Extraction: Infinite Hunger

A Gate unzipped the dark off to Vivian’s right side and shoved out a heavier shape than the ones before it. She planted her heels in the snow.

A B-rank.

It rolled forward with a massive bone-plated arm extended, head canted, tasting the air. She felt the weight of its attention land on her. She set her heels deep into the tundra snow.

She slipped the heavy swing and caught the limb on its recoil. The heel of her palm struck the exposed elbow directly from underneath, folding the joint the wrong direction. Bone tore through the gray hide with a wet, heavy crack. The forearm fell limp, dangling off a thick rope of tendon.

She drove her fist straight through the gap the broken guard left open. Thick plates of calcified rib peeled backward around her knuckles, hot black ichor welling over her wrist. The Hollow caved downward over the catastrophic wound and dissolved to ash mid-step.

Her knuckles split open against the armor plate. Each split registered sharp and immediate, the sting blooming when the freezing air penetrated the cuts. She flexed the bloody hand once, letting the honest answer of the pain settle into her.

She walked directly to the next tear. The cabin window behind her had shrunk to the size of a small coin.

The next gate gave up an entity that hadn’t finished converting. Half its face remained distinctly human, featuring an intact jaw and one weeping eye, while the gray tide of the Hollow necrosis actively crawled up its cheek to consume the rest. The human half recognized her. The mouth pulled helplessly into a shape meant for loved ones; the hand reaching out still bore five normal fingers, a dull gold wedding band gripping the ring finger.

Azure would have taken the creature by the hand. Vivian took it by the throat.

Her fist drove through the soft tissue beneath the jawline. The half that had been a man died instantly. She stepped directly over the dissipating ash and kept moving forward.

Two more gates tore open simultaneously, generating close together. The surrounding air soured into a heavy pressure before physically splitting with a sound resembling tearing wet canvas.

She intercepted the nearest Hollow’s lunge and drove it skull-first into the frozen earth. The cranium crumpled flat against the permafrost. She pivoted sharply, but the second creature caught her as her weight shifted fully forward.

She never saw the limb. The strike landed flush across her back and ribs, flat and massively heavy, dropping her to one knee and blasting the oxygen from her lungs. The cold shot up through her kneecap and told her exactly how hard she’d hit the ground.

The Hollow crowded into her vision to finish the job. She surged upward. She caught its next swinging hook on a completely numb forearm, hooked her free arm around its thick neck during the rotation, and cleanly snapped the cervical vertebrae across her own shoulder.

The gates did not wait for her to recover. The absolute dark stopped opening one gate at a time.

It opened four. Wide, heavily distorted, tearing taller than any anomaly she had faced so far. The shapes leaning through the rifts moved slowly, with certainty, and heavily coordinated. Their combined mass pressed down as a flat atmospheric weight across the field before they even breached the tree line.

She reached behind her head and snapped the elastic band loose.

The heavy cascade of her hair fell, and the ceiling holding her down crashed down with it. The agonizing cold went mute in her nerves. The crushing atmospheric pressure evaporated. She dropped her guard completely.

She marched straight up the frozen incline to meet them, a feral, bloodstained grin already splitting her face, her right hand cocked back into a lethal piston.

The first Hollow to reach her stood a head and a half taller than the rest, heavily plated to the eyes in overlapping bone armor. It brought a massive forearm crashing down at her skull like a dropped steel girder. She didn’t surrender an inch of ground. She stepped inside the arc, occupying the exact spatial gap the limb had to fall through, arriving before the strike landed. Her palm met the descending forearm exactly at the wrist, turning the bone structure a few degrees outward. The lethal blow passed her cheek close enough to leave a wind burn mark on her skin and buried itself deep into the snow.

She climbed the trapped limb, gripping the jagged bone plates with both hands, her heels leaving the ground as she rode the massive arm while the Hollow bucked wildly to throw her off. Arriving at the shoulder, she located the soft seam where the calcified plate gave way to the joint and drove her entire fist into the gap up to her wrist.

The shoulder detonated from the inside. Bone plate split and violently peeled outward. The dense gray muscle beneath parted into two wet halves, and the pressurized black ichor erupted in a massive sheet, coating her entire arm and steaming fiercely against the freezing air.

The arm she had just climbed severed completely and dropped off the host body. She kicked clear of the falling mass and landed perfectly squared up against the next target, the black fluid already freezing into brittle glass across her knuckles and cracking away when she tightened her fists.

Three of them reached her simultaneously. Three coordinated B-ranks were an impossible volume for anyone.

One struck low, one struck high, and the third charged straight up the centerline. She shattered the low attacker’s knee and violently torqued the high attacker’s wrist. The third Hollow drove a massive strike directly into her spine.

The old spinal fracture gave way. The vertebrae, already compromised, snapped, firing agony up her spine like a severed high-tension wire.

The sheer force launched her completely off her feet, hurtling her backward into a jagged ridge of black ice that refused to give. Her spine folded against the frozen rock at a mathematically wrong angle. Hot blood rushed up her throat, spilling out over her lips to stain the pristine white snow.

She didn’t rise right away. The freezing ice rested flush against her cheek. The three Hollows rotated toward her in absolute, synchronized silence.

She stood up anyway.

Her legs locked into a standing posture before her brain had agreed to the movement. Her muscles hauled her off the ice, her shattered spine screaming in protest, the feral grin returning across her face vastly wider than before.

Three of them.

Vivian dragged the back of a ruined, bloody hand across her chin.

She waded back into the center. She baited the nearest Hollow into a heavily committed lunge and slipped off at the last possible microsecond. The massive force intended for her skull slammed directly into the Hollow standing right behind it.

The two Hollows fouled violently together, bone plate grinding against bone plate, limbs hopelessly snarled, both entities desperately hunting for solid footing in the same patch of churned snow. Half a second of chaos served her perfectly.

She breached the first one’s guard before it registered her movement. Locking both hands onto its skull, she rode its massive weight downward and drove her heel straight through the back of its exposed neck. The crunch traveled entirely up her leg. The head detached, and the black ichor let go beneath it, flooding the snow.

She rolled off the dropping corpse straight into the second Hollow’s exposed knee. Both fists targeted the joint she had already mapped. The bone splintered like green wood, and the behemoth pitched violently down to her level, where the rest of its anatomy was hers to break.

The third Hollow caught her with a heavy blow while she worked. She gladly took exchange. All it cost her was one of her ribs cracking while she ripped the head off the Hollow and threw it to her side.

One remained.

She circled it through the churned red snow, slow, letting the silence press in. It lunged blind. She caught the reaching wrist and twisted, riding the limb’s own momentum until the elbow socket popped with a wet shriek. The arm flopped wrong. She took the second arm next, heel stomping the joint backward against frozen earth. The Hollow dropped, steaming, still trying to crawl.

She planted another heel between its shoulder blades and pushed its skull into the snow. No hurry. One fist, straight down through the base of the skull.

She rose out of the wreckage of the slaughter with her hair hanging loose and plastered to her face. Extreme heat rolled off her skin; blood soaked her arms to the elbows, most of it her own. Her back screamed as one unbroken line of wrongness. Her left eye swelled rapidly shut.

Zero new Gates breached the dark. The tundra went completely dead again around her, offering nothing but falling snow and the ragged, heavy drag of her own breathing.

Her adrenaline finally burned out, and she turned around to locate the cabin.

She saw no cabin. No lit window, no distant yellow light painting the snow, no angled roofline cutting the night sky. Only the churned battlefield she’d wrecked and the absolute null-space beyond remained, stretching flat and pitch-black in every direction. Every sequential gate had lured her one step further out into the frozen wasteland.

She had followed the Gates. She had refused to count her steps.