He didn't know where he was going, he just kept jumping whatever route he found, but mostly it was in a circle, he darted left, weaving through a cluster of ancient oaks, his Dagger-Mouth reflexes allowing him to make ninety-degree turns at full speed.

He felt the wind whistling in his ears, his heartbeat a frantic, rhythmic thrum that matched the heavy thud-thud-thud of the titan behind him.

And then, his eyes caught the familiar scenery again. The lightning-scarred white-wood tree.That's when he had realized that he had in his frantic maneuvering, he had unconsciously circled back to the starting point.

The flower still lay there, glowing with its eerie, diamond-like light.

Seeing it, Sol's eyes flashed. A sudden, irrational greed… fueled by the "overdose" of predatory energy… overrode his survival instinct. "If I'm going to be chased for a flower," he thought, a dark grin returning to his face, "I might as well take that damn flower."

Without slowing down, he leaned low, his hand grazing the dirt. In a blur of motion that would have been invisible to a normal human, his fingers snapped the Pale Moon flower (a name he had just came up with) back up.

"ON SECOND THOUGHT, I'M TAKING IT!" Sol yelled over his shoulder, his voice filled with a manic, desperado-like glee.

The beast let out a roar that didn't just shake the leaves… it felt like it was stripping the bark from the trees. It was a sound of absolute, incandescent fury. For a titan like him being mocked by a hairless, tiny monkey was a sin that could only be washed away in blood and pulverized bone. It wasn't defending its property anymore; it was an avatar of vengeance itself.

So, the chase reached a new level of violence. The beast was no longer just running, it was launching itself. With every explosive leap, its massive paws shredded the earth, sending clods of dirt and ancient roots flying like shrapnel. And more importantly, It was closing the distance with terrifying ease, a black tidal wave of fur and rage that flattened everything in its path.

Of course, Sol also didn't dare to slow down, as the noise behind him was unbearable, a rhythmic boom-boom-boom of five tons of predator closing in. His heart hammered against his ribs, not just with fear, but with the frantic, electric surge of the Blue-Neck Strider soul.

"Faster... just a bit faster!" Sol hissed to his own legs.

Every step was a high-stakes gamble between survival and a messy death. Using his Dagger-Mouth reflexes, he utilized his short form to the fullest and danced through the chaos.

He leapt over gnarled, knee-high roots that would have tripped a normal man, ducked under jagged branches that threatened to impale his skull, and used the trunks of the iron-bark trees to pivot at impossible angles.

He was a blur of motion, a dark spark flying through a forest that was being systematically demolished behind him.

Unknowingly, in his frantic, zig-zagging flight, Sol crossed an invisible boundary.

The air suddenly grew colder, turning into a heavy, biting mist that smelt of ozone and ancient rot. The trees… already massive in the Eastern Zone… suddenly grew taller, their trunks becoming so thick they looked like the pillars of a dark, prehistoric cathedral.

The foliage above was so dense that the dying light could only penetrate in thin, needle-like beams, casting eerie shadows so long and deep they seemed to reach out for Sol's ankles.

But of course, he didn't know that or was in the mood to care, he was too high on adrenaline and all that survival chemicals brain released in an absolute emergency to care, his mind focused entirely on the hot breath of the beast at his back.

He didn't realize he had stumbled into the Inner Circle… the forbidden, silent heart of the Eastern Zone where the logic of the familiar world was replaced by the laws of the ancient world.

Suddenly, the brush ahead thickened into a massive, shimmering screen of giant silver ferns. Sol didn't hesitate, not like he could in this situation, with the massive beast's paws vibrating through his very marrow. He tucked his chin and burst through the foliage like a spear launched from the hand of a god.

He expected the familiar resistance of more trunks, the low-hanging branches of the iron-bark trees, or perhaps another thicket to weave through.

Instead, the world simply... opened.

To his utter shock, the scene ahead was something that made his entire body go cold, the heat of the chase drained away by a sudden, icy realization. It wasn't that the view was bad; in fact, under any other circumstances, Sol would have stopped to admire it for a lifetime.

Compared to the claustrophobic, soot-choked darkness of the jungle behind, the landscape had surrendered to a vast, panoramic world.

To the far west, the sun was drawing its last, dying breath, bleeding a bruised, incandescent orange across the clouds like the final, glowing embers of a titan's pyre.

Rising directly opposite this solar decay was a massive, pale yellow moon, shimmering with a ghostly, terrifying might. It hung so low and looked so impossibly large in the sky that it felt as if Sol could reach out and touch its cold, cratered surface.

Below the jagged lip of the ledge, a sea of grey and violet mist churned within the deep ravine, hiding the floor of the world beneath a soft, deceptive blanket that looked like a bed of clouds.

The beauty was agonizing… a masterpiece of celestial geometry where the orange fire of the sun clashed with the silver ice of the moon. But in this situation, it was nothing more than a beautifully illustrated death sentence.

The contrast was staggering. Behind him lay the dark, rotting reality of the hunt; before him lay the infinite, silent glory of the heights. Sol's heels skidded, kicking up a spray of gravel that tumbled into the void, the tiny stones disappearing into the mist without a single sound to mark their fall.

He teetered on the razor's edge, a tiny, dark speck caught between a celestial masterpiece and a five-ton mountain of fur and rage.

"Beautiful," a dark, psycho-edged voice whispered in the back of his mind. "What a spectacular place to become a red smudge."

Just then, the silver ferns behind him exploded. The beast burst into the clearing, its golden eyes instantly locking onto Sol, who stood silhouetted against the colossal yellow moon like a fish on a chopping board.

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