After they found the barrier, Soma and his party went back to report what they found to Leona. And in turn, she told them about a certain book she found behind one of the shelves in the Archiving Building, ‘Observation of the shady side of the Love Church Vol 2’. She didn’t tell Soma about this book before because she wanted to make sure of the contents of the book before showing it to him. Soma in turn told her about the book he, Ren, and Dolan found back at Elk, ‘Observation of the shady side of the Love Church Vol 5’.

After that, Soma and his party went to a restaurant to eat lunch together before separating and going to their respective dorm rooms. And in the next morning, they went into the mines but this time from a different entrance; they found Shadow Wolves yet again and the three girls dealt with them. Marina with her gauntlets, Rimi with her sword, With Alice provided them support with her bow from behind. They kept doing that for a whole week, stopping at the barrier in each mine before going into the next mine, and before long they finished checking all the mines in Akud.

“Today, let’s start going past the barriers. We will start with the first mine we went inside”(Soma)

“ “ “ Yes!” ” ”

They went back to the first mine they investigated and proceeded straight towards the barrier. Once there Soma touched the barrier and inserted some of his Mana into it, easily taking control of it just enough to open a temporary opening for him and his party to pass through. Once they passed through the barrier, they were surprised to find that the narrow mineshaft has become a huge cave with a very high ceiling, it was so huge that the whole town of Akud could fit inside it. Soma started by casting magic that would completely hide their presence before going further in to investigate.

They started going around the perimeter of the huge cave by walking right next to the wall, and before long they started finding the mineshafts that were located near the one they entered. Walking for hours by the wall unveiled that the cave is far bigger than they thought, they found out that the mountain where the mineshaft they entered was completely hollow. Moreover, all five mountains were in the same condition and all of them were connected from the inside, making a huge cave in the shape of a ring surrounding the town of Akud. Alice wanted to scream and ask ‘How the hell did the mountains not collapse under their weight plus the weight of the town?!’ but she noticed the answer to that question before she was able to ask.

Alice finally noticed the huge structures supporting the mountain they were inside. They started walking inwards towards one of the structures to investigate it, and when they were near enough their path was blocked by thick spider webs placed all over the place. And as expected, if there are spider webs then there are bound to be spiders and said spiders started appearing from behind the webs as soon as they noticed the approaching humans. Soma’s spell didn’t work on them because it only blocked detection through magical means and nothing else.

“These are Big Red Spiders. They should be living in forests and not inside caves though”(Alice)

“So it’s the same as the Shadow Wolves, huh”(Marina)

“…And they are coming in swarms to”(Rimi)

“Well, let’s deal with them quickly, so we can investigate further”(Soma)

They took their positions with Rimi and Marina in the front, Soma in the center, and Alice at the back. Alice was the first to attack by shooting fire covered arrows from her bow at the Spiders in the front. Since the Spiders are insect type monsters they caught fire very quickly and started burning furiously creating a flaming barricade causing the Spiders behind them to hesitate, giving Rimi and Marina enough time to go around the burning Spiders and start attacking the hesitating ones. There Soma used his chains to attack the spiders that Rimi and Marina can’t handle due to their great number and Alice kept shooting her fire arrows and burning the Spiders in a way that divided the battlefield to make it so Marina and Rimi don’t have to fight more than they can handle as much as possible. With Soma dealing with the ones that managed to slip by Alice’s burning barricade.

After dominating the battlefield for 30 minutes, the last Red Spider died after taking Rimi’s sword right through the head. Once that was done, they went ahead and past the spider webs and towards the structures. Once they came close enough to the structures, they became easy to make out in the darkness. The structures were completely made out of iron and were astonishingly wide, they were cylindrical and had a staircase coiling around it going upwards. Looking up, they could make out some kind of hanging pathways branching from the structure, and looking around they could see that the other structures had the same hanging pathways branching from them. Soma came close to the structure in front of them and started touching it and hitting it with the hilt of his sword to check for its texture and hardness.

“…How can such a thing be made out of iron? Isn’t too heavy to support itself? And how could they get their hands on this much iron and use it for something like this?”(Alice)

“Generally, iron is a metal used most commonly to make weapons, and seeing this much iron used like this must be a shock to you. But, this is not a normal iron, this iron must have been harvested from monsters in some dungeon thus the amount”(Soma)

“…I see, since monsters would keep spawning endlessly in dungeons they can just keep hunting them as they spawn”(Marina)

“Back to my earlier point, this iron has some Mana circulating through it and that make is a type of Magic Iron and that’s how I figured out that it was harvested from a dungeon. But, this iron can’t be used for weapons and such, the way you might think”(Soma)

“Why?”(Alice)

“It’s the hardness of the iron. This iron is way too hard without any softness in it, and that’s because of the Mana circulating around inside it, and since it’s a metal harvested from a monster that makes it impossible to alloy with other metals”(Soma)

“…I still don’t understand. Isn’t the harder the metal is, the better it’s for making weapons?”(Alice)

“I don’t blame you for not knowing. But when it comes to metals, there are two properties you need to take into consideration. Hardness and Ductility, hardness is easy to understand, right? Ductility is sort of the softness of the metal, or more like the flexibility of the metal. To put it simply, it’s the property that allows you to make the metal into wires and sheets. And so, having a metal be very hard, but lack ductility means that the metal would have no indication whatsoever before it fails. You know that your weapon is damaged by checking it for any deformations such as dents, kinks, and chips. But, if the ductility is low, the metal will not deform and would break suddenly in the worst of times, thus making it not suitable for making weapons”(Soma)