The Mech Touch novel Chapter 793

It took a bit more than a standard day for the first contact delegation and its escorts to return to camp. Carrying Lieutenant Dise’s electrically-fried mech back without damaging it further required a lot of coordination on the part of the mechs that carried the wreck. They had to slow down when they traversed difficult terrain in order to avoid jostling the damaged but restorable frame.

In the meantime, the Vandal and Swordmaiden experts all exchanged their data and observations among themselves and discussed some of the implications. The mutual exchange helped everyone out as everyone possessed a different perspective.

Frankly, Ves didn’t play too much of a role this time because the inhabitants of Mulak didn’t make use of any mechs at all. Instead, their principal form of defense came in the form of their exobeasts!

With their sacred gods acting as their main line of defense, was there any need for them to develop mechs? They could just grow a giant beast and proclaim it as a god to convince the dumb creature to defend their cities. It was a lot more convenient to maintain a tamed exobeast than a mech because the latter needed extensive logistical support in the long term.

"The entire city is geared first and foremost on supporting their pantheon of gods." Ves explained his thoughts. "With the amount of food they must be consuming at set intervals, the city can barely spare any infrastructure on anything big like mechs, shuttles or tanks. Research and development, production and maintenance all require hundreds of scientists, engineers, technicians, machinists and more to get an entire industry sector up and running. Nothing we’ve seen so far of Mulak suggests that the city possesses any significant industry."

"Mulak was never an industrial city in the first place." Chief Dakkon concurred. "According to the abbreviated history told by Pirisa, Mulak used to be the center of a resource harvesting operation. Ores and raw materials flowed to the city before being shipped elsewhere. If any cities have managed to retain some semblance of technology, it should be at those settlements geared towards industry."

All of this sounded interesting, and implied a means for the Flagrant Swordmaidens to come to some sort of mutually beneficial agreement with the locals.

Their mistaken impression that the visitors worshipped some sort of smithing or crafting god already laid down the road to further cooperation. Chief Dakkon already developed hundreds of potential suggestions to improve the defenses and the standard of living of Mulak.

"The city is an ancient relic." Dakkon said as he showed off projections of various images that his suit had taken. "Look at these portions. The metal sheets that are covering up these sections used to be occupied by various machines and electrical devices. They all wore down over hundreds or thousands of years due to lack of maintenance, so the city isn’t functioning as it used to. I can easily restore some of the functionality of these machines with some basic supplies and the help of a crew of technicians."

"I’ll take your suggestions under advisement." Captain Byrd replied as she had remained in thought throughout the journey back. "Mind you, we want to be as efficient as possible in our trades. Seeing that the cities are essentially independent city-states with no apparent contact with each other, it’s fine for us to trade for basic knowledge. It doesn’t cost us anything to hand over some data pads containing various manuals and technical specifications to every city open for trade."

Though they hadn’t seen much of the city, what they already observed from the main boulevard that ran through the middle of the settlement already showed that the inhabitants lived in their own self-contained world.

The blessed people that lived in the cities never contemplated traveling to another city. The potential trade benefits simply didn’t measure up to the massive risk of predation along the way.

Pirisa and the city officials already named the three most prominent threats.

The wildlings consisting of feral tribes of genetically engineered dwarves felt right at home under heavy gravity conditions.

It was a question how worse off their society had degenerated over the years of divergence. If the blessed people resembled a society that lived in medieval times, then the cursed people living in the wilds had likely gone back to the era of tribes!

In fact, the dwarves didn’t sound very intimidating at all. The second threat that posed a potential danger to the ground forces was the offspring of the gods in the wild. As small and fast breeders, practically all of godlings perished before they reached their full potential. Still, different species and subraces sometimes traveled by the thousands, and they could easily overwhelm a city if it didn’t put up a serious defense.

According to the locals, the godlings were a scourge upon the lands, preying on the native herbivores and the wildlings alike, sometimes to extinction. Their hordes constantly roamed across the planet for that reason. This also allowed newer populations of animals and wildlings to settle on the emptied lands.

This warped ecological cycle made it very unsafe for anything less than a sacred god to venture far outside a city.

Yet even a sacred god could be felled in the wilds. The culprits often comprised of the third and most serious threat someone could face on the planet, which were the wild gods.

Neither Ves nor anyone else could figure out from Pirisa’s description whether the wild gods possessed any sentience. They also lacked the crystals implanted on their bodies shortly after their birth that enabled them to call upon an energy tornado to siphon away some higher-dimensional energy and temporarily store them in the reservoirs for later use.

This distinguished wild gods from their more civilized countersparts. Nonetheless, even a sacred god could be brought down by superior numbers that attempted to exhaust the grand exobeast of its godly powers.

Still, if the Flagrant Swordmaidens ever encountered packs of wild gods in their upcoming trek to the Starlight Megalodon, then they could easily take care of the big lumbering beasts by bombarding it with a bevy of lasers from a distance.