I was between the boar and the boy before either of them understood what had happened.

  There was no crossing of distance. No rush of air, no blur of motion. I had been standing by the tree line and then I was here — close enough to see the individual bristles on the boar's snout, each one thick as a needle, each one vibrating with the qi that kept this animal alive.

  I raised my hand, pointing it straight to the charging beast - and then I flicked my index finger between its eyes.

  It came apart.

  It simply stopped holding together, the way a sandcastle stops holding together when the tide comes in. Bristles, bone, muscle, qi — all of it unraveled at once, each component drifting away from every other as if they had never been properly introduced. The beast's eyes were the last to go. They held their shape for half a heartbeat longer than the rest, still locked on me, still furious. Then they were dust too.

  The dust hung in the air. Fine particles, catching the morning light, turning it amber. The kind of light that belonged in temples, not in clearings where things had just died. It settled slowly — on the leaves, on the moss, on the boy's hair — carrying the faint metallic scent of dispersed qi. Ozone and underneath it, something earthier. The smell of a living thing that had stopped being a living thing so quickly it hadn't had time to rot.

  No birds sang.

  No insects hummed.

  The forest held its breath, the way forests do when something happens that they have no category for. The silence wasn't empty — it had weight. It pressed against my ears like water.

  I counted the heartbeats. Ten. Twelve. On the fourteenth, a finch started up again from somewhere to the east. Tentative. Testing whether the world was still the world.

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  Behind me, the boy breathed.

  I turned around.

  He was still on the ground. His back against the boulder, legs splayed, one ankle purple and swollen. His mouth was open. His hands were at his sides, palms flat against the dirt, fingers curled into the earth as if the ground might decide to throw him off. The rock he'd been holding — the second one, the one he'd picked up to throw — had fallen from his fingers. It sat in his lap, grey and ordinary.

  He stared at me.

  Not with fear. That would have made sense. Not with gratitude — that would come later, or not at all. What sat in his eyes was something closer to confusion. The expression of someone who had been told one thing about how the world worked and was now watching that information become irrelevant.

  His nose was still bleeding. The thin red line had reached his chin.

  I looked at him. He looked at me. The dust settled between us, slow as snow.

  I thought about saying something. Discarded the thought. You're welcome was too generous. Be more careful was too parental. Those mushrooms would have killed whoever you brought them to faster than the boar would have killed you was accurate but unhelpful. There was a fourth option — just standing there, saying nothing, the way I'd been doing for centuries. That one came easiest. It always had.

  Instead, I looked at the space where the beast had been. A patch of bare earth, slightly warm. In a few hours, the grass would grow back. In a few days, the warmth would fade. In a few weeks, nothing would mark this spot as anything other than forest floor.

  I had seen that happen so many times that it should have stopped meaning anything. It had, mostly. But there was still a part of me — small, quiet, the part that remembered gardens — that noticed when warmth faded from a place.

  The boy moved. Slow, careful — reaching down to free his swollen ankle from where it was wedged against a root. He winced. Sucked air through his teeth. Got his foot loose. Then he stood, or tried to — his ankle buckled and he caught himself against the boulder. He tried again. This time he stayed upright, weight on his good foot, one hand braced against the stone.

  He brushed dirt off his pants. A small, absurd gesture — straightening his clothes after watching a spirit beast turn to powder two meters from his face. As if tidiness mattered. As if anything about his appearance was relevant.

  He looked at me again.

  I looked back.

  He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

  I turned around and walked away.

  The last thing I killed had been larger. And more pointless.