The Mech Touch novel Chapter 290

They say that dead men tell no tales. His mother didn’t reveal anything either about the System.

Ves had become awfully spooked after meeting his long-dead mother. He clearly felt as if his mother was real, but that couldn’t be. She was dead.

"I’m hallucinating, just like those other folks. She’s not real. She’s a figment of my imagination."

He struggled inwardly to convince himself that he imagined the whole sequence. Only one thing forced him to admit that it might not have stayed inside his head.

He turned to Lucky. "You saw that, didn’t you?" _{ƒree𝑤ebnσvel.com}

His cat kept up a wary posture, as if he encountered an extremely dangerous predator. Ves had the sense that Lucky had definitely shared his experiences.

With that confirmation, Ves didn’t know what to think. Did the Glowing Planet toy with him? Did the planet possess some highly energetic exotic that was capable of manipulating spacetime? Why did he encounter mother, and not someone else?

Too many questions swirled in his mind, but without a solid understanding of what happened to him, it was useless to speculate any further.

"Another incident to add to the growing pile of mysteries surrounding my life."

With a harried mind, Ves returned to the fortified camp with Lucky in his arms. His cat had been so spooked by the encounter that he didn’t resist being picked up. Apparently, he lost his voracious appetite, which was a first.

Once he returned to confines of Walter’s Whalers, Ves declined to report the incident and tried to go back work. He went to the workshop that held the partially disassembled Urman mech and removed his bulky hazard suit before approaching the Urman.

The mech looked huge and strong as always. Ves admired its robust construction and how much care its designer had put into strengthening the arms.

Walter approached from the side. "The Urman’s been with me for more than a decade. While I don’t know how the fiddly stuff works, I can tell you that there’s hardly anyone who’s more familiar with the Urman than me. I don’t think there’s more than forty of these mechs in circulation, and I’m sure that most of them have been scrapped by now."

"Is it because it’s difficult to fight with a brawler mech?"

"Oh, more than you can imagine. The only way the Urman can withstand a sword or a spear is to block them with its heavy gauntlets. While they’re powerful and open up a lot of options, they also slow down your arms and they’re really expensive to maintain."

Ves already figured out the Urman came with such a trade-off. Those disposable gauntlets weighed as much if not more than a typical mech-sized sword and shield. This gave them an amazing amount of thickness and endurance, but it didn’t help the brawler mech’s speed.

Any mech pilot crazy enough to pilot a brawler had to be a natural wrestler and fistfighter to be qualified to pilot such a strange type of mech.

He started to listen to Walter describe in his own words how he saw the Brawler. Despite his many faults, Walter had been gifted with a talent for brawling, and he honed his street fighting skills by taking formal classes back when he joined a gang in Bentheim.

The gang leader didn’t ruminate on his stay in Bentheim and turned his story back to his mech.

"The Urman is a great mech, but it’s a difficult one to pilot as well. The mech designer who sold me the Urman went bankrupt soon after. He must be regretting that he designed a brawler mech in the first place."

"Why did you go for a brawler instead of a more conventional mech like a knight or a swordsman mech?"

"Oh, I’ve tried those mechs. I’ve tried to find the right mech plenty of times. They didn’t click me. It’s like I’m being stuffed into the wrong body. Those knights are useless without their armaments and the swordsman mechs rely too much on their swords. All the time I’ve piloted those standard mechs, I always felt less of a man."

Walter’s discussion about his mech was fascinating to Ves. Hearing about his experiences successfully cleansed his fright and allowed him to forget his brief but frightening encounter with the apparition of his mother.

"Alright, I think I’ve gained an understanding of your Urman." Ves nodded in satisfaction. "Let’s move on to what you want to change. Since I’m overhauling your mech, I might as well be thorough."

"I don’t know." Walter appeared serious as he considered the matter carefully. "I’m already used to how it’s built right now. There’s hardly anything that stands out that I want done. It’s not the best mech, but it’s mine."

"Mechs like these won’t be able to maintain a constant level of performance, especially if they are older than a decade. There must be something that you’re annoying with. It could be something that worked fine at the start, but became increasingly more annoying over the years."

"Now that I think about it, I’ve always been wondering about the left elbow joint. It’s just a little bit less supple than the other one. My mech technicians say it’s fine, but maybe it’s starting to break down."

After jogging his memory, Walter listed over two-dozen pet peeves. Some of them sounded trivial to the point where Ves doubted a mechanical problem had been the case, but Ves noted them all down anyway. Once he got his list, he gathered a couple of mech technicians and got to work.

Dismantling the Urman, designing new modifications and implementing them on an existing frame proved to be a stimulating job to Ves. Over the course of several days, he became immersed in trying to understand this rare and exotic brawler mech.

With each puzzle solved, Ves gained another insight into the operation of heavier mechs. Although the Urman hadn’t reached that particular threshold, it operated along the same principles as an orthodox heavy mech while retaining a couple of key features of a medium mech.

As Ves went about his days, the universe around him moved on.

The Whalers dug out a decent underground refuge and finished putting up some rudimentary defenses.

The Blood Claws used their extensive manpower and sophisticated equipment to establish a fort.