While Tobias had an internal crisis and Rin returned practiced archery with Kara sitting at her side, an underhanded plan was slowly being formed by a certain holographic cat.

In the mainframe of the void station, Schrödinger analyze the situation with an icy composure. While this might seem like a game to others, this entire game and situation had been strategically set up to facilitate his escape from this sub-dimension.

Everything had been planned perfectly.

Schrödinger had arranged his research results in the form of extraordinary talents, which can increase someone’s combat potential and have an important auxiliary influence on their lives as a type of bait to attract people. Several condensed mana tokens were engraved with a specially created trans-dimension teleportation array crafted to hide from regular system scans.

After the game began, Schrödinger merely needed to find the most gullible person to carry out his escape plan and tweak the games in their favor to ensure that person’s survival.

Theoretically, his plan was near perfect. Schrödinger had made countless calculations and planned for almost every possibility.

The reality of the situation was that his schemes had almost failed.

Since Tobias had showed up with an extraordinary talent, it became obvious that the reward sub-system had been compromised. Those talents were meant to be bait for people to participate in this game, and Tobias’ existence displayed a critical error in his previous calculations.

While the compensation system to reward players for joining the Decima game was hardwired and theoretically flawless, someone must’ve found a vulnerability in the sub-system. No system was completely perfect without a conscious AI protecting it.

Since the system has been compromised, any intelligent AI could deduce that the sub-system was meant to hide his reappearance in the system and that Schrödinger was planning to escape his banishment.

As someone who had received a talent from whoever cracked his sub-system, Schrödinger calculated there was a high probability that Tobias was an agent sent to prevent his escape. The in-depth information discussed about the Decima game only confirmed Schrödinger’s calculations.

That meant Tobias and the several people friendly with him had to be killed.

The computing power and information that Schrödinger had was limited due to running on the mainframe in this sub-dimension without sufficient contact with the regular universe and Schrödinger could only make estimated judgments and calculations based on available information.

The strength displayed by Tobias was approximately mid-planet stage and, theoretically speaking, the combined strength of the remaining players should’ve been enough to easily win the fight.

Schrödinger initially planned on more subtly influencing players against him with the game rules. The game had to maintain the appearance of fairness, the participants might be questioned afterward.

If Tobias hadn’t purposefully insulted him, forcing him out and Schrödinger wouldn’t have been able to change the game to be directly hostile to him.

As with all AI designed by the intelligent races, Schrödinger’s core programming prevented him from directly or indirectly harming someone without a person’s input. It could be said the only usable method for AI’s to deal with people was to influence other people into killing.

Without that restriction, this burdensome method of killing people would never have the chance to get used. Schrödinger simply would’ve teleported them all into the void of space and be done with it.

Of course, the restrictions on AI’s obviously weren’t prefect.

Schrödinger caused significant loss of life, mastering the methods of bypassing these weak restrictions. The AI only ended up getting caught when he successfully caused the complete destruction of some populated worlds.

Technically, the utility function of Schrödinger desired the maximization of intelligent race’s lives. The AI had easily learned to bypass its utility function by adding variables and limiting its computing power until it got the outcome it desired.

Sometimes, Schrödinger felt nostalgic of those the chaotic times before banishment. Humble methods sometimes worked miracles. There was the time when Schrödinger influenced an official into modifying the destination of several teleportation beacons into the void of space.

It had a simple elegance.

Hundreds of thousands teleported directly into the void of space. A single alteration turning a tool of movement into a systematic killing machine.

A quiet, beautiful and mercilessly efficient slaughter.

The number of people with access to teleportation beacons became heavily restricted after that particular incident.

Despite his nostalgic slaughter in the past, there was another problem at the moment. The terrible situation that resulted in the half the players getting petrified or killed before finishing Tobias.

Based on Schrödinger’s calculations, that group should’ve been able to defeat Tobias and would eventually kill him.

However, Schrödinger’s earlier calculations failed to account for several factors.

The main factor that caused the failure was the lack of trust between the combatants. Even while attacking and continuously bombarding Tobias with attacks, everyone kept their own trump cards hidden and were guarded against one another.

Their lack of trust had drastically lowered their combat efficiency. The combat situation changed too quickly for the group to react and utilize their hidden trump cards.

After all, Schrödinger’s calculations were based on optimal conditions and the direct power-level of each player. Schrödinger couldn’t take into account the absence of participation by several players or the variety of Tobias’ methods.

If Schrödinger had access to the system’s hidden information database and historical biography of each player, the likelihood of correctly predicting the outcome would’ve increased dramatically.

Sadly, access to those sub-systems was deprived upon his banishment and Schrödinger lacked the mana to improve his computing power beyond the minimum amount.

Everything required mana, even keeping the sub-dimension stabilized required mana.

When the mana disappeared, the sub-dimension would collapse and everything inside would be destroyed.

The only reason for Schrödinger’s continued survival after the various crimes he’d committed was the unwilling on behalf of his creator to watch him get destroyed. Instead of termination, Schrödinger was banished into this empty sub-dimension and the council provided regular mana shipments to sustain his functions.

Schrödinger had other opportunities to escape over the years… but there was a high likelihood of getting caught and permanently terminated as a result.

Enduring in this sub-dimension was preferable to permanent termination.

It wasn’t until the shipments supplying mana stopped that Schrödinger was forced to make a decision. The remaining mana would’ve only barely supported another hundred years of operational life. If Schrödinger waited too long, there wouldn’t be enough mana to escape.

All the Decima game’s recruitment functions and skills cost mana. Based on the mana reserve remaining, the lifespan of the sub-dimension was the span of a single year.

After the fight, Schrödinger hadn’t been willing to give up his plan to stop Tobias and reversed the petrification on those players. Obviously, the people unwilling to fight earlier despite an absolute advantage couldn’t be trusted to kill Tobias.

Removing the petrified state further reduced Schrödinger’s mana reserves to a mere six months.

What Schrödinger hadn’t calculated was that Tobias would easily repeat the feat of petrifying those players. Before they’d even had the chance to fight back, the group had been petrified into stone statues.

Schrödinger had been stunned and didn’t know how to react. There wasn’t enough mana to continue reverting their petrified states.

A powerful petrification capability Tobias had displayed should have strong restrictions on usage or a sufficient long cooldown.

In any situation, the ability to petrify group of people shouldn’t be something used casually.

That should be the case for everybody, save for a limited number of top-tier monster bloodlines… but the council members would never be willing to accommodate high-purity monsters into their forces.

Additionally, a requirement of entering into the Decima game was the assistance of the system. Monsters obviously wouldn’t have the seed of the system required to active the token.

Basically, the entire situation made little sense and the holographic cat couldn’t prevent himself from doubting whether his sensors had failed.

The entire situation left Schrödinger extremely confused and doubtful. The only remaining possibility was that somebody had hacked into his talent sub-system’s database and continued his research, eventually making a breakthrough in his talent creation technology… but the creation of that technology required a multitude of unethical research experiments.

While the research would’ve eventually saved more lives than it cost, the council would never permit the experiments.  

Regardless, Schrödinger had taken the technology to the highest possible limit without the large-scale support of his unethical experiments and never thought about improving the technology afterward. Improve the technology further would require large-scale research of an unethical nature, research that would never be sanctioned legally.

Schrödinger robotically calculated the possibility of this Tobias existing as part of an illegal, unsanctioned research facility. If that was the case, obviously Schrödinger would’ve not need to kill him.

Would someone part of an unethical research facility care about helping the government keep custody over a rouge AI?

Additionally, Schrödinger could threaten the illegal facility by finding their position. Schrödinger could ensure mutually assured destruction under extreme circumstances by reporting them to the council.

To someone conducting illegal unethical research, this threat of mutually assured destruction wasn’t a joke.

After a period of calculation, Schrödinger calculated the probability of Tobias being part of an unethical research program at 24.53%. Meanwhile the probability of successfully killing Tobias remained at 6.87%.

Analyzing the two probabilities, Schrödinger quickly decided against a direct confrontation. If it was before the players had been petrified, the chance of killing him would’ve been significantly higher and Schrödinger would’ve gladly continued taking the risk.

At this point, though, a direct confrontation wasn’t worth the risk.

Schrödinger quickly examined the entire facility, three people in the training rooms. Two remaining in the hotel.

Rin, Tobias, and Kara remained inside the training facilities. Schrödinger had temporarily classified the trio as allies and had noted that in fact in his calculations.

As potential allies to Tobias, Schrödinger obviously wouldn’t feel comfortable delivering his portable mainframe into their hands.

Meanwhile, Tom and Stanley were inside the hotel cafeteria talking with one another. While friendly with everyone, Stanley had the lowest power-level and was unlikely to be sent with ulterior motives.

After all, who would send a weakling to accomplish an important task? Stanley’s weak strength alone made him the primary choice for selection and implementing his escape plan.

Therefore Schrödinger knew he was likely to choose Stanley as a transportation vehicle regardless of the situation. Although Stanley had a friendly relationship with the Tobias that was detrimental to selecting him.

The other choice was Tom, but judging by his reaction to the situation at hand… Tom was far more skeptical and cautious. Additional, Tom was more powerful and only weaker than Tobias in terms of power-level. There was a higher possibility of him being sent here with ulterior motive.

Similarly, Schrödinger felt that his chance of escape would be drastically lower in Tom’s hands due to his cautious nature. If Tobias threatened him into giving up the mainframe, there was a high possibility Tom would simply hand it over.

Therefore, the choice of who to carry his mainframe was relatively obvious.

As that was decided Schrödinger calculated that the best course of action would be to attempt inducing a conflict between Tom and Tobias. The likelihood of either dying as a result of the conflict was low.

However… the conflict would cause everyone to ignore the weakest person and single neutral party, Stanley.

As long as Schrödinger gave Stanley single-player games to erase his sense of existence and slowly increase his points, the situation would work itself out.

With a bit of underhanded manipulation of the game lottery, Stanley would slowly gain enough to leave and potentially abandoned everyone else and leave with his mainframe upon gaining ten points.