The Mech Touch novel Chapter 810

The infirmaries of both the Vandals and the Swordmaidens filled up with their injured. The bodies of scores of servicemen, pirates and slaves temporarily piled up in a freezing container.

Throughout the chaotic, dust-laden camp, heavy transports conveyed several scarred and deformed mechs to the prefab workshops.

Life must go on!

The mission stayed the same. No matter how awful the events of yesterday impacted the ground forces, the survivors had to clench their teeth and do their best to pick up their duties.

Not much news arrived from the fleet after the initial status update. The Flagrant Swordmaidens in orbit remained as ignorant as those on the ground.

Except for figuring out that the Starlight Megalodon likely launched the torpedo as a reaction against the indiscriminate orbital bombardment, they couldn’t figure out much else. The dense concentration of astral winds made observation from orbit impossible.

Ves suspended his experiments in order to supervise the repair process in person. None of the other mech designers but him could draft up a repair plan for each damaged mech that wasted the least amount of resources.

Having done this many times before, he only needed to spend a half hour at most to go over the state of each damaged mech and point out which parts needed to be replaced and which parts could be restored.

With the limited stockpile of resources at hand, the Vandals couldn’t afford to replace every broken part that could still be restored.

Most of the damage actually consisted of dented armor plating and deformed parts. Many of the mechs lost their antigrav field when they became affected by their proximity to a meteorite impact. This exacerbated their fall damage and gave the mech technicians a lot of headaches.

"It’s too wasteful to replace these armor plating with new ones. Just pound them back into shape!"

Mech armor plating was made up of highly advanced alloys that couldn’t easily be recycled with field equipment. Only their logistics ships up in orbit possessed the capacity to recycle damaged armor plating down to their base materials. After that, it might take several hours to fabricate a completely new plate from those recovered materials.

If the Vandals made use of the formidable capabilities of the logistics ships, then the damaged mechs would easily be able to regain their peak strength.

It took way too much time and effort to do so, though. The damaged mechs didn’t need to be restored to a near-perfect state. Ves was fine with straightening out the dents and deformities. Even though the bending and unbending weakened the structure of the armor plating, the Vandals really couldn’t afford to spend too much time in one place.

They still needed to move! _{ƒreewebηoveℓ.com}

Therefore, Ves prioritized the repair of the internal components over the armor plating because restoring the former directly restored the battle capabilities of the mech while the latter only increased its level of protection.

"Hopefully the Ancient City of Samar won’t do anything crazy during this time."

The disaster destroyed half the city walls and even knocked down some of the resilient metal structures in the outer districts of the city. Thousands of blessed people lost their lives, and tens of thousands sustained various injuries.

The Flagrant Swordmaidens saw an opportunity in this. They possessed vastly superior medical technology. When they began to offer to help out with treating the injured, the tech-crazy fanatics finally showed some clarity.

Collecting technological baubles may be fine and dandy, but saving the lives of their citizens mattered more!

However, a new threat began to emerge from the city.

"The more aggressive sacred gods of Samar are angry." Ketis told him as he finalized the repair plan of the last damaged mech under his purview. "The exobeasts aren’t as sympathetic to their injured subjects. The blessed people are servants to them. If a bunch of them die, they only need to wait a couple of decades for them to replenish their numbers."

"What are they angry about, then?" Ves asked.

"They’re angry about the orbital bombardment. The sacred gods don’t believe it’s a coincidence that they became the victim of it shortly after we’ve arrived to attempt to trade with their city. Both our arrivals happened to coincide together that they can’t help but draw a connection between us and the rocks that almost pulverized their domain."

Ves grimaced. "We didn’t do it. Even our camp suffered under the same bombardment!"

"You know that, I know that, every Vandal and Swordmaiden knows that. Yet to the natives, everything that’s foreign and comes from beyond the vault of the gods are connected."

"So what are they plotting at this moment?"

"There’s a split between the sacred gods. The aggressive faction is trying to drum up support for an attack. They want to take the offensive and attack our camp!"

That caused Ves to pause. An attack would be really bad for them for several reasons! "How many sacred gods does Samar have?"

"Twelve! That’s not all. Their sacred gods are older and better fed. The area around Samar isn’t as barren as the wastelands around Mulak. If one of the sacred gods want to enjoy a feast, they could easily lumber out of the city and slowly catch up to one of the animal herds. That’s also why the sacred gods are pissed. The meteorites probably wiped out a lot of the beast herds in the wild!"

Ves began to imagine the result of twelve sacred gods assaulting the camp at the same time. The distance between the camp and the city wasn’t very far. Depending on how fast the sacred gods moved, they could reach the camp within half a day or less.

That wasn’t enough time to evacuate the camp, especially when around eighty damaged mechs weighed down the Vandals and Swordmaidens!

Unless the ground forces decisively abandoned all eighty mechs as well as at least half of their supplies, they had no choice but to make a stand and repel the sacred gods.