Extraction: Infinite Hunger

Chapter 75: You’re Wasting Our Time

Two days later, the only sign Ash had nearly died was a thin bandage wrapped around his neck. The skin beneath it still felt like something was pressing on his throat every time he swallowed.

Ash took a seat in one of the cold metal empty seats, watching the finale of a tournament. His vision swam at the edges, unable to hold a clean view of what was in front of him for much longer. His read of the room kept arriving a half a second late, the room resolving after he had already looked at for long enough instead of before.

The crowd below him was a smear of color and noise. He blinked hard, once, twice, trying to sharpen the edges.

He blamed the neck. There was nothing else he knew to blame.

Phoebe straightened the pink sweater tied at her waist, before taking a seat beside him, her shoulder resting against his.

"You should be lying down," she said. "Not watching the fight of a person who nearly decapitated you."

"I know," Ash said stubbornly.

"And..." her eyes turned to his neck. "Your pulse is disgusting. I can see it beat through the bandage."

"I’m—Let’s just watch the match, please."

"Okay," Phoebe said, dragging the word out. "But if your neck starts bleeding I’m telling Daro."

Phoebe kept her head fixed on the arena ahead, but every few seconds her eyes cut back to the white wrapping on Ash’s throat, checking for red. He caught her looking once. She didn’t look away, only raising an eyebrow as if daring him to complain.

Below them, the two finalists had already crossed to the center mark.

Evelyn moved first, the way the academy’s number one ranked student was supposed to move. Her heels struck the stone in a metronomic rhythm. Each step a declaration that she had arrived exactly when she meant to.

The first cut slashed across Vivian’s ribs. Vivian turned it with her own blade. The steel rang and skated apart. Evelyn was already folding the failed cut into a rising backhand, her heel driving into the stone hard enough that the impact traveled up her whole leg. Her weight committed past the point of recovery before Vivian answered. The violence said she already knew she was being outread and pressed into it anyway.

Vivian’s eyes tracked the motion without urgency.

The blade rose for Vivian’s jaw. Vivian tilted her head a coin’s width, letting the edge graze past her cheek. A thread of blood parted along the bone.

Every angle Evelyn chose was already a dead end before she committed, each step landing exactly where the last one had sentenced it.

Vivian was reading her like a sentence she had finished on her own before Evelyn reached the verb.

Her blonde ponytail still showed signs of blood that hadn’t fully washed away with faint, rust-colored streaks that caught the light when she turned. The same color Ash’s blood had dried on his collar.

Vivian let the downward edge slide off her blade. Her weight had already shifted to her back foot before Evelyn’s second strike committed, her feet in the exit position before the danger had finished forming. She let Evelyn’s footwork carry her into a space that should have been an opening for anybody else.

Vivian had already moved past this, Evelyn’s blade just in a position it couldn’t reach. Nothing Evelyn did was a surprise for Vivian.

The two had fought before, after all.

Evelyn changed her approach. She dropped her weight and drove a thrust straight up the center of Vivian’s throat. A careless fighter would have called it a bluff. Vivian rolled her head aside, letting the blade graze her ear, and stepped inside. They stood chest to chest, their blades crossed between them.

The arena was close enough that Ash could see the rise and fall of both their chests, perfectly synchronized.

Vivian shoved Evelyn back with a flat palm to the sternum to reset the distance, giving the exchange back rather than taking it.

Evelyn answered with a series of slashes that walked Vivian back toward the eastern boundary, each strike flowing into the next before the steel had finished singing.

The crowd rose with each clash, a wave of noise that crested every time Evelyn’s blade found Vivian’s and broke apart.

Then, Vivian stopped reading and started writing.

There was no visible shift in her stance, no tell that anyone in the stands could have pointed to afterward. The change was interior. The difference between a fighter solving a problem and a fighter who had already solved it and was now simply executing the answer.

Her exhale came out slower than the last one, her blade moving in perfect synchronization with it. Not between Evelyn’s cuts, but through each one, the edge splitting the arcs before Evelyn had finished committing to it. The katana dragged across the meat of Evelyn’s shoulder. She followed the blade’s momentum past the wound and planted her heel where the pivot would land.

Evelyn’s blood followed the blade in a fine spray, a red arc that painted the stone at Vivian’s feet.

When Evelyn’s body arrived there, Vivian had already raised an elbow, driving it into her sternum, the breath leaving her body in one hard involuntary compression. The flat of Vivian’s katana cracked across her hip with the sound of a green branch snapping underfoot.

That was all.

Her body argued against the decision, but she did not let herself fall down.

Ash let his Shade-sense drift across the floor.

The door behind Evelyn was still shut.

Not just closed. Sealed.

The same slammed weight that had nearly torn open against Lucia. But the heat behind it had bled through. The skin along her collarbone held the flush of metal left too long in a fire.

Evelyn reset her stance, rolling her cut shoulder once to test what still worked, bringing the katana back up to the guard.

The door remained shut.

"Hey," Phoebe asked.

"What."

"What did it feel like when she opened up against Lucia?"

Ash didn’t want to relive that experience. It still felt like he had third-degree burns on places he couldn’t point to.

Instead he focused on the question he didn’t have an answer for: the thing that made her the academy’s top-ranked student, sealed behind a door she only ever allowed the heat to seep through for a second.

Vivian baited Evelyn to move more weight into the strike. The katana came down in a diagonal. Evelyn caught it on her own edge, but not square.

Vivian put her whole frame into it and drove through it. Steel skated off steel. The shoulder behind Vivian’s blade carried into Evelyn’s collarbone. Evelyn’s front foot lifted off the stone entirely. Her whole structure had committed to absorbing the strike and found nothing to push back against. The impact folded her backward off her feet.

She went back. One step. Then two, three, her heels scraping pale lines into the stone, until the painted boundary of the arena caught up with her.

Her breath was audible from where Ash sat.

She stood at the edge of the arena, with only three meters of open stone between her and Vivian. Her cut shoulder bled red into her sleeve, her chest heaving. Her free hand came up to the gold chain at her collar.

She looked at Vivian crossing the gap—

Vivian had stopped moving.

She let her katana hang loose at her side. But her face was utterly disgusted. It didn’t look like the face she had when she fought a sky full of red iron weapons. It didn’t even look like an expression she would have fighting a chicken.

A weak fighter she could dismiss.

A strong one refusing to fight back was just a waste of skin.

"If you’re not going to use your Dominion," Vivian said, "you’re wasting both of our time."

She began to raise her hand.

It wasn’t directed at Evelyn. She lifted it up and out to the side, palm open, fingers slightly curled like the gesture a student makes in a lecture hall when they have an answer waiting to be called on. The phase officer looked over and understood exactly what Vivian was asking for.

So did everyone in the stands.

Vivian was about to forfeit, and she was doing it as the most courteous insult anyone had ever given Evelyn. At least Lucia got what she was after. Evelyn had given Vivian nothing.

Vivian thought her time would have been better off tracking a Seven Vein location than fighting a lame duck like Evelyn.

Evelyn watched her raised hand, brushing the gold chain with one hand, keeping her grip unchanged on the katana with the other.

"Not yet."