I Only Wanted A Class In The Apocalypse-Chapter 1945: Reaching the Mines

"Blueprints for the city's life-support systems, designs for high-pressure mining rigs, or perhaps something even more experimental. That reminds me... I found the warehouses, the residents, and the blueprints, but I haven't seen the actual mining locations yet."

He suddenly realised this simple yet glaringly important point. He had focused so intensely on the city, the interrogation of the captives, and the seizure of the stored ore that he had missed the source itself. What puzzled him was that despite sending hundreds of teams to scour the city, not a single one had reported finding an entrance to a mine.

"Time to see if someone has the answer."

He wasn't powerless in the face of this mystery. Whenever a puzzle appeared, he simply referred the question to his massive network of interrogated captives. With hundreds of thousands under his soul-contracted control, the truth couldn't stay hidden for long. Soon enough, the answer arrived in a flurry of reports.

"The mines are hidden directly underneath the city… Impressive!" Hye muttered in genuine admiration as he read the descriptions sent by his warriors.

"They did it to hide the presence of the operation from any prying eyes. Even if an official Hescos inspection team came here to check the city under any circumstances, they'd find a 'normal' settlement surviving in their world and wouldn't suspect a thing.

On top of that, the presence of those massive hollowed spaces underneath the city serves a darker purpose. It allows the leaders to detonate the foundations and collapse the entire mountain city into the crust in case of an unfixable situation—like the one they're facing at my hands."

He felt a chill of realisation. His timely and decisive intervention with his technique hadn't just secured the population; it had been the only thing that prevented the city's commanders from triggering a self-destruct sequence that would have buried the evidence and his warriors alike.

Now that he knew the secret entrances, he didn't waste another second. He stepped out of his ship and felt the cool night air once more. With a flick of his wrist, he summoned a vanguard of Soulers, tens of thousands of them.

The entrance was cleverly camouflaged by common sewer covers, indistinguishable from a standard drainage system found in any urban sprawl. Yet, guided by the precise directions and detailed responses squeezed from his captives, Hye knew exactly which heavy discs to pry open and which decoys to ignore.

When he finally unlatched the correct cover, he was greeted not by the stench of waste, but by the sterile hum of a deep-shaft ventilation system. A long metallic ladder vanished into a seemingly bottomless darkness. Hye descended for ten gruelling minutes, his muscles tensed, before his boots finally met the solid floor of a spacious staging area.

"It's not just buried under the city; it's fortified well enough to sustain a direct orbital bombardment," he noted, running a gloved hand over the walls. He found them reinforced with a high-density, sturdy concrete composite. He inwardly sighed.

"This place… It wasn't built by just haphazardly digging into a mountain. They took decades to prepare this infrastructure. This isn't a temporary raid; they have long-term colonial plans for this planet."

Hye navigated a series of long, echoing corridors that eventually opened into a central hub, which branched off into even more tunnels. The place was an underground fortress. To expedite the search, he unleashed his Soulers, their translucent forms drifting through the rock like ghosts, scouting every corridor simultaneously until they located the primary excavation site.

"Impressive…"

After trekking through one specific corridor for another half hour, Hye finally emerged into a massive, cavernous opening. It was as if he had stepped inside a hollowed-out world.

The ceiling was a jagged, irregular rocky expanse, glittering with the natural shimmer of the god-ore veins protruding from the walls. The ground ahead was a dizzying pit that stretched kilometres into the depths, illuminated by thousands of high-intensity torches and artificial lanterns mounted on firm, industrial staircases that clung to the cave walls.

"Even if they spent the next hundred years digging, they wouldn't exhaust this single mine," Hye remarked, his voice echoing in the vastness. "And that's just one site from twenty-three others in this city alone! They must have planned to supply themselves with this divine fuel for centuries."

The sheer scale of the operation and the permanence of the architecture left Hye speechless and deeply puzzled. "If they have the resources for all this—if they have the ability to infiltrate the most secure, sacred heart of the Hescos Empire—why didn't they just aim to crush the Hescos from the start? Why play this long, expensive game of shadows?"

The question itched at the back of his mind like a persistent parasite. He felt the Toranks' actions were merely a mask for a scheme far more terrifying than simple resource theft. However, with his limited data, he was blind to the true endgame.

"I want to know where that dude went," Hye muttered, his thoughts drifting to Silverlinning. He had tried to contact the man multiple times since his arrival, only to be met with dead silence. "I hope he isn't in a Toranks gulag, or else getting real answers won't be realistic anytime soon."

The thought of turning to the Hescos for the big picture was almost hilarious to him. They had been breached and compromised to the core, yet they hadn't realised a thing until he literally shoved the evidence in their faces. Expecting them to have the answers was delusional; they were the ones who had been duped.

"Unless they managed, somehow, to capture the traitors in the Elder Council and forced them to speak," he mused. He entertained the idea for some time, weighing the pros and cons of sharing the names of the traitors he'd identified and the nature of the shadow-city network with Moth and the Grand Elder.

"No. For now, I'll act as if I don't know how to contact them," he finally decided. He wasn't going to show his hand until he had a better grasp of the Hescos' internal situation.

He focused instead on taking lots of physical samples of the ore from different depths of the cave, all the digging machines he found, and anything that looked advanced to his eyes, securing them in stabilised containers for Old Gan to analyse later.