At the signal, the Proxima Centauri man pressed his lips together firmly and hurried forward under everyone's gaze.
He deftly pulled a slim personal terminal from the backpack behind him and connected it to the reader beside the door.
Then he rapidly moved his forelimbs, tapping the keys of what looked like a keyboard before him.
"Will this work?"
Levi watched the intensely focused Proxima Centauri man and asked in a low voice.
The man did not look up at the question.
Still typing rapidly, he said, "Don't worry. We haven't changed our algorithm in 150 years."
Levi frowned. "And what if... they changed it recently?"
"Those Lairs at the Academy of Sciences would never bother with such a thankless task!" the man typing at the keyboard said irritably. "Otherwise, how do you think I took control of these surveillance devices?"
A moment later, he narrowed his three pairs of visual organs and struck a key hard.
"Done!"
As his words fell, the heavy door to the Main Control Room slowly opened, revealing a terrified Rex dressed in gray.
On the first floor of the Hatching Center.
Aquitas stumbled through the piles of corpses.
Fighting back wave after wave of nausea, she kept crouching down and forcing herself to turn over the bodies of the small, scrawny Marus.
Their bodies were coated in slick blue blood.
And there were exposed internal organs, too...
An unusually soft, slippery organ slid across her fingertips.
It was a Thought Organ!
Aquitas could not stop herself from vomiting amid the corpses.
Even so, she refused to give up.
Once, twice, three times...
She kept searching through the bodies before her.
Not this one... not this one either...
As she searched more and more corpses, the unease and agitation in Aquitas's heart steadily grew.