The Mech Touch novel Chapter 3429

Chapter 3429: Husk Maker

Ves and his wife took their time to inspect and admire each masterwork mech.

No machine was identical. The more masterwork mechs they saw, the more they became aware of how cleverly the gallery operators selected the individual pieces.

Each masterwork mech told a different story. Some were developed especially for rich scions in the galactic center who went on to enjoy successful careers.

Others were masterwork versions of fairly ordinary mech designs. Their histories were more mixed. A few even took part in losing wars where they had eventually fallen in battle and taken as trophies by the opposition.

The cases where the ownership of masterwork mechs swapped from one organization to another were the most intriguing ones to Ves. As someone who always favored pairing mechs to the same mech pilots, it was interesting to see how mechs with the potential for life developed in a different direction.

From what he could observe, these masterwork mechs also developed more life, but their characters were a little less defined and a bit more general. That made it hard to detect that they possessed any further special qualities at all, but they were definitely present.

That answered at least a couple of questions that Ves always wondered about. This insight alone was already worth the 20 MTA merits he paid for two half-priced day tickets.

"Look! It's a masterwork doom crawler! Let's go and see what it can do!" Gloriana enthusiastically called.

The doom crawler was a popular display piece of the Masterwork Gallery. Although the venue didn't host too many visitors at this time, there were already three people floating in front of the distinctive heavy mech.

Ves spared a brief glance at the strangers. All three of them were mech designers and likely belonged to the same group. One of them, an older woman, was clearly a Master Mech Designer. The other two possessed the spiritual strength that Ves associated with Senior Mech Designers.

All three of them wore bright teal uniforms that were incredibly refined and reminded Ves of first-class materials.

Through various other clues, he deduced that the trio of older mech designers likely came from the galactic center!

Even though the galactic center was incredibly powerful and dominated by first-rate states, a few second-rate states existed between the cracks. The people who tended to live there had access to better tech and opportunities due to the ease in which they could associate with first-raters.

Neither of the two groups took the initiative to greet each other. They were total strangers to each other and the age gap between them was too big.

The older mech designers probably thought that Ves and Gloriana had come in order to look at cool mechs, nothing more. The fact that the couple also brought their baby and pets along further reinforced the impression of a casual day out, which actually wasn't far from the truth!

Ves twitched his mouth. He wondered how these old fogeys would react if they knew that he and his lovely wife both had five masterwork certificates under their belt!

There was no need for him to come up to them and brag, though. Rather than waste his time on posturing for no good reason, it was better for him to study the latest masterwork mech that had caught his attention.

"The Husk Maker has a more sordid history than the other masterwork mechs we've seen." Gloriana stated as she read the info panel. "This masterwork mech did a lot more damage to civilians than enemy combat units."

"That's stating it lightly."

Ves could already sense the dark history of the Husk Maker even before he read a single word from its info panel. The character of a mech, especially a living one, was defined both by its creator and its pilot.

In both cases, the Husk Maker inherited their darkness.

When Ves set aside most details and just wanted to capture a deeper impression of the second-class doom crawler, he gradually understood its nature.

The machine was designed as a murder weapon. Ves didn't know what the eight-legged mech's brilliant designer specialized in, but he or she passed on a strain of madness and despair to the Husk Maker.

When he examined the technical design of the doom crawler, he saw that while it wasn't customized for a single user, it was definitely designed for only a single use in mind.

A lot of wealthy materials and premium tech for its time had been put into this doom crawler. They were so extravagant in fact that it even surpassed the cost of low-tier expert mechs!

While that didn't automatically mean that the Husk Maker could actually beat an expert mech in battle, it possessed a huge advantage against standard mechs!

Due to the extreme investment its designer put in this standard mech, the Husk Maker became incredibly tough, which was one of the defining parameters of a doom crawler.

Not only was it clad with expert mech-grade armor plating, it also featured a large and power-hungry shield generator.

As for offensive capabilities, the Husk Maker was armed with an array of ranged weapons.

First was the missile launcher. This was a fairly standard module for doom crawlers, but the Husk Maker was special in that it actually carried a small arsenal of nuclear missiles!

"Damn, how did this designer get his hands on tactical nuclear missiles?" Ves frowned. "Did he produce them himself?"

This was a fairly real possibility. The tech behind nuclear weapons and most weapons of mass destruction wasn't actually complicated. Any mech designer who possessed decent fundamentals could make them in a typical workshop. It wasn't even that hard to obtain fissionable materials.

The real difficulty lay in hiding the illegal goods. Just one mistake was enough to invite a violent and immediate response from the MTA's Compliance Department!

In any case, a mech designer who deliberately designed a mech to utilize nuclear missiles definitely had a few screws loose in his head. There was no way that someone prepared a mech that was capable of mass murder without acknowledging that there was a real possibility that it would be used for its 'intended' purpose!

The other weapon systems of the Husk Maker weren't as extreme, if only to ensure that it possessed the means to defeat other mechs.

Ves was already familiar with gauss cannons and positron cannons.

What was a little bit more special to the Husk Maker was its arsenal of flammable weapons. It not only featured numerous flamethrowers, but also mounted an array of small mortars at the top.

These mortars weren't designed to bomb mechs or military strongholds from afar. Their payloads weren't capable of penetrating through armor.

Instead, they fired small and compact fire bombs that burned anything it came into contact with! The amount of lightly-protected structures the Husk Maker could burn if it was able to keep launching fire bomb after fire bomb was quite considerable!

"A mech designer cannot do the deed himself, though." Ves murmured. "There always has to be an accomplice."

Again, without reading any of the information that could provide him with context, he tried to decipher the character of the mech pilot.

Over the span of several years, he secretly designed a doom crawler that was designed to retaliate against the state by hitting an important city. _{fɾēewebnσveℓ.com}

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