The hedgerow tore wide. Branches pinwheeled into the beans, and the thing behind them walked through as if it had never met the idea of resistance. Hooves sank and lifted, sank and lifted, printing commas into the soil. Its shoulders were a moving wall; its bristles stood like iron filings charmed by a magnet hidden under the world.
Evan did not move. "Set," he told the Mech Goblin. To the sprite, quiet: "Hold that hum."
The boar swung its head, not frantic—curious the way a hammer might be curious about a nail.
He let Inspect bloom.
[INSPECT][TARGET: BOAR BRUTE (LV5)][HP: High | Damage: High | Traits: Thick Hide, Charge, Gore][ADVICE: Absorb first line. Disrupt momentum. Attack rear tendon during recovery.] [CHECK: exact boss name/traits]
Borderline. His scan cut off at five; if it had been six, he would have been reading only the shape and his own nerves.
"Anchor," he said. "I'll give you the angle."
The Mech Goblin lowered its stance and raised the wrench into a blunt parody of a guard. Aurora's lightning gathered to a neat tightness, a storm tamed into a fist.
The brute picked them—eyes like old amber deciding whether a fly was worth the blink—and then it came. The charge wasn't speed so much as decision. Dirt jumped. The fence line rattled a warning; a post leaned a degree farther from the earth and would not be catching up soon.
"Now," Evan said.
The Goblin met it a half step early, wrench face set to glance. Metal rang; tusk skated off steel and bit into the post. The post snapped, and the boar took its own debris in the shoulder with a confused grunt that read as anger in a different grammar.
[HIT ABSORBED][STATUS: MOMENTUM REDIRECTED]
"Aurora," Evan said.
The sprite threaded a bolt through the boar's neck-meat just behind the jaw. Light crawled; muscle hiccuped; the brute's front legs stuttered over their orders.
[STATUS CHANCE: STAGGER—LOW] — [SUCCESS]
Evan bled the Pumpkin Staff's stored charge, not at the body but at the ground in front of the boar's right foreleg. The spark cracked and lingered as a distraction; the brute, irritated, stamped at the pain that wasn't there—and put weight where Evan wanted it to.
"Left pivot," he said.
The Goblin slid, wrench biting at the hinge of movement behind the shoulder. The blow didn't break anything; it told a story. The boar turned, committing mass the wrong way. Aurora's second bolt wrote a blue line along a tendon, thin as a seamstress's insult.
The brute lost half a stride. Half a stride was the size of a life.
It recovered out of sheer principle and came again. Evan didn't give it a clean lane this time. He cut across two rows, boots filling with dirt, staff kept low to avoid catching plants. The fence to his left canted in; he put his shoulder into it and felt it give that inch a man hopes his own bones will never give.
"Mech—post!" He wanted geometry.
The Goblin took the cue and set itself at the leaning timber like a second post with opinions. The boar read the two verticals as a gate just wide enough for arrogance. It charged through; the wrench met the skull ridge at a shallow angle; tusk kissed wood; the post made a sound like a tooth choosing to stay in.
Aurora's bolt hit the brute's right eye ridge and popped. Not a blinding—just a stun where the world hiccups.
[HIT][STATUS: BRIEF DAZE]
"Bite the leg," Evan said, already moving.
He skated to the brute's outside rear, staff lifted. The Pumpkin orb pulsed, humming at the pitch of a held breath. He didn't swing. He touched the tip to the tendon under the hide as Aurora's third bolt landed.
Two small harms can be a big argument.
The leg buckled a quarter and then a half. The brute tried to carry its weight on a plan that no longer existed. The fencepost finally broke with a crack like a spent thunderclap; the top half toppled across the boar's back. Its own charge did the rest, shoving it low and wrong.
"Drive," Evan said.
The Goblin went to work, wrench jabbing—short, mean, relentless. Evan kept the staff discharging in stings to keep the cadence broken. Aurora's lightning threaded only when it could make pain into lost balance rather than smoke into lost crop.
The brute refused to believe the new story and wrote its own, which is to say it thrashed. The world filled with dirt and green and a smell like blood's angrier cousin. A tusk went past Evan's knee close enough to draft cold. He didn't leave his feet. He did not give momentum a clean thing to eat.
The goblin took a hit that should have folded a man. Plates dented. A lens cracked a spiderweb and kept burning.
[ALLY DAMAGED: MECH GOBLIN — INTEGRITY 72%] [CHECK: if integrity tracked numerically]
"Hold," Evan said, throat tight and voice level. "You're winning."
He let the boar choose a new direction and then took that direction away. When it tried to turn right, he stepped into that future and made it a past. When it fell forward, the Goblin convinced it that "down" was a hill that kept going. Aurora stitched the moments together with pain in clever places.
The window opened like windows do in games—slowly, and then obvious all at once. The brute's head dropped and stayed. Its rear leg kicked in a way that belonged to reflex more than plan. Evan read the shape of the next two seconds and decided they were not the boar's.
"Finish," he said.
The Goblin's wrench came down in a sharp arc at the hinge of skull and spine. It wasn't a cinematic blow. It was a mechanic finishing a problem. The brute sagged; Evan poured the last of his staff's charge right where the brain's arguments take a hallway to the heart.
The body made one more offended shrug and quit.
[ENEMY DOWN: BOAR BRUTE (LV5)][LOOT GENERATED]
For half a breath, the field held its sound—the buzz of small lives, the thin clink of something metal deciding to be still. Evan waited for the other shoe: another charge, a scream, a shout from the lane. Instead a flag blinked at the edge of his sight like a coin thinking about being tossed.
[HUNDREDFOLD: CONTEXT FLAGGED][POTENTIAL AMPLIFICATION: MATERIAL QUALITY] [CHECK: qualitative upgrade vs. quantity]
"Show me," he said softly.
The UI obliged in its elegant, indifferent way.
[YOU OBTAIN: BRUTE HIDE (HIGH-GRADE) ×1][YOU OBTAIN: BRUTE TUSK ×2][COINS: +?][REPUTATION: +? (Novice Village)] [CHECK: numbers pending]
He set to work, knife flicking along the system's highlighted seams. The hide came away harder than the smaller boars—denser, less willing to be elsewhere. He didn't mind the fight in it. He minded time.
"Eyes up," he told Aurora. To the Goblin: "Guard."
The sprite floated a little higher, lightning guttering down to a line along their forearms. The Goblin planted its feet over the brute's head like a statue with the power to change its mind.
The harvest finished, inventory thunking with the authority of weight.
[QUEST PROGRESS: HIDES (3/??)] [CHECK: if brute counts differently]
The breeze shifted. Leaves traded whispers with the soil. Something moved in the treeline, but that was not a surprise—the forest always moved when you looked at it. What mattered was how this movement sounded: not many small somethings, not one big thing, but the permission of the place rewriting itself because a piece had been removed.
He straightened. The brute's tusks looked like promises no one should have made.
"Hold," he said again, because repeating orders can turn a hope into a plan.
The hedgerow where the brute had broken through sagged now, an ugly doorway torn in plants. Beyond it, the forest held a darker kind of afternoon. Evan traced the line of the break with his gaze and found a patch of shadow that did not look like the rest. It moved when the wind did not.
Inspect offered itself like a nervous friend.
[INSPECT]
The panel snapped up and then refused, polite as a bureaucrat.
[SCAN FAILED: TARGET LEVEL EXCEEDS CURRENT THRESHOLD][SUGGESTION: Retreat or prepare additional control.]
He felt the smallest muscle in his cheek try to consider a smile and correctly decide no. "Noted."
In the torn doorway, something outlined itself—taller than the brute by a head, or maybe that was the way the light bent around it. The shape breathed like a forge. A hoof dug at the soil once and left a hole that filled slowly, as if the earth had changed its mind about being whole.
"Mech," Evan said, low. "New line. Two paces back from the break."
The Goblin shuffled into place. Aurora drifted to his shoulder, lightning narrowing to a scalpel.
The shape did not come. It looked at him—or he felt looked at—and then the brush shook with something that could have been a laugh if plants knew jokes. The dark pulled back a fraction, then another.
"Patience," he said to himself, because the enemy had just taught him the word.
He checked the Goblin's cracked lens and filed it into a pocket in his attention. He rolled his shoulders to mark the staff on his palms again. He kept his feet in the furrow not because it was strong but because it told him what direction was.
A leaf fell and landed wrong—the slow float that belongs to a late season even when the calendar disagrees. Evan watched it spin and thought about what the game means when it opens a door and then doesn't shove you through it.
The shadow took one step forward. The air around his teeth tasted like metal.
He did not move. He watched the breath before the world decides which of two stories it wants to tell.