In the computer room corridor, a pool of blood and flesh lay on the floor.
The human named Jackson had been sliced into pieces by the laser grid Murphy had created in imitation of Resident Evil.
Yet a small pendant still floated in the air.
A dense pale-blue glow condensed around the pendant, forming a sphere only about five centimeters in diameter.
Even when lasers hot enough to melt steel focused on the sphere, they still failed to damage it.
"Truly astonishing," the female voice from the speakers said. "It resembles the protective spells of a Horcrux, yet it is undoubtedly far more powerful. Especially after being compressed to such a small size—these lasers could easily destroy any one of my Horcruxes, yet they cannot breach your defenses."
"Tom Riddle." A voice came from the pendant.
"I no longer use that name." Lucas said, "Say something, Holy Mother. Who exactly are you? What is your purpose? Perhaps once we receive satisfactory answers, we'll let you go."
"Why did you guess that I would come here?" the pendant asked.
"Ah, so you have a sense of curiosity too? Well, I can answer that. Professor Murphy had already discovered that you could locate him. He even suspected that you could, to some extent, detect his thoughts. So, to prevent his arrangements from being exposed to you, he asked me to prepare a backup plan."
"Only I knew about this Plan B," Lucas said.
"Though we don't know much about your motives, we could guess that you wanted to prevent our antenna from being completed. There were two key stages in building it. One was the antenna itself, which you entrusted Professor Dumbledore to handle. The other was the antenna's computing division—Athena. Destroying either one would greatly delay our project."
"Professor Murphy was