At the moment, however, Tsukishiro Yanagi had no time to carefully examine where this strange sense of embarrassment had come from.
Reason told her that, under the circumstances, it was indeed necessary to listen to someone else’s suggestions.
“…Then what do you think we should do?”
Anyone could raise problems.
The person who could solve them was the one whose words carried weight.
“Take the girl with us.
I’ll help you rescue your people, then we’ll find a way out that they won’t expect.”
Russell’s suggestion left Tsukishiro Yanagi momentarily stunned.
She had expected some earth-shattering scheme.
Instead, the plan was absurdly simple.
No.
This…
this was practically no plan at all.
“Wait, that’s not—”
Tsukishiro Yanagi was about to argue when Russell pulled out that Pickaxe of his again.
“What?”
“Nothing…
Since you’re so confident, let’s go with your plan.”
The moment she saw that joke-like strange Pickaxe, the image of him carving straight through the vault wall naturally resurfaced in her mind.
Whether any plan could be carried out depended on one thing:
Whether the person executing it actually possessed the ability to do so.
Or rather, most plans were designed around the capabilities of their executors.
Tsukishiro Yanagi’s own plans could generally be summarized as “I’ll handle it myself.”
But that confidence was built upon her faith in her own abilities.
If the Section Chief were here, her confidence in such plans would increase dramatically.
Russell’s plan sounded equally simple.
So simple that her instinctive reaction was to find it ridiculous.
Yet she quickly realized something.
She didn’t understand the premise upon which his plan was built.
This man had never clearly displayed the full extent of his abilities.
…Maybe he really could do it?
That was why the words she had wanted to say ended up swallowed back down.
Suddenly, she realized that perhaps she herself was hoping for some miraculous solution to break the deadlock.
Seeing that she said nothing further, Russell assumed she had accepted.
At this point, there was no reason to continue hiding his capabilities.
If he didn’t want to join the happy, screaming Ethereal family, it was time to show some real skills.
After taking out the Pickaxe, Russell climbed back out of the vault.
Then he checked the minimap and determined their current coordinates relative to the factory. Get faster updates on g.com.
Actually, if not for the Hollow’s interference, the distance between the two locations wasn’t particularly great.
After all, the entire area was only about the size of two industrial parks.
Normally, a single industrial park covered around thirty to forty thousand square meters.
That sounded huge.
But a thousand meters by a thousand meters was already a full hundred thousand square meters.
As a result, the straight-line distance between two points within a park generally wouldn’t exceed two or three hundred meters.
The truly complicated factor was the spatial distortion caused by the Topological Structure, along with locations blocked by solid walls and floors.
Being blocked by a wall was easy to understand.
But what did it mean to be blocked by the ground?
In normal three-dimensional space, the ground was like a flat sheet of paper, and everyone moved across its surface like ants.
The Topological Structure created by the Hollow turned that sheet of paper into a crumpled ball.
And that ball was constantly shifting and folding.
As a result, when parts of the ground clipped into the air, reaching certain locations often required tunneling directly through the earth itself.
Under normal circumstances, even large professional Hollow investigation teams wouldn’t do such a thing.
Unless the route leading downward was exceptionally stable, spending huge amounts of time fighting against the terrain simply wasn’t worthwhile.
But for Russell, there wasn’t much cost involved.
The best thing about the JourneyMap Mod compared to the vanilla map was its Cave Map Mode.
Once activated, the chaos of the topological space became perfectly visible.
The illusion of a flat world was shattered.
The terrain displayed on the map resembled a collection of interconnected miniature worlds linked by paths that could or couldn’t be traversed.
Because he had previously marked the investigation team members, Russell quickly located the area containing the factory.
“…It’s actually pretty close.”
After locating the investigators and technicians, Russell was surprised to discover that if he simply tunneled through the ground, the distance was only forty or fifty meters.
The route he and Tsukishiro Yanagi had taken earlier had required over twenty minutes of detours.
Once he had roughly determined the location, Russell began hacking away at the ground.
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
·
The commotion outside was considerable, but Tsukishiro Yanagi couldn’t hear it from inside the vault.
Although she still felt uneasy, there was little she could do except wait and see just how miraculous that man’s Ether Aptitude truly was.
Once all of the Vitality Fluid had been drained, the Cultivation Pod’s revival sequence completed.
The lid slowly opened.
The girl lay limply inside, seemingly boneless.
She took a set of men’s clothes from a compartment on the side of the pod and dressed the girl in them.
Then she secured everything tightly with several belts.
The result was a giant seaweed rice roll with only a head sticking out.
After finishing, Tsukishiro Yanagi tucked the oversized rice roll under one arm and climbed out of the vault.
As for the archive materials that could serve as evidence against Belobog Industries, she ignored them.
If they couldn’t get out alive, those documents were meaningless.
After emerging from the vault, Tsukishiro Yanagi froze slightly.
Because she couldn’t see Russell anywhere.
Her first thought was:
Did this guy abandon me and run?
However, she soon heard the sound of excavation coming from somewhere ahead.
The distinctive thumping noise produced by that strange Pickaxe.
Then she spotted a perfectly square hole.
The same size as the one he had carved into the vault wall.
And the sounds were coming from inside it.
Tsukishiro Yanagi still hadn’t figured out what Russell was doing.
She cautiously approached the edge of the hole.
Then she discovered that it was a deep shaft.
At the far end, Russell was vigorously swinging his strange Pickaxe.
With every swing, a one-meter-long, one-meter-wide cubic section vanished into thin air.
The cut surfaces were perfectly smooth, as though sliced by a laser.
Even the exposed cross-sections of severed steel reinforcement bars gleamed with metallic reflections.
Clearly, this tunnel had not only punched through the ground.
It had also cut through factory walls that had somehow become folded and twisted into this location.
The moment she saw this, Tsukishiro Yanagi immediately understood Russell’s intention.
And when she realized what he was trying to do, her eyes widened in shock.
He was naturally digging his way back to the factory.
But…
How could someone’s detection ability be this powerful?
Could it actually penetrate the Topological Structure itself?
Tsukishiro Yanagi had already considered his abilities absurd enough.
Yet she now realized that the extent of that absurdity far exceeded anything she had imagined.
“Th-This…
What kind of person are you…?”
★ ★ ★
Shilling time!