The Axe is merciless. Guess it was too slow if they hadn't left the starting village in 100 chapters.
Well, you're not wrong, It really is too slow. In quite a few ways.
But it's not just that the characters remain within the same place+-. It's that the "carrot" is lacking in this series.
That is to say, there's a lot of planning, a lot of prepping, a lot of conversations about what can be or could be, slowly moving through dank caves -- but even after 100 chapters, you don't get a good concept of how "they are advancing".
Yeah, sure, one of them has a rare class, another received a demonic blade and got trained by an elite, they find rare loot all the time -- but it feels more like a bunch of low-level characters clearing low-level dungeons, and getting excited of getting drops of varied rarities, when all of them are of grade 1 out of 10.
Usually, in these type of stories, they introduce new types of elements, energies, "cultivation methods", ways to set apart people from each other. Not much here, really. At least, not after 100 chapters.
I think that, if the author really wanted to focus on the intrigue, on the inter-personal mambojambo of living in a battle-royal shithole, then he should've moved the gang to places where they can conflict with other people, guilds, clans, mayors, what have you, and be exposed to the conspiracies and webs of people older and more experienced than they are.
Rather than, you know, kill spiders and skeletons for 100 chapters.
If this was axed, I can totally understand why. If I didn't have a backlog of 40+- chapters to read from, I would NOT be following this on a weekly basis. It truly does move too slowly, like the author is constantly stalling for time. It's just boring.