Extraction: Infinite Hunger

Ash deflected a plunging coil with a gravity field. It shattered like glass, but it bought him the half-second he needed to roll backward. The train car buckled where he had just stood.

He was completely out of roof. The terrain behind him was a jagged drop into the snow.

Ash tried to overclock his physicality, pumping everything into his legs to get back up, but it was gone.

He finally stopped blaming his neck.

A severed coil whipped toward his blind spot. Steel flashed as the appendage fell in three distinct chunks. Its dark fluid dyed the snow around them.

Vivian dragged herself over the crushed roof edge. Dried blood caked half her face. Her left arm swung dead against her ribs. She gripped her katana with her right hand and bared her teeth in a manic, ragged grin.

Ash drove his ruined strut upward, catching onto a descending jaw. Vivian planted a foot on his braced shoulder and launched, her let-down hair whipping across his face. Her blade carved a silver arc through the exposed underbelly, raining freezing dark fluid over the steel.

They moved in rhythm.

Ash projected a gravity field, causing a lunging coil to skid off the barrier. Vivian’s blade intercepted the redirected momentum, cleaving the flesh to the bone.

Another coil thrashed out with a spiked tail. Ash threw the densest gravity field he could at its center of mass, stalling the tail mid-swing. Vivian spun, using the dead weight of her paralyzed left arm as a counterweight, and severed the tail at the joint. A third appendage crashed down on them. Ash clamped his field around its base, pinning it to the roof. Vivian stepped off the pinned flesh and decapitated it.

Vivian spun, her mouth opening to call a target.

The Boreal adapted before the word could leave her throat. The entity abandoned its staggered assaults. Three coils lunged at the exact space Ash’s gravity field was forming. The mass shattered it before it could solidify. The impact crushed the remaining roof panels, shrinking their foothold to a single, buckling train car.

The main column of the Boreal loomed overhead. The mass eclipsed the sun. The towering shadow swallowed the snow and the steel. Miles of plated armor descended, the vertical collapse aimed entirely for the ruined car. Ash stepped in front of Vivian regardless, and raised his hands toward the falling sky.

A sonic crack ruptured the air.

Sheila hit the deck between them, shattering the floor grating. She crossed her forearms above her head just as the sky fell.

The collision sounded like a collapsing cathedral. The descending column slammed into her guard. The shockwave blew the surrounding wreckage clean off the train. Sheila stomped her heels through the steel floorboards, grounding her against the car’s chassis. The car’s suspension shattered. Sparks cascaded in a blinding sheet as the undercarriage scraped the tracks. The massive coil ground downward, inch by inch, forcing Sheila’s knees to bend.

And for the first time since Ash had seen her, blood vessels burst in her forearms, painting her blouse red.

The Boreal shifted its weight, concentrating the looming crush directly over her spine. The roof panels buckled inward, curling like a crushed tin. Sheila exhaled a harsh breath, driving her fists upward. The counter-force sent a ripple down the car’s length. The windows on all of the cars blew out simultaneously. Glass rained over the steel. The descent stalled a foot above Ash and Vivian’s heads.

"Move," Sheila grunted through clenched teeth, paying no mind to her blouse.

Ash and Vivian rolled clear. Sheila raised her arms upward, redirecting the colossal weight over the side of the train. The coil crashed into the snow, shaking the earth.

Sheila stood up straight. A single diagonal tear ran down the front of her white blouse and mixed in with bloodstains.

Off the left side of the train, a sprawling grid of towers met the Boreal. Office buildings burning from the top floor down, a highway overpass lit end to end, a hospital tower with every window blazing white against the dark. The colossal body rolled over the outer ring. The furthest towers blacked out first. The darkness moved inward block by block, floor by floor, as fast as a person walking.

Ash’s read flickered. He had exhausted what he could use on the vein. Vivian leaned on her blade, dragging a dead arm. A new coil reared up, its blue-coal eyes locking onto the three of them.

Vivian sank her katana into the crown. Sheila drove a uppercut into the lower jaw. Ash threw his entire body weight into a point-blank burst dead center. The three strikes landed on the same point at the same time. The massive head caved inward from top, bottom, and center. Bone erupted. The appendage collapsed onto the steel.

It did not regenerate. For once, the blue eyes dimmed and did not reignite.

Ash stared at the dead meat. The scattered segments down the line continued to thrash. Two fresh coils lunged forward.

Ash dropped his shoulder low, tackling Vivian out of the way. He projected a desperate, narrow gravity field, clamping both incoming heads together. Sheila stepped into the gap and launched a roundhouse kick through the compressed flesh. The twin heads exploded outward. Both appendages dropped lifeless onto the tracks.

A low, grinding vibration echoed from the rear of the train.

Every severed length they had cut down across the miles of wreckage twitched. The dormant, headless segments lifted off the flatbeds and the snow. Pale tissue knit itself together. New heads blossomed from the stumps. Blue-coal eyes ignited down the entire length of the train. Seven distinct appendages reared into the sky, tethered to the main column.

The Boreal retreated. The seven heads fanned out, hovering high above the train and widening the gap between each segment.

Vivian dropped her blade and surveyed the ring of armored heads.

"We need to hit all of it at once and at the same time," she finally said.

"You still in?" Ash asked, his eyes trying to track Sheila.

"I’m here," she responded.

Sheila caught a sweeping tail meant to decapitate Vivian. She wrapped her arms around the spiked bone and hurled the entire appendage into an adjacent coil. The two massive heads collided. Before Vivian could strike the tangled heads, a third coil slammed down between them, driving a wedge of plating into their formation.

Ash scrambled over a pile of twisted wreckage. He locked a strong grip onto the wedge, trying to rip it backward. The coil held its own. A fourth head lunged from the blindside, clamping its jaws around the debris pile Ash stood on. He threw himself sideways as the jaws pulverized the steel into shrapnel. A fist-sized chunk of iron clipped his ribs. He hit the deck hard, rolling to avoid a stomping spine.

A lateral whip of a tail caught Vivian flush in the chest. The impact moved her ten feet backward, skidding across the frost. She stabbed her sword into the floor to stop her slide. She forced herself up after recovering, raising the katana with her whether it wanted to or not.

Ash tasted metal and salt. His read sputtered, searching for an anchor. It caught a massive displacement in the air miles behind the Boreal’s main column. The gravity of it shorted his perception.

The seven hovering coils froze. The Boreal’s relentless assault halted. Every blue-coal eye snapped away from the train, locking onto the horizon.

A shadow crept over the tundra. It swallowed the Boreal’s figure, plunging the entire atmosphere into absolute blackness. The ambient temperature plummeted.

Ash tilted his head back. The entity approaching from the white void dwarfed the Boreal.

"Hey, guys?" Ash breathed, staring at what he had sensed.

The real predator had arrived.