Extraction: Infinite Hunger

From the billowing snowstorm, the Shade’s vessel finally showed itself. The Ossuarium Chimera. It walked at the scale of a mountain range. Its fused bones stacked into a jagged, towering silhouette. Skulls socketed into skulls formed the armor. Femurs the length of suspension bridges scraped the ground beneath the snow. Sulfuric yellow gas already bled from its joints, settling into a dense, caustic fog the wind could not scatter.

Back when Ash and Vivian first saw this Vein, it was able to fit itself into an alleyway. Now it eclipsed the sky.

It did not look at the ruined train or the three fighters bleeding on the steel. Its focus pinned entirely on the creature beside it.

The Boreal reacted. The seven hovering coils ceased their assault on the train. Every blue-coal eye swiveled away from Ash, Vivian, and Sheila, locking onto the bone-mountain.

Vivian palmed a knuckle, her grin reaching the edge of her face. "You two still in?" she asked, her attention entirely on the encroaching Vein.

The realization finally hit Ash like a physical blow. The Boreal had never been hunting them. Ash, Vivian and Sheila had only corralled the beast straight into the jaws of its predator.

The sound of Vivian dropping her katana made Ash look at the floor below them. Then, he saw Vivian falling to her knees as well. Blood dripped from her chin, mixing with the outline of tears that had frozen together at her collarbone.

"It was supposed to be mine," she said, doing her best to stop the tears from falling further.

Ash knelt down beside her, and gave her head a place to relax against.

Her eyes didn’t blink. Her breathing shallowed out. She just watched what was in front of her.

The two titans collided.

The impact deafened Ash: a concussive shockwave that ruptured the air pressure and dropped him to his stomach. The tundra split. A fissure miles wide tore through the frost. The frozen river beside the tracks heaved upward, shattering into ice slabs the size of city blocks.

The Boreal did not strike with a single head. It threw its entire long mass into the Chimera. The colossal column wrapped around the bone-mountain like a constrictor. Millions of tons of plated armor constricted. The outermost layer of human skulls on the Chimera’s chest shattered under the pressure, exploding into white dust. The Boreal’s seven primary heads snapped forward, sinking jaws the size of freight ships into the Chimera’s shoulders and necks. Blue-black teeth bit through the fused bone.

The Chimera hadn’t flinched. It drove a multi-jointed skeletal hand into the Boreal’s main column. Fingers tipped with razor-bone pierced the pale tissue. The Chimera gripped the spine and ripped backward.

Flesh tore with the sound of metal stripping apart. The Chimera ripped an entire segment of the Boreal free from its central mass. Dark, freezing fluid geysered into the stratosphere, raining down on the train in a frozen torrential downpour. The bone-mountain dropped the severed chunk. It reached into its own exposed ribcage, wrapping its fist around a massive, interior femur and snapped it off.

The Chimera wielded its own bone like a greatsword. It drove the jagged, splintered end straight through the Boreal’s secondary knot, pinning thousands of tons of thrashing muscle to the bedrock.

The Boreal retaliated with its only tactic. The pinned segment writhed, splitting down the middle. Hundreds of new heads blossomed from the raw wounds. Its evolution protocol activated at a macroscopic scale. A thousand blue-coal eyes ignited in the sulfur fog.

The multiplying mass flooded the Chimera. A surging tide of armored coils crawled up the bone-mountain’s legs, crushing the skeletal joints. A dozen heads clamped onto the Chimera’s left arm. They twisted in unison. The sound of the limb snapping echoed like a detonating fault line. The Chimera’s arm sheared off at the elbow, crashing into a distant foothill and leveling it.

The Boreal shoved all of its mass through the Chimera’s open stump. It tried to burrow inward, seeking to erupt the bone-mountain from the inside out. Yellow sulfur gas poured from the Chimera’s shattered marrow, melting the Boreal’s pale flesh on contact. The acid stripped the coils down to black slurry, but its regeneration was outpacing the decay. Two heads died, ten more had regenerated through the sludge. The sheer weight of the swarming entity forced the Chimera down to one knee. The resulting snowquake slammed everyone into the side of the car. Ash heard his ribs crack.

The bone-mountain was buried under writhing, blue-black flesh. The Boreal’s thousand heads ripped at the skeletal armor, tearing away chunks of fused spine and socketed skulls. A massive jaw clamped onto the Chimera’s throat, vibrating with a high-pitched sonic pulse that shattered the surrounding ice for miles. The Chimera’s chest plating began to spiderweb under the sonic assault.

The Boreal sensed the Chimera’s weakness. It coiled tighter, layering head over head, building a living barricade of biting jaws and crushing plates against the Chimera’s exposed core, starving the bone-mountain of movement.

Then, the Chimera stopped fighting back.

The yellow gas thickened, boiling out from every fracture in its body. The Chimera executed the simultaneous kill that Ash, Vivian, and Sheila had been unable to carry out.

Ten thousand sharpened femurs erupted from the Chimera’s mass in a single, omnidirectional burst.

"Ash!" Vivian cried out. "Do something."

The bone-spears fired outward at the speed of artillery shells. They pierced every single coil, every severed head, every multiplying segment of the Boreal at the exact same millisecond. The dense, pale armor offered no resistance. The bone drove straight through the Boreal’s flesh, pinning the thousands of thrashing appendages against each other, against the environment, and against the Chimera’s own body.

The sound was loud enough to shake a continent.

Spikes of yellow bone jutted from every inch of the Boreal’s distributed mass. The simultaneous trauma overloaded the Boreal’s evolved biology. The regenerative reflex stalled. There was no uninjured tissue left to grow from. The Boreal’s heads opened their jaws in a silent, paralyzed scream. The eyes flickered, dimmed, and extinguished in unison. The massive, writhing blockade collapsed. The dead meat sloughed off the bone-spears crashing onto the shattered environment in a tidal wave of rotting flesh.

But the Chimera wasn’t done. It reached down, plunging its talons into the frozen earth, ripping up the topsoil beneath the Boreal’s central cluster. It slammed the entire fusion together, crushing the Boreal’s main heart into a singular, pulped ruin. It didn’t stop until the entire length of the Boreal was nothing but a smear of dark, inert tissue across the snow.

The Chimera retracted its spikes. It unhinged a jaw comprised of a hundred fused ribcages, clamping its teeth into the Boreal’s central mass and inhaled.

The dead flesh liquified. The blue-black coils dissolved into a thick, dark slurry flowing upward into the Chimera’s maw. The bone-mountain consumed the meat, the armor, the eyes. It fed on the entire Vein, triggering an immediate metamorphosis.

New architecture pushed its way out of the Chimera’s spine. Massive, jagged dorsal plates cracked through the existing bone, dripping with yellow marrow. The skull elongated, fracturing and fusing into a crown of hardened enamel. The creature added the Boreal’s sheer mass to its own density. It swelled, casting a shadow that swallowed the horizon. Its ruined left arm extruded fresh bone, knitting together a new, longer limb tipped with scythe-like claws.

Vivian watched as best as her pride as a fighter could allow. The fight she had lost had just been served as a meal for a future fight she was destined for. Her expression held no despair. Her eyes tracked every shifting bone, every new plate of armor.

She was already dissecting the Chimera’s new anatomy in her mind.

The Chimera turned its back on the train. It walked north, its massive footfalls triggering minor earthquakes.

It never looked down.

It left them alive in a wreckage because the Chimera hadn’t registered them as a threat.

A single, jagged chunk of the Boreal flew to the side of them at the same speed as the train car.

Ash stared at it, projecting his Shade-sense over the dead meat. The void in his chest lay dormant. The Boreal had been a Seven Vein, condensed Shade-mass turned physical.

Ash crawled, moving his body to an opening which revealed a chunk of the slain Vein. He reached out with his bare, ruined hand, bypassing every instinct inside of him.

He had spent the entire fight lacking weight to matter more than a housefly. He refused to leave empty-handed. He plunged his fingers into the freezing, dead tissue, and force-fed the remaining Shade residue into his void.

The cold hit his stomach like a lead weight.

Immediately, his void stirred, like it hadn’t expected it to taste that good.

Ding!

Evolution extracted.

Now that it had just a piece, it wanted a complete Vein next time.

Underneath them, the ruined train continued north.