The boy was on his knees in the dirt, digging.

  I watched from behind an oak — not hiding, just standing where I happened to be. The tree was wide enough that I didn't need to try. Thirty paces between us, give or take. He had his side to me, shoulders hunched, fingers working at something in the soil. A basket sat beside him, half-full of roots and mushrooms and the kind of leafy bundles that village herbalists wrapped their guesses in.

  He was small. Twelve, maybe, though hunger and hard work had a way of shaving years off how a child looked. Thin arms, knobby wrists, clothes that had been mended so many times the patches had patches. His hair was tied back with a strip of cloth that might once have been a sleeve. Bare feet, callused — not the barefoot of someone who chose it, like me, but the barefoot of someone who couldn't afford the alternative.

  The mushrooms in his basket were wrong.

  I could see them from here — pale caps with a faint blush of pink along the edge. Blushing Cap lookalikes. The real ones had white gills; these had cream-colored gills with a yellow tinge at the base. Close enough to fool a child. Close enough to kill a man with a weak liver.

  I noted it and said nothing. I could have said something. In retrospect, the number of things I could have done differently that morning would fill a book — and you'd know, you're the one writing them down.

  The boy looked up as if frightened, but relaxed and pried a root from the ground, held it up, squinted at it. Nodded to himself and dropped it into the basket. His concentration was absolute — total, unself-conscious, the way only a child's could be. Nothing existed beyond the patch of earth in front of him.

  "This one's good," he muttered. He held the root up to the light filtering through the canopy, squinting at it like a jeweler with a questionable gem. "Yeah. This one's really good."

  He was narrating his own expedition. Children did that — filled the silence with a voice because the forest was too large and their lives were too small and a voice drew the boundaries tighter. I'd forgotten how that sounded. The earnestness of it. The way someone could talk to no one and mean every word.

  "Two more," he told the basket. "Two more and we go home."

  The basket, wisely, did not argue.

  He didn't hear the boar.

  I did.

  The spirit beast came through the undergrowth like a landslide wearing skin. The trees didn't part for it — it went through them, or between them, or close enough that bark stripped from the trunks it shouldered past. The sound arrived a heartbeat before the sight: a deep, guttural snorting, the crack of branches, the heavy thud-thud-thud of something too large moving too fast.

  It was a boar. The basic shape was right — four legs, tusks, a blunt head designed for ramming. But spirit beasts wore their wrongness openly. This one was the size of a draft horse, maybe larger. Its bristles stood rigid as quills along its spine, each one thick as a finger and tipped with a dull gleam that said qi-saturated. Its eyes were wrong — too bright, the irises a sickly amber that pulsed faintly, like embers breathing. Its tusks curved upward past its snout, yellowed and scarred.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Low tier two. It had been eating well — the qi in this forest was rich enough to feed a beast for decades without plateau.

  For me, it would have been a warm-up. For anyone trained, a fight. For a mortal child alone in the forest with a basket of poisonous mushrooms and a voice that carried further than caution—

  The boy looked up.

  The root fell from his hand.

  "No—" A whisper. Just the one syllable. As if saying it could make it true.

  For one breath, everything was still. The boar, head lowered, nostrils flaring wide enough to show the pink tissue inside. The boy, on his knees, both hands flat on the dirt, mouth open, eyes going wide with the blankness that comes before the mind catches up to what the body already knows.

  Then the boar charged.

  The boy scrambled. The basket tipped — mushrooms and roots scattered across the forest floor, a few rolling into a patch of ferns. He got one foot under him, almost stood, his other heel catching on the root he'd just dug up. He fell sideways, caught himself with one hand, pushed up again. His breath came in short, high gasps — not screaming yet, just breathing too fast, the body's panicked engine running ahead of the mind.

  He ran.

  Not well. Not fast. Arms pumping, head down, feet slapping the dirt. He didn't know this part of the forest — I could tell from his path. He was heading deeper, not toward the village, because the boar was between him and the way back. The trees closed around him.

  The boar followed. It was faster. It was always going to be faster.

  I stood where I was and calculated. Habit, not intention — the kind of math that ran itself after enough repetition. The beast's speed, the boy's stride, the distance between them. The gap was closing at a rate that left him maybe four heartbeats. Three, if he tripped again.

  He tripped again.

  A root — one of the big knotted ones that laced across the forest floor like veins. His foot caught. He went down hard, face-first into the dirt, the breath knocked out of him in a sound that was half gasp, half whimper. His ankle twisted in the root's grip. He clawed at the ground, trying to pull free.

  The boar was five paces behind him. Four. Its hooves tore up the earth. Its breath was a wet rasp, audible even over the boy's panicked struggling. The bristles along its spine had flattened — it was committed now, locked into the charge, every fiber of its qi-dense body focused on the soft, small, fragile thing in front of it.

  The boy twisted around. Saw it coming. And then — past the beast, past the tusks and the amber eyes and the impossible mass of it — he saw me.

  I was standing between the trees, still as the oaks on either side of me. Arms at my sides. No weapon. No stance. Just a woman watching.

  His face changed. Not to hope — he didn't know me, had no reason for hope. Something older than hope. The look a child gives any adult when the world breaks. The look that says: you're big. Do something.

  He screamed.

  Not a word at first — just a sound, raw, tearing at his throat. Then:

  "HEY! Help me! HELP ME!"

  His voice cracked. Found a lower register. Found words that were sharper than panic.

  "Move! Why are you just standing there?"

  No please. No deference. He screamed the way drowning people screamed — with everything, leaving nothing behind for dignity.

  The boar was one pace away. Its head was lowered, tusks angled upward. The boy's ankle was still caught in the root. He couldn't move. He couldn't run. He could only scream and stare at me and wait for something to happen.

  I looked at him.

  Loud, I thought.

  The boar lunged.