Extraction: Infinite Hunger

Following the call with Azure, Ash checked the time to see it was nearly midnight. Dane and Sheila had already gone to their own rooms. Vivian had gone wherever she went and decided to be. Ash remained alone in his thoughts, staring at the ceiling from his bed.

His eyes lazily closed as he fell asleep.

Immediately, he was blasted by the sound of his 8-bit ringtone from his phone, which felt more like an alarm and less like an incoming call at that point.

He slammed his hand onto the table and picked it up, trying to deafen the call as soon as he could. Everyone had already woken up; even Ash knew that without reading anyone’s Shade signature.

The screen displayed Phoebe’s name over a selfie she had taken to serve as her contact photo. He stared at her bright blue eyes, letting the chirp cycle one more time before swiping the glass to accept.

"Give me a minute," Ash whispered. He threw the heavy bedsheets off his legs and draped the nearest hoodie on a floor over his head.

"Are you walking somewhere?" Phoebe asked.

"Somewhere I can keep my voice down."

He pulled the phone away to check the time and saw he had only slept for fifty minutes.

Ash navigated silently to the main level of the cabin, dragging a wooden chair into the kitchen, using the layers of drywall and distance to completely dampen his voice.

"Where are you?" Ash finally asked, sinking into the seat.

"A deck." She delivered the word like a terminal diagnosis. "There’s a student a few lounge chairs down from me who has already consumed three separate drinks containing decorative fruit before the morning has even finished."

"That sounds like a hard day. They dropped you in the one place where nothing—"

"Don’t." The sharp clatter of melting ice swirling in a plastic cup echoed through the receiver. "The official posting explicitly stated marine Hollow activity. The so-called ’marine Hollow activity’ is a plastic float tied to a rope. The field trip supervisor literally tallies how many recreational swimmers pass it each day. I signed up for a combat research station, Ash. This is a tropical resort."

While she spoke, Ash opened the kitchen cabinets, desperately searching for a viable alternative to the endless boxes of tea.

"There is a mandatory children’s hour at ten AM each day," she continued, her tone going dangerously flat. "Then, when I return to my quarters, the cleaning staff has folded my bath towel into the shape of a swan. There hasn’t been a single confirmed Hollow breach in this place for two years."

"You were first on the board. I saw your pink pen ink."

"I signed up for work."

"And received a decorative swan."

"And received a swan." A soft, stifled laugh followed the admission, though the audio compression made it clear she was actively trying to hide it from Ash. "You explicitly agreed to be my second set of ears. I am currently cashing in the favor. Today was severely tiring . The most difficult decision I made was choosing between two sunscreens left in a basket by my front door."

Ash had opened and closed every single cabinet. Each one held only tea bags and loose leaves, separated by an organizational logic only Dane could possibly comprehend.

"And you?" Phoebe said, pulling Ash’s attention back to the call. "Everything quiet out there?"

"Yeah, it is. It’s one AM."

"You went quiet on me. I wasn’t sure."

"You filled the air for me."

"That was the deal." The sound of a chair pushing back followed. "I no longer want to put that student in his own drink. The deal holds."

"Then it worked," Ash said with a yawn.

"It worked. Sleep, please. You sound worse than how Azure described."

"I’ll sleep," Ash said.

"You won’t. We both know that." She didn’t budge. "Say you’ll sleep."

"I’ll sleep," he finally said, listening to how easy the lie had been.

"Anything you want to tell me?" Phoebe asked.

Ash thought about telling her about the Boreal, the Chimera, or even about Dane.

Instead, he said, "I miss the way you order coffee for us. I’ve learned I absolutely do not like tea."

The friction of a brush pulling through her hair fed softly through the microphone. "Sleep well, Ash." She responded, hanging up on her end before Ash could say another word.

He pocketed the phone in the front pouch of his hoodie and leaned heavily back into the wooden chair. The upright posture bizarrely felt more comfortable than returning to the bedroom, so he simply stayed in the kitchen, fully intending to let the sunrise wake him.

It wasn’t much later when the heavy thud of footsteps coming up the stairs pulled him back from the edge of unconsciousness.

Vivian.

She came up with her hair pulled back, wearing one of the hoodies Ash had given her.

"Sorry if I—"

She completely ignored him. She hit the front door, pushed it open into the freezing night, and slammed it shut behind her without a single hesitation.

"Wait you forgot your ka—" Ash yawned again. Instead of chasing the thought, he stretched his arms overhead and actively tried to fall back asleep in the kitchen.

Outside, the dark held no shape.

The solitary lit window bleeding from one of Dane’s lab rooms stood as the single splash of color interrupting the dead, frozen night. Vivian walked to the exact perimeter of the artificial light, stopped, and continued walking.

The freezing temperature concerned her least. The cold actively settled deep into her knuckles, restricting the reach of her joints until the skin cracked and fresh blood ran down her fingertips. She forcefully popped each knuckle loose, one sharp crack at a time. She had built a tolerance since arriving at the cabin.

A few hundred meters directly ahead of her, a seam split the dark. It grabbed the surrounding atmosphere and ripped the space wide open, establishing a Gate.

A C-rank Hollow locked onto her immediately. Its neck stretched vastly higher than ordinary cervical vertebrae should allow, its shoulders raised and locked at an impossible, jagged angle.

It charged straight for Vivian.

Vivian maintained her exact walking rhythm. She slipped cleanly past its initial reaching strike and drove a uppercut directly under its jaw. The bone plate of its skull folded around her knuckles, the concussive crack of the impact traveling straight down her forearm.

The head caved inward, tearing completely loose from the neck. Black ichor geysered from the open stump, and the decapitated body carried two full steps forward on legs that had not yet realized it was walking without a head and dissolved to ash.

She stood motionless in the dissipating residue, her breath pluming white in the freezing air, and finally reclaimed the one internal baseline that striking empty oxygen had worn entirely flat.

Interest.

The dark tore open a second time before the first corpse had fully vanished, generating farther out, opening farther from the cabin. She tracked the spatial distortion. Then, she crossed the snow to meet it.

This Hollow breached the realm mid-spin, already tracking her coordinates. It whipped a long, multi-jointed limb horizontally. Vivian dropped under the strike and drove the heel of her palm straight upward into the exposed joint. The hinge shattered instantly. Jagged white bone erupted through the gray skin, leaving the limb dangling uselessly by a single, thick cord of tendon.

She stepped into the blind spot the break created and drove her fist cleanly through the center of its chest cavity. The ribs splintered outward around her forearm before the creature could even complete its initial swing.

A third Gate tore open while the second Hollow still fell. Farther out. Deeper into the tree line.

This Hollow possessed genuine mass.

It approached slowly, which proved it had earned the right to pace itself, and it absolutely refused to blindly charge. It planted its footing, a tactical patience not a single predecessor had demonstrated. Vivian reached behind her head, pulled the elastic band out of her hair, and let the heavy locks fall loose around her shoulders.

The Hollow led with a calculated lie. A feint buried inside a strike. Vivian’s guard snapped shut on empty air. The true blow triggered from beneath her sightline, catching her cleanly across the floating ribs and physically launching her backward into the snow.

She rolled the momentum perfectly. The follow-up strike literally cratered the frozen earth where her skull had just been.

She snapped back to her feet as it crowded her eyesight. She caught its next sweeping hook across both forearms, feeling a micro-fracture spiderweb through her left wrist, and actively rode the force through a tight spin rather than statically blocking it. Out of the rotation, she had its center of gravity completely mapped.

She surged back inside its guard and drove both fists straight down through the primary joint of its forward leg. The structural bone splintered and the limb completely buckled under the Hollow’s immense weight.

It threw a desperate backhand on its way down. She slipped beneath the swinging trunk of an arm, materialized at its back, drove a heel-kick directly into the hollow behind its remaining knee to drop its elevation entirely, and slammed the point of her elbow down onto the base of its spine.

One strike, and the vertebrae catastrophically yielded. Two strikes, and the skull detached from the column. The pressurized black ichor let go, sheeting across the snow and steaming heavily long after the host body stopped twitching.

Her bare hands radiated heat for the first time since she had walked out of the cabin door.

Vivian’s breathing finally picked up, the freezing air dragging heavily in and out of her lungs. Past the crater where the fourth had gone down, the dark tore at a fifth seam. Farther still. There was zero desire left inside her to walk back to a cold bed and endure striking static targets.

She broke into a dead sprint toward the next Gate, and the one forming beyond it. The cabin’s artificial light shrank to a coin against her back, then to a pinhole, and finally to a dying rumor she refused to turn around and confirm.