The Mech Touch novel Chapter 626

The Verle Task Force was about to reach the Remoss System in one more day. The Remoss System was a popular stopover point for treasure hunters and pirates traveling back and forth between the frontier and the Harkensen System.

The Remoss System offered nothing interesting to any visitors. With a big neighbor like the Harkensen System, it lacked the ability to offer anything worthwhile to tourists and outfits. Its domestic industries was rather anemic as they were forced to produce low-value bulk goods that sold for a pittance in Harkensen.

While Remoss didn’t station any garrison forces in the outer system, they nonetheless maintained a small but capable defense fleet.

Since the upcoming battle would likely take place in the outer system, the local defenders likely wouldn’t intervene. Though the relationship between the Reinald Republic and the Flagrant Vandals had soured, it shouldn’t have come to the point of provoking them into action.

"Even if the local garrison is compelled to act, they’re too weak to challenge the Vandals."

He focused most of his attention on preparing the Vandal spaceborn mechs for battle. He first read up on the Masters of Combat in order to see whether he missed something crucial.

The Masters of Combat turned out to be a few decades old, the same as the Flagrant Vandals. That was sufficient for them to develop their own unique culture and mech tradition, but not to the point where they had reached the ranks of the elites.

"Battling them won’t result in a repeat of the battle against the Frosty Meteors."

Ves recalled the desperate circumstances of that fight. Though the Frosty Meteors only managed to intercept the Verle Task Force with three or four companies of spaceborn mechs, they practically halved the Vandal mech roster with their near-unyielding charge.

He scratched his chin while he processed the extra data. "The Masters of Combat excel on land, so we definitely have to catch them before their mechs make landfall. This is a rare opportunity to take out one of our competitors before they become ten times harder to dislodge."

He could already imagine the horror of trying to stem the tide of Vesian mechs on the surface of the Super Earth. In such an extreme environment where their power-hungry gravitic backpacks formed their only means of succor, the best asset was experience.

"It makes sense to force the Masters of Combat off the board. If they’re one of the participants of the game, their prowess on land is too scary to contemplate."

This also explained why the Flagrant Vandals and Lydia’s Swordmaidens went to bed with each other. Though the two had little in common, it also meant their interests didn’t collide. Besides chasing after the same prize, they had little else to fight over.

"I wonder what Lydia’s Swordmaidens are good at. They sound like they’re a bunch of melee maniacs."

Diving into the records revealed sparse details. Because they operated entirely in the frontier, detailed records was hard to come by. Nonetheless, Ves stitched together various scraps of intelligence and formed a decent impression of their fighting style.

He snorted at the result. "They’re a bunch of robbers!"

Just like any other pirate outfit, the Swordmaidens earned their living by robbing others. The main distinction with the Swordsmaidens was that rather than intercepting fleets in transit in space, they favored attacking ongoing expeditions on land!

This required a lot more effort than sitting in wait at the edge of a random star system. Pirates generally lay in ambush near popular transit points. In practice, the huge distances involved and the inherent lack of precision of FTL technology made ambushing fleets in space exceptionally hard.

If the incoming fleet of ships ended up several light-hours away from the ambushers, the pirates would never be able to close the distance in time. Even if the pirates predicted the route and vector of their targets, they still let too many victims slip from their grasp.

The pirates couldn’t help it. Space was simply too big.

Compared to ambushing fleets in space, ambushing an expedition that was chained to the ground was a lot easier. The Swordmaidens knew where they could find their targets, and as long as they enjoyed orbital superiority, they could drop as much mechs as necessary to subdue the forces on the ground.

The only challenge with this method was that Lydia’s Swordmaidens depended upon tip offs and their own intelligence gathering efforts to sniff out juicy treasure hunting expeditions.

"Still, it seems they’ve become quite good at it over the years."

This meant that the Swordmaidens had become very formidable in this aspect. They had fully taken root in the lawless society of frontier space.

Maybe the Flagrant Vandals could easily demolish the Swordmaidens in civilized space. Yet if the battle took place in the frontier, the Swordmaidens would easily be able to gain the upper hand through various means.

In general, their focus on robbing treasure hunters had turned them into formidable landbound combatants. As their name suggested, they highly favored swordsman mechs. This mech archetype offered a flexible balance between mobility and protection under challenging environments. The best part about swordsman mechs was that they offered a high amount of offensive power that enabled them to overwhelm guard mechs in the flashiest manner possible.

Most treasure hunting expeditions surrendered on the spot at that point.

As a gang of robbers, the conduct of the Swordmaidens turned out to be rather mild. They never killed the treasure hunters after they surrendered and never demolished their means of escape.

Crueler pirates either slaughtered or enslaved every single captive. If they were lazy enough to do so, they could still drive the expedition members to despair by stealing their mechs and ships. With no way out of the wild and untamed planet, they lost every hope of returning to civilized space!

In fact, the frontier wasn’t made up a vast stretch of unpopulated or alien-occupied star systems. A small but critical portion of planets hosted humans that had gone native over the years. Either willingly or not, they managed to persevere where others had fallen and erected functional, self-sufficient settlements, some of which turned into fiefs for the brutal pirate gangs that held sway in those regions of space.