A violent sense of weightlessness crashed over him, and Solomon immediately let out a shrill scream.
Fortunately, the instant the fissure opened, Gaia, who had been beside him, had already grabbed him by the back and pulled him above her own body.
Since Igor III was only a moon, its mass was relatively small, so its gravitational pull was not especially strong. Even so, a fall this long was still enough to chill a person to the bone.
Solomon simply shut his eyes and began praying that the great God-Emperor might still be willing to accept an Imperial Creed believer as halfhearted as him.
To his senses, the fall seemed to last for centuries.
At last, with one tremendous crash and a muffled thud, he felt a heavy impact strike through his back.
What confused him was that although the force had been considerable, it had not actually caused any real injury.
The next moment, he felt himself being lifted off the warm surface beneath him by a strong hand and set back down on the ground.
When his weak legs touched solid ground again, he staggered a few steps out of instinct, but quickly regained his balance.
Opening his eyes, he found himself standing in pitch-black darkness.
On both sides, he could hear the constant sound of sand and gravel falling, clearly debris still dropping from the fissure above.
Just as he was wondering how they were supposed to see anything down here, a bright light suddenly flared in the distance.
The burst of light was so harsh it felt like a flash grenade, and for a short while Solomon could not even open his eyes.
But after a moment of adjustment, he managed to look again and finally used that beam of light to study their surroundings.
This was a cold underground cavern. The damp, slick rock walls suggested that it had existed for a very long time.
He lifted his head and looked upward, only to catch the faintest trace of light far above.
Obviously, they were deep.
Very deep.
So how exactly had he survived?
"This isn't a natural cavern, but it should have formed a very long time ago."
Hearing the voice, Solomon turned and saw Gaia crouched by the beam of light, feeling along the flat ground.
Then he remembered.
She had cushioned his fall.
That was why he had not been smashed into paste.
What shocked him, however, was that aside from her shredded cloak and the dust covering her, she did not seem to have the slightest external injury.
That was an absurd level of durability.
"So it really is this place... Then it really was that thing behind all this?"
While Solomon was still marveling at Gaia's absurd toughness, a synthetic mechanical voice came from the direction of the light source.
He turned back and narrowed his eyes, barely making out the tall shadow standing behind the light.
Judging by his words, though, he seemed to know where they were.
"Forge Lord, where is this place?"
Gaia was the first to voice the question in her heart.
From her brief inspection, she had already noticed the unnatural flatness of the ground. This was clearly a man-made cavern.
And judging by how long they had been falling, this place had to be incredibly deep underground.
The Forge Lord did not answer her question. Instead, relying on memory, he began forcing his somewhat uncooperative mechanical body to move forward after the fall.
Gaia's curiosity was thoroughly stirred, so she followed closely behind him.
She remembered the eerie voice she had heard during the fall.
Below.
"The mutated servitors earlier were also telling us to go below."
"Could it be that they were trying to lead us here?"
At that thought, Gaia looked deeply at the Forge Lord walking ahead of them.
Clearly, both this Forge Lord and Igor III had secrets of their own.
What puzzled her was why that secret had anything to do with her.
From their earlier conversation, it was obvious that whatever had been calling to her had nothing to do with Ulizar. Otherwise, the Forge Lord would have linked the two matters together immediately.
And he had also seemed to be deliberately concealing the servitor disturbance from the start, barely discussing it with her at all.
Holding on to her confusion, Gaia continued following him deeper underground.
She had a feeling that the answer would reveal itself the moment she saw whatever lay ahead.
After walking for some distance, the Forge Lord arrived before a clearly man-made concrete platform and climbed onto it with his four mechanical legs.
Click.
With the sound of a lever being pulled, bright lights began switching on one after another from all directions. They were rows of lamps installed along the top of the tunnel.
Under the guidance of those lights, Solomon and Gaia saw that the passageway continued sloping downward.
"This place was left behind during an excavation I organized after arriving on Igor III."
The Forge Lord's voice rang out again.
He climbed back down from the platform and led the two, both awed by the scale of the underground cavern, farther into the depths.
Along the way, perhaps because he had begun remembering those years, the Forge Lord leisurely began explaining how that excavation had begun in the first place.
"At the time, I had just been forced out of Mars. I wanted to prove myself by completing a great undertaking in accordance with the will of the Omnissiah, or at the very least make those people allow my mentor to return to work in a forge world."
"After I arrived on this forge world, I learned that somewhere below it was a massive geothermal generator dating back to the Golden Age."
"By the Omnissiah, at the time, I believed it was the perfect chance to prove myself."
"If I could understand the principles behind such a magnificent machine, then I would surely be able to restore both my name and my mentor's."
"And so, I began digging downward."
As he spoke, he pointed toward the strangely shaped arched ceiling above them.
"Are you wondering why the ceiling of this cavern is shaped so strangely?"
"The truth is, this is the bottom section of one of the geothermal generator's conduits."
The moment he said that, Gaia's pupils trembled.
This cavern was already wide enough to rival the upper-deck rest area of Solomon's Spear of Destiny.
And even this did not encompass the full width of just one conduit from that generator?
Filled with shock, they finally reached the end of the tunnel.
And to their surprise, the far end had been sealed off by collapsed rubble.
The Forge Lord turned back toward them and said meaningfully,
"Don't worry. If it really wants to see you, then the rubble I ordered collapsed back then won't be enough to block the way."
The moment his words fell, violent tremors surged through the ground again. The crash of tumbling rocks echoed one after another, while thick dust billowed out into the air.
When everything finally settled, the three of them saw an unbelievable sight.
The tunnel ahead had collapsed downward at an exaggerated angle, and the rubble that had blocked their way had become a natural path forward.
What exactly was guiding them onward?
Gaia did not know why she dared to keep walking into that unknown darkness.
But by the time she came back to herself, she was already standing at the end of the broken path of rubble.
Ahead of her, a scorching wind flickered in and out, blowing gently through the air.
Within a hollow of bedrock lit by drifting dark-red glows, Gaia saw something that made her completely stop thinking for a brief moment.
It was a strange metal construct, half-sitting against the rock wall, its body badly broken, though its outline still vaguely resembled that of a human.
(End of Chapter)
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