Time rewound to an hour earlier.
After a thorough round of preparations, Giant Axe and the others once again headed deeper into the passage.
Every so often, Koya placed detection devices behind them to record data and mark the route back.
After all, this place was completely unfamiliar to them. The passages crisscrossed in every direction without the slightest pattern, making it easy to lose their way.
Compared to their initial exploration, they were considerably more cautious.
It could roughly be summed up as: it was fine to move slower, but absolutely no mistakes were allowed.
For this ancient creature to have survived underground until now and even bored out caverns of such scale, its size had likely already surpassed the limits of their imagination.
And Steel City had been built atop its head.
Even if it had remained obediently still throughout all these long years, that had only been because they had not known.
Once anyone learned that they were standing atop a landmine that could explode at any moment, they could hardly pretend not to know. They likely would not even sleep soundly.
What they needed to do now was figure out exactly what was going on and see whether there was any solution.
Of course, they also knew there was probably none.
After all, Steel City was so enormous that relocating it elsewhere was definitely unrealistic...
There were too many problems. They could only cross the river by feeling the stones.
"Are we just going to keep walking like this?"
Elizabeth stopped. She picked up a black stone from the ground and tossed it up and down in her hand. Ghostly blue Soul Fire burned beneath it, yet had no effect whatsoever.
She could not tell whether it was actually rock.
It possessed none of rock's properties,