Jayden’s heart pounded. A creature with the ability to phase through things. The tactical problem immediately presented itself in Jayden’s mind: A beast like this would be hard, if not impossible to touch or hit.

But Jayden was never one to walk away from a challenge. He stepped out of the brush, his hands igniting.

The rational part of his mind noted clearly that he had no idea how to hit an intangible beast. But Jayden decided to figure that out through direct experience.

The Ghost-Lynx’s violet eyes snapped to him.

Jayden threw a volley of fireballs, but the beast simply shifted to static, the explosions passing harmlessly through its body and detonating on the trees behind it. Jayden rushed in, swinging his knuckle claws, but he struck nothing but cold air.

Then, the beast countered.

It had stayed completely intangible while Jayden attacked, but the millisecond Jayden’s momentum carried him off balance, the Lynx solidified its paw and struck.

Slash.

Jayden caught a heavy, physical blow to the ribs that sent him skidding across the dirt. He gasped, rolling to his feet, but the Lynx was already glitching behind him, delivering a raking strike to his back.

Jayden tried to blast it with a point-blank telekinetic wave, but the beast phased right through the shockwave, completely unaffected. He tried to calculate the timing of the beast’s phase pattern, but that failed too. The beast was incredibly fast in switching from solid to intangible, timing its tangible moments precisely for the attacks and its intangible moments precisely for the defensive gaps.

No matter what ability Jayden used, the Lynx was untouchable. He was taking a severe beating, his clothes torn and blood dripping from his chin.

Finally, a brutal swipe from the beast’s solid tail swept Jayden’s legs out from under him. He hit the forest floor hard, the wind knocked out of his lungs.

Before he could recover, the Ghost-Lynx was standing over him. Then, moving faster than Jayden’s reaction time could cover, the beast raised a static, semi-transparent paw and thrust it downward, aiming straight for Jayden’s chest.

Jayden was on the floor. He couldn’t dodge. He couldn’t block. He couldn’t evade in that moment. It was too late now.

The lynx’s paws connected with Jayden’s sternum and he felt something reach into his chest. He didn’t even feel pain. He felt something much worse. Something that bypassed it entirely and went directly to the base-level understanding of what was happening.

The lynx’s paw was inside him. Not on him. Inside him. He could feel the cold pressure of it at the edge of something that should never have been reachable.

His heart.

The beast was aiming for his heart. To crush it and kill him instantly.

Jayden’s eyes widened. His instincts screamed at him to do something. Anything. His mind raced, searching desperately for a way to survive this.

Eventually, he found one.

Just before the lynx’s paws could grasp his heart, Jayden’s body suddenly vanished.

The Ghost-Lynx’s paw closed on empty air. The beast froze, its violet eyes widening in confusion as it stared deeply at the spot where Jayden’s body had been a moment before.

Meanwhile, down in the microscopic terrain of the dirt, Jayden stood at the size of an ant. He had used size manipulation to shrink his body in time. The world became enormous and uniform and incomprehensible in every direction, the forest floor a terrain of canyons and hills, the cat above him suddenly a gigantic structure rather than a creature.

This was the second time he was using the shrinking aspect of size manipulation, and the first time using it to this extent. He normally only used the ability to grow, because for some strange, biological reason, shrinking drained his stamina at an exponential, terrifying rate. He had tried it once before, shrinking to the size of a stuffed teddy bear, and had almost passed out after holding the form for just thirty seconds. So he made a deliberate decision after that experiment to treat shrinking as a last resort. Or as an emergency measure like today. However, this comes at a significant cost to his stamina.

The Lynx sniffed the ground, utterly bewildered by its prey suddenly ceasing to exist. Finding nothing, it let out a frustrated, glitching hiss, and phased away into the dense treeline.

The second the beast was gone, Jayden expanded back to his normal size, collapsing onto his back in the dirt. He took in massive, greedy gulps of air, his lungs burning, his muscles screaming from stamina depletion.

He lay there for a long time, staring up at the canopy. He had just been utterly defeated and had nearly had his heart crushed.

But as he lay beaten in the dirt, he didn’t feel rage. He didn’t feel frustration. Instead, he felt a massive rush of adrenaline.

He felt excited.

That Ghost-Lynx was exactly what he had been looking for. Its feline genes were perfect for boosting his agility and stealth, and its Molecular Phasing ability was overpowered on a completely different level. If he had that power, he would be untouchable.

He needed to have it.

No matter what it took.

But he wasn’t going to get it today. He had almost lost his life just now, and going back in blind for a second round would be absolute foolishness. He needed to understand the mechanics of the beast’s power. He needed a countermeasure.

Jayden forced himself to stand up. He dusted the dirt off his torn clothes, wiped the blood from his face, and began heading home.

The hunt was far from over.

.......

When Jayden finally made it back home, he slipped through the back entrance and headed straight for his room. He stripped off his torn, bloodied clothes and stood under the shower, letting the water wash away the grime and the sting of his bruised ribs.

As soon as he was clean, he threw on a pair of sweatpants, walked over to his desktop, and got to work.

He accessed the underground hunter forums and beast databases, cross-referencing everything he had just witnessed. But most posts didn’t turn out useful. The Ghost-Lynx was not a well-documented creature, which tracked with what Jayden had already worked out in the field; if you couldn’t catch it, you couldn’t study it, and if you couldn’t study it, whatever reports accumulated would only be speculation and secondhand accounts.

At a point he began to wonder if anyone had ever caught or killed a Ghost-Lynx, because there was absolutely nothing online about the beast’s weakness or how to defeat it.

Jayden kept scrolling through the web anyways, hoping to eventually find something. It took an hour, but he did finally find scattered, unverified reports about the beast. It wasn’t info on how to defeat it, but rather on how its ability worked.

Apparently, the beast’s intangibility wasn’t magic; it was an extreme form of molecular vibration. The creature maintained a vibrational frequency in its molecular structure that allowed it to exist in an offset state from solid matter, passing through it without interaction

Furthermore, it didn’t just hunt for sustenance—it was drawn to high-density energy and beast crystals.

Jayden leaned back in his chair, his eyes fixed on the glowing monitor as he began to formulate a counterattack. He ran through every possible scenario, evaluating his options with cold, calculated logic.

His first instinct had been to use massive Area of Effect attacks. But he quickly discarded that. In their first fight, he had already tried bathing it in fire, and his telekinetic waves had been utterly useless. The Ghost-Lynx was a D-Rank beast, meaning its stamina pool was massive. It could comfortably hold its intangible state long enough to walk through an inferno without breaking a sweat. Hoping it would solidify just to deal a wide attack was foolish; the beast was highly intelligent and a precision killer. It knew exactly when to stay phased.

Next, Jayden considered anatomical weaknesses. It has to breathe, right?Therefore, its lungs must be tangible at some point to process oxygen. And the undersides of its paws must also interact with the solid matter of the ground, otherwise, it would fall straight down to the center of the earth.

Jayden stared at the ceiling, turning the idea over, but ultimately shook his head. It was too speculative. Even if he somehow aimed a perfectly timed strike at its lungs, the beast’s reaction speed was absurd. It could easily shift those specific organs into an intangible state for the millisecond his blade connected. And the window for aiming at the paws that weren’t reliably touching the ground was not a window he could count on.

No. He needed something absolute.

Jayden let out a sigh. He kept reading through several posts and articles. And eventually, he came up with an idea.

If the Ghost-Lynx power relied on vibrating its molecules at a specific rate, what if he could jam the signal? What if he could disrupt the beast’s vibrational frequency.

Jayden decided to confirm this theory.

He left the hunting forums and decided to delve into the beast research platforms. The place that focused more on theoretical statements and near-correct assumptions. These platforms were mostly occupied by researchers and scientists, rather than hunters.

Jayden began to scroll, looking through the pages for posts related to the Ghost-Lynx. It didn’t take long for him to find one.

Someone had written up a speculative theory based on the Ghost-Lynx phasing mechanism’s fundamental structure. If the frequency that enabled the phasing was itself disrupted... overwhelmed by a counter-frequency strong enough to violently force the beast’s atomic structure back into physical reality, the ability would collapse temporarily. Briefly.

Jayden kept reading. The mechanism the researcher proposed was a seismic frequency emitter. A device that could broadcast the disrupting frequency as a wave from the emitter point.

But there was a massive catch. For a localized, portable disruptor to work on a D-Rank beast, it had to be deployed at point-blank range.

Jayden’s jaw clenched as he finalized the plan. To get the beast close enough, he couldn’t dodge. He had to make sure the creature committed entirely to a lethal strike. In other words, he had to use himself as bait.

Having made up his mind, he pulled up his System Shop interface.

"Luna," he muttered. "I need a seismic frequency disruptor."

[On it] Luna replied. Then almost instantly, a system notification popped up.

[Searching system shop inventory...]

[Item Located: Seismic Pulse Emitter

*Features: 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

-Class C Disruptor.

-Compact remote-trigger design.

*Description:

Emits targeted vibrational frequency sufficient to temporarily destabilize other frequency mechanism.

*Range: 1.5 meters.

*Duration of disruption: 5–7 seconds.

*Price: 10,000 Shop Points]

Jayden purchased it without hesitating and stored it in his inventory.

Tomorrow he was going back into the forest. And this time... he wasn’t going to lose.