Reboot: Mechanic

When Mary informed him that she finished identifying the leader's identity, Shi Tian quickly dropped the materials on his desk and rushed toward her.

Of course, he made a sneaky glance at the current depressed or bitter Vanessa and was internally relieved that he could avoid feeling pressured.

If it was any random woman, then Shi Tian truly could care less, but because Vanessa was somewhat pivotal in their plan as well, he was overly helpless toward her.

Especially when everyone in the camp knew about her "special identity" that even Olivia Harrett could not afford to act willfully.

"So who is the person, Mary?" Shi Tian asked swiftly the moment he arrived behind Mary. His eyes stared at the screen and was amazed by Mary's skills in digital image processing.

Going from his terrible quality of 144p, Mary managed to turn the image around in high quality, albeit very different from what an image looked like.

The image was grayscale and seemed to have undergone a histogram equalization.

"You did histogram equalization on the picture you took a snippet of?" Shi Tian questioned once he noticed what Mary had done to the image.

Mary nodded her head and said, "Yeah, with the terrible video quality, the image is practically unrecognizable unless I completely change it into something else."

Given that the image was extremely pixelated and hard to discern who they were, and could be said to look like anyone, Mary knew she needed to search for another method.

And histogram equalization of the image was the optimum choice in this situation.

Histogram equalization was a method used to enhance the contrast of an image by adjusting the distribution of pixel intensities. It works by spreading out the most frequent intensity values in an image, making it more evenly distributed.

To put it simply, this process helped to improve the overall appearance of the image, bringing out more details and making it visually clearer and sharper.

And through this method, Mary could access the database while modifying the search bar to get a close resemblance of who the person matched.

"With the histogram equalization, I've got five people that match the result," Mary revealed.

"Five?" Shi Tian raised an eyebrow, seemingly dumbfounded.

"There shouldn't be that much." He added, finding it confusing. The image might have undergone some changes, but this was a person they were talking about.

Just how many look-alike people could there be in Gearits City?

It was hard to even find a single doppelganger that existed, let alone five in total. The chances of that happening were extremely rare.

Meanwhile, Mary rolled her eyes and gave Shi Tian a pinch, prompting him to quickly move away to avoid being pinched further.

"What was that for?" He then asked, rubbing his waist on the spot that Mary had pinched fiercely.

"Normally, there shouldn't be that many, but thanks to your great videography, it ended up having such results," Mary explained, clearly riled up when the fault was his and not hers.

Realizing it was his fault in phrasing his intentions wrongly, Shi Tian scratched his head slightly.

"So that means we need to investigate these five candidates?" While Shi Tian was trying to act innocent, Vanessa suddenly stepped forward and asked curiously.

Mary ignored the dumb behavior of Shi Tian and turned her attention to Vanessa. "No need, because we can just do the process of elimination."

"Right… we're looking for someone in the military, and you got the database." Vanessa clasped her hands, having understood Mary's intention.

Since Mary could access the database of Gearits City which should have been restricted and heavily defended against hackers, Mary could simply look up information of each of the candidates.

Whoever data wasn't involved in the military or more specifically, Theobold's platoons were automatically eliminated, given that they were searching for someone who leads the elite platoon of Theobold.

This was also why it was dangerous to hold such a high position because anyone could easily confirm it was you since the position isn't common.

A few minutes later, Mary pinpointed the candidate to be Felix, a man in his 30s who had joined the military at the relatively young age of 19.

"Felix was a rising star in Theobold's 24th military recruitment. He came out on top with nearly a perfect score and was soon transferred to the elite platoon. At the age of 24, he managed to earn quite the merits in successfully leading a small team to suppress the rampaging monsters in District B." Mary read the data aloud and was somewhat astonished by Felix's achievement.

"Geez, this Felix is practically a shining star that probably has a great future ahead of him." Vanessa chimed in and said, her eyes slowly turning to Shi Tian.

And it didn't even take a second for Shi Tian to understand the eyesight she was giving him, especially the implication of her statement.

She was essentially saying Felix's future was bright, but because of him, Felix's military career ended abruptly.

How could a person who lost half of his vision remain as a leader of an elite platoon that demanded the best of the best?

"If I'm Felix and know the culprit that caused me to lose all of my past efforts, then I'll definitely kill you as well." Vanessa joked, clicking her tongue and shaking her head at Shi Tian.

"No wonder you were hastily crafting new stuff to protect yourself. You knew you had messed up by not having him killed." Mary seemingly taunted with a snicker.

Had Shi Tian managed to kill Felix and not taken his right eye, then there wouldn't have been any trouble.

However, Shi Tian failed miserably which resulted in him creating a very hostile relationship with Felix.

What was worse was that Felix wasn't someone to be trifled with.

Sure, he might have been ambushed early on and looked weak, but now that Felix was aware of Shi Tian's capability. His revenge would surely not be simple, but in fact, meticulous and deadly.

'This is what happens when you fail to cut the root off.' Shi Tian clenched his fist, having realized the enemy was a formidable foe.