Ves encountered several expert pilots in his life. What he always found remarkable was that they possessed a strong sense of confidence and certainty in their values. Naturally, they had cause to be confident, but now he knew the exact mechanics behind the secret to advance to expert pilot. As Ves expected, a mech pilot needed to possess spirituality before they could even be eligible to advance! Of all the mech pilots he met in his life, practically none of them possessed spirituality in any appreciable amounts, causing their chances to go beyond advanced pilot to be a pipedream. Eloise Pelican should have been one of them. No matter how many battles she went through, no matter how much she piloted the Valiant Warden to the point of developing an organic bond with it, no matter how much she practiced to learn every single nuance and idiosyncrasy of her frankenstein mech, there was no way for her to ever ascend beyond her mortal limits! Yet that iron rule did not take external factors into account. The decisive intervention of Qilanxo’s spiritual fragment that somehow rode along the System’s Mastery experience changed Eloise’s fate! The strong motherly and protective emotions of Eloise meshed particularly well with Qilanxo’s spiritual energy. Even shed of the Sacred God’s imprint, the energy would never have merged so well with Eloise’s desires if they didn’t possess similar traits. To Ves, spiritual energy seemed to be made of condensed meaning. Shaped by the personalities of the entities who formed them, some spiritual energy, such as that of Venerable Foster, possessed an aggressive bent, while others leaned more towards love or protectiveness. What he found the most remarkable was that Qilanxo’s spiritual fragment seemed adept at changing the personal imprint of spiritual energy. It was as if it specialized in this aspect of applying her spirituality! "Perhaps that is why the locals of Aeon Corona VII regarded her species as Sacred Gods. This must be the principal reason why they are worshipped." Ves mentally murmured in the back of Eloise’s increasingly more active mind. In fact, his stay in her mind was becoming increasingly uncomfortable! It was one thing to inhabit the mind of a regular pilot, but the strengthening force of will was like a forcefield that repelled any foreign influences! If not because Eloise was in the midst of battle, Ves would have been kicked back in his own time and space! Right now, a huge Super Starspawn half the size of the Silent Nomad space fortress bore down on Eloise’s Valiant Warden! The old and patchy space knight already bore an incredible amount of strain during the battle. While Eloise’s fighting spirit continued to increase despite landing in the crosshairs the monstrous astral creature, her mech might not be able to keep up with her moves! Eloise knew it too. She could feel it breaking apart due to the forced resonance exerting it beyond its physical limitations. "NO! My Valiant Warden, fight for me! You must not fall here!" Surprisingly enough, the Valiant Warden responded! Its nascent X-Factor that had slowly developed over years of continuous use by Eloise had recently been magnified by Ves’ stolen spiritual energy! Whatever attribute this special spiritual energy possessed, it seemed to be highly compatible with mechs! The man-machine connection became empowered by Eloise’s force of will, deepening her bond with the Valiant Warden and unearthing its newly invigorated X-Factor. They resonated with each other! Something incredibly marvelous happened. Ves mentally became astonished as the X-Factor of the Valiant Warden somehow supercharged itself! The feeling of protectiveness that it gained from Eloise’s influence made it incredibly compatible with the force of will it came into touch! The only way for Ves to describe the phenomenon was to call it a unity between man and machine! For a single instant, the boundary between mech pilot and mech blurred! In the depths of his mind, Ves recognized the phenomenon that took place. This was the legendary complete resonance! Although often depicted in action dramas broadcasted throughout the galaxy, complete resonance was extremely hard to come by! Let alone expert pilots, even ace pilots and god pilots never managed to replicate the feat. Yet Venerable Eloise Pelican seemed poised to do the impossible yet again! Her harmony with her own mech caused her force of will and the Valiant Warden’s X-Factor, empowering the combination to ludicrous heights! Even though Ves noted with alarm that the strain on the mech abruptly magnified, that single burst of complete resonance caused the resonating glow around the Valiant Warden to grow in size until it matched the size of the Super Starspawn! As the strange fused astral creature centered around the Defiled Gene tried to engulf the Valiant Warden whole, it instead bumped into a shield composed completely of energy, bashing the monster to a halt in space! The giant energy projection of the Valiant Warden echoed the physical mech’s every move! After shield bashing the enormous monster back, the energy mech flew forward and chopped its sword over the Super Starspawn’s head! The giant energy sword possessed an intense corrosive effect on the astral creature, parting and burning its flew along with giving it an incredible amount of pain from its very spirit! Ves could sense the echoes of agony radiating from the Super Starspawn’s distorted spirit! The giant energy sword formed by the combination of Eloise’s force of will and her Valiant Warden’s X-Factor was a weapon that repelled all evil towards her family and comrades! "You shall not stand in my way, foul beast!" Although the giant energy mech already started to fizzle and fade, Eloise and her mech called upon their strength once more to thrust the giant energy sword straight through the Super Starspawn’s damaged maw! The sword cut straight through the monster’s gullet and sheared straight through the starship residing in the very center of the Super Starspawn! The Defiled Gene instantly cut apart into half! The catastrophic damage to the light carrier’s structure and volatile power reactors caused her to be engulfed by numerous secondary explosions, obliterating Mr. Drenad’s flagship and causing the Super Starspawn to lose cohesion! "The astral beast is dead! Venerable Pelican slayed the monster!" The morale of the surviving independents cheered, yet Eloise finally couldn’t bear the strain any longer. The sustaining the complete resonance effect with her mech drained her force of will almost entirely! The X-Factor of the Valiant Warden, just recently empowered, faded away entirely as the mech itself broke apart into scattered components! "Venerable Pelican!" Commander Pritchard yelled over the communication channel. "We’ve got you!" His personal mech flew to Eloise’s cockpit and gently took hold of it. A number of mechs from the Insurmountable Drakes moved to flank and surround the cockpit as it was being returned to the Stained Salamander. "What are you waiting for?!" Pritchard exhorted the members of the independent outfits who were still gaping at the astonishing events that took place. "The monsters are dead or in retreat and the defenders are in total disarray! Let us cross the portal before either of them regain their wits and resume the fight!" That caused every independent mech pilot into action! Buoyed by Venerable Pelican’s heroic and transcendent feats, the morale of the survivors surged, causing them to fly forward with a single purpose! The defenders on the other hand were still reeling from the disasters that took place. Not only had the space fortress sustained such massive damage that it lost most of its power and firepower, the military mechs lost most of their cohesion and fighting will. The garrison only threw up a meager amount of resistance. The shock of witnessing the birth of an expert pilot only for her to display the legendary phenomenon of complete resonance shortly afterwards completely put an end to any serious fighting! As Eloise suffered the aftermath of her wild transformations, she noted with distinct relief that the Insurmountable Drakes and the others were about to pass through the portal! Due to the volatile position of the Dark Sphere in realspace, no one knew where they would end up after they exited the portal. Each different portal led to different destinations that fluctuated frequently. That itself guaranteed their safety because there was no chance that the Silent Nomad military forces stationed a guard force at the other side of the portal! Even as Commander Pritchard mech’s placed her cockpit on the deck of the Stained Salamander’s hangar bay, Eloise struggled to stay awake. She needed to see if the portal took them back out! As the Stained Salamander finally crossed the portal, a moment of non-existence took place before the ship and its escorting mechs emerged back into empty space! "The stars! The stars have returned!" "We’ve succeeded! We’re back in the galaxy!" "Don’t celebrate yet! Let’s kick our long-dormant FTL drives online and get the hell out of here?!" None of the independent outfits that used to be trapped in the Dark Sphere wanted to linger any longer than they had to! The military forces at the other side of the portal could still cross over as well in order to pursue the escapees! The mechs of the Insurmountable Drakes returned to the Stained Salamander as rapidly as possible while the carrier slowly spooled up her FTL drive. Although the FTL drive had long remained dormant within the Dark Sphere, the engineers always prioritized its maintenance in the event of escape! "Where to, Commander Pritchard?!" "Doesn’t matter! Just point the ship at the easiest star system you can dial in and bring us away!" "Roger that, commander!" Only until the Stained Salamander successfully transitioned into FTL did Eloise finally let go of her insistence of staying awake. The physical, mental and spiritual fatigue she accumulated during her short burst of ascended performance simultaneously hit her like a crashing shuttle! She quickly lost consciousness as her entire being urgently craved rest in order to recuperate from her ordeal. Before she lost consciousness though, she swept her much-weakened force of will towards Ves’ consciousness one last time. Ves felt as if Eloise definitely took notice of him! Despite his attempts to hide his presence, the mind of an expert pilot was much more formidable than that of a regular pilot! There was no hiding in her own mental sanctum! WHO ARE YOU? "I’m just a mech designer." Ves mentally replied. Just as Eloise faded to sleep, the System finally ended this lengthy Mastery session! Ves felt as if a hook grabbed his consciousness yet again and dragged him straight through a portal. The wild ride that ensued was still enormously vague to Ves, and he only returned to his own mind and body an indeterminate amount of time later. "That was some Mastery experience." He sighed as his dormant body awoke from the isolated chamber within the Mech Nursery’s lab floor. "It was worth every single DP I spent on it, that’s for sure." Due to the happy accidents that took place during the battle, Ves gained much more than a first-hand perspective on piloting space knights. While the information he gathered to that nature was certainly abundant enough for him to overhaul large portions of his current draft design, it did not beat the other events he witnessed! By residing right inside Eloise’s mind as she underwent both apotheosis and complete resonance, Ves gained an unprecedented amount of understanding on both phenomena! So many mech pilots dreamt of becoming expert pilots! Many more expert pilots aimed to achieve a complete union with their mechs during battle! Yet both remained out of reach to the vast majority of mech pilots. No matter how hard some mech pilots trained and fought, they would never be able to transcend their mortal limits in their lives! "Ordinarily, they can’t." Ves whispered to himself with his parched throat. "Yet nothing is impossible! Qilanxo showed me the way to circumvent the limitations stopping most mech pilots from advancing!" More than a week went by while his mind took a mental trip into the past. While his massively enhanced physique allowed him to sustain his week-long dormancy, it still left him craving for food and water! Ves wearily chuckled to himself. "I’ll have to hook myself up to life support the next time I undergo a Mastery! Otherwise, my body might starve to death if I take too long to return!"