The next afternoon,
Jayden returned to the forest. He found the Ghost-Lynx in the same general area of the forest as the day before. Not because it had stayed put. Because the trail of drained beast corpses had continued. It had moved through the night, feeding, and he'd tracked it through the pattern of its kills the same way he'd found it the first time… following the absence of crystals through the tree line until the absence resolved into a direction.
The lynx was moving when he caught up to it. Hunting, not resting. Its paws cleared the ground by a centimeter and its fur shifted through its static cycle in slow, continuous waves. It passed through a stand of undergrowth without slowing, the branches registering nothing on the other side of where it had passed.
