As the main fleet under the command of Otrus Magrin set course for the coordinates that corresponded to the mysterious image transmitted by an alien beast goddess, Saint Neville Magrin began to entertain doubts.
It was not often that ace pilots doubted themselves or their judgment. It was pretty much mandatory for those who had pushed their willpower to such great heights to develop an unreasonable amount of confidence in themselves.
Ace pilots had many reasons to be confident in themselves. They had succeeded in reaching a level of strength that countless mech pilots could only dream of. They had survived battles where they should have died, won duels against opponents that were supposed to be stronger than them and recognized their true selves.
The only warriors that could bring Saint Neville Magrin to heel were senior ace pilots and god pilots,but they were so rare that the chances of encountering them in the wild was miniscule.
Even if it was possible for him to confront them on the opposite side of the battlefield, he knew that his father was far too shrewd to make this happen in the first place.
However, despite his father's great track record, Saint Neville couldn't help but think that the current circumstances were a bit… wrong.
"Everything has become more complicated since we entered the Red Ocean." He muttered as he stood at the side while a crew of mech technicians performed routine maintenance on the Unrelenting.
His father demanded the highest possible care for the proud ace hybrid mech. After each deployment, it had to go through an extensive round of inspections.
Anything that even looked slightly wrong had to be marked and analyzed to determine whether it needed to be replaced immediately or a few weeks later.
This pace of replacement was way too exaggerated and always made Saint Neville feel off-put by his own machine. The fit between himself and 'his' ace mech never felt completely right as he constantly had to readjust himself to the minute changes induced by the frequent swapping of parts.
Nonetheless, the performance of the Unrelenting always managed to remain close to its factory peak. Saint Neville knew without a shadow of a doubt that he could always count on his ace mech to perform reliably and endure exactly as much stresses as described in the manual.
Yet despite the formidable strength and combat power of the Unrelenting, Saint Neville still grew concerned that it wouldn't be enough to survive the latest tide.
"This entire star system is dangerous." He concluded.
The Red Ocean was always dangerous to begin with. Ace pilots like him possessed keen intuition that was far in excess to that of normal people.
Though plenty of scientists who studied this phenomenon claimed that ace pilots unconsciously predicted future events by extrapolating many little clues, Saint Neville had always thought that it worked differently.
Those people who always spoke with complicated and confusing words never knew what it was like to stare down a gun barrel that was strong enough to punch through the cockpit of a mech.
How could they know that mech pilots such as himself generated an inexplicable sense of threat and danger?
It was too bad that as sensitive as Saint Neville had become towards danger, it still possessed many limitations.
The reason why the unknown saboteurs had managed to cripple nine combat carriers as well as the Roaring Berann was because the culprits never targeted him and those closest to him in the first place.
The infiltrators had managed to sneak their way through every checkpoint without fearing discovery from either the crews or Saint Neville himself.
It disconcerted a lot of people in Cenatus Prospecting. Many of them had become assured that no one around them had the guts to attack a fleet watched over by an ace pilot.
That a severe incident happened anyway was a personal failing of Saint Neville.
He had never expected the Golden Skull Alliance which had developed a good reputation over the years to launch such a detestable attack!
Though Saint Neville knew that his father intended to take advantage of the Golden Skull Alliance somehow, the Golden Skullers should have at least waited for a casus belli before they initiated hostilities.
For them to strike without bothering to find an excuse threw many people in Cenatus Prospecting off-guard.
No matter what, people had died under his watch. No matter what reason drove his father to shadow the Golden Skullers, the fact of the matter was that blood had been spilled.
This was why he never questioned his father's decision to enter SDDD-4343X-AER-232666410 and figure out exactly what the Golden Skull Alliance had been up to in this part of space.
Yet now that they had arrived, Saint Neville grew unsettled despite his unflinching confidence in his own strength.
The first indication that everything was not quite right was the absence of his father's current target.
Even though the fleet of the Golden Skull Alliance had probably lingered in this star system for a week or so, it had left by the time that the fleet of his own group arrived.
The second indication that something may be amiss was the mysterious abandonment of a piece of alien ship wreckage.
Though Cenatus Prospecting hadn't been able to dispatch a scout vessel to this brown dwarf star system in advance, it was still possible to monitor what happened in the past by exploiting the speed of light.
By dispatching a scout vessel equipped with a warp drive far away from the center of the star system, they could eventually reach a distance where they could capture light that depicted everything that happened a few days in the past.
It was a relatively new tactic that humanity had taken over from the indigenous alien races.
While the effect sounded magical, the results weren't as impressive as everyone initially thought.
Due to the inverse-square law, the rapid dispersal of light rapidly made it more and more difficult to observe fine details.
Other factors such as the strength of the light source, the size of the subject of interest and the angle of observation further limited the amount of information that could be derived from this method.
From what their distant warp-capable scouting vessels reported back, the fleet of the Golden Skull Alliance hadn't appeared to have done anything remarkable in the star system.
The first human ships to have arrived in this star system appeared to have lingered in orbit of a tiny planet for a long time until they departed by moving to a Lagrange point.
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