"Purging Light!" Stark roared. The largely depleted Amaranto Mark III mustered up all of the light energy she could gather and released it all in a single omni-directional explosion! The resonance-empowered light wave instantly cleansed and purified the junior ace pilot’s mind, causing her to shake off her traumatic recollection and fully regain her focus. The expanding explosion of light was too weak to repel the incoming Lamia Kailamassu, but it at least gave Stark enough time to quickly adjust the Amaranto’s posture so that her feet touched the surface of the dual-pilot ace mech first! The Amaranto struggled to maintain her footing, but she was able to extend her legs and launch herself to the side with just enough skill and control to maintain control over her flight! The ace marksman mech subsequently spun around on her axis and swiped her plasma bayonet in a sweeping slash! The Lamia Kailamassu teleported right in the path of the plasma bayonet, just as Stark predicted! The plasma bayonet glowed brighter and hotter as Stark poured all of her hatred and frustrations into the tip of her Instrument of Vengeance. "Light Arts!" The drastically more powerful and lethal bayonet struck the exterior of the Lamia Kailamassu, only to do nothing aside from leave a miniscule scorch mark on the resonance-empowered armor plating. Even if this amounted to practically zero damage, it was already a considerably impressive accomplishment that a dedicated ranged machine was able to leave a visible mark! "Are you tired already?" Alo said in genuine concern that sounded like a taunt in the current context. "Do you want to stop and rest now that your ace mech is close to running dry?" "No." Stark snarled in response. "I will not stop until my machine cannot keep up anymore. My tech is allowed to fail, but my willpower must never break." She was determined to fight to her limit as the Stewards Siamesia intended! She would not accept any other outcome! The Amaranto exerted the utmost of her flight system and maneuvered around the Lamia Kailamassu as best as possible. Though she was not able to avoid most collisions, she at least tried to ensure she landed a good hit whenever the two ace mechs came close. As first-class ace mechs that possessed vastly more power than standard first-class multipurpose mechs, each collision between the Lamia Kailamassu and the Amaranto was enough to crumple practically every other small craft! Yet the absurdly strong and thick armor system of the former and the exotic archetech construction of the latter enabled the two machines to withstand these forces quite well. Of course, neither machines could endure this level of violence for hours at a time without the reality-defying properties of their Saint Kingdoms. After many repeated collisions, Saint Stark understood to a much greater degree why the Stewards Siamesia opted to dual-pilot a single ace mech. The advantages outweighed the disadvantages. Rather than pilot two separate machines and disperse their power, they stuck to each other on a permanent basis and essentially doubled up their true resonance. The maximum resonance strength an ace pilot could reach was 1545 laveres. Hitting this figure meant that they were being held back by their bottlenecks. The only way to overcome these barriers was to step onto the road to no return, and that was not a trivial decision to make. This meant that ace pilots could remain stuck at 1545 laveres for decades or even centuries at a time. From the General Axelar Streon to the Mace of Retaliation, each of them were biding their time while doing their best to accumulate as many advantages as possible for their ultimate attempt to ascend to godhood. Before they began their ultimate challenge, the amount of true resonance they were able to employ would remain constrained by their ceiling for a long time. It was due to this limitation that the Lamia Kailamassu was stronger than pretty much every other individual peak ace mech! The powerful machine resonated with two peak ace pilots. The degree of reality distortion of two nearly identical Saint Kingdoms allowed it to get away with pulling off feats that only god pilots perform! To put it in a different way, the Lamia Kailamassu possessed an effective resonance strength that did not come anywhere close to 3090 laveres, but was definitely a lot higher than 1545 laveres! Saint Stark was unable to estimate an exact number. The lavere scale was not linear, but was instead determined by a complicated formula that completely went over her head. The resonance meters of the Amaranto Mark III were unable to measure the combined resonance strength of two Saint Kingdoms working together in total synchronicity. Whatever the case, the combined willpower of the Stewards Siamesia was just so strong that Saint Stark still had no way in hell of gaining supremacy anywhere outside of the physical boundary of her ace mech! This was the ultimate reason why Saint Stark continually failed to gain the upper hand in these bouts. The tech used to power up both mechs were impressive. The Lamia Kailamassu was truly worthy of its fame. It served its pilots extremely well even though it had only shown off a fraction of its capabilities during hours of constant sparring. The amount of super-class materials stuffed inside her sizable mech frame was considerable. The dual-pilot ace mech exerted a lot more strain in order to apply constant pressure onto the Amaranto, yet it did not falter even once! Its defenses, mobility and endurance parameters were frankly ridiculous! If not for the glaring absence of any overt form of offensive capabilities, Saint Stark would have been tempted to call it the perfect ace mech. The Amaranto never stood a chance. That did not mean that Saint Stark wanted to deliver a poor performance. Even if her foe was virtually undefeatable at her current strength and means, she still wanted to keep her head high and protect her pride! She knew that if she bowed her head even once and admitted that she could never get the better of her adversary, her journey to become a god pilot would come to an end. As tiring as it was to fight for over 5 hours straight, Stark had come close to thinking about calling it quits, yet she always squashed these thoughts as soon as they emerged. She could never give up! She had a mission to complete! She had a cause to fulfill! The blood of the innocents stained her soul. Her desire to enact retribution burned eternal. Her willpower flared and her Saint Kingdom became reinvigorated. Despite the increasingly more exhausted state of her ace mech, Saint Stark continued to fight as if she had just started! Even so, her willpower was not endless, and neither was the energy reserves of her machine. Stark squeezed the utmost of her Amaranto as well as her own willpower. She felt she had never explored the depths of her capabilities as much as she did today! By the time the Amaranto had finally begun to dim, the Lamia Kailamassu eventually ceased to attack any further. The Stewards Siamesia knew exactly when the Amaranto had reached her hard limits.’ "That is enough for today." Saint Jerivern Chevor announced as if she had not exerted herself in the slightest. "Your performance just now is much better than at the start of this training session. Are you satisfied?" "No." Stark growled as she breathed heavily. "I am not. I got a lot better than before. My instincts improved rapidly to the point where I can predict your attacks in advance 10 to 20 percent of the time. I managed to develop an ability to purge my mind and will from your distractions. I have developed the prototype of an ability to strengthen the plasma bayonet of my rifle. I also made a huge amount of progress in my melee weapon handling skills as well as my short-ranged maneuvering skills." "Yet you are still not satisfied." Stark let out a sigh. "No ace pilot should remain satisfied with their current level of strength. The moment you become content with what you can do, there will be no reason for you to grow any stronger. The road to power is endless. I have not even traversed most of it. There is still far too much room for improvement. I cannot fall into the trap of complacency just because I managed to become a lot more competent at fending off enemies up close. It has only been a single day." "You maintain the correct attitude. Good." Saint Alo spoke in satisfaction. "Not just any ace pilot can become a god pilot. One of the strongest contributors to a successful ascension is necessity. The weaker you think you are, the more you desire strength that is far beyond your current level. If you check your arrogance and fear enemies that are on a different level than you, then you may have a slightly greater chance of surviving the Mech Body Merger Process. It certainly does not help if you think you are already invincible against all enemies." That made a lot of sense, but there was a part of Saint Stark that instinctively objected to this viewpoint. "What of our pride? What is our confidence? There are many sources that emphasize the importance of confidence and belief in your own strength as the foundation of your willpower. I know this to be true. If I think of myself as weak, my willpower becomes brittle and easier to break." "That is one of the persistent tests that any expert pilot and ace pilot must endure." Jeri answered. "You must find a balance that works out for you. I can tell you that overconfidence will cause your growth to effectively cease. At the same time, a complete lack of confidence in your current capabilities will weaken your Saint Kingdom to the point that it will fail in protecting you from lethal harm. Neither extremes will lead to good outcomes. You must establish a balance where you can maintain enough confidence to keep up your performance, but also retain enough awareness of how lacking you are to motivate yourself to grow stronger." "That doesn’t sound too difficult…" "It is when you consider that leaning in one direction to another can influence whether you will live or die, Davia. In a fight against a powerful opponent, you need an abundance of confidence in order to perform at your best. However, the lack of perceived shortcomings will make it so that you will never improve past your ceiling. On the other hand, if you maintain the assumption that you are weaker, then you may not fight at your best, but an opportunity may arise where your urge to grasp greater power will trigger a minor or major breakthrough moment, thereby allowing you to reach a new level of strength. This works even if you have already become an ace pilot." One approach sounded safer, while the other was rife with risk. Your journey continues at freewebnovel Saint Stark thought back on the expert pilots and ace pilots that she knew of. There were plenty of them that possessed an abundance of confidence. How were they able to break through? "I find it hard to accept that it is that simple." She said. Alo chuckled in amusement. "That is because it is not. This is an oversimplified way of looking at how we fight and improve. Our realities are much more complicated than a single two-dimensional spectrum. I believe that ace pilots fare best when they score high in both areas. They must have supreme confidence in their own fighting prowess, yet simultaneously feel incredibly insecure about their current level of strength. Only when you can maintain both attitudes at the same time will you reach your best possible state." "That… sounds impossible." "Just a few years ago, people assumed that norms could never pilot mechs. Now they can. Nothing is impossible, Davia. Out of every human, high-ranking mech pilots such as us are best at altering our own reality. That is what you must rely upon to maintain two opposite states of mind. So long as your willpower is strong enough, everything is possible."