broke formation. One of them physically folded itself to form the base of a throne, the other positioning itself to become a back rest.

Lucia turned her back on Evelyn as she approached the throne made for her. She took a seat, crossing one leg over the other, folding her perfectly manicured hands in her lap.

The remaining ten turned entirely toward Evelyn.

The crowd noise spiked into baffled confusion, then erupted into a roar of disbelief, the front rows leaning over the rails to verify the spectacle.

Ash extended his Shade-sense across the twelve constructs on the floor. It returned the exact same reading twelve times over. The same flat, suppressed, evenly distributed weight he had spent months trying to trace whenever he was near Lucia. He had his conclusion now.

They were a part of Lucia the entire time.

The remaining ten closed the gap on Evelyn.

They fought flawlessly in Lucia’s image. Unhurried, each step anchoring where it needed to be and nothing more, entirely stripped of wasted motion. They were drilled so relentlessly that their movements stopped being technique and became inevitability. The closest ghost reached Evelyn and opened with a brutal strike straight down her center.

Evelyn parried the force off her forearm, absorbing the shock to map the ghost’s mechanics.

Another one threw a short, vicious elbow aimed directly at the inside of her guard. She gave up the angle, letting the strike pass by her cheek.

Evelyn decided she had enough data by then. Her katana flashed across as a razor-thin seam of light, cleanly dissecting the ghost in a single pass.

It shattered into red and black ash, sinking instantly back into the floor.

A new ghost breached the surface before the first one had finished dissolving.

Twelve.

Evelyn stopped fighting them one by one, and fought them as a lump sum. Her katana swung in a wide, sweeping arc, the steel tearing through a cluster of three ghosts that had crowded together.

All three dissolved with another three taking their place.

The ambient temperature around the arena violently spiked. The oppressive, sealed door Evelyn constantly carried with her was beginning to pound. What lay behind it was slamming against the door, demanding release.

Her katana tore through the air in a blinding, superheated arc. The strike vaporized four ghosts at once into clouds of red ash.

Evelyn stopped trying to violently outpace the respawn rate and shifted to managing their spacing.

If only ten could fight her at a time, she just had to position them for a single, sweeping elimination.

For a handful of attacks, her plan was working. Lucia’s ghosts were slowly spawning closer to each other.

Then the spawning adapted. The next ghost surfaced almost beneath her feet, one hand catching her heel as it hauled itself free of the floor.

She kicked it in the face with her other leg.

Evelyn stopped holding her ground and went for brutality.

There had to be a limit to how many ghosts Lucia could spawn and maintain.

She crushed the closest ghost with a sickening crunch from her heel, then in a blink, she had slashed through three ghosts.

For a moment she was outpacing them. The floor had dropped to nine ghosts, then eight.

Then, the stone violently corrected the difference. Eight became twelve before Evelyn took her next breath.

Evelyn’s eyes turned to where the real Lucia had sat all this time. She looked disinterested in the whole idea of a tournament, deciding that making a mockery of it, and of Evelyn, was the best use of her time.

For the first time since he met her, Ash finally figured what had bothered him about Lucia all this time.

She didn’t have one Shade.

She had twelve.

But Evelyn wasn’t ever in any critical danger from any one ghost. The ghosts could only fight at the physical ceiling of their highly skilled baseline. Evelyn was the highest-ranked student in the academy after all. One ghost she could have dismantled over and over across a long afternoon without ever losing her foundational stance.

Ten of them, replacing each other as fast as her blade could clear them, was a fundamentally different problem.

Each exchange where she had to sever a ghost extracted a physical toll, a momentary tactical read, a recalibration of her footwork, the constant strain of keeping that door shut, that her opponent never had to pay. The ghosts meanwhile spent absolutely nothing. They could go in, do what they please, and breach back through the floor without retaining a single memory of the catastrophic damage Evelyn inflicted on them.

A strike finally shattered her guard.

The ghost’s heel buried itself deep under her ribs. The concussive force drove the oxygen out from her lungs in a sharp, involuntary hiss. Evelyn buried the reaction instantly. The punch wasn’t severe. But it wasn’t nothing either. Accumulated bruises would eventually be something she couldn’t hide.

Between exchanges, her free hand snapped up to the gold chain that rested at her collar. She touched the cold metal once, then immediately dropped her hand back to the tsuka. So long as the gold chain was anchored where it should be, she could handle this.

The animalistic noise in the stands had completely bled out into a morbid, suffocating quiet. They were watching the academy’s pristine apex fighter be dismantled by someone who seemed more concerned about making her salon appointment on time than winning the fight.

Ash didn’t have any notes to take, but even he began to think about what he could do if he actually fought Lucia should he advance past Vivian.

He kept watching, his Shade-sense locked only on Evelyn and on Lucia.

He counted each time Evelyn’s chest rose and dropped, each time Lucia’s eyebrows so much as twitched. Whether this was actually useful was a concern he put away long ago.

A ghost caught up to Evelyn a second time, moving its body low, hammering the exact same compromised rib section that the first one had found. Her breath hitched short on the very next inhale. She managed to recover flawlessly, giving absolutely no visual confirmation to the stands, or to the woman on a throne of bodies, that the attack had done a thing.

Ash felt the mass behind the door in Evelyn’s Shade pound harder with each blow she took. Meanwhile, his own internal hunger began questioning whether it had set aside enough room to contain whatever was behind that door.

Evelyn forcibly reset her stance. She cleaved three ghosts into ash; three more ghostly images of Lucia rose to meet her. She severed two more, pinned a third into the ground with her katana, and used that as a stationary pole to kick away the encroaching ghosts that were closing to an arm’s length distance to her.

Two more Lucia-shaped figures rose, steadying the staggered ghosts before they could topple, while a third emerged behind them all.

Through the slaughter, its architect sat quietly in wait, entirely uninterested in watching this fight last any longer.