[1-200] THE MECH TOUCH

Chapter 154: Holy Grail

The security guard yawned as he closed the hefty coffer. Its antrigrav modules sprung back to life and took up position behind its sharp-faced owner.

"Everything checks out. It's a false alarm." The guard declared and waved the new arrival away. "Off you go. Enjoy your stay at Cloudy Curtain."

The middle-aged man nodded and sauntered to the exit. Bypassing the security of this dreary spaceport had taken a lot more effort than he thought. For some reason, the spaceport recently received a massive upgrade in its security suite. It took some quick thinking for the man to respond to the alarms.

As he walked outside the building, he looked up at the dreary clouds that constantly shrouded this planets. The few sheens of color, akin to flattened rainbows, hardly cheered up his day. He hailed an aircar and set his destination to the opposite side of the planet.

After several hours of flight, the man departed from the aircar and looked at the quiet neighborhood he'd be living in for the time being. He glanced at the sturdy walls of the guarded compound a few blocks away and whistled appreciatively.

"This is going to require a lot of patience."

His client had already prepared a house for him. Outwardly, it looked identical to the many other homesteads on the street. In fact, the house incorporated many dampening materials that suppressed signals and blocked unwanted spying.

After entering the home, the man ignored the furnished house and the closet full of clothes. He directly climbed to the attic at the top and approached a camouflaged window that could not be spotted outside.

The coffer dropped to the spotless floor and opened by itself. Instead of the mundane clothes the man showed to the spaceport's security guard, the coffer held a dizzying array of alloy components.

The man took each of the components and methodically assembled them until the entire construction resembled a metal tree sitting on its sides. Its intimidating size and shape resembled a railgun, only scaled up to the point it could threaten mechs.

The main laid down behind the complicated weapon and swept over its systems. The railgun's muzzle aimed straight at the entrance of the guarded compound that could barely be seen through the attic's window.

"You got away once, but I've seen your tricks now." The man whispered as recalled his previous failure. He never expected to come up short due the presence of a mythical miniaturized shield generator.

He made some adjustments this time. As long as his target left the compound, his railgun would never miss.

He simply had to be patient.

Back at the workshop, Melkor expressed his views on rifleman mechs with a very simple premise. "Why do mechs wield rifles? Why don't all of them come in the style of frontline mechs?"

For humanoid mechs, the main difference between a standard mech and a frontline mech had to do with their arms. A frontline mech replaced its arms with gun barrels, while a standard mech retained its human-like arms capable of manipulating external gear like mech-sized rifles.

"A skilled pilot can manipulate the limbs of their mechs with great precision." Ves repeated the standard answer found in textbooks. "A frontline mech is largely reliant on its hardware and software to aim, which can shore up the aim of an average mech pilot. A standard mech on the other hand combines the use of its systems along with its pilot's intuition to deliver better results."

A lot of mech designers thought that adding arms and a rifle to a mech wasted a lot of resources. Yet on an actual battlefield, a standard mech often outperformed its frontline mech counterpart. Many factors played a role, from the increased range of motion afforded by its arms, to the ability to make better use of a pilot's real life marksmanship.