The Mech Touch novel Chapter 552

Chapter 552

Ves instantly catapulted to the top, but that didn't necessarily secured his win . He was still far short of reaching the victory condition for the game, so he had no choice but to transform his newly-gained wealth into strengthening his battle capabilities .

With a much-expanded force of mid-range ships and mechs, Ves experienced a renaissance which he took full advantage off to batter Chief Haine's increasingly formidable pirate armada . It was a shame that Chief Avanaeon's elite mercenary force beggared off at this time .

"Avanaeon, scuttlebutt says that the slapdash installation of the FTL drives on our logistics ships is coming back to bite us . Is there any credence to this rumor?"

The engineer grunted . "All the chief engineers are pulling double duty in trying to keep those shoddy FTL drives in one piece . What do you expect? They're simply the wrong fit for the Beggar's Bounty and the Linever Swan . To a mech designer like you, it's like putting an engine for a light mech into a medium mech . The FTL drives constantly break something after each and every jump . That's why we've suffered so many many delays recently . "

This sounded very worrisome to the other occupants of the compartments . "Do we need to open the stockpiles for the repair effort?"

"No, it's fine . The lack of materials is not an issue . The main challenge we are grappling with is that we don't have a good understanding of FTL technology ourselves . Even the best of humanity hasn't figured out all the nuances, so us poor engineers from a backwater third-rate state are only scratching the surface in this field . "

"Aren't chief engineers supposed to master FTL theory?" Soapstone followed up .

Avanaeon laughed . "Impossible! You'll have to be as smart as a three-hundred year old theoretical physicist to understand maybe twenty percent of how FTL drives work . Engineers like us make do with maybe five percent . We mainly learn what each component of an FTL drive is suppose to do and how it should look like . Unlike mech designers, we don't need to understand the underlying workings of FTL drives in order to get it to work . "

"So you are essentially treating FTL drives as black boxes?" Ves asked .

Even though he knew that engineers didn't comprehensively grasp the theory of FTL travel, he severely underestimated how little they actually knew .

The thought disconcerted him a lot more than he thought . After all, he wouldn't be happy to know if he rode a shuttle piloted by someone who never graduated from piloting school .

"You don't want to mess around with FTL drives . One faulty component can cause a ship to get lost in the higher dimensions for centuries . That's the least-bad outcome by the way . It's much more likely to get dropped out of FTL only to get sucked into a random black hole . What a way to go . "

Everyone shuddered a bit at the thought .

Chief Haine's attempt to beat back the sudden incursion from Ves succeeded, but at great cost . Her pirate fleet lost most of their low-quality scum . Despite being used as sacrificial pawns, the stupid pirates rabidly held up the rear guard and fought to the death .

The strengthened mercenary corps owned by Ves lost a lot of time chewing through the cannon fodder . By the time they shrugged off the pirate scum, Chief Haine's elites had already made a getaway .

In the meantime, Chief Avanaeon's mercenaries actively hunted for Lieutenant Commander Soapstone's treasure hunting expedition . They followed the trail of breadcrumbs into uncharted territory and through sheer luck managed to arrive at the right star system .

"Hey! That's not fair!" Soapstone slammed her fist against the table . The vibration from the impact briefly scrambled the projection of the game . "Out of thirty-nine star systems your fleet could have jumped to, how come you picked the right one?!"

"I'm just lucky, haha!" Avanaeon laughed as he sent his elite mercenaries to decimate Soapstone's civilian-grade ships . "Prepare your booty, because I'm coming to take them all!"

Soapstone's expedition had been caught in the middle of a planetary exploration phase and faced two difficult choices . Either she could abandon her considerable landbound assets and preserve all of her ships, or she could make a stand in an attempt to buy enough time to evacuate her landbound forces .

The first option led to guaranteed survivor, but represented a major setback . The second option might cause her to bow out of this game .

The former option wasn't even a viable choice at all . Chief Engineer Avanaeon loved to run with very fast ships, so there was no running from his pursuit .

The outcome of the battle arrived quickly enough . Soapstone hadn't devoted enough resources to defend her fleet from spaceborn threats and paid for it . Even though Avanaeon fought with a diminished force of mechs, their outstanding quality allowed him to defeat the much more fragile ships and mechs of Soapstone's treasure hunting expedition .

The logistical officer was the first player to be taken out of the game .

"You lucky dog . "

"Good game . "

With three players left in the game, the session transitioned into the late game phase . Every side accumulated a core force of high quality people and assets . Instead of racing to accumulate enough wealth to satisfy the victory condition of the game, everyone tried to hunt each other in order to take their opponents out directly .

"Come on, Haine . Where is your mighty pirate fleet?"

"I'm swaggering towards you! Just you wait! Our final battle will soon begin!"

"Speaking of final battles, how high are the odds we'll be forced into a battle against the Hafner Duchy?" Avanaeon asked .

"My gut feeling tells me that Hafner won't let us go without a fight . " Haine remarked . "I've managed to survive up to now by listening to my gut feeling, so you better take my warning seriously . "

Ves shrugged at that as he drove his mercenary corps in a search pattern . "I've studied Hafner's strategies extensively, and one thing that stands out is that they've erected a massive monitoring web at the border between the Kingdom and the Reinald Republic . According to Miss Jupiter, there's no way the local rebels can sabotage this monitoring network . We'll definitely trip an alarm as soon as our ships near the border . "

"Hafner has a reputation for responding quickly to alerts . Their ships catch up fast . "