Chapter 124: The Magnificent Battle

The Hollow Boar was, up close, significantly larger than the stories suggested.

This was unfair. Stories were supposed to prepare you. Stories were supposed to give you a reasonable estimate of tusk length and general attitude so that when you met the subject of said stories in a dark forest at night, you were not standing there with your three tails puffed to four times their normal size doing absolutely nothing useful.

“Hello,” he said.

The Hollow Boar did not say hello back. It breathed. The breath hit Zhāo Yàn in the face like a warm, terrible wall and smelled like something had died inside the boar.

Okay, Zhāo Yàn thought. Okay. You are a fox of exceptional cultivation. You have three tails. You are not afraid of a pig.

He was extremely afraid of the pig.

You are not afraid, he corrected firmly. You are simply…..gathering information. Tactically. Like a general surveys a battlefield before committing his forces.

The Hollow Boar snorted.

One of Zhāo Yàn’s tails made a small, involuntary sound against the underbrush. He would later deny this.

Attack, said some part of his brain. The stupid part.

Run, said the considerably smarter part.

Zhāo Yàn had not gotten three tails by listening to the smart part.

“I,” he announced, to the boar, to the forest, to whatever ancestors were currently watching this with their faces in their hands, “am Zhāo Yàn of the Eastern Hills. Son of Gū Gū. Fox of exceptional cultivation.” He reached into his small traveling pack. “And I am going to defeat you.”

He pulled out the weapon he had brought.

It was a stick.

Not even a good stick. It was the stick he had grabbed from outside the window in the dark, approximately the length of his arm and the diameter of his thumb, with two small leaves still attached at the end that fluttered in the night breeze.

The Hollow Boar charged.

What happened next would, in later years, become a story that Zhāo Yàn told at meals with great enthusiasm and significant creative embellishment.

In his version, there was a heroic leap, a series of perfectly executed evasions, and at least one moment where he stood on the boar’s back and pointed dramatically at the moon.

What actually happened was this:

He ran.

His three tails streamed behind him. His ears were flat against his head. His small traveling pack bounced violently against his back, and the stick was still in his hand because he had forgotten to drop it and now there was no time.

The Hollow Boar was faster.

He dodged left. The boar adjusted.

He dodged right. The boar adjusted.

He tried to climb a tree. He got three feet up and his traveling pack caught on a branch and swung him back down like a very small, very unfortunate pendulum.

He hit the ground running, which was at least something, and put on a fresh burst of speed that he was fairly certain he had not previously known he possessed.

Behind him, the Hollow Boar was making a grunting sound.

As if his luck couldn’t get any worse, the poor fox kit tripped.

The root came from nowhere. His foot caught it perfectly and he went down.

He tucked. Rolled. Came up facing the wrong direction.

The Hollow Boar was right there.

He could see his own reflection in its small, mean eyes. He could see, with the crystalline clarity of someone whose brain had briefly left his body, that the boar was about to do something that was going to hurt very much.

Zhāo Yàn raised his stick.

The boar’s snout connected with his entire body.

It was not a tusk. It was not even particularly aggressive, as the Hollow Boar’s attacks went. It was, in the grand ledger of the Hollow Boar’s violence, barely worth mentioning.

It sent Zhāo Yàn approximately eight feet through the air.

He had a moment, at the peak of his arc, where everything was very quiet and the thin moon was visible through the leaves and the forest looked, from up here, quite beautiful actually.

Then he came down.

Thwump.

He landed in a bush.

The bush was soft. This was the only good thing that had happened in the last four minutes.

He lay there, staring up through the branches at the moon.

Every part of his body had an opinion about what had just happened.

His three tails, squashed beneath him, also had opinions.

Somewhere beyond the bush, the Hollow Boar snorted. Once. The undergrowth rustled. The heavy footsteps moved away, growing fainter, fainter, until the forest was quiet again and there was nothing left but the sound of Zhāo Yàn breathing and the thin moon looking down at him.

He stared at the sky for a long time.

His traveling pack was somewhere. His stick was somewhere else. One of his ears was folded at an angle that was going to be embarrassing when it unfolded.

Very slowly, with great dignity, Zhāo Yàn sat up.

His three tails unstuck themselves from the mud with a sound he was never going to speak of.

He found his traveling pack. He found his stick. He held the stick up and looked at it, at the two small leaves still attached, trembling slightly in the night air.

“Fine,” he said, to the forest, to the moon, to the retreating sound of the Hollow Boar disappearing into the dark. “Fine. That was a preliminary engagement.” He straightened his ears. “I was gathering information.”

The forest did not respond.

“I know things now,” he continued. “Important things. About its speed. Its attack pattern. Its general disposition.”

A night bird called somewhere above him. It sounded skeptical.

“Next time,” Zhāo Yàn informed it, and himself, and possibly his ancestors, “will be different.”

He stood up.

He had one tail stuck in the bush. He extracted it with as much grace as the situation allowed, which was not very much.

He began the walk home.

He was going to have to climb back through the window. He was going to have to clean the mud off before morning. He was going to have to reconstruct, from memory, what a cub who had spent the night sleeping peacefully in his bed looked like, and replicate it convincingly enough to survive breakfast.

He was also going to have to figure out why, exactly, a supposedly retreating boar had stopped.

He could still hear it. Faint now, far away.

But not moving.

Zhāo Yàn’s ears came forward. His tails, still slightly muddy, went still.

The sound wasn’t moving away anymore.

It was coming back.

The undergrowth exploded.

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