Ves took a seat in the conference room. Calabast and Major Verle followed suit and sat beside him. Both of them looked a little nervous due to the importance of the upcoming meeting.

"Relax. It will be fine." He attempted to project confidence. "Expert pilots can be unyielding if you confront them head-on, but they're easy to handle as long as you don't get affected by their force of personality."

"I really prefer not to be in the same room as them." Calabast grimaced.

"You need to become accustomed to their presence." Major Verle noted. "For better or worse, our new expert pilots have become the new fixtures of our clan. Even if they aren't interested in running the clan, they possess an outsized voice."

Calabast came from a pure intelligence background, which meant she mostly worked with regular people. Facing expert pilots was something reserved for the military.

As for Major Verle, he possessed experience with dealing with expert pilots. Just the Aeon Corona Mission alone forced him to deal with the likes of Venerable O'Callahan, Venerable Xie and Venerable Foster.

The Larkinson Clan may not be a military organization like the Bright Republic's Mech Corps, but it was still militaristic by nature. In an organization where martial strength earned great respect, expert pilots naturally commanded respect even when they didn't do anything special!

As a clan leader, Ves had to be wary of their motives. Every expert pilot possessed their own wants and needs, and sometimes they weren't above using their influence to support their cause!

This was one of the other reasons why many private forces and organizations were reluctant to employ expert pilots.

They not only demanded ludicrously expensive expert mechs which had to be designed by at least a Senior, but their existence alone also presented a latent threat to the leaders.

Instances where expert pilots became dissatisfied with their bosses and launched coups were not unheard of! It didn't help that the MTA's arbitrators often sided with them in disputes.

Only state militaries possessed the structure and legitimacy to keep expert pilots in line. The ability to pilot a mech was not correlated with the ability to command. Not everyone was as multi-talented as Colonel Ark Larkinson. Most expert pilots recognized that they should leave all of the complicated decision-making to their commanding officers and simply focus on improving their combat abilities.

Right now, Ves wasn't sure what roles his new expert pilots wanted to play, hence why he looked forward to talking to them. This would be the first time after the Battle against the Abyss where he could enter into a proper discussion with the new stars of the Larkinson Clan.

The hatch slid open. Five people entered. Each of them wore the uniforms of their respective troops. Three Avatars, one Flagrant Vandal and one Swordmaiden stepped inside.

None of them were average. Even before they entered the conference room, Ves already sensed their force of wills bumping into his mind, and from the faint reactions of his advisors, they felt it as well!

Neither Verle nor Calabast possessed spiritual potential. On one hand, that allowed them to escape the brunt of the effects. On the other hand, they possessed very weak defenses against this kind of influence. Both consequences pretty much balanced the other out, causing the two norms to experience changing moods.

It did not help that they were in the same room as multiple expert pilots, each of whom possessed different convictions.

Ves smiled as he came in touch with Venerable Joshua's life-oriented force of will. He felt slightly abrasive when he touched Venerable Jannzi's force of will. Both Venerable Orfan and Venerable Dise felt prickly to him. As for Venerable Tusa, he hardly felt anything.

Once the newcomers took their seats, Ves gestured to Calabast. She promptly activated a jammer and some other security measures.

The air became charged with interference, giving both Calabast and Verle some relief. The sensation of jamming distracted them from the force of wills projected by the expert pilots.

"Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. I hope that all of you have recovered from the previous battle. Tusa, how is your body doing?"

The light mech specialist smiled sardonically. "I enjoyed the best of care from Miss Ranya Wodin-Larkinson, though I do not feel as if my body entirely belongs to me anymore."

"I understand the sensation. It will blow over after a few weeks."

Of the five, Tusa had been the worst off. In his duel against the Inexorable One, he fell short once the fog projection became occupied with the avian dark god's true body.

In fact, Ves feared that Tusa may have died after the huge bird simply rammed through the Blueshift, causing the heavily-modified mech to break into pieces!

Seeing that Tusa was recovering nicely, he fully put down his concerns on his continued ability to serve the clan.

"Let's move on the first item of the agenda. First, congratulations to the four of you. While Venerable Jannzi has moved ahead of you, each of you have performed admirably by stepping up against our opponents when we most needed it. Your help was indispensable."

Venerable Orfan interrupted his speech. "That's all well and good, but when are you going to tell me about what we just fought against and who helped us out in the end? I asked some of my men to do some digging for me. And you know what they found? That winged tiger mech that appeared through the portal belongs to the Oblivion Hand. What are your ties with the dark mercenaries? Why did they decide to help us, and what the hell was that big alien woman?!"

Ves did not feel flustered at her sudden inquiry. He already anticipated these questions beforehand. He briefly looked into the eyes of the other expert pilots and recognized that they all wanted answers as well.

"We don't share a relationship with the Oblivion Hand." He told them. "In fact, none of us expected the mech and that female alien god to appear out of nowhere to help us in our hour of need. While we did cooperate during the battle, they left shortly afterwards without expressing any other intentions."

"Why did they take the initiative to help us out?" Orfan narrowed her eyes.

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend." Ves readily answered. "If you have studied the history of the Oblivion Hand, then you should know that it has become a growing thorn in the side of the pirates. For some reason, the Dark Cleaver is hell-bent on toppling as many pirates as possible. The Oblivion Hand became interested in our clash against the Allidus Alliance and its allies because the dark mercenaries wanted to end the existences of the dark gods."

"What are those three giant monsters, really?" Venerable Tusa skeptically asked. "Are they truly gods? Why did three of them emerge from the Gravada Knarlax, and who exactly is the god that defeated them in the end?"

Ves shrugged and decided to offer an ambiguous answer. "Who knows? Gods or not, the Unending One, the Blinding One and the Inexorable One are all old and powerful existences that can't be fought with normal means. As for the alien woman who defeated them, I know even less about her aside from the fact that she must have been pursuing a vendetta against the three monsters."

Throughout this entire meeting, he did not say anything that could tie him and his parents together.

Fortunately, nobody knew that the Dark Cleaver who piloted the Devil Tiger was actually his father, though Joshua was looking at him a little differently.

Nobody happened to recognize the giant energy projection of his mother. All of the alien mutations that warped her energy projection pretty much made her unrecognizable.

At best, she was a completely unrelated half-human. At worst, she was an alien that only vaguely resembled humans due to convergent evolution!

Another indication was that the Larkinson Network didn't seem to work properly on his parents. He could already guess that his mother had done something to sabotage the connections so that they wouldn't inadvertently expose their identities or locations. This wasn't actually difficult to do. Even Ves cut off the connections if he wished.

None of the expert pilots had any reason to doubt his lies. They all believed that the Oblivion Hand genuinely had nothing to do with Ves or the Larkinsons. To them, the Dark Cleaver and the alien female god simply wanted to take advantage of the situation to weaken the pirates.

Though Ves felt tempted to tell them the truth, it was too dangerous for him to do so. They possessed their own principles that did not necessarily align with the clan. In fact, Ves believed that the Larkinson Network was no longer effective in influencing their mindsets.

This effectively meant he had to be very careful with exposing any information to them in the future.

The meeting moved on. After answering a lot of questions about the battle, the expert pilots finally relented.

They still looked unsatisfied as a whole. Ves hadn't provided them with many clear answers.

"Alright, now that we are done with discussing the past, let's address our current and future situation. First, the Wodin Warriors will soon arrive and escort us out of the Nyxian Gap. We won't be risking any further battles. This means we can start focusing on rebuilding. We have suffered a lot of losses. A lot of our clansmen are hurting right now, and we need your help to restore everyone's morale."

"Too many Larkinsons have died." Jannzi spoke up in an accusatory tone. "Out of our entire mech roster, we have lost more than half of our mech pilots on this disastrous venture. What's even worse is that we lost thousands more when the pirates targeted our ships. Why did we fight so much?"

Some of the other expert pilots nodded, which was a bad sign to Ves. He knew this reckoning was coming.

"I don't understand what we were fighting for either." Tusa said. "Is it experience? Is it loot? While I am glad that I managed to break through, I would gladly give up the opportunity to become an expert pilot if all of our fallen brothers and sisters never met their end in this forsaken place."

"Their deaths were not worthy. We weren't fighting to defend the Bright Republic. We were just fighting to advance your goals. I don't know how to face the Vandals who fell because of your decisions." Commander Orfan added.

"Cut him some slack." Venerable Joshua said. "What happened was regrettable, but we became stronger in the end. Not just us, but nine other expert candidates rose up. This is proof that our patriarch is right. Only by going through hardship will we be able to rise above our current height. Once we return home and digest our gains, our clan will grow by leaps and bounds!"

Orfan and Dise nodded in agreement, though his girlfriend did not look pleased.

"Joshua, do you care nothing about the Larkinsons who have died?"

"Don't get me wrong, Jannzi!" He quickly defended himself. "I do care. It's just that I think our clan will ultimately become better because of it. If we hadn't entered the Nyxian Gap, our force would have remained brittle and untested. That would leave us in a dangerous position when our entire clan comes under attack one day."

Commander Dise agreed with Joshua. "We are warriors. Living well sounds nice, but I never believed in putting my safety into other people's hands. While I care for my remaining Swordmaidens, I never thought of coddling them. That will only turn them dependent on others. I don't want the Larkinson Clan to breed weakness and become unable to defend or take care of itself. Trust me, with the survivors we have today, we don't have to worry about any weakness in our ranks for the next fifty years!"

The expert pilots expressed different views. Ves listened and took note of each expert pilot's inclination.