Extraction: Infinite Hunger

Chapter 85: Stop Cutting It

A third body of the Eclipsing Boreal slithered out from the wreckage behind them. Sheila raised her fists, slamming it through the crown as it came for her. Its head caved in flat, splitting where her knuckles dove in. From that split, before she could pull her arm back, two more ridges of spine shoved up, the one head becoming two, both now turning on her.

Ash saw it happen.

"Stop cutting it!"

"Are you stupid? How are we supposed to kill this thing then?"

"I don’t know, but we’re only making our problem worse."

Sheila changed her swing mid-motion, raising her arms up. Not to punch an incoming head, but to brace herself for impact.

The coil drove her straight down, her knees bending under the pressure, and her heels tore two lines through the frost to the steel of the car. The coil folded over, pressing her back across the roof. She set a foot on the raised seam and shoved it away.

The coil shoved harder, rolling her off the seam and into the wall of the next car.

The wall was like paper. Her body broke through steel that should have caught her. Her body tumbled and rolled until she came out the other side in a layer of frost, dropping to a knee on the next roof.

A second coil came down on top of her. She raised herself and caught it with both hands, holding it until the roof was splitting in a star pattern under her heels, then threw it off to the side and punched the coil down into the car underneath her.

Ash continued moving back, until his back pressed against Sheila’s again

"You still in it?" she asked.

"Barely. How much longer can you hold them off?"

She didn’t answer, raising her fists to stop the coils coming in low. Ash handled the ones that were coming from above. Her fists caved in the heads Ash slammed down onto the ground with amplified gravity. By the time Ash had released the field, she was already running for the next one. A coil drove between them; they jumped, then entered back in, her fists going in from one side, and Ash with all of his amplified gravity on the other.

Another coil came in from the top. Ash caught it in time in a gravity field. Sheila began running, then vaulted herself off Ash’s braced shoulder, and up onto the stalled weight of the coil itself. Her heels caught into the skin of the Boreal. Sheila brought both fists down through the head. Organs, blood, and saliva exploded out of the head as it caved under her. She rode the dying coil down to the roof, kicking off it and onto the next car, already hunting the next.

Vivian groaned as she hauled herself up over the lip of a car with one hand. The other bracing the katana in her teeth. Blood was dripping down her face, her black sleeveless blouse slashed and stained, her once glossy thigh highs dulling with the blood soaking into them.

Ash saw a new figure stand on the roofs with them. By the time he processed it was Vivian, she had already run past him and was throwing herself into the nearest coil with her katana unsheathed.

The slash bit deep into a seam, the coil shuddering. She ripped the blade free and drove it down two more inches lower, then even lower. Her heels leaving the roof as she climbed the coil’s flank cut over cut. Blood and shattered bone fragments flew from the opening and stained the snow.

Until—

Another drove in low and she rolled her wrist and opened it along its length, and the dark fluid surged up and glassed on her forearm before it could fall. She climbed. The plating split ahead of her edge faster than she could ride the seam. The whole segment shook under her heels. Near the crown she was all the way fast against it, one cut from flaying it open.

It folded out from under the blade.

Her edge swept through the air where the coil had been and and sheared through empty air, coming off the top of the swing carrying the full weight of the swing. Her knees buckled, one hand slapping the steel to keep her face off it.

Sheila intercepted the coil driving at Vivian’s blind side head-on. Her fist drove into the head, the plate caving and resealing under each blow, the steel melting under her heels, forcing it back a length before it folded away from her entirely.

Ash clamped both hands onto a passing coil, pushing dry cold rot into it through his palms. The plating began to gray, cracking and crumbling in his grip.

And then—

It had completely faded, a surge of wet new tissue welling up under it and shoving his hands off the body. A spine punched past his ear, laying his cheek open. He slammed a gravity field on the coil passing by him.

That, it felt.

A howling whine tore from its mouth until Ash retreated back to where Vivian and Sheila were running.

The three of them gave ground down the train, a coil on each of them and more behind. Vivian carved one back and it folded and lunged at Sheila. She caught it and threw it at Ash. Ash put a gravity field under it and flung it into the coil closing on Vivian. The two tangled, came apart, and where the two had tangled there were three.

Then a coil reared up between all three of them, head splitting wide, rising to crash down on the lot of them at once.

Ash dropped a field into the body before either of them swung, and the coil’s whole length went heavy and stopped. The gravity field pinned all of it to the steel, no slack left in it to fold away on.

Vivian’s edge went into the crown and split it to the jaw, the plating giving instead of sliding, the blade running down into the eyes. Sheila’s fist drove up under the jaw from below, and the two impacts crossed in the middle of the head with the skull caught between them.

It burst.

Bone and black fluid blew out sideways across the roof, the head caving top and bottom at once with nowhere to grow and nothing under it but Ash’s held weight. The coil dropped its length onto the steel and lay there.

It didn’t rise.

The others rose instead. New heads punched up off severed lengths down the line. The three of them had only a single breath to share between them all until the next coil struck.

Vivian stepped in to finish the dead one and a new head shoved up out of the body two segments down, clear of her blade, and swung into her from the side. She blocked it on the flat edge, gave a step and cut back into it.

Ahead, the rail ran at a frozen gorge. A coil of the Boreal lay across it where an iron bridge had stood.

A coil folded away from Vivian the instant she set to cut it. She stepped at another; it slid out of reach before the edge could land. She went still. Not beaten. Just done throwing herself at the ones that folded away. She turned the katana once in her grip and picked the nearest coil.

If it wouldn’t be a wall, she would ride it down until it was.