"You?" After several seconds of silence, Juno spoke first. "Is it almost time? Let me guess. It's 2012 in your era now, isn't it? You have no other options left, correct?"
The words themselves were ordinary, but paired with that arrogance ingrained in her very bones, they became anything but ordinary.
Jupiter had been full of goodwill toward the humans of the future. He had researched seven major plans and revised them more than a hundred times in total. The old buddy's moral standards were practically off the charts. Saying he loved all humanity like a god might be an exaggeration, but the nature of what he had done was not far off.
Minerva did not love humans as much as Jupiter did, but she had still done everything she could to help humanity escape its seemingly inevitable destruction.
Of the three Isu, only this haughty Juno was a villain—at least from humanity's perspective. She was an Isu supremacist. In her eyes, humans were nothing more than livestock capable of speech and rudimentary thought.
Bella shook her head. "No. I'm still thinking about what Jupiter told me earlier."
Juno spoke in the tone of someone looking down on an idiot. "You cannot even accomplish something this simple? You humans are... truly pitiable. I could explain the principles to you for a hundred years and you would probably still fail to understand them. Humans possess only five senses, while we can command the sixth. This may simply be too difficult for you. Never mind. Open the pedestal and let me help you."
She seemed to be offering kind advice, and then even pointed at the metal pedestal beneath the holographic projection. There was an obvious raised section there.
This old woman was awfully confident. Did she really think Bella would walk into such an obvious trap? Was she insulting her intelligence?
Bella pursed her lips and did not answer until quite a while later. "You're still thinking about that honest kid Desmond Miles, aren't you? I already told you before. He's away on a business trip and won't be back anytime soon."
Juno's face turned ugly. "You are toying with me? You dare insult me! You lowly half-breed mongrel!"
Bella raised a hand and immediately fired a Mind Blast.
She knew perfectly well that it was the wrong type of attack, but when she saw the remnants of the holographic projection scatter under the Mind Blast, she still shook her head. No good. Wrong specialty. Her spells could not actually hit Juno.
Juno tried to suppress Bella with her superior Isu bloodline, but ran into the same problem. With the holographic projection equipment between them, she could not do anything to Bella either.
Both sides were left with the faintly awkward sense that neither had any way to get at the other.
"I don't believe you have any way to kill Juno completely. Leave her imprisoned here." Minerva's holographic projection slowly walked out from the wall on the other side.
Bella readily took the offered way out. "Fine. For your sake."
Minerva looked at her former companion and remained silent for a long time before speaking. "I already imprisoned her here. You should focus on resolving the Toba Catastrophe as soon as possible. If you truly have no other solution in the end, then you will have no choice but to activate the pedestal and use the energy accumulated by the Eye over these seventy-five thousand years to alter reality. At that time, Juno will also be released. I hope you fully understand the benefits and drawbacks involved. You do not have much time left..."
Bella looked solemnly at the two holographic projections. "I'll find a better solution."
She paused. "I have great respect for the Isu. Well, most of the Isu, at least. But Ms. Minerva, there is something I want to tell you. Times have changed. This is humanity's era now. You should stop interfering with the course of human development."
Her words made both projections, who had maintained an imposing air from beginning to end, freeze for a moment. Minerva asked tentatively, "What do you mean?"
"I don't mean anything." Bella spread her hands. "You're already dead. You died seventy-five thousand years ago."
"No! Do not use your narrow perspective to judge our values. We are still alive, in a form beyond anything you can imagine!" Juno cut her off sharply.
Bella did not hurry her. Only after the old woman finally shut up did she continue. "Your hearts stopped beating. Your brains died. Your bodies turned to ash. You call that being alive? At most, the two of you are copies of Juno's and Minerva's original consciousnesses."
Seeing that Juno was about to speak again, Bella gave her a cold glance backed by the mental force of a demigod.
"I admire the noble character of most Isu, and I deeply respect everything you did for later generations. But as I just said, your era is over. Whether that thing is called the Toba Catastrophe or a solar flare, it is a disaster, but it is absolutely not some irreversible apocalypse. I will find a way to solve it. So you can rest now."
Her tone was firm and her voice clear.
"I hope you can do what you said you would." Minerva turned and vanished.
Juno gave a heavy "hmph" and disappeared from the room as well.
Trying to talk these two "people" into deleting themselves with a few sentences was pure fantasy. Bella only needed them to stop coming out and causing trouble. They were nothing more than two consciousnesses hidden in a database.
"Mentor? What happened in there?" The Apple of Eden had blocked not only sight but sound as well. When Bella walked out of the inner hall, the Assassins still had no idea what had occurred.
"Just a minor problem. Nothing worth mentioning." Bella did not explain at all. She closed the gate of light again, removed the Grand Temple key, and stored it in her dimensional space.
Bella had no particularly good way to deal with enemies hidden inside a database. If she could not solve the problem, she could simply leave it hanging.
Juno and Minerva had already stayed here for seventy-five thousand years. Presumably they would not mind staying another seventy-five thousand.
The Isu believed they could use the device called the Eye to completely eliminate the solar flare. Their mathematics had reached an absurd level. They used numbers to calculate the very concept of "existence" and derived an equation. By relying on the Eye, the energy pedestal, and that equation, they could erase the future solar flare at the level of existence itself.
The method was somewhat like the reality-warping abilities of those absurdly overpowered mutants in later Marvel stories, and somewhat like the Reality Stone. If I didn't like a particular reality, I could simply change it at the level of the rules.
For the Isu to accomplish something similar through technology was truly outrageous. The problem was that activating the Eye consumed an enormous amount of energy. The equation was the arm, the Eye was the fist, but without enough energy behind them, there was no way to launch this ultimate program.
After seventy-five thousand years of accumulation, and judging from Minerva's words, they had probably accumulated just about enough by now. There should be sufficient energy for a single activation. Unfortunately, that villain Juno was still in the way. To activate the Eye now, Bella would first have to kill Juno. That made things rather troublesome.