The casual tone with which this ancient being spoke to Daneel irked him, but he knew that it could not be avoided.
Through his machinations, he had made it so that the Basilisk now thought that the fate of her sect was tied to his own, and the first act of collaboration had been in him asking for a transmission device that would send a message to the Vohler's group that would seem as if it had really come from the Church.
He tried to do it by himself, but with the system in its un-upgraded state, it had been pretty impossible. The Church was, after all, a powerhouse in the Mainland whose capacity he could not even begin to understand, and hence, the encryption technique it used to authenticate its messages was something that could not be duplicated by just anyone.
When he had been making his plan that had revolved completely around the upgrade, he had known that he would have to pull out each and every member of the Church if he wanted to defeat them all at the same time in a dominating manner. They were like rats in an infested house- one round of extermination could not possibly have gotten them all, even if the lure was very tempting. The goal was for it to be thorough, so that even those rats which had hidden themselves the most deeply would be exposed, and beaten into submission.
This would definitely not have been possible if it weren't for the official message invoking the oaths sworn by the traitors, so the Basilisk's help had been indispensable.
If he understood it correctly, the TriCobra sect was a force that was definitely at least on the scale of the Church, and if the Basilisk was to be believed, they were actually even stronger, but their strength was dispersed throughout the area outside the continent of Angaria.
Their chief specialties were espionage and assassination, and hence, they had already cracked the encryption methods of all the major forces of the Mainland long ago.
These were the words of the Basilisk, not his, so it was to be expected that he had been apprehensive.
Even when he had voiced his doubt, that ancient serpent had laughed it off, saying that it might have been a different case if they were talking about a relatively close range method of communication on the Mainland itself, but because this was so far away, there were only a few encryption methods that could be used that would facilitate such long-range communication without expending too much Energy, and the TriCobra sect had cracked them all long ago.
Sure enough, it had worked beautifully, and now, he needed to go back to speak with her.
Understanding that this was also not something that he could keep waiting, Daneel promised himself that this would definitely be the last thing he would do before sitting down with his close friend.
Without further ado, he directly teleported away from the cavern and began to travel toward the Endless Sea.
The sea was turbulent, as always, unaffected by the happenings of the land that dotted its landscape. While he flew above it, he felt himself reduced to a small speck in the sky, insignificant, as even if he deployed all of his power, he would not be able to harm the sea whose real depth was unknown even though so many generations had lived and died on Angaria since its birth.
This moment of reflection helped him to push back the slight feeling of invincibility that he had begun to get after seeing all the magnificent things that the system was capable of.
Still, thinking back to his origins, when compared to that kid who had been able to do nothing except grit his teeth when seeing his father and mother head towards a poor, miserable death, he had come a long way, and that was to be celebrated.
The celebrations could wait, though, as he soon neared the area where he had first spoken to the Basilisk.
This was when a thought suddenly struck him - what if the upgraded system could finally analyze the different type of magic that the Basilisk was repeatedly using to confound him at every turn?
The last time it had analyzed it, the system had said that it would need 2 upgrades to meet the complexity required, but what if it could at least obtain some information regarding what it was?
With excitement coursing through his veins, he flew the last few hundred meters, before seeing the figure of that poor assassin suddenly appear out of nowhere to greet him.
Yes! There it was!
Alastair had already been using a spell that he could not understand to conceal herself, and with mounting nervousness, he asked in his mind, "Has anything been detected, now?"
He waited with bated breath for a moment in which it almost seemed as if he could hear the gears of the system turning in response, and a second later, it said:
[Upgraded Phenomenon Analysis Module has begun to decipher the workings of the Dimensional Magic that was just detected. Although a complete analysis is not possible, it has been deemed that some insights can be obtained.
As complexity of this task borders on the upper bound of complexity of phenomena that are able to be analyzed, it requires an unknown amount of time.
Cognition Module has determined that the amount of resources the task will take up can be set aside indefinitely, so the option is available for the task to go on in the background while host uses the system for his needs.
It has also been ascertained that increasing the amount of resources and putting the system offline will not decrease the time required, as brute force methods are useless in this task.
Host will be notified when the task is completed.]
Daneel could hardly believe his ears.
He had been right!
It had been quite unreasonable for him to want the system to work on something that was clearly supposed to be secret even on the Mainland, but of course, his expectations for it had been high, and it had not disappointed.
The worst case would have been if it had still said that it was impossible to understand just what was going on as another upgrade was necessary to do what he asked, so even if it took time, he was totally fine with that.
Feeling as if he was finally making headway into the swirling eddies of danger that he had thrust himself into by collaborating with the TriCobra sect, he waited for the Basilisk to speak, whose eyes had once again appeared in the voids that seemed to have permanently taken the place of the eyes of the one who had come to this continent for very different reasons.