Extraction: Infinite Hunger

The arm came down from the right side, angled across his damaged side, the exact spot that would drive the full calcified weight through the rib he’d guarded since the Boreal fight and hadn’t said aloud to anyone.

The arm came down. Dane had catalogued every injury Ash ever tried to hide. His rib, especially, and the human half had given that information to the Hollow without a fight.

Ash’s eyes dropped to the frozen blood in the snow beside him, his own from the cut the bone-hand had opened. It had pooled in a long dark crescent against the permafrost and frozen there, fractured and flat, catching dull pieces of the colorless sky.

The arm kept coming.

He stopped looking for Dane.

One breath.

Dane had become two systems wearing a single body. The two sides warred against each other. The human side wanted to kill Ash now. The other wanted to make it clean and painless. They never agreed on the same thing.

Ash’s palm slammed into the frozen crust. The downward impact cracked the permafrost. The dark red crescent beneath the ice liquefied and surged upward into his grip. It condensed against his forearm into a jagged spine of concentrated hemoglobin. The edge crystallized into a razor-thin pane of dark glass, the pressurized iron within it burning like a dying star. It hissed aggressively as it drew heat from his skin and left a trailing ribbon of superheated crimson vapor the moment the wind struck the flat.

The calcified fist cratered the snow exactly where his skull had been.

It was already gone.

Ash moved through the debris: the roll, the knee, the heel driving hard into packed ice. The cracked rib turned his right side to blinding static as he forced his legs under him. The crimson blade came up with him.

The Half-Hollow saw the miss in one fluid motion. It planted the calcified heel, rotated, and drew the remaining arm back along the exact line it had done so already.

Forward into Ash’s ribs.

Ash stepped directly into the strike. The calcified forearm caught him squarely across the lower ribs. The existing fracture buckled inward with the wet sound of bone sinking directly into muscle. Absolute cold flooded the pleural cavity. His respiration stopped dead, choking on the sudden metallic copper flooding the back of his throat.

He refused to break the rotation. His body passed completely through the impact, hijacking the momentum instead of fighting it. The crimson glass arced upward and forward, carrying the full weight the step had loaded into the blade.

The rising diagonal arc hit the dangling, ruined arm perfectly at the shoulder. The arterial glass sheared through the joint. The calcified plating detonated into white shards, and the underlying gray muscle tore apart. The arm sloughed away and dropped into the deep snow like a felled tree trunk. Stripped of the left limb’s counterweight, the Half-Hollow’s massive torso twisted to the right, the exposed collarbone grinding against its housing with a rattle.

The Half-Hollow compensated. It drove off the listing right side, utilizing the tilt as momentum, the remaining shoulder dropping into a forward crash aimed strictly to put him back on the ice.

Ash did not let it finish. He whipped the crimson glass into a full horizontal arc while he kept his feet moving, converting the rising strike’s momentum into a sweeping lateral spin that carried him around the outside of the creature’s guard. The Half-Hollow’s remaining calcified hand slashed through the arc. Ash dropped directly beneath the pass, the blow missing the side of his head by the width of a tilted shoulder.

He came out the other side still rotating, every single step a pivot.

The human eye snapped to him. The filmed one lagged, dragging the neck a quarter-second behind.

He let the Half-Hollow’s own tracking pull it a half-step too far and stepped into the gap it left behind. He found the blind position.

He ran inside the remaining guard, the edge caught the calcified forearm at the elbow. The joint shattered. White shards of calcified bone sprayed sideways across the churned snow. The lower arm dropped into the frost trailing a wet rope of grey tissue. The elbow’s loss drove the Half-Hollow’s forward momentum past the position it had been aiming for. The remaining shoulder drove through the space where Ash had been standing and met nothing.

The Half-Hollow’s own weight carried it one step past the fragment’s intended line and kept going; Ash moved with it. He stepped behind the creature and dragged the glass wedge through the lower lumbar. The blade chewed through the calcified shell and snapped the vertebrae with a clear metallic crack. The torso disconnected from the pelvis. The top half slipped off its spinal alignment and dumped raw nerve and grey fluid into the churned snow.

Ash dropped low beneath the falling mass. The disconnected torso swung past his head and struck the snow three feet ahead, spreading dark fluid across the permafrost in a rapidly expanding stain. He pushed up inside the collapse, his knee biting into the permafrost, the blade already angling from below.

Ash reversed direction. He planted his heel deep into the permafrost and unleashed the accumulated force into one vertical arc. The superheated glass sheared upward like a rising red moon. It entered beneath the jaw. It vaporized the larynx. It punched through the roof of the mouth and erupted out the crown of the skull, leaving a perfectly suspended ring of crimson vapor in the freezing air.

The face split down the middle. The necrotic eye and Dane’s human eye separated as the skull collapsed outward, a mangled ruin of cold grease and bone marrow, carried apart from each other into a red slush.

The man and the tool Locke had made collapsed into the same pile of wet meat.

The vastly heavier necrotic half struck the frost first and shattered on impact, the bone meal spreading outward in a low gray fan. What remained of the body crashed down heavily on top of it: the disconnected torso, the scattered calcified plating, each layer arriving a half-second behind the last.

The dark hood dropped into the ruin of the bisected skull, the heavy fabric soaking immediately into the black slush freezing rapidly on the permafrost.

The adrenaline left Ash all at once, taking the vibrant heat of the glass with it. His fractured ribs folded around the break, and absolute cold flooded into the gap. He locked his knees together and breathed through the agony in controlled, shallow halves until the horizon held its shape.

The superheated glass degraded back to wet blood, and the wet blood went immediately cold and sticky across his palm.

He stared down at the empty hood. Two staggered steps later, he left the execution behind him. The freezing air found the deep, open laceration under his arm, his bloody hand rising to compress the wound without him consciously looking down.

The low, mechanical scrape of the northern wind returned to his ears. The heavy, nauseating smell of copper coated the back of his throat, his own spilled blood hitting the frost in a steady, rhythmic drop.

An impact displaced the ambient silence across the dead white. A physical shockwave came first, low and intensely solid. Following immediately behind it came the high-pitch tear of a Gate ripping open, collapsing, and tearing wide again.

Sheila and Locke had only just begun their fight.