Sora Yatagami was a completely average human, and possessed a strong-willed, kind-hearted, humble and generous personality. However, when one of his classmates betrayed him, he fell into the abyss, where his journey to become the strongest began.
Sora: That's an impressive trick. Better than Miledi's, at least.
Hajime: Indeed. This feels like actually fantasy; I'm a bit moved.
Hajime and Sora watched in awe as the moonlight quite literally showed them the way. Yue, Aishia, and Shea, who'd been with them for the Reisen Gorge, seemed impressed as well.
There was no telling how long the light would last, so they decided to hurry. They scrambled back into the submarine and followed the trail. The sea was even darker at night. Practically no light made it down past the first few kilometers. It quickly grew pitch black, and Hajime turned on the sub's headlights. Those, and the light emanating from the pendant, were the only sources of light in the sea.
The pendant's light easily pierced through the transparent crystal Hajime had used in place of glass for the front windshield.
As they grew closer to the sea floor, Sora realized the light was pointing to a rocky section of the bottom. Countless massive boulders were next to each other, creating an underwater mountain range of sorts. When they'd explored that section in the afternoon, there had been nothing there. The light hit a specific part of a boulder, and the entire formation began to shake with an ominous rumbling.
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Part of the rock crumbled away, almost like a door. It revealed a passage leading further inside. The passage was pitch-black, like the gateway to some hellish underworld.
Hajime: I see, no wonder why we couldn't find it when searching normally. It was dumb of me to hope I'd just stumble upon the entrance.
Yue: We had the time anyway, and it was fun.
Kaori: Yeah. Sightseeing at the bottom of the ocean in another world was a great experience.
Hajime slumped his shoulders dejectedly, but Yue and Kaori seemed to have enjoyed the undersea adventure. Hajime steered the submarine into the newly-revealed passage. The pendant still had around half of its light left, but once they were in it suddenly stopped emitting any. All that remained to illuminate the surroundings was Hajime's headlights.
Sora: Hmmm... I've been thinking about this since I heard the ruins were underground, but normal people would be unable to even reach the entrance.
Aishia: Yeah... You'd need a really strong barrier.
Yue: On top of that, you'd need to create air, and light, and hold back the waves at the same time.
Shea: You can't even enter unless you've cleared the Grand Gruen Volcano, though. If you can beat a labyrinth, you're already not someone normal.
Tio: I guess the expectation is you'd use air magic to make it down here.
They discussed how they would have made it down here if Hajime hadn't built a submarine as they continued down the passage.
