Chapter 35: Lynx and Labyrinth
The Phase Lynx didn’t waste any more time with growling. One moment it was tensed up ten feet away, and the next, it vanished.
It didn’t run; it just... wasn’t there anymore. Ryan’s Hyper-Awareness screamed a warning, not with sound, but with a prickling sensation on the back of his neck.
His newly awakened Temporal Sense gave him a strange, split-second feeling of déjà vu, as if this had already happened. The air to his right shimmered.
He didn’t think, he just reacted. He threw himself to the left as the Lynx reappeared, claws extended, swiping at the exact spot where his head had just been.
It was unnervingly fast. Before he could even counter-attack, the Lynx shimmered again and was gone.
"Okay," Ryan muttered to himself, his heart pounding a little faster. "So, we’re playing hide-and-seek with a teleporting space cat. Fun."
His Neural Symbiote Map flickered, trying to keep up. It couldn’t track the Lynx when it was phased out, but it did show tiny, fading trails of energy where it had been.
The Lynx was zipping around him, a blur of silver fur and deadly claws, appearing for only a second at a time before vanishing again.
It was trying to wear him down, to land a lucky, fatal strike.
Swinging his knife wildly was useless. He’d just be swinging at empty air ninety-nine percent of the time. He needed a plan. He stood still, focusing, trying to sync up with his enhanced senses.
The Temporal Sense was the key, he realized. It wasn’t showing him the future, but it was giving him a tiny, fractional heads-up, a whisper of where the Lynx was about to be.