The Mech Touch novel Chapter 559

Relia Foster grew up in a small town on Carpenter II, a rural planet in an unremarkable corner of the Hafner Duchy. The Carpenter System was nothing special. It lacked the industries that encouraged development.

Everyone who lived on Carpenter II knew their place. They worked in mundane jobs and paid their taxes to a noble House that they never had any hope of approaching.

When she was young, her parents taught her an important lesson.

"Little Relia. Whenever you meet a noble, never look at them in the eyes. Their might and wealth aren’t something you can withstand."

"Because we are commoners?" The little girl asked.

"Because we are weak."

Over time, when Relia entered school, she learned what commoners truly represented. They owed their lives to the nobles and royals that ruled over them. It was not their place to question. They merely needed to obey.

"You are Hafners first, and Vesians second, never forget that!"

Her classes taught her that the Hafner Duchy shouldered the important duty of shielding the Vesia Kingdom against thieves and other bad men across the border. Even though the enemies dressed up in other identities, their true origin was the wicked Reinald Republic.

It was a state without morals. Their rejection of nobles had caused them to descend into anarchy and misery. Billions of people starved while the people at the top feasted with food that could have fed the entire state for a day.

"The depravity of the Reinaldans are only matched by the cruelty of the Roppongans and the zealotry of the Lisvians. Even our mortal enemies on the other side of the Kingdom cannot match the sheer evil that pours out of the Frozen Leaf Alliance."

Her teachers frequently emphasized the evilness of the trio of states across the border by showing the aftermath of their raids. Broken homes, fallen mechs, families torn apart, the Reinaldan pirates did not even let off children like Relia and her classmates!

"Sic semper pirata!"

Relia didn’t know what that meant, but everyone repeated it for some reason, so she mindlessly yelled out the words in unison.

Most of the time, Relia was a precocious child who played whenever her classes ended. Her idyllic days in that small town came to an end when she reached her tenth birthday. Some Hafner men brought her family to a hospital at a nearby city and put her in some big machine.

Having heard about it from others, she knew that the machine tested something funny called genes. It was said that genes were long strips of strings, and if they wound up just the right way, you became a bigshot that other people called a potentate!

Occasionally, some boy or girl from her town would test positive for the right genes. Their entire family had cause to celebrate because Hafner bestowed them lots of money so that the newly-discovered potentate could attend a distant academy, which was like a school for fighting!

Still, this almost never happened, so Relia didn’t think she was anything special.

She was so wrong.

The console in front of the doctor beeped in alarm. After a short analysis, the doctor grinned and whooped.

"What is wrong? Is there something wrong with our child?" Her mother asked with concern.

"Nothing of the sort! Your child is very likely to be a potentate, and not a weak one at that! Further testing is required!"

The excitement uprooted the entire hospital. Doctors and nurses kept prodding at her, taking out samples of blood and saliva. They even cut her brown locks of hair!

For some reason, the hospital couldn’t come to a definite conclusion about the specialness of her genes. Only half a day later, a big and menacing shuttle arrived before the hospital and took away Relia and her parents. Little Relia thought that they would be taken to the capital city of Carpenter System.

She was wrong.

Despite the harsh military lines of the shuttle’s interior, the journey went absolutely smooth, so much so that Relia only found out later that they had been brought into space!

"Wow! I’m actually in space! My friends will be so jealous of me!"

She didn’t know that she would never return to Carpenter II at that time.

As Relia stared out of the porthole of the shuttle, admiring the globe that was her home, the vehicle slowly docked with a larger vessel that turned out to be a corvette. While the Fosters made themselves comfortable in the cramped ship, the corvette zipped to an entirely different star system!

"Wow! We’re actually travelling faster than light! Mom, is light really fast?"

Her mother laughed awkwardly before trying to distract her daughter with some toys.

A few days later, the corvette arrived at a star system that Relia only heard from her teachers. "We’re in the Beicham System!"

The Beicham System was the capital system of the Hafner Duchy! The Duke of Hafner himself resided in a massive palace on Beicham III! When the big men told Relia that she would be brought to a special facility on that same planet, Relia’s eyes began to grow stars! What wonders would she see?

Once the corvette went through a number of security checks, another shuttle brought the Fosters to the surface of Beicham III. The shuttle touched down in an enclosed parking space, whereupon men armed with weapons that Relia had only seen in dramas firmly guided her family inside a massive research facility of some sorts.