A powerful rifleman mech maneuvered through space. With a powerful flight system and a slim construction, it moved with speed incarnate.

Yet as it deliberately let a number of positron beams hit its frame, the thinly plated armor of the mech proved to be deceptively tough! Though the power level of the beams had been tuned down, the sheer quantity of them hitting the mech was still a huge concern.

Various combat bots zipping about in space continued to deluge the rifleman mech with powerful beams of destruction, yet the most the rifleman mech suffered was just some scorch marks.

Soon enough, the mech pilot had enough. The mech brought its formidable-looking rifle to bear and fired a single shot.

The rifle's chamber glowed before the muzzle spat out a splintering bright beam that hit all of the bots at once!

If not for the fact that the rifle's power level had been forcefully reduced to an artificially low setting, a considerable amount of hardware would have been destroyed!

Nonetheless, each of the bots detected that they had been destroyed, so they no longer fired their potent positron weapons.

It was not that easy to disable so many bots at once! Each of them outputted an incredible amount of ECM. Other than hacking the bots or countering their ECM, hitting their small, nimble and fast-moving was easier said than done, especially all at the same time!

A regular second-class mech pilot could never accomplish such a feat with ease. Only those who touched the realm of the extraordinary could accomplish such an exceptional result!

Yet what happened in this corner of space was only a small part of the clandestine testing ground.

Adjacent to this zone were other zones!

Each of those zones featured an identical rifleman mech. Each of them let the bots hit them with numerous positron beam attacks before retaliating against them in a single blow, taking them all out with an unerringly-accurate blow!

More zones existed beyond these areas. If the view was zoomed out, then it turned out that a whopping fifty mechs delivered an identical performance!

What was even more remarkable was the mech in the center of it all. Occupying a much large zone than the other mechs, the machine glowed with the radiance of both an energy shield and a resonance shield!

A deluge of positron beams poured onto the shields of the mechs. Instead of letting one of the shields absorb the brunt of the attacks before reaching its limit, the mech instead alternated the absorption, allowing the two shields to support each other and thereby extending their longevity!

Just as the mech's two shields began to dim, the mech finally lifted its larger and much more powerful rifle. The entire surface of the weapon began to glow with resonance as an incredible amount of power accumulated inside the weapon.

The moment it fired, it was as if the entire surrounding environment was blinded by a flash!

The outcome was devastating.

Not a single drone survived.

The power of a resonating attack at this magnitude was too much for any of them to resist!

A lot of valuable hardware had been vaporized, leaving nothing but residual heat and scattered dust in their place. The cost of this single test was considerable, but the data recorded from this awe-inspiring display of power was worth it in the eyes of the organizers.

After years of planning and months of intensive development, the experimental new expert mech finally bared its fangs!

Once the lesser mechs completed their tests, they all left their zones and converged onto the expert mechs.

Though all fifty mechs exhibited the power reminiscent of an expert mech, their quality and performance paled in comparison to the real deal!

The mech in the center flew forward, and all of its escorts moved precisely in unison. It was rather disturbing how synchronized they moved. Only AIs could match this level of precision, but the fact of the matter was that every single mech was still under the control of their own mech pilots.

Each of them sat quietly in their cockpits. They exchanged no words or thoughts with each other. Their vacant, empty-eyed stares looked profoundly disturbing, yet the way they piloted their mechs was sublime.

This was an impossible sight as far as many people were concerned!

The formation of mechs flew a moderate distance before they reached a large hangar bay built into an asteroid. Once they entered, the mechs all stood down in unison.

Swarms of mech technicians began to approach the mechs.

Though the cockpits had all opened up, none of the mech pilots emerged aside from a single exception.

Venerable Ghanso Larkinson slowly climbed out of the cockpit of his expert mech and looked at the surrounding mechs with a troubled expression.

He saw how a team of mech technicians floated over to the open cockpits before gently pulling out the vacant-eyed mech pilots. Their piloting suits turned them weightless, causing the mech technicians to handle the unresponsive pilots as if they were objects.

Though the power of these mech pilots was considerable when they were fielded alongside Ghanso, now they were as weak as a kitten. Anyone could knock them out with ease!

The fact that every single mech pilot aside from himself acted like an idle bot disturbed Ghanso to no end.

Yet he did not issue a word of complaint. Expert pilot or not, he knew when he should keep his mouth shut.

This was his duty now. As he floated from his mech, his uniform reflected his new identity.

He had become an expert pilot in the service of the Coalition Reserve Corps. Though the switch happened many months ago, Ghanso still couldn't get used to the fact that he no longer served under the banner of the Bright Republic.

In truth, many mech pilots would have envied him for moving up. Serving a superior state such as the Friday Coalition is a much grander choice than serving a weak and inconsequential lesser state!

Ghanso didn't think so. If not for his duty and his desire to protect the Bright Republic, he wouldn't have embraced this new job at all. Even if he had become one of his home state's biggest sinners, he still desired to protect it even now! This was the true meaning of his conviction!

Though his mood was dark, his mind was bright. He believed he had a duty to uphold the torch of the Bright Republic.

No matter how many incentives the Gauge Dynasty and the Coalition Reserve Corps offered him, Ghanso would always consider himself a Brighter even if his citizenship had changed!

"No change in record can override the conviction in my heart!"

He was a true Brighter! He was a true Larkinson! In fact, he considered nearly every other Larkinson to have gone astray!

"The responsibility of restoring the Larkinson Family rests on my shoulders." He muttered. "Not even Ark can be trusted to lead my relatives now. In the end, he betrayed the Bright Republic as well."

Ark Larkinson's desertion was unforgivable in Ghanso's eyes! No matter how strained the relations between the Larkinson Family and the Bright Republic had become, all of it could have been water under the bridge if his relatives had just been patient!

Yet all of it became moot when the majority of his relatives escaped. Only a scant few diehard loyalists remained, and most of them consisted of old and stubborn veterans. There were simply too few true Larkinsons left to restore the family to a semblance of its old self.

If Ghanso wanted to restore the honor of the Larkinson Family, then he had to catch up to the fleeing rats and capture them himself!

Right now, the only way to do that was to borrow the power of the Friday Coalition. As long as the Fridaymen defeated the Hexers, the entire Komodo Star Sector would fall into the Coalition's grasp!

At that time, it would be as easy as pie for Ghanso to round all of the scattered Larkinsons up if they hadn't left the star sector!

"Without a state backing you up, let me see if you can withstand power, Ark!"

The existence of the Larkinson Family's most powerful expert pilot of the generation before his own loomed very large in his mind. For as long as he lived, Venerable Ark had become the childhood hero of every Larkinson that grew up under the former mech colonel's shadow!

Now that the hero had become a villain in Ghanso's eyes, it took a considerable amount of courage for him to even think about challenging the family's most famous war hero.

Yet Ghanso dared to do so because he had a powerful state backing him up. The mech he had just test-piloted was just a taste of what would come!

After flying through some corridors, he eventually reached a debriefing room. He sat down on a comfortable chair while facing the young woman seated on the opposite side of the desk.

An extensive grid of screens and projections floated before her. Lady Aisling Curver studied them for a moment longer before facing the former Brighter.

"This was a good test." She enthusiastically smiled. "Every single slave in the neural network exhibited a nearly identical degree of performance. We have managed to smooth out most of the unstable elements and fixed all of the critical bugs. Not a single slave has shown signs of incompatibility! You are truly one of the most remarkable masters that we have ever had the pleasure of working with. Your great merit is noted."

Ghanso frowned. "Milady, I already told you that I don't prefer to hear that term. Calling them 'slaves' is very demeaning, and I don't fancy myself their 'master'."

"I mean no offense, Venerable Ghanso." Lady Curver showed no sign of reproach. "These terms are common in the programming and computer engineering disciplines. The only way to stop these terms from being used is if you can persuade Master Huron to change his mind."

That was a non-starter. Ghanso had only met the esteemed Master a few times, but everytime he did, he felt as if he was looked down by an inscrutable existence!

The power, wealth and influence wielded by a Master Mech Designer was not something a foreign-born expert pilot could match.

Ghanso bowed his head once more.

"I don't know if I can continue leading those.. clones. While I admit that this neural network is amazing, the burden to my mind is considerable. Even with all of the augmentations I've received, it is not so simple to share my power to fifty mechs! As of now, I can only keep it up for ten minutes at most!"

Aisling did not look disappointed. "Ten minutes is enough considering all of the progress you made. I'm sure we can train your limits further. As long as you can manage to hold on for twenty minutes, Unit L will finally be ready to debut on the battlefields of the Komodo War! With the first neural network centered around an expert pilot, we will all become famous!"

Unit L was one of the latest brainchilds of Master Huron! Instead of forming a neural network among a group of regular mech pilots in an equal fashion, the Master instead formed an unequal neural network around a single expert mech!

Ghanso had gradually found out that this project had long been stalled due to Huron's inability to solicit a Fridayman expert pilot for this radical new innovation.

It was only when he came along that Master Huron could finally embark on this research project!

There had been plenty of bumps along the way. The most troubling of which was the sheer amount of clones that had been tested. Thousands of them had shown up in the previous months, but only fifty made it through the end.

Ghanso didn't ask where these clones came from.

Ghanso didn't ask how a few of them were able to arouse a measure of resonance after syncing up to his mind.

Ghanso didn't ask what was being done to the clones when they turned out to be 'defective'.

He preferred to steer his thoughts towards safer subjects, such as the state of his expert mech.

"The prototype has performed better than last time." He remarked. "I can't wait to pilot the completed version of the Charlemagne. In terms of firepower and mobility, I can't say enough good things about it. In fact, I'm still getting used to the power level of a mech of this caliber."

"Don't take too long. While the frontlines are relatively stable now, the Hexers might launch a surprise on us at any moment. We need Unit L to be battle ready as fast as possible. A single expert mech might not make much of a difference, but an expert mech acting in sync with fifty quasi-expert mechs can be a real game changer in a critical battle!"

It wouldn't be long before Venerable Ghanso Larkinson fought his first battle on behalf of his new masters!