After making her so worried and not saying anything about his own business, making her feel frustrated.

That Hume male who kept so many things hidden must have been concerned about her entering the forest and ended up following her all the way to the logging site.

A playful smile spread across Haniel’s face.

‘He’s so kind while pretending not to be. His inability to be honest is cute at times like this.’

Then this fur in her hand… is it Regan’s fur?

It’s slightly curly, but from where could it be? Surely not…

Poke.

“Aah…”

Haniel drew in a breath.

She felt something bulging and soft poking at her lower back.

A gesture that poked at her from the top of her buttock cleft, wanting to enter her groin.

Haniel’s cheeks turned red.

This is obviously that…

‘B-but here? Outside? You want to do it here? While logging?’

It felt somewhat sudden, but considering how Regan had grabbed her regardless of location and suddenly pushed himself in until now… it wasn’t that surprising.

But couldn’t “Regan” clearly see that she was holding an axe? There’s a risk of cutting something important. Haniel glanced sideways at “Regan” while biting her lip.

With her face burning red, she whispered:

“Don’t… I’m holding an axe right now.”

Haniel reached out and gently grasped Regan’s hand that was heavily resting on her shoulder.

…She felt rough fur under her palm.

So rough that it almost felt like a steel scouring pad.

‘Huh?’

At the same time, the smile disappeared from Haniel’s face as if washed away.

“…Huh?”

Rustle rustle. A chill ran up from her tailbone to her ears…

Sensing that something was wrong, Haniel turned her head while still holding the “furry hand.”

And where Regan should have been…

Gruk.

There was an unfamiliar bear.

A black bear of overwhelming size, twice as tall as Haniel.

Drooling glossy saliva from its muzzle…

“……”

Haniel froze completely, like an inanimate object.

Like a mouse before a cat, like a n*ked human facing a tiger for the first time…

No, a n*ked human in front of a bear. That was her. Her at this very moment.

‘It wasn’t Regan.’

A bear… it was a bear.

That bear had been standing behind Haniel with its muzzle close to her.

“Uh… ub… ububub… ub…”

Trembling. As the excessive shock and fear intensified one step further, her already stiff body began to shake more violently than an aspen in a typhoon.

Haniel clenched her jaw to prevent her teeth from chattering and reluctantly shifted her gaze to the lower part of the bear, rolling only her eyeballs.

“Uh… uu… huuu…”

At the bear’s lower body was a bright red p*nis, grotesquely swollen to the size of a forearm.

“Ah… ah… aaaa… oh sh…”

What had been poking at her waist was that bear’s g*nitalia…

At the moment of realization, Haniel screamed at the top of her lungs, veins bulging in her neck.

“Keeeeaaaak!”

Haniel ran immediately.

“Huaaaak! Help me!”

She had no presence of mind to look back or check what the bear was doing.

In her mind, there was only one thought: ‘I must return to my territory.’

She didn’t even have the mental capacity to judge whether the bear would tear her apart or not, despite the status window informing her that this creature also loved her.

Urgent breaths scattered through her teeth.

If it had been a similar situation to usual, she would have been confident that this animal couldn’t harm her according to the status window, and would have done her best to utilize or hunt this animal for food.

But with such a large predator chasing her fiercely, her usual boldness extinguished like a candle in the wind, leaving only the fear that death awaited if she didn’t flee.

Haniel, who had tried to glance back very slightly to see what the bear was doing, quickly returned her head to its original position and moved her legs more swiftly.

“Heeeeek! No, wait! Please!”

Because the bear was chasing her madly, right at her heels.

‘That d*mn bear is still following me… stop following me!’

Perhaps it wanted to embrace the always-lonely Haniel tightly because it felt so sorry for her?

The bear was pursuing her with movements as desperate as Haniel’s own.

Haniel’s face turned pale blue.

Surprisingly, Haniel clearly knew what to do when encountering a bear in the forest.

In the Korea of her time, quite a few people had migrated to space colonies, allowing nature to recover as humans disappeared, and successfully restoring several endangered species in protected areas.

Naturally, the probability of these species encountering humans became higher than before, so government agencies often publicized what to do when meeting dangerous wild animals.

So she definitely knew how to handle the situation before, but when actually being chased by a real bear, all that knowledge turned to dust, except for the method of running as fast as possible.

She couldn’t think of anything. She was solely focused on escaping.

“Save me, be good!”

“I don’t want to be mounted by a bear!”

A furry animal would understand another furry animal’s heart well, so she should have heeded the words of the furry Regan…

Why did I take Regan’s words lightly? Such regrets flooded in, and there was something else driving Haniel crazy in this situation.

She gritted her teeth as she pushed through trees that suddenly appeared in the middle of her running path.

‘The forest… this can’t be right?’

Why couldn’t she see the path she always took?

The familiar path she had traversed, like her own bedroom, was completely invisible at this moment.

Unbelievably, the forest had clearly “changed” from before Haniel entered this logging site.

Haniel drew in trembling breaths.

What a predicament.

She had planned to flee to her territory, knowing she would be safe once she reached that boundary.

The place she was heading toward was the same path she had always used, the one she had been on just minutes ago. From the moment she started fleeing from the bear, she had turned around and gone back exactly the way she came without the slightest deviation.

But that route, that path she knew as clearly as the road in front of her house…

‘Why, why has it changed?’

This had never happened before.

While the deeper parts of the forest might be unpredictable, the area around “Haniel’s territory” boundary had never undergone such sudden tectonic shifts—happening with the shocking speed of lightning striking the ground.

The forest had changed its location instantly, as if it had free will, without any warning signs.

Haniel didn’t even have the presence of mind to guess that all of this was due to the “Rift” that Regan had so strongly warned her about.

To make matters worse, the forest was growing darker with each step she took.

It was as if each of her steps was a button that turned off the light.

“That is…”

Amid this, something white suddenly caught the eye of the nearly panicking Haniel.

‘Sunlight? Is it sunlight?’

Whether it was sunlight or a white piece of clothing.

Haniel instinctively thought that the white fluttering something was sunlight stretching between the path to her territory, and she ran toward it.

However, that white thing—which she thought was sunlight or a torch shining alone in the darkness—flickered in the distance before her eyes, seeming within reach yet ungraspable.

At that moment, Haniel opened her eyes wide and looked directly at that whitish thing shining between the trees.

“?!”

It wasn’t sunlight or a torch.

It was… someone wearing white clothes.

‘Who is it? Who are you?’

Had there been anyone else around here besides Regan and Nasir?

Not knowing who it was, Haniel’s legs raced toward the white-clothed figure who might be able to help her.

But it receded like a mirage, and she suddenly realized that she had somehow ended up in a very strange place.

“…Where, huff, where am I?”