"It's practical. If you were someone else, I wouldn't have even brought it up. I would have only alluded to it and let you fall into the conclusion yourself."
The professor scoffed out a sob. "What is practical about choosing vigilantes?"
"You heard him," Sylas said. "There's an organization that's been recruiting people from elite schools. You're smart, what do you think that means?"
The professor froze. She looked up at Sylas as though she didn't want to admit the obvious conclusion.
This time, she couldn't hold back her tears at all.
And they still let her son die, and for what? To hold onto a little more power?
The professor practically folded herself into her chair, sinking in deep and burying her head into her legs. She didn't care that Sylas was here anymore. She just sat there, grieving out her soul.
Sylas didn't say a word, nor did he try to comfort her. The two of them didn't have that sort of relationship, and he knew enough about this woman to know that she was probably nursing grievances against him as well.
Several minutes passed by before she managed to calm herself, her shoulders shuddering beneath the strain.
The first thing she saw when she looked up was a tissue Sylas handed to her.
By this point, Sylas' nose had already stopped bleeding and he had taken the gauze out. Although there was a hint of swelling, even that seemed to be rapidly going down.
It was such a simple thing, but now she had seen Sylas throw something across a room and kill a man with his mind, and now he was healing from an injury that should have taken weeks of recovery right before her eyes.
Was the world really changing?
"What do you want me to do?" she asked, her voice having returned to an almost icy sort of calm.
"Well first, I need your help. I came here today for a specific reason. But I also want to know exactly what that man asked of you before your 'snarky' comment."
"He asked me to join their organization and he said something about becoming superhuman. What do you need help with?"
"I need to use the supercomputer to analyze some data. It would take too much time on my own, and my current stats are low enough that I likely wouldn't succeed for now no matter how hard I try.
"You don't know much about the Trial and the Aether Plane, but I will have to keep this brief. I have to go soon.
"I have what they call a Profession. It allows me to contract snakes as my partners and exchange benefits between the two of us. I need the supercomputer to analyze the genome of one of my snakes to help me better understand some things."
Sylas said snakes, but Professor Fembroise heard something very different.
She knew what Sylas studied. Could it be that they could translate their skills from this world to this so-called 'Aether Plane'?
Was there more of a chance for her than she originally knew?
She shook her head, focusing on the task.
"But what kind of file do you have the genome in? How are you going to transfer it? Do they have USBs in that world?"
Sylas shook his head.
This was an obvious problem that he had thought of as well, and his original method was going to be to brute force it.
It was too difficult to analyze the genome, but what was DNA if not just a long string of alternating letters?
So long as he had the time, with his current stats he could blaze through it.
Even before the Trial, his typing speed was around 120 words per minute, or two words a second. Even at that pace, he could write out probably 500+ of a DNA sequence a minute.
Right now, his typing speed almost certainly dwarfed that; he just had to worry about the input speed of the laptop. But according to his calculations, the theoretical limit for that should be at least several thousand words per minute, and it's unlikely that he would be able to hit that speed even with these stats.
Even so, to type out the whole human genome at that speed would take years, and that's if he never took a break. Normal technology didn't even seem to have weeks left.
What Sylas actually wanted was just to analyze small portions and hopefully land on something useful.
"I just planned to type it out," he eventually replied.
"Type it out? Where do you have it stored?" she asked in confusion.
"It's in the system interface, I—"
Sylas stopped talking because he was seeing a look from Professor Fembroise now that he rarely saw in his life. In fact, he could remember every time he had.
She looked like she was looking at an idiot.
Professor Fembroise took a breath and bit her tongue. The last time she had snapped at a man—
"Just say what you want to say. I've never been a fan of mincing words."
Seeing that Sylas didn't seem to just be testing her obedience, the professor shook her head.
"Do you really think this alien technology is so simple? How much research have you done into it? I thought you were smarter than this."
"You have the system?" Sylas asked in surprise.
"Everyone does now. It appeared after the Trial."
Sylas' brows raised in recognition. Now that he thought about it, he had been able to see the stats of the Bronze Cube even before the Trial began and certainly before there was any Aether. Why did he assume that one needed the other? Or maybe the system was radioing itself in from a place with plenty of Aether.
He should have known, but his family never talked about it so it was something he neglected. They had just been happy he came back alive, and other than the time they spent grilling into him, they entirely avoided the topic because it hit too close to home.