The Mech Touch novel Chapter 1409

No one in the hunting team thought the hunt for Zeigra proceeded well. Over the course of three rounds of battle, their mechs managed to unload a lot of damage onto the Crown Cat.

However, his exotic and mineral-enhanced hide proved to be as tough as the armor plating of a heavy mech! The sheer resilience of the Crown Cat along with his formidable mobility meant that Zeigra absorbed or evaded most attacks directed against him without any apparent results!

Even if the exobiologists and other experts claimed that their efforts succeeded in wearing Zeigra, the mech pilots all suffered from the illusion that they faced Zeigra in his peak condition!

When one side visibly grew weaker while the other side still fought close to peak condition, the latter became increasingly unfathomable!

No amount of analysis and expert opinions could shake the impression that had rooted into the minds of Lady Miralix’s closest companions. Her former classmates in the academy finally exhibited the weaknesses resulting from their lack of tempering and experience.

More and more, the mech pilots began to demand an end to the hunt!

Who cared whether they failed? They could always try next time! The price of retreat was no big deal to the mech pilots, but the same didn’t apply to their commander.

Lady Miralix urgently wanted to conclude the hunt! The faster she hunted down a Crown Cat, the sooner she received permission to leave Felixia and pursue a career in the wider Sentinel Kingdom!

She was well aware that the late twenties and early thirties proved pivotal to the careers of many mech pilots. This was a time where the most ambitious and successful mech pilots grew the fastest and attracted the attention of a patron who might take a promising mech pilot under their wing!

While there was no harm in wasting a year or two, this was unacceptable to the most ambitious mech pilots! Every year mattered! It would be hard to make up for lost time as Lady Miralix might enter the service of Sentinel’s military at the starting line while most of her fellow peers of the same generation had already been promoted to mech lieutenants or mech captains!

Due to these considerations, declaring an end to the hunt while they still possessed a number of functioning mechs was completely unacceptable to Lady Miralix!

\"I would not call one rifleman mech, one knight mech, two spearman mechs, one axeman mech and one tiger mech a qualified hunting force against a Crown Cat.\" One of the mech pilots argued. \"And lest you argue otherwise, all of our mechs barring your own are already falling apart!\"

Due to the enduring complaints, Lady Miralix decided to call every mech pilot to a meeting.

Of course, considering the danger of leaving their hunting team exposed, they attended the meeting via projections. All six mechs that were still fit for battle deployed around the vulnerable legged transports.

Fortunately, Zeigra’s preoccupation with demolishing and taking bites out of the mechs in front of his face prevented the cat from going after the vulnerable transports parked in the distance.

However, it was exactly due to Zeigra’s focus on their mechs that forced Lady Miralix to confront her mech pilots over their demands to retreat!

\"We can still fight.\" She stated, her face marked by the stress and exhaustion of keeping the hunting team together. \"We entered this hunting zone to slay a Crown Cat, and we will not return without his carcass in our possession!\"

\"Madness!\"

\"Zeigra is too strong!\"

\"We’re not good enough!\"

\"Lady Miralix!\" One of the female mech pilots who lost their mechs shouted over the crowd. \"Let’s face it, our plan has failed. The battle of attrition that we waged against Zeigra has weakened us more than this darned cat! He’s practically immortal! Every time we face him in battle, it’s as if all the damage we’ve dealt to it before has been wasted! According to your own exobiologists, the damn cat has been eating huge chunks of our mechs to restore the integrity of his hide! A drawn-out chase is exactly the wrong approach to take against this monster!\"

The woman’s words resonated with the others in the meeting room. The exobiologists carefully studied the data captured by the sensors and found out after the third round that the cat’s hide already incorporated a significant amount of exotics and metals it previously ate from their own mechs!

Ves sat in the back of the room and observed the meeting while Lucky yawned and napped on his lap.

If Genevieve was here, Lucky would at least be able to enjoy the company of a fellow cat. Sadly, Lady Miralix declined to bring her pet along the expedition, knowing that she would be forced to remain in the cockpit of her mech for days on end!

As the mech pilots continued to convince Lady Miralix to call for an end to the hunt, Ves began to entertain his own doubts.

He developed his own judgement based on how the first three rounds developed.

Both sides increasingly became more familiar with each other. Just as the Felixia Catstrikers gathered a wealth of data on Zeigra, so did the cat learn how to better defeat the opposing mechs.

In the first round, the Catstrikers lost just a single mech.

In the second round, the hunting team lost two mechs.

In the third round, they lost three mechs!

It didn’t take much imagination to suspect that the hunting team might lose all of their remaining mechs!

A key factor that depressed everyone’s expectations was the condition of the surviving mechs.

Every mech aside from the Kinslayer lost at least twenty percent of their battle strength! Some mechs fared worse, such as the axeman mech that lost its arm in the first round.