After the steel chain snapped, Rook intended to lift the Coffin open with his bare hands, but Captain Duke reached out and stopped him.
"Don't touch it with your hands. Polly, go find a longer crowbar. We'll just pry the lid open with that," Captain Duke ordered his crew with practiced experience.
Although Duke now captained a garbage salvage boat on the Manzanares River, he had spent his younger years on the high seas west of Iberia. Those waters were very close to the Chaos Sea, and he had seen all sorts of salvaged objects there, so he had developed his own methods for dealing with these bizarre finds.
Until you knew what was inside, you never touched them with your hands.
"Got it." Polly immediately followed his captain's orders and went into the cabin to find a crowbar.
Soon, Polly returned to the captain with an excited expression and a crowbar in hand. He handed it to Duke, who accepted it.
"Everyone, stand back a little. If there's some kind of shrapnel launcher inside, it could kill a whole bunch of us at once." Duke waved the crowbar in his right hand and grinned mischievously at the surrounding crew.
At the captain's words, the crew instinctively stepped back. Duke glanced in satisfaction at the path that had opened up, then slowly approached the red Coffin inlaid with seven Different-Colored Gems. He wedged his crowbar under one corner of the lid, checked his leverage, and began applying pressure little by little.
To guard against any possible projectile triggers, Duke did not simply wrench the lid open. Instead, he raised it slowly this way, so that if any fragments or pellets really did shoot out of the Coffin, he could roll across the ground to dodge them.
Creak, creak, creak-
The