The sound left first.

  The forest stopping, the birds gone silent, the stream suddenly audible because everything louder had ceased to make a noise. The silence was the signal.

  I felt it before I saw it. A qi-disturbance as a heavy, compressed signature emerged from the undergrowth thirty meters east and moving fast. A predator that had decided to attack.

  A rock lynx.

  It came out of the undergrowth — grey-brown fur over muscle denser and wider than normal animals should have. A qi-enhanced beast whose enhancement had been progressing for years in the wild, unguided, organic. The natural consequence of a qi-rich environment absorbed and compounded over time.

  It was wolf-height but broader. Seventy kilos of predatory mass moving at a speed normal cats didn't reach. Qi-lines ran through its fur like veins of light — pale blue, pulsing, combat readiness made visible. The canines extended past what anatomy suggested, revised by qi into something longer and sharper.

  Its eyes were intelligent, not human-intelligent but carrying the intelligence of a territorial predator that had been challenged. Wei had been here for three weeks. Training, moving, broadcasting qi into a space that this animal considered its own. For three weeks, the lynx had been registering the intrusion. Evaluating. Deciding.

  It had decided.

  Wei's eyes opened.

  The shift was instant — from training-trance to combat awareness, the switch that happened between one heartbeat and the next. His body knew before his mind did. The mind was catching up fast, because fast was what he was.

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  "Something's here," he breathed.

  He'd been training unarmed — the forms that didn't require steel, the hand-to-hand vocabulary that was the foundation beneath the blade work. The sword he made with Lao Chen was at home, leaning against the wall beside his bed, being ornamental.

  The lynx charged. Direct. No circling, no assessment, no territorial posturing. It was sure it would win — its directness told me that. Animals that circled were uncertain. Animals that charged were confident.

  Wei set his stance low, qi flowing into his hands — raw channeling. This combat demanded raw power, because refinement took time and time was a luxury he did not have with the lynx closing at eleven meters per second.

  His hands glowed with the gold-white luminescence of qi directed through flesh. As if they were saying "We have power. It is available. Now."

  "I can do this!"

  The words — to himself, not to me. Reaching for confidence and finding it. Genuine confidence, earned through months of training and survival.

  The lynx closed to ten meters. Eight.

  "Come on," Wei said. Quieter now. The bravado burned off, leaving something harder underneath. Something that didn't need volume. "Come on, come on—"

  I dropped from the branch.

  The descent was controlled and silent, the three-meter fall converted to a landing that made no sound. I stood at the clearing's edge, eight meters from Wei. Close enough.

  My hands were ready, my qi suppressed but present — the coiled spring, the drawn bow, the metaphor that applied to potential energy held just beneath the threshold of release. I could intervene. I could cross eight meters in a fraction of a second. I could unmake this animal with a thought.

  I could, but not right now. I wanted to see first, how Wei handled this. I wanted to see if he could do it. I wanted to see if he would do it.

  "Hold your ground," I said. Quiet. Not a shout — a statement, delivered at conversational volume across eight meters of charged air. Shouting would make him flinch and flinching was death.

  Wei didn't turn. Good. But his spine straightened — the fractional adjustment of someone who had just learned they were not alone.

  The lynx reached Wei.