The boar's tusks caught the light as its head came up — aimed where the boy's chest had been half a breath ago.

  The boy threw himself sideways. Every muscle firing on something deeper than thought — the body making its last case. The tusks scraped the earth where his chest had been, gouging twin furrows in the dirt. The boar's momentum carried it forward, its shoulder clipping the root that held the boy's ankle and the root snapped. The boy rolled free. Scrambled. Got his hands and knees under him and crawled, because standing took time he didn't have.

  The boar turned. It was not elegant — spirit beasts at this tier never were. It plowed through its own turn like a ship coming about, hooves churning the ground, hindquarters swinging wide and smashing through a sapling that had taken thirty years to grow. The sapling went over without a sound, its root system too shallow to resist.

  The boy made it to his feet. He was limping — the ankle that had been caught was already swelling, the skin flushed red even through the dirt. He backed up, hands out in front of him as if his palms could stop a thousand pounds of qi-hardened muscle. His eyes were locked on the beast. His chest heaved.

  "Please."

  That one was quieter. Not to me — to anything. The sky, the trees, whatever power a child believed in when the world narrowed down to teeth and weight and speed.

  The boar pawed the ground. Its breath came in thick snorts that misted in the morning air — warmer than it should have been, heated by the qi burning through its body. Its eyes found the boy again. Locked on.

  I watched.

  I know how that sounds. Believe me — it sounds worse from the inside.

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  It charged.

  This time, there was no room to dodge. The boy was backed against a boulder — moss-covered, twice his height, immovable. He pressed himself flat against the stone. His fingers clawed at the rock behind him, looking for a handhold, a crack, anything. There was nothing. The boulder was smooth where it mattered, worn by centuries of rain and root pressure.

  The boar closed the distance in two strides.

  The boy did something unexpected. He stopped trying to climb. Stopped trying to run. He turned around, faced the beast and picked up a rock from the ground — a small one, barely the size of his fist, still crusted with dirt.

  He threw it.

  It hit the boar on the snout, right between the nostrils. The sound was a dull thok — stone against cartilage. The boar flinched. Not from pain — from surprise. Spirit beasts at this tier barely registered physical impacts from anything below a cultivator's strike. But the flinch bought a heartbeat. Maybe two.

  The boy looked at me.

  Not screaming this time. Past screaming. His face was streaked with dirt and tears and snot and his hands were shaking so badly that the second rock he'd picked up rattled against his palm.

  "Are you just going to watch?!"

  His voice cracked on the last word.

  The boar recovered. Shook its head. Snorted — and this time, the snort carried a pulse of qi that flattened the grass in a circle around its hooves. The air thickened. A pressure settled over the clearing like a hand pressing down on a drum.

  The boy staggered. His knees buckled — not from fear, but from the qi pressure. He didn't have the cultivation to resist even a tier-two beast's passive aura. His nose began to bleed. A thin red line from his left nostril, tracking down to his lip.

  He wiped it on his sleeve. Didn't look away from the beast.

  "I'm going to die," he said and the words came out too flat to be brave. "And you're going to—" He swallowed. "You're going to watch."

  The boar lowered its head.

  I looked at the boy. At the blood on his lip. At the rock in his shaking hand. At the ankle that was already turning purple. At the basket, overturned twenty paces behind the beast, its cargo of poisonous mushrooms scattered across the dirt.

  He was going to die collecting the wrong mushrooms for someone waiting at home. A small death for a large reason, in a forest that would forget him by morning.

  The boar charged.

  I moved.