"Without a doubt, there definitely is." Angel gave a firm answer through the Mind Tether. "But this also proves one thing: there really is a way out hidden above the flue."
The sewer and the maze had actually been one whole from the start. Discussing them separately was merely a classification made by those who came later.
Before Abyss City fell into ruin, the underground was much like the surface, with a great many residential districts. Calling it an underground city would not have been an exaggeration. Otherwise, Abyss City would not have established all manner of official institutions within the underground maze.
Where people lived, there naturally had to be channels for drainage and sewage. Thus came the later "stinking sewers."
The appearance of mutated carrion-eating squirrels along this route meant there had to be sewers here. And where there were sewers, there had to be residential districts nearby. Residential districts meant a way out.
Of course, "ways out" and "dead ends" were merely distinctions made by later generations. Even the term maze might have been nothing more than an offhand joke by those who once lived here, rather than the actual truth.
This place had been an underground waterway, a steel jungle beneath the earth. To the people who once lived here, every path had been a way out. They simply lived underground; seeking the exit of the maze—the passage leading to the surface—had been part of their everyday lives.
Only, time had flowed on. Most of the underground waterway's exits had now collapsed. There were very, very few passages left that could lead to the surface. That was what had turned the underground waterway into this so-called "maze."
"Things are no longer what they were ten thousand years ago. A way out can also become a dead