Yuki had been thinking about the math test.
That was the stupid, mundane truth of it. He'd been walking home from school, bag over one shoulder, earbuds in, mentally replaying the quadratic formula because he was pretty sure he'd bombed question fourteen — when the ground disappeared.
Not metaphorically. The sidewalk, the street, the vending machine on the corner, the old lady walking her dog — all of it just went away, replaced by a flash of white light and a sensation like being grabbed by the ribs and pulled through a straw.
Then wind. More wind than he'd ever felt in his life, roaring in his ears, ripping at his school uniform, and he was tumbling through open air beneath a sky that was way too blue.
He screamed. It didn't help.
Below him — far below but getting closer by the second — was a forest. Not a park. Not a nature reserve. A forest, stretching to every horizon like a green ocean, ancient and dense and endless.
I'm going to die.
The thought was calm and factual. He was a seventeen-year-old kid in a school uniform falling from what looked like a few thousand metres with nothing beneath him but trees. There was no parachute. No conveniently placed lake. Just wood and leaves and gravity doing what gravity does.
The canopy rushed up.
He crossed his arms over his face and his body punched through the first layer of branches like a sack of concrete. A limb hit his ribs and spun him. Another caught his leg and snapped off. Leaves and bark exploded around him. He was a pinball in a machine made of wood, bouncing off surfaces he couldn't see, each impact slowing him a little and hurting a lot.
Something popped against his chest. Cold and wet, like a water balloon. Then another against his back. A third burst across his face and got in his mouth — tasteless gel, thick, almost gelatinous. He wiped his eyes mid-tumble and caught a split-second glimpse of translucent blob-like things clinging to the branches around him. They were everywhere — dozens of them, wobbling, glowing faintly.
He didn't have time to think about what they were. He was falling through them like a bowling ball through jelly, each one bursting on contact and coating him in slime.
Then the ground arrived.
He hit it back-first. The impact cratered the forest floor and drove every molecule of air out of his lungs. His vision whited out. For a long moment there was just ringing silence and the distant awareness that he was lying in a shallow depression surrounded by broken branches and translucent goo.
I'm alive.
That didn't make sense. A fall like that — even with the branches breaking it — should have shattered every bone in his body. He should be a bag of pulp in a school uniform. But when he tried moving his fingers, they moved. When he tried breathing, air came in. Everything hurt in a distant, muffled way, but nothing felt broken.
He lay there and stared up at the hole he'd punched through the canopy. Sunlight streamed down. Leaves drifted.
Then the warmth started.
It began in his chest — a slow heat building behind his sternum. It spread into his arms, his gut, his skull. The slime coating his skin was sinking in. He watched it happen on his forearm — the translucent gel absorbing into his skin like water into a sponge. Wherever it went, the heat followed.
His heartbeat spiked. The warmth became a burn. Something inside him was filling up — rapidly, violently — and it had no intention of stopping.
A pulse of energy rolled through him. Every muscle in his body locked. He gasped, tried to sit up, made it halfway, and collapsed.
The forest around him started dying.
He was too far gone to notice. His vision was blurring, consciousness slipping. But it was happening — the grass beneath him browning and crumbling. The nearest tree shedding its leaves in a single exhale, its bark greying, its trunk going hollow. Insects dropping from the air. A horned lizard thirty metres away stumbling, falling, going still.
An invisible tide was rolling outward from Yuki's body, pulling life and energy from everything it touched. Trees that had stood for centuries turned to grey husks in seconds. Creatures died mid-stride. The soil went pale and powdery.
One kilometre. Two. Three.
By the time it stopped, the devastation was a perfect circle. Kilometres of dead forest in every direction, and a seventeen-year-old kid lying unconscious in the exact centre, still wearing half a school uniform and covered in slime residue.
His chest rose and fell. The only living thing left.
He came back slowly.
First: the stars. Unfamiliar constellations in a too-dark sky. No light pollution. No city glow on the horizon. Just stars — dense, vivid, impossibly many.
Second: the pressure. A knot of energy packed behind his ribs so dense and hot it felt like he'd swallowed a live coal the size of a fist. It throbbed with every heartbeat. His whole torso felt swollen with it — stuffed, like he'd eaten three times past full and then someone had kept shovelling more in.
Third: the silence.
No insects. No birds. No wind through leaves. Nothing.
Yuki sat up. The motion made the pressure in his chest slosh like liquid, and he almost threw up. He braced his hands on the ground — which was powder, not soil — and waited for his head to stop spinning.
He looked around.
Everything was dead.
Not some things. Everything. Grey trees standing like bones. Grey dust where grass should have been. Withered shapes on the ground that might have been animals once. The moonlight made it look like a photograph with the colour drained out. A wasteland, perfect and circular, stretching to every edge of his vision.
He stood up. Turned in a full circle. The same in every direction.
I did this.
He knew it the way you know you've been asleep — not because someone told you, but because the gap in your memory has a specific shape. He remembered the heat. The pulling sensation. The feeling of being filled past capacity. Whatever had poured into him from those slime creatures had started a chain reaction, and his body had kept draining the world while he was out.
The pressure in his chest pulsed. Still there. Still massive.
He looked down at himself. His school uniform was shredded — the jacket was gone, his shirt was ripped open, his pants were torn at both knees. One shoe was missing. He was coated in a fine layer of grey dust.
But he wasn't hurt. Not a scratch. Not a bruise. Not even sore, which was absurd given that he'd fallen out of the sky and hit the ground hard enough to make a crater.
The air was warm. Too warm. The heat radiating from his own chest was cooking him from the inside, and the mild night air felt like a sauna. He lifted his hand and fanned his face — a reflex, thoughtless.
Wind exploded from his palm.
It ripped outward in a focused blast, scattering dust in a plume, snapping branches off dead trees, toppling a withered trunk twenty metres away. The sound was like a thunderclap.
Yuki flinched so hard he fell over.
He sat in the dust, heart hammering, staring at his hand. The pressure in his chest had dipped. Just slightly. Like he'd released a tiny amount of whatever was packed inside him.
He raised his hand again. Carefully this time. He thought about a breeze — gentle, light — and flexed something he didn't have a name for.
Air moved. A soft current pushed outward from his fingers. Exactly as strong as he'd imagined.
Again. Stronger. Weaker. Angled left. Each time, the air did what he pictured before he finished the thought.
He picked up a rock — a sharp one, the size of his thumb — and dragged it across his forearm.
Nothing. Not a mark. The rock chipped.
He stared at the chip. At his arm. At the kilometres of grey death around him.
This is another world. I have magic. And I killed a forest in my sleep.
He was seventeen. He had a math test he'd never hand in. And he was sitting in the middle of a wasteland he'd created, in a world he didn't know, with a chest full of power he didn't understand.
Don't panic. Don't rush. Think.
If there were people in this world — and someone had clearly pulled him here, so yes, there were people — then stumbling out of a dead zone with no control over his abilities was a terrible plan. He didn't speak the language. Didn't know the customs. Didn't know if the people who'd summoned him were friendly or not.
And he definitely couldn't guarantee he wouldn't accidentally drain a town the way he'd drained this forest.
He needed to stay here. Practice. Learn what he could do and — more importantly — learn how to not do it.
Yuki sat cross-legged in the dust. He held out his palm and tried to form a ball of compressed air above it. It wobbled. Fell apart. He tried again. It held for two seconds, then popped.
Third time. It stabilised — a shaky, imperfect sphere of spinning air hovering above his hand.
A grin spread across his face. Small. A little manic.
Okay. Let's figure this out.