Ves didn’t hide his reactions at the mention of the Devil Tiger. He couldn’t. How could he remain calm when this mech was tied to both of his parents?
There was no way Ves could disregard any news that could tell him more about his missing father and his inscrutable mother!
What were they up to? Was his father piloting the dangerous mech in person? What kind of battles had he fought while he was trying to do his best to avoid getting caught by the Five Scrolls Compact?
Calabast watched him very carefully. She confirmed a number of theories, disproved some others and formed some additional conclusions.
All of this happened in the span of a few seconds!
“Ves..” She opened her mouth. “Don’t tell me.. the Devil Tiger that is striking fear in the hearts of pirates..”
“It’s mine.” He confirmed. “I designed and built the Devil Tiger.”
Fortunately, the office had already been jammed and secured. Uttering something explosive as this in public would instantly land Ves in hot water!
Backed by Hexers or not, the Sentinel Kingdom would universally condemn him if he had made any dealings with Nyxian scum!
Calabast looked incredibly serious all of a sudden. “I should have known! Even if the Devil Tiger in the rumors doesn’t possess any glows, I couldn’t get rid of the hunch that you had a hand in its creation! Ever since it emerged, this mech has exacerbated the chaos that has been brewing in this region.”
“What did you say?” Ves reacted in shock yet again.
Was it a coincidence she used the word ‘chaos’?
“Let me start from the beginning.” She said. “There are several unusual aspects about the mech and the faction it belongs to. From what information I’ve gathered, the Oblivion Hand existed for quite some time as a notable but relatively unremarkable band of dark mercenaries. That was until the emergence of their new leader. Someone who goes by the name of the Dark Cleaver has triggered a mutiny against Commander Arnold Dafoe, the prior leader of the Oblivion Hand.”
The Dark Cleaver? The Oblivion Hand? Ves couldn’t imagine his relatively upright father mixing in a cesspool where these lurid names were common!
“Who is the Dark Cleaver?”
“No one knows.” Calabast shrugged. “There are countless rumors surrounding his abrupt rise, but the Nyxian Gap isn’t exactly a place where keeping accurate records is common. At least in civilized space you can always find reliable traces in the records of various government institutions. That’s not the case here. The stories vary so wildly that I don’t dare to mention any of you lest you develop an incorrect bias.”
She had been looking at him very intently when she talked about the Dark Cleaver. With her powerful deductive abilities, she constantly became more certain about her guess.
“The Dark Cleaver.. is your father, isn’t he?”
“…I don’t know. I need to hear more.”
Ves knew there was no way he could hide his thoughts on the matter from Calabast. She knew too much!
“If Ryncol is your father.. it would explain much.” She slowly said as she parsed her thoughts. “There are too many uncertainties, though. As far as I’m aware of, ever since the Dark Cleaver took control of the Oblivion Hand, the dark mercenary corps has grown explosively.”
“How?”
“Conquest.” Calabast replied. “Ever since the Oblivion Hand had a change in leadership, it no longer performed illicit missions on behalf of clients who don’t want to besmirch its reputation. Instead, the Hand has turned its entire attention to attacking certain pirate factions.”
“That.. isn’t very unusual.” Ves spoke. “Everyone in the Nyxian Gap fights against each other. True peace doesn’t exist in a place like that. It’s much easier to rob the people next to you than to travel all the way to the Sentinel Kingdom in order to raid some trade convoy.”
“This is different.” She shook her head. “The Oblivion Hand isn’t just engaging in opportunistic robbery. It has been ending entire pirate organizations that have existed for decades, if not centuries! The Hand has razed over a dozen fortified pirate bases, which has disrupted all of the existing patterns that have taken shape in the surrounding regions!”
Ves couldn’t help but drop his jaw at that news! How could his father ever accomplish such a feat? Was the Oblivion Hand that strong when he took it over? That was impossible!
Back in the Bright Republic, Ryncol Larkinson was the younger and much less talented brother of Ark Larkinson.
Ves knew very well that as much as he loved and respected his father, he had never performed better than the average Larkinson mech pilot. He didn’t possess that much ability for command either.
It was way too much to equate his father as this notorious Nyxian pirate killer!
Yet Ves couldn’t ignore the fact that the Dark Cleaver piloted the Devil Tiger. His mother stole the masterwork mech herself. She recognized its exceptional value. She would never drop this treasure in the hands of a random Nyxian!
“Have you obtained any battle footage of the Oblivion Hand?”
She shook her head. “Footage is always hard to obtain. The Sentinel Kingdom always cracks down whenever someone tries to spread anything that takes place in the Nyxian Gap. From what I can gather, the Oblivion Hand fight so viciously that they rarely leave anything behind.”
Was this truly the organization that his father led? How could he have grown so ruthless?!
“Why is the Oblivion Hand so aggressive? Has anyone figured out its goals?”
“I’m not sure. From the information I’ve gathered up until now, I believe the Dark Cleaver wants to expand his organization.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“It has become clear that the Oblivion Hand is clearly targeting pirate organizations with lots of assets.” Calabast spoke with admiration. “Not only that, but after every battle, the Hand grows stronger. Despite the casualties, the dark mercenary corps is able to field more mechs and ships. It doesn’t have any problems attracting new recruits either. Everyone loves a winner, the Nyxians most of all. What is remarkable about the Oblivion Hand is that it has never lost a battle ever since the Dark Cleaver became its new commander.”
“Are you sure?!”
It was impossible to win everytime. Too many factors affected the outcome of a battle. Unless someone controlled every variable, setbacks and losses would happen sooner or later.
“No one knows how the Dark Cleaver does it. Commander Dafoe used to be a regular leader who won slightly more often than he lost. The new commander is becoming increasingly more known for achieving guaranteed victories. He has never lost, even against pirate organizations that should have been strong enough to crush the Oblivion Hand in a straight battle! It is not uncommon to hear that the Hand has managed to achieve lop-sided victories when outnumbered by at least 3-to-1!”
“What the hell?! Are those rumors even credible!?”
“I reacted the same when I first heard about them.” Calabast ruefully smiled. “However, no matter who you talk to, they all vouch for the Oblivion Hand’s string of victories. The leadership vacuum that emerges after the Oblivion Hand has toppled another pirate power is proof of the Hand’s accomplishments. These huge fluctuations can’t be faked.”
Ves never stopped looking shocked. He received so much explosive news that he never had the opportunity to regain his composure. To think that his father was behind all of these acts was simply too difficult for him to accept!
However, once Ves thought the matter true, he realized he missed one crucial factor.
His mother.
If his mother was fighting alongside his father, then these ludicrous tales became a lot more plausible!
With her intangibility and her potent spiritual abilities whose depths Ves couldn’t even fathom, Cynthia Larkinson could perform all kinds of mischief against her targets!
She could sneak into a pirate ship or a fortified base without encountering any hindrance. Once inside, his mother could take advantage of her intangible and invisible form to spy on the enemy commanders, assassinate them in their sleep or steal their command codes.
She could also mess with the enemy hardware. She could easily phase through all kinds of solid barriers in order to damage all kinds of critical components.
She could disable the FTL drive of a starship in order to prevent her escape.
She could tamper with the power reactors of every mech inside a carrier vessel.
She could destroy the life support systems so that the occupants of a ship or base would slowly suffocate as they ran out of air to breathe.
With so many possibilities, it was no wonder that the organization led by her husband managed to raise such a storm!
Perhaps the only concern was the fact that his mother probably had to conserve her energy. Why else did she siphon his spiritual energy each time they met? Her current form of existence must be defective somehow!
If not for this constraint, his mother would have probably turned the entire Nyxian Gap upside-down by now. Considering her extraordinary origins, this wasn’t an exaggeration in his opinion!
Though Calabast thoroughly captured the rapid changes in his expression, she refrained from probing him any further.
There were some matters he simply couldn’t reveal. Calabast probably understood that, so she appropriately maintained her distance.
It had become very clear to her that the reason why Ves had become so remarkable was undeniably related to his parents!
“Tell me about the Devil Tiger.”
She looked uncertain. “It’s a remarkable mech. It has become just as renowned as its mech pilot. What is strange about the mech is that its initial appearance wasn’t all that remarkable. It initially became known as a powerful but fairly manageable tiger mech.”
“And then?”
“Well, just like the Oblivion Hand, each time it showed up again, it became a little stronger. A lot of Nyxians have guessed that the Dark Cleaver must have secured the services of a very capable mech designer. The Nyxians have already surmised that one of the reasons why the Oblivion Hand is so aggressive is because the Dark Cleaver is eager to upgrade his mech through plunder!”
That made a lot of sense. Due to the ASMAS system that Ves incorporated in the Devil Tiger, it had become a self-evolving mech!
People just had to feed any exotic or other powerful material to the mech. The pure ASMAS, which consisted of very high-quality nanomachines, slowly processed these materials into substitute ASMAS.
Most of the structure of the Devil Tiger consisted of this derivative substance.
The quality of the substitute ASMAS was directly proportional to the quality of the materials being fed to the mech!
It had been several years since Ves made the Devil Tiger. If the Oblivion Hand had been fighting as often as Calabast claimed, then his father would have definitely fed all kinds of goodies to the Devil Tiger!
“What is the current state of the Devil Tiger? How strong has it grown?” He asked in an eager tone.
“From what I have heard, it has become an expert mech!”
“What?!” Ves reacted with shock for the umpteenth time today!
“The Oblivion Hand has spread the news itself. Their leader, the Dark Cleaver, has become an expert pilot! This alone has caused a lot of Nyxian pirates and mercenaries to join his banner. Expert pilots are very rare in the Nyxian Gap, and every single one of them are prominent leaders in the pirate community!”
This was too much for Ves to absorb. His father, an expert pilot? Impossible! His father served in the mech corps for such a long time without any signs of breaking through.
His father even fought in some of the same bloody battles as his brother Ark, but nothing happened in the end!
Yet after recalling that expert pilots all emerged due to empowering their willpower with spirituality, Ves suddenly froze.
In his previous experiments, Ves managed to turn William Urbesh into an expert candidate.
This proved that it was possible to artificially advance a mech pilot to a higher stage!
If Ves could do so, then what stopped his mother from attempting the same?
Perhaps to her, turning someone into an expert pilot was just a matter of investing enough spiritual energy! That might have explained why she had been so eager to siphon his spiritual energy last time!
A sense of confusion radiated from his mind.
He already felt he couldn’t recognize his mother anymore. Would his father be the same? Did this enigmatic Dark Cleaver even bore any relation to the father who raised him back in Cloudy Curtain?
