The Mech Touch novel Chapter 530

Soon, enough time passed for the Inheritors to enter into engagement range to the two Vesian combat carriers.

Ves kept an eye on the telemetry of a sample of Inheritors throughout the ordeal. He watched carefully for anomalies and other dangerous signs.

Several times, he detected latent dangers such as an excessive buildup of heat in one section or a weakening of the power draw in another section.

He was quite good at detecting these kinds of dangers. Each time he spotted something worrisome, he came up with a solution and sent the entire package to the mech pilot.

Naturally, every mech pilot that read the message attached to the setting tweaks couldn’t understand a thing of what Ves proposed. All of the jargon and technical numbers looked like a maze to these brutes.

What, did you think mech pilots studied advanced calculus or engineering in the academies?

None of the pilots understood his tweaks, but since they came from the head designer, they all accepted them without too much consideration. After all, the head designer was the most knowledgeable mech specialist among them. Their belief in his capabilities was naively high.

These on-the-fly adjustments compensated for the quick and dirty last-minute modifications made to the Inheritors.

Throughout the time the task force waded through the minefield, Ves ordered the mech designers to supervise a frantic modification of the Inheritor mechs in order to squeeze more speed out of their skinny frames.

The suddenness of the Vesian ambush and the shortage of time precluded any major overhauls.

"If only we had a week’s worth of warning." He sighed in the command center of the Shield of Hispania. "With that much time, our mech designers and mech technicians could have bolstered the internals of those Inheritors to withstand the overload."

Iris smiled ruefully at him next to his seat. "You can’t predict anything in war. Events never progress the way we want to, because Lady Luck and our opponents are playing the same game as us. Be thankful that we are only facing two mech companies. This is far from our worst-case scenario."

The worst-case scenario would be getting cornered by an entire Mech Legion. There could be no escape if the famous Lady Amalia managed to throw all the mechs at her disposal at them. Even the arrival of two additional mech regiment cut down their chances of escape by ninety percent.

The Flagrant Vandals needed to mop up the two companies in record time in order to avoid more complications.

Ves was relieved to see that the overloaded Inheritors held themselves together so far. In order to speed them up even further, he enacted some modifications that didn’t take much time to implement.

The mech technicians worked around the clock to complete these modifications. They deployed with only half of their energy cells, which saved them a fair amount of mass at the cost of halving their uptime. They also stripped various other components that wouldn’t be needed in the coming battle.

Considering that they needed to finish this battle quickly, Major Verle approved of the changes. Fighting a lengthy engagement was no different from getting annihilated, so they needed to pull all the stops.

All of that sacrifice served their purpose. The Inheritors inexorably caught up to the Pinpricks and Brain Scramblers. Both of the latter mechs primarily relied on ranged weaponry, so the Vesians attacked first.

As their model name suggested, the Pinpricks didn’t deal much damage. Their submachine guns fired light caliber ballistic shells at a rapid rate of fire. Nevertheless, they carried a fairly high amount of ammunition, so they could keep up their harassment for a fairly lengthy time.

Compared to laser weapons of the same power and capacity, ballistic weapons had the edge in lethality. The Pinpricks weren’t meant to last forever in a battle of attrition. Their designers only opted for ballistic submachine guns because a laser weapon version simply possessed too little threat. _{ƒrēewebnoѵёl.cσm}

One of the downsides of the submachine gun was that it wasn’t very accurate at long ranges. The Pinpricks needed to wait until the Inheritors came into medium range before they had a chance of hitting them. Even then, the inherent inaccuracy of the weapons and their awkward postures due to the chase didn’t allow them to hit the Inheritors very often.

Still, even if they got hit a couple of times, the Inheritor mechs couldn’t handle too much damage. They were light mechs after all, and many people likened their armor to fabric rather than plates of alloy.

If not for the extremely light payloads of the submachine gun shells, the Inheritors would have been forced to turn away after suffering a couple of hits at the same section.

As for now, they could probably endure half a magazine, but no more. The Inheritor mechs didn’t allow their opponents the luxury to aim at the same spots. They dodged and weaved even as they continued to close the distance.

The only mechs they needed to be wary of was the Brain Scrambler. As the spaceborn frontline mechs of the Calico Dancer Bats, the Brain Scrambler served as their medium to long-ranged fire support.

Frontline mechs stripped everything that wasn’t essential to a mech to minimize their production cost and complexity of piloting them. The Brain Scrambler resembled a spacecraft more than a mech as it resembled an armed shuttle with gun barrels for arms more than some humanoid or bestial creation.

In truth, calling it a mech at all would be stretching it, as it completely lacked a pair of legs and a head. Everything except its weapon was embedded into their center body.

The only reason why people called such spaceborn crafts a mech rather than a fighter was because it needed a mech pilot to interface with the machine. Of course, due to lacking all of those complicated limbs, even the most untalented pilots could make a contribution with these simple mechs.

Replacing their humanoid arms with rotating gun barrels might have reduced their flexibility to a low point, but it gave them a considerable amount of firepower.

The worst thing about the Brain Scramblers was that they fired higher caliber high-explosive shells. Though they couldn’t carry a lot of ammunition for that reason, their threat level was much higher despite being much less valuable than the Pinpricks.

"Boss, why are they called the Brain Scramblers?" Iris asked.