The Mech Touch novel Chapter 3585

Chapter 3585 Cylinder Ships

"Have you ever fought a Red Ocean alien?"

Melkor hesitated. "Maybe. It depends on your definition of alien."

The old veteran who was sitting despondently behind the bar threw a disdainful look at the Avatar Commander. "You either fought against one or you haven't. There's no middle ground here, boy."

"We fought against an astral beast whose body was over 5 kilometers long. It took a lot of firepower and extraordinary measures to kill this battleship-sized beast. Does that qualify as alien to you?" Melkor snapped back.

"Hah! Slaying mindless beasts is no different from slaughtering cattle!" The old man laughed. "Astral beasts can be powerful, but if they're by themselves, it doesn't matter whether they are 5 kilometers or 50 kilometers long. Their minds are so simple and their attack methods are so one-dimensional that you can whittle them down by bombarding most of them from a distance."

"And real alien forces are different?"

"THEY KILLED MY PALS!" The veteran burst out! "Joey, Czelin, Avarash, Gallia. All of them were my friends and comrades. If we hadn't bumped into the aliens, my drinking buddies would have been sitting next to me. If they were still alive, a brat like you would have never been able to sit at that spot."

The old man continued to ramble about his lost comrades as if the loss was still fresh for him. The trauma had set in so deep that it was as if talking about his lost friends was the only way to keep them alive!

Melkor didn't know why he put down his commander uniform and donned a regular outfit before entering a random seedy bar in the cheaper part of Pejana.

Perhaps he was looking to take a break from his heavy responsibilities.

Perhaps he wanted to remind himself what it was like to be a normal person.

Perhaps he needed to talk to people who didn't clean up their behavior after they noticed his rank.

Whatever the case, Melkor began to regret entering this dreary water hole. Half the lights weren't working and the air filtration system was close to failing. The floor was sticky with dried beer and the cleaning bots had been kicked too many times to clean up all of the messes.

Melkor didn't even know how this place continued to function. The awful environment repelled a lot of potential customers. Those that did frequent the place were the sort of people who didn't have a lot of spending money.

Even so, the old veteran was worth his time. Despite the rambles and despite the erratic shouting, the man had fought a powerful alien fleet and survived the encounter.

Hearing his tale might provide Melkor with valuable insights that could keep his men alive if the expeditionary fleet ended up in a similar position one day!

"What happened first?" He asked. "Did you discover the aliens, or did they ambush you first?"

"The damn aliens caught us when we were prospecting one of the planets scoured by the CFA." The old veteran slowly answered. "You should see what the fleeters have done to it. From the records, it used to host billions of nunsers."

"Those large mammalian quadrupeds?"

"Yeah. We don't call them by those fancy words. Those nunsers have weird ideas on what their homes should be. They hardly build any solid structures. Instead, they keep constructing starships that can land upright on planets. The place our fleet visited used to host over a hundred thousand of their cylinder ships. Can you imagine it? To humans like us, a fleet composed of a thousand ships is already an armada. To the nunsers, it's their home."

"What did the CFA warfleet do when it dropped into the star system?"

"Well, we don't have any visuals, but we managed to figure out what happened by studying the ruins. The best we managed to figure out is that the CFA warfleet likely used their fancy portal technology to jump right into orbit of the planet despite all of the precautions the aliens have. The warships then began to bombard the entire surface with no delay. Hardly any of those large and powerful nunser cylinder ships managed to lift off from the ground. Any that flew higher than 10 kilometers instantly became a priority target."

Melkor could easily imagine the awful sight. If the CFA warfleet entered a remote part of the star system, then the nunsers would have been able to launch at least 100,000 of their cylinder ships into space!

The size of their ship-homes varied, but the nunsers tended to build big. Their average cylinder ships were around 300 meters tall but their main warships regularly surpassed a height of 2 kilometers!

Though the nunsers weren't able to build much of the latter, each of them were only a bit weaker than an equivalent human warship!

"What was the state of the planet when the fleet that you were a part of entered the star system?" Melkor asked.

"The planet turned into an enormous scrapyard. All of those nunser ships never made it to orbit, let alone escape into deep space. Almost all of them either crashed to the ground or toppled over. Without any nunsers, the ruined hulls were ripe for salvaging. We aren't the only ones who came, though. Other salvage fleets had already arrived weeks before and took their pick of the best pieces of salvage they could stuff into their cargo holds. In fact, the fleeters probably stripped all of those crashed ships of their phasewater before they left."

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