Two days into the expedition, Professor Serizawa sent the pilot back. Extra bodies were useless on a trek like this—if someone's nerves weren't up to it, forcing them along only created a liability. The kind of companion who might snap under pressure and empty a submachine gun into the group.
It had happened before. Sometimes teammates were more dangerous than wild animals.
The pilot took one of the female graduate students with him. The girl was a Harvard graduate, a textbook overachiever. She was Bella's age, ordinarily cheerful and optimistic, but two days of trudging through the underground cavern had brought her to the edge of a nervous breakdown.
The male doctoral student's mental fortitude wasn't much better. Hobbs talked him through it, and eventually persuaded him to head back too.
That left the team at five: Professor Serizawa, Old Joe, Hobbs, Bella, and Shaw.
Serizawa had an ironclad conviction driving him forward. Old Joe simply didn't care—dying in an underground cavern was fine by him. The remaining three genuinely weren't afraid.
Shedding the three dead weights boosted the group's pace by twenty percent.
They walked for ten days.
"Die!" Hobbs bear-hugged the giant snake's tail, Bella pinned its lower jaw with a pointed blade, and Shaw drove her tactical knife into its skull over and over.
They didn't dare use firearms for fear of attracting more creatures.
It took all three of them considerable effort to kill the giant snake beside a water source deep in the cavern. They had no choice—everyone was on the verge of dying from thirst.
They filled every canteen, then spent another five days marching through dead-silent underground passages.
By now they were practically walking in a trance. Seventeen consecutive days of travel, and Bella still couldn't sense the end of this tunnel.
All they knew was that they were heading downward and south. The prolonged darkness and oppressive atmosphere were getting to everyone—even Bella felt a creeping irritation, and only Shaw seemed unaffected.
How much longer was this going to take?
As the group's energy drained at an alarming rate, their water consumption surged. Seven days after killing the snake and filling their canteens, the drinking water ran dry.
Serizawa and Old Joe volunteered to help find water. The other three refused immediately—the scenes involved in water-hunting were best left unseen.
Stop and go, stop and go. On the forty-seventh day inside the underground cavern:
"Warm air. The exit should be just ahead." Bella's voice broke the silence without warning. The others startled, then broke into grins.
They walked for another full day before a sliver of light pierced through the rock wall, and every head snapped toward it in unison.
The light was blinding. They had been in darkness so long that their eyes needed time to readjust.
It took a while before they could see clearly. When they finally stepped out of the cavern, even Bella was stunned by what lay before them.
A towering volcano rose against the distant horizon. Every direction was filled with tropical trees reaching toward the sky and hillsides carpeted in bizarre vegetation. To their right, a waterfall plunged over a drop of more than 100 meters (330 feet), and brilliant light lanced through the mist, casting a dazzling rainbow nearby.
"So this is the Mysterious Island from Verne's book?! It's so much bigger than I imagined!" Old Joe shouted with delight. The others were just as electrified.
Only Bella was looking up at the sky.
Over the course of their journey, the group had noticed a few peculiarities about her—at the very least, staying relatively clean after a month and a half underground with no sour smell wasn't something an ordinary person could manage. Serizawa followed her gaze upward.
"Miss Swan, do you see a problem?"
The Japanese professor's question silenced the group.
Bella pointed at the sky and their surroundings. "This place is very strange... Professor, I don't think it's quite what you expected."
She was certain of one thing: this wasn't Hollow Earth. A subterranean world's light source would never be the sun, and here... She suspected Serizawa was in for a disappointment. They might have walked in a massive arc and emerged back on the surface.
Shaw hated the sun—had hated it during her days as a field agent, and her current half-spirit state made it even worse.
She gave the sky a cursory glance, shook her head. Couldn't see the issue.
Hobbs, on the other hand, studied their surroundings for a good while.
Bella turned to Serizawa. "Professor, Vivienne told me about your team's brief experience underground before. This doesn't look like the subsurface. I think we've come back out."
Serizawa stomped the dirt beneath his feet. "You're saying... you're saying we're back on the surface? Then where the hell are we? What is this place?"
He immediately opened his backpack. "Quick—let's use spherical trigonometry to determine our position."
Instruments were unreliable down here. More often than not, mathematics was the only dependable tool for fixing your location.
Bella worked the calculations alongside him. First, their own height. Then the length of their shadows, factoring in the time and date to triangulate their position.
She ran the numbers twice. Both times she stared at the result, dumbfounded. "Professor... we're in Antarctica?"
Palau sat in the western Pacific. Nowhere near Antarctica. No matter how far you walked from the storm-shrouded Mysterious Island, you couldn't end up in Antarctica.
Walking for forty-eight days from Palau to Antarctica—it sounded like pure nonsense.
Serizawa looked back at the tunnel behind them, then up at the sun hanging high in the sky. "If this conclusion is correct, then we've found the answer to how Titans can traverse underground at such speed. The Palau-to-Antarctica passage won't be the only one..."
He sat down on the ground, carefully thinking through what this meant for his own research—and for Monarch's entire body of theory.
Bella had no interest in debating scientific questions with the perpetually anguished professor. Returning to the surface lifted an enormous weight from her chest. Forty-eight days of grueling trekking, released all at once—the relief was overwhelming. Even the shackles binding her at the threshold between the fifth and sixth circles loosened by a fraction.
Those monks who subjected themselves to brutal austerities for the sake of breakthroughs—she had to admit, they had a point.
She could barely keep the joy off her face.
She glanced left and right, then darted into the dense jungle nearby. Moments later, she emerged with a miniature elephant in each hand.
"These little guys have been watching us this whole time. Here, hold one for me—I'm taking them home!" The elephants were about the size of ordinary house cats. Bella gripped them by the belly, their four stubby legs churning frantically, trunks and tails whipping back and forth.
She handed one to Shaw. Here—go play with it.
She'd always felt Arendelle was missing something. Foxes, squirrels, rabbits—plenty of those. She'd never looked closely before, but now it hit her: what had been missing all along were miniature elephants.
Grab them for the kids! And naturally, she and Natasha could play with them too.
Shaw rubbed the little elephant's belly, tugged its trunk, pinched its tail and ears. Even with her emotional flatness, she found this genuinely entertaining.