Extraction: Infinite Hunger

Chapter 72: The Appetizer

The floor of the arena still radiated the heat of the previous match when Ash stepped onto the stone.

Vivian crossed from the western tunnel in a deliberate pace, dragging her sheathed katana along the floor. Hairline cracks traced her path across the stone. When Ash looked up at her, she looked exactly like the person he’d sat beside at a diner counter past midnight, waiting for a plate of food to arrive.

She was starving.

And now—

The main course she had ordered was finally here.

Vivian rolled the katana once in her grip. The edge of it caught the arena lights, reflecting a flat, dull glare where a razor-sharp bevel should have been.

"You’re a copycat," she stated through the noise of the crowd.

Ash didn’t respond. His stomach shifted around. She hadn’t guessed. She had to know, or was close enough that the difference didn’t matter.

"Yeah," she said, rubbing her chin with the other hand. "That’s exactly what you are. If you understand a person’s Dominion intimately enough, you can rip it off for yourself." She tilted her head, looking deeply satisfied, as if she finally had enough evidence to validate the theory she had about Ash since she first fought alongside him. "I’ve been studying you, but I’m not gonna let you study me."

Ash let his Shade-sense sweep across the floor and envelop Vivian.

It returned nothing. Where everyone else carried something buried, Vivian projected everything openly, without shame. His hunger reached around her, finding no sealed door like Evelyn’s, not even a cabinet. This was an open vault that had never installed a hatch.

"I’ll try to prove you wrong then," Ash said.

The phase officer’s arm dropped, turning his back on the fight and running away.

Ash immediately spiked the gravity beneath Vivian’s heels. A localized gravity well dragged the ground out from under her center of mass, grabbed the stone, and pulled everything down with it.

Vivian had already left that area.

She was completely clear before the gravity well finished establishing its position. She had shifted her mass off the targeted tile a fraction of a second before it fully sank. Her eyes had tracked the faint dip in his shoulder that Ash hadn’t even known he telegraphed.

"I saw that one from you already," she said.

Ash burned a massive cognitive load and routed the remaining energy into his legs. The world screeched to a halt, dissolving into slow-motion frames. The stone blurred beneath his stride as he crossed the floor at triple speed. His kinetic burst was designed to open distance that Vivian shouldn’t have been able to close. His exit position was already chosen before she could track the trajectory.

So she didn’t chase after the blur.

She cut directly to his destination. Instead of chasing his speed, she had mapped the arc and jumped straight to the tile he was destined to land on. Her body waited patiently for Ash to arrive, her right foot tapping the stone. Ash was forced to burn his reserves a second time to redirect. His trajectory snapped sideways, throwing him wide of her position. His vision grayed at the edges the longer he pushed at this speed.

Vivian had watched him run long enough to predict not where he was, but where he was forced to go.

Ash hit the stone off-balance and reached for his third option. He severed her proprioceptive read. Her footwork stuttered. The spatial corruption made her heel strike several degrees off the committed line, her nervous system screaming a catastrophic failure before her brain could argue with the result.

Vivian didn’t possess the years of intimate knowledge Seth had of Ash. But she had her own tools to deal with his tricks.

She slowed down.

She didn’t show any signs of panic, diagnosing the issue like an engineer isolating a mechanical failure. She reduced her stride to short, heavily committed steps, deliberately refusing to transfer her center of mass into any part of the arena floor that might lie to her. The structural compensation was far faster than any other fighter could have managed.

"Spatial. Got it," she confirmed. "Same as that teammate of yours."

Vivian adjusted her rhythm to keep advancing. She was slower now, but no less dangerous.

Ash hadn’t seen when she unsheathed her katana.

He felt it when the blade sliced the inside of his forearm before he could react.

The crimson blood ran heavy. He reached into the flow of the blood and violently extracted the water, the liquid dulling to rust and then to dead grey once all the moisture had evaporated off it. It elongated into a lethal point. He threw the heavy spike without any hesitation.

Vivian brought her blunted katana up in a vicious diagonal sweep.

The rust-colored spike slammed into the dulled steel. The composite didn’t deflect. It exploded. The unsharpened edge transferred all of its blunt force directly into the brittle iron, shattering it into a cloud of red grit.

Ash had already created a second by the time the residue cleared. Vivian swung through it like a battering ram, reducing it to dust. He reached for a third, but the blood was still thickening when her blade pulverized it.

"I just fought someone like that," she said, her voice flat.

Ash closed the distance instead of retreating. If she had answers for everything he threw, he decided to stop throwing them. His right cross caught her jaw before she finished speaking. Her head snapped sideways, but her grin only widened. She reset her stance, licking a thin line of blood from the corner of her mouth. He followed with a left hook to the ribs. She ate it. The dulled katana came around fast. He barely slipped it, the flat of the blade grazing his ear.

Ash stopped throwing and reached for something more personal. He reaped the last thirty seconds from her memory.

Vivian stopped mid-stride. Her lead foot hung just above the stone as a neurological attack severed her from her own timeline.

The temporal amputation hit her vastly harder.

She stopped for a full second. For someone who never stopped moving, losing thirty seconds of positional memory was like being unplugged from the world.

Ash moved ruthlessly into the gap. He threw a punch at her ribs. She hadn’t registered him in time and immediately followed it with a low sweep that clipped her ankle.

He didn’t let her recover. A knee drove toward her sternum. She caught it on her forearm, but the force lifted her an inch off the stone. He landed, pivoted, and threw an elbow at her temple. She tilted her head just enough that the bone skimmed past her hairline. She was still blind to the last thirty seconds, fighting on reflex alone.

Then her eyes blinked back into focus. Vivian returned, raising her guard slower now, compensating for the lost data.

Ash had only one attack left she had never seen before. He let it rip out from him and spread throughout the arena. The attack bypassed her conscious mind entirely, the peripheral frequency screaming at her nervous system that an apex predator was directly behind her.

It flooded over Vivian.

She didn’t so much as flinch.

This kind of feeling was exactly where she thrived. She leaned directly into it. Her center of mass shifted forward despite what any other sane person would do. A predatory grin appeared on her face when the biological signal reached her.

"I feel like I’m fighting a Vein," she said. "I love it. I love this."

She didn’t wait for him to process that his fear hadn’t worked. Her katana came around in a flat, brutal arc aimed at his collarbone. Ash ducked under it, feeling the wind of the dulled blade shear the air above his scalp. She had ran straight through the psychological broadcast like it was a fence made of twigs, the manufactured fear an invitation for her rather than a threat.

She had dismantled each of Ash’s attacks so far. None of it was trivial. But she had asked for a feast from Ash. This was just the appetizer. The hunger she’d arrived with remained untouched.

Ash saw it happening. She had flawlessly prepared for him on the ground. Every countermeasure was engineered for a battle anchored to the floor. He traced the pattern, and it all pointed in one direction.

Ash instantly inverted the gravitational pull beneath his shoes. The localized gravity well seized his mass and yanked him upward. The stone floor dropped away as he launched into open air for a three-dimensional battlefield neither of them planned for.

Vivian’s chin snapped up to track his ascent. Whatever creeping boredom had settled over her evaporated, replaced instantly by the feral anticipation of a surprise dessert she hadn’t known was coming.

She didn’t hesitate any longer. She lunged for the arena’s perimeter scaffolding, scaling it with ease, her katana wedged through the sash at her back.

By the time Ash stabilized at the apex of his arc, she was already above him, higher by a clear margin.

The famished look from the diner burned on her face once more.

Both of them hung suspended in the open air above the stone.

The fight restarted from scratch in three dimensions.