Extraction: Infinite Hunger

Chapter 81: Something’s Here

Ash still thought about the other student who was on the same train as them: Vivian.

He didn’t know what their current relationship was. When he first met her, she wanted to fight him. Since then, they’ve fought a Seven Vein in-between their most recent fight.

Exiting Sheila’s car, he went through the ration car. He saw it had been ransacked of its packets and the hot water dispenser was still running. He turned the water off and went the other way.

Vivian was already eating several cars over. All the freeze-dried food was now reconstituted. She had neatly organized each table based on category. The "lighter" foods were all grouped together, with subsequent tables getting denser, until his eyes saw all the dessert items together.

It was a banquet for a party, but a meal for one.

"Have you eaten anything?" she asked, turning around to see Ash.

"Not since—"

Ash’s stomach growled. His actual one.

"One dish wouldn’t hurt," he said, taking the one that looked least offensive.

Vivian shrugged and meticulously devoured each reconstituted food with ease and without complaint. By the time Ash finished what looked like mac and cheese in front of him, Vivian had finished an entire table and was moving on to the next one she had prepared.

"Are you always this picky with the meals you eat?"

"In more ways than you can know," Ash said, trying to keep the food down with several strong swallows.

She continued eating what was in front of her.

"Vivian," Ash said after he was sure the food would stay down.

"Mm what is it?" she said through a mouthful of brown protein and broccoli. He didn’t want to think of it as beef, but that’s what the package likely marketed it as.

"Are we good?"

She finished what she was eating. "Why wouldn’t we be? I finally got to fight you. Chin up, next time we fight, you’ll still lose, but you’ll last way longer, I bet."

It was her form of encouragement, but it glossed over the most important thought on his mind.

Come back at me different.

He was starting to think she had forgotten what she said.

"You said something at the end of our fight that’s been weighing me down," Ash said, opening up to her.

"Did I?" Vivian asked. She couldn’t keep herself from clearing an entire pack of food in the time it took Ash to ask that question.

"Never mind. Anyways, what do you know about this place we’re going to?"

"Cold buries things." She aimed the fork in her hand at the window without looking at it. "Nothing warm-blooded picks a tundra. Whatever ends up out there got put there, or put itself there. I knew you thought like me, but I didn’t think we were that close."

"We’re close?!" Ash said, his cheeks going red.

"Yeah, that face you gave me when you fell down. You looked like you wanted to fight something or someone even stronger than me."

"So you did remember what you said," Ash said, ignoring her comment entirely.

"I don’t remember a lot of unimportant things. If I told you something, and I can’t remember it, then it was unimportant. The look on your face was important. A person’s face says way more than any spoken word can."

"You can read what a person thinks from their face? That’s incredible," Ash said in awe.

Vivian allowed her ego to be stroked with a grin.

"But you’re right. Whether you knew it or not, what you told me is why I’m here," Ash said.

"You sell yourself too short," Vivian said sternly. "Not many students are crazy enough to join me on a Vein hunt and fight me with everything they have. You did both, and that’s while you’re still a Null in the academy’s system."

"You have a good eye for talent yourself, though you did sell me off to Lucia. I haven’t forgotten that."

"Did I?" she said again.

Ash shrugged and exhaled the breath he was holding.

"Whatever you’re after, though." She waved the fork in his direction, not looking. "Getting stronger and getting different aren’t the same thing. People mix them up all the time."

"So you did remember," Ash said accusingly.

She didn’t respond to that, but her mouth definitely made a smile when she slammed a revolting bag of what looked like slimy chicken stew. She wouldn’t be happy eating that, Ash thought.

She moved between seats and tables, and no pack of food had been able to hold her attention in the way he or Evelyn had.

"Was that your first time seeing Evelyn like that?" Vivian asked.

"Yeah. It was—"

"Incredible," the two said at the same time.

Ash internally cursed himself, thinking that maybe he was similar to Vivian in ways he hadn’t fully realized.

"Since our fight, she only ever used it once. That was during the academy entrance exam. She kept refusing to use her Dominion saying she wouldn’t ever need to use it, but they pushed her into using it anyway. I still remember the look on the face of the proctor when she unleashed it."

"What did it look like?"

"Black," she said flatly. "The academy covers up the incident as a self-inflicted wound and has him on permanent medical leave. No Restorative Facility or Dominion healer has ever been able to treat him."

"Then how did you survive a full frontal attack by it?"

"If I punch you without warning and you’re not expecting it, what do you think would happen?"

"I’d be down in pain groaning for the rest of the day."

"But if we were already in a fight—"

"It wouldn’t be as bad," Ash answered.

"No. It was still really bad," she corrected. "But not many people would willingly taunt a locked beast once it’s given sunlight."

"You’re an incredible teacher," Ash said. He was about to write down what she said, then realized it would have gone in the artbook. He stopped himself before a single letter was written.

Ash’s eyes turned to look outside the window.

"Vivian?" Ash asked softly.

"Yeah?"

"If you didn’t raise your hand and threaten to forfeit the match, would Evelyn have still beaten you?"

"She’s the person you know her as without using it."

The land around them had been thinning for some time. Snow was mixed in with the occasional cluster of houses and trees. Civilization had been getting further and further apart each time he looked out.

Ash’s body reacted before his mind told him what it was.

"You good?" Vivian asked.

His Shade-sense pulled at the edge of its range. A monster was out there, bigger than anything a person carried inside them. He reached out to overclock his condition, finding a once-normal ability completely gone.

"Where did it go?" Ash muttered to himself.

"Hey, Ash, I’m worried about you. Go lie down in one of those beds."

The hunger inside him hadn’t moved.

A read that size should have woken up the void hard, or at the very least, dragged its attention. It found the signature and turned away, wanting no part in how this creature was dealt with. This was Ash’s problem to solve.

The signature finished arriving after passing by a cluster of houses and trees. Not a Hollow. Not a person. Nothing that could ever come close.

"Something’s here."

Vivian’s fork stopped halfway up off the tray. She looked at Ash’s face, analyzed all the muscles there, and came to the conclusion that this wasn’t normal indigestion. Her hand was already pulling out the tie from her hair, letting her blonde, char-tipped hair fall free to her shoulders.

Ash went still in the middle of his own sentence.

By then, the door to their car had opened, and Sheila had stepped out, drawn in by the same wrong note as Ash. She looked out the window, and it definitely wasn’t to see her reflection.

Outside, the white had stopped being white.

The light was first to go, going out entirely like the only source of light in a room. The snow took on a cold icy blue that fell from above instead of down from the sun.

The figure wasn’t just crossing the ground toward them; it was standing up out of it, rising, one body that climbed into the grey sky it had created, and kept climbing past that, coils over coils, winding around its own length until Ash lost the top of it to the clouds. The hide was blue-black and plated, scaled in segments that ran the full height and length of it, each plate ridged and edged with a spine.

The coils were ringed in teeth of frost. The whole shape was slowly turning, like it had never once needed to be fast to get what it wanted.

And then it opened.

What Ash had taken for more of the armor was a head. And it wasn’t the only one he was seeing.

A second head with its own jaws came out from a segment along its body, unhinged down the length of the body, one after another.

The eyes were what he saw last.

They weren’t just one set of eyes. They were everywhere, set in clusters across the plating, ringed around each jaw, scattered down the coils entirely. Every one of them a cold blue coal.

And what was more worrying: each and every one of them was locked onto the autonomous train they were riding.

Far down the line, a metal shriek echoed as the rearmost car uncoupled, followed by the crunch of twisting iron and a sudden, violent explosion.

The Vein had been there the entire time. It was only waiting to be looked at.

"The Eclipsing Boreal," Vivian said, her eyes wide and face open, staring out the window. "It really was here the entire time."