Extraction: Infinite Hunger

Chapter 86: Alone On The Steel

Vivian vaulted herself towards the nearest coil. The armored segment folded over backwards to dodge the strike. She refused to let this go. She drove her katana into the plating up to the handguard and released her grip on the train roof entirely.

She dangled from the blade buried in the Seven Vein that had tried to bury them in the environment around them. Only the depth of her cut kept her from the drop. The freezing wind battered her ribs. The coil’s upward motion lifted her over the rushing white snow. Instead of fighting the momentum, she rode it. She hauled herself up the hilt, hand over hand, wrenching the blade free and sinking it even deeper. She scaled the side of the Boreal like a cliff trying to shake a mountain scaler off.

Vivian opened the coil’s crown end to end. The blade split a plated seam, sliding into the soft tissue underneath like scissors gliding through silk. She kicked off a protruding spine, bringing her blade back to her. The backswing slashed through a cluster of eyes; they popped as they closed and went dark. The grey-blue flesh parted as dark fluid erupted in sheets, freezing instantly and shattering off her forearms as black glass.

The largest head stopped its movement, and the entire front rotated itself. Hundreds of blue-coal eyes swiveled in unison, locking onto the woman clinging to its side.

The Boreal had so far behaved like a natural disaster, flattening towns, forests and mountains without regard. Now, it had finally recognized a threat. The crushing weight of its gaze hit Vivian at the top; the spines running down the segment bent inward, narrowing like fingers closing around a fly.

Vivian grinned, showing her teeth to the freezing air. She shoved the blade deep and twisted the grip. Spines drove down from every angle. The head swung down to scrape her off its flank. She met the barrage head on, parrying bone and carving through tissue, clashing with the Boreal on her terms.

Bone needles shoved out of the raw cuts before her blade could exit the flesh. The crown she had split down the middle tore itself apart, growing two independent heads from the gap. The faster she cut, the more the beast multiplied.

Vivian’s blade sheared through a rising coil, but three more had erupted from the stump. Her arm already moved, but a primal instinct took over from conscious control. Her hands kept carving, reducing her to the engine of her own execution.

The towering segment whipped backward, flinging Vivian off the peak of its arc. The dark space between coils swallowed her. She plummeted at a velocity she couldn’t stop, striking through a car roof clean and nearly through the undercarriage as well.

The impact cracked through her vertebrae and snapped her skull against the steel.

The world whited out.

Vivian slid from her position, her cheek dragging through the crater her body had made to the car’s floor. Blood pooled in her mouth, then the wind whipped it away. Her fist still gripped the katana, but her body slackened.

Down the line, the multiplying heads writhed, continuing without her.

Sheila hit the roof two cars forward, having run the last stretch alongside the train until a low-crossing coil gave her a ridge to catch. She regained her feet before the landing finished.

Ash sprinted towards Sheila. A plunging coil shadowed her, but Ash thrust his hand forward. His gravity field caught the descending mass a foot above her head. Ash’s arms trembled, unable to contain the weight anymore.

He let go.

Sheila looked up to see the encroaching mass about to take her clean. Just at the moment of impact, she rolled herself clear.

A secondary coil the size of a freight car swept horizontally across the roof. Ash dropped his center of gravity, projecting the gravity field like a barrier to deflect the mass again. The dark flesh struck. He could feel the gravity fields fracture. The sheer kinetic backlash drove Ash backward, his shoes carving twin grooves into the freezing steel. A third appendage slammed down from above.

Ash sliced his forearm across the jagged opening of the car’s roof beside him. The freezing air bit into the open flesh. He grit his teeth as blood leaped from the wound, condensing in the air into a solid, red spear. He hurled the bloody weapon into the nearest coil. The point penetrated a foot deep. The pale flesh closed over the shaft, absorbing the blood and sealing the puncture in seconds.

Ash dug deeper into his arm. He forged another spear and ripped the moisture out of the blood as it formed. The vibrant red faded into a dead, brittle grey as it hardened into pure iron. He drove it into the coil’s flank and held on for the follow-through, watching the grey metal jut from the armor. He stood on the shaking train car and waited for the iron to starve the beast.

The pale tissue swallowed the iron without a tremor.

Ash swallowed his breath and complaints.

"This isn’t working," Sheila said between plunging spines.

"I know," Ash admitted.

"Then?"

Ash kept his mouth shut.

Off the left side of the train, a sprawling grid of towers met the Boreal. A hundred thousand lit windows burned against the night. The colossal body rolled over the perimeter. The lights extinguished in a sweeping wave. Concrete structures folded into their own footprints as the mass ground over them, block by block. The city vanished, leaving a flat plain of snow behind.

The coils shifted tactics. They stopped attacking head-on and flanked the train cars. A plated head slammed into the left side of the car. Another crushed the right flank, compressing the steel floorboards. They folded inward to block the forward roofs, crossing their massive lengths like interlocking fingers. They forced Ash and Sheila backward, step by step, shrinking their walkable ground to a narrow strip of spine.

"They’re pushing us back," Ash said.

"I see the edge ahead," Sheila replied, her eyes fixed on the shifting plating. Behind them, the train cars ended in torn metal and open air. "Stop walking."

Sheila planted her heels. She dropped her weight through her back leg and drove a devastating uppercut into the descending coil. The roof pane buckled under her heels, tearing outward in a jagged star. The Vein’s head caved in. Dark fluid ruptured from the shattered plates.

A secondary length of the beast whipped around her blind spot. It did not target her. It merely occupied the space her finishing blow had forced her into. The massive flank slammed into her torso. The impact lifted Sheila clean off the roof, carrying her over the edge of the rushing locomotive.

Ash lunged to the edge. Sheila hit the snowdrifts a hundred yards out, her heels carving deep trenches into the white. She stood upright, unharmed, but the train’s speed shrank her in the distance.

Ash stepped toward the gap. A towering wall of plated armor slammed down onto the connecting car, severing his path. He peered over the shifting black flesh. Sheila did not run. She stood still in the snowstorm, watching the locomotive pull away until a massive, rolling fold of the Boreal eclipsed her.

Ash stood on the frozen steel. The hunger inside him churned, scanning the colossal entity ahead. It found no weakness, no heat, no blood worth draining. The void in his chest offered no solutions. Ash squared his shoulders and faced the descending wall alone.

"A little help from you now would be appreciated," Ash muttered to himself, his words catching in the wind for no one else to hear.