Extraction: Infinite Hunger

Chapter 73: The Entree

The first mid-air exchange between Ash and Vivian showed exactly how much trouble he was in.

He inverted the gravity beneath himself mid-strike, using his own mass to move sideways through the open air. The movement bent from a straight line to a jagged, impossible wave that reached Vivian from an angle no falling body should have been capable of doing.

He closed the gap in a serpentine lunge, his fist leading.

He had done it this way to be entirely unreadable. In the air, there was no solid ground for either of them to reference. Only the trajectory one of them could take.

Vivian had predicted the inversion before the field even fired.

She had seen the ground version, then the first aerial one. The physiological tell lived in the same muscle grouping. The small, involuntary gather in his core before his center of mass shifted.

She read it like a countdown.

She didn’t need to adjust for where the redirect movement was going to.

She only had to redirect for where the end point actually was.

Her body had preemptively angled itself toward the destination while he was still physically committing to the turn.

He tried to redirect a second time, but Vivian had already compensated before Ash even thought about doing it.

Her shoulder dipped. Her hips realigned. She was already there.

The blunted katana swept cleanly across the pocket of air Ash was arriving at. He barely raised his hands in time as the blunt edge rang off his forearm with a force that rattled deep into the joint. His fingers went numb. He bled distance in the air, kicking off an inverted gravity pocket of his own making to reset his altitude above her.

Vivian offered no spatial field for him to work with. On the arena floor, his gravity had the stone to pull and atmospheric pressure to bend.

Vivian wasn’t standing on any surface he could invert. She scaled the arena’s perimeter, holding brutal angles off the steel girders. Meanwhile, he burned massive reserves just to stay airborne. His legs ached from the constant micro-adjustments, each one a tiny gravity well that chipped at his stamina.

His gravity inversions reached against Vivian, and snapped shut on empty air. Vivian had perched herself against a high crossbeam, jumping from beam to beam before the gravity wells Ash threw could reach her.

She was far faster in the air than he had anticipated.

She crossed from beam to beam in two bounding leaps, her katana flashing as she cut the distance he’d fought to open.

He reaped the last thirty seconds from her memory. In the air, the reset hit harder than it had on the ground. She caught it mid-jump, halfway through launching off a steel beam. Three-dimensional movement demanded more active retention than walking. She lost the spatial telemetry she had been gathering. For half a second, she didn’t know where she had jumped from or where she was supposed to land.

Her body drifted. One arm pinwheeled. Her knee banged hard against a crossbeam she should have cleared.

Ash exploited the advantage.

He threw a heavy-weighted punch at her shoulder, dragging her sharply off her chosen descent line. A second strike landed cleanly on the back as she was tumbling through air. Then her eyes snapped back into focus. The window slammed shut. The damage he had inflicted wasn’t worth the reserves he had burned.

He only landed two clean hits.

She had already forgotten about them.

He dug into his forearm with an untrimmed fingernail. The blood tore away instantly, caught on the high-altitude cross-breeze. Gravity claimed a third of the mass before he could oxidize it. He tried to coagulate what remained into anything he could. The result was an uneven iron pike, heavily lopsided.

It wobbled in his grip, one end thicker than the other. He adjusted his hold twice before throwing.

He threw the malformed mass anyway.

The heavy javelin spun wildly, missing Vivian entirely. He jabbed into the tissue again, working faster to gather blood into a tighter sphere before the wind took it. The second attempt was denser, heavier, closer to even.

He threw it at Vivian again.

Vivian tracked the trajectory and brought the flat of her blade across it. The javelin met the steel and shattered, its remains scattering in the wind.

Ash was already reaching for more blood before the fragments hit the ground.

Her focus was entirely on the attempt itself.

The mid-air material conversion was the most interesting attack she had encountered in the match so far. She wasn’t watching because the technique worked. She was watching because she knew Ash was hunting for the angle where it would work.

Most would have abandoned it entirely after the first or second failed attempt.

Ash hadn’t.

She could afford patience. She had been patient waiting to fight Ash. A little more wouldn’t hurt. Beneath the feral energy and flawless swordplay, she wasn’t waiting for him to exhaust his stamina. She was waiting for the skirmish to produce the phenomenon she had come to expect.

The real Ash. Not the one that was throwing other people’s Dominions at her. The one she could have picked up with two fingers in the hallways that interested her so much.

Everything Ash had thrown at her, she could counter as known data off other students. The actual subject she desired hadn’t arrived yet. So, Vivian maintained her angle and approach, trading only what she absolutely had to trade, allowing Ash to keep reaching for it on her behalf.

Ash severed her spatial read one more time.

Suspended in mid-air, the proprioceptive corruption attacked her twofold. There was zero solid ground to anchor the correction against, no floor to tell the truth back to a blinded nervous system. She stalled again for two seconds, her own coordinates a mystery around her.

Vivian lost her foothold, falling off the steel framework. Ash dropped with her, spiking the gravity to accelerate. His punch cracked her ribs and slammed her into the arena floor. The stone cratered around her.

She stood once and spat. No blood came with it.

Ash was breathing on borrowed credit, and his body knew it. Each gravity inversion taxed his legs heavily. Each burst of speed frayed his vision at the edges, the recovery time lengthening after every use. His breathing had gone wet and ragged, catching on a cracked rib. The wound on his forearm hadn’t clotted. The limb below the cut had gone numb and clumsy from fluid loss. He was holding himself up in a body that had stopped agreeing to hold him after the first exchange.

The only reason the scales hadn’t tipped in Vivian’s favor was that she had deliberately decided not to let it end this way. Not yet. Both combatants were operating deep past the absolute ceiling either should have been able to sustain.

Vivian was doing it fueled by the loose, starving animal inside of her.

Ash was doing it entirely on fumes and raw refusal to lose.

Vivian recovered her spatial awareness by issuing a sharp order to her nervous system. Correct itself or else. It knew better than to ignore her. She stomped her heel several times, recalibrating, then nodded, satisfied.

Her tempo shifted. She had stopped solving for his individual answers. She was trying to calculate exactly what it would take to manifest the finale she was waiting for. She was missing something critical in the equation, so she decided to force an answer into the gap and see if it held.

When Ash fully committed to an upward inversion, there was a temporary pocket directly beneath his trajectory where the gravitational field had already passed through.

A dead-zone beneath his own shoes.

Vivian had been waiting for him to aggressively commit to one.

And Ash desperately needed the height now. He had lost the high ground to her relentlessly climbing and wanted the open airspace back. He inverted hard beneath his own footing, pulling violently up, the well blooming beneath him with full authority.

She launched at the position where Ash had been.

When his inversion fired, she was already in the dead-zone and moving upward through the air before gravity could track and renew. The localized well of gravity reached for her center of mass, but she was already past it.

Her hand clamped like a steel vice around Ash’s ankle. His momentum pulled upward; hers pulled down.

They hung suspended for a breath in the open air, the stone a lethal drop waiting below.

Ash’s vision tunneled. There was no plan left. No ability left he hadn’t thrown several times by now. Only the animal fact of falling and his body’s refusal to die alone.

He reached his hand back.

There was zero conscious thought inside his mind. His hunger had remained dormant the entire match finding zero psychological mass to lock onto. But Ash’s physical body reacted purely on survival instinct, his arm whipping around to Vivian.

His hand clamped rigidly around her ankle, tearing her Shade’s realm open whether his hunger wanted to or not.