The Mech Touch

The hunting party eventually packed up their stuff and made their way back to the camp. Each meal they ate during the travels incorporated wild god meat to a degree. The carnivorous Vandals and Swordmaidens insisted on eating it with every meal while it lasted!

Once the cooks became accustomed to working with the tough and heat-resistant meat, they began to get creative with their recipes. The menu began to include items such as god meat hot dogs, god meat curry, god meat cheeseburgers and god meat filet mignon.

Some of the more adventurous Swordmaidens even ate the meat raw or in the form of sushi.

The only ones who didn't participate consisted of a handful of vegetarians and those with belief and dietary concerns. The Vandals took in all kinds of people, even those who should have belonged to other states.

Most people happily munched on the god meat every chance they got though. Nobody got tired of the taste of god meat. Chewy, filling and suffused with fat, the taste of meat from a creature that was hundreds of years old truly satiated their stomachs in a way that fake meat synthesized from nutrient packs could never match.

"We should turn Seven into a farm and rear these wild gods for the slaughter!"

"It's not worth the effort, idiot. It takes a hundred years for a wild god to grow to this size."

"Eh, haven't you forgotten about the timespace stuff? Time runs more than ten times faster on this planet!"

"That won't last forever! All of this crap is only happening because someone forgot to turn off the Starlight Megalodon's FTL drive when they left!"

When the hunting arrived back to the camp, Ves heard that the ancient city of Mulak eventually opened up to a substantial trade.

One of the ways the negotiators used to put some pressure on the city was to show them footage of their successful attempt at slaying one of the dreaded wild god at a distance.

Though the strength of a wild god without a beast rider paled in comparison to a sacred god, both creatures suffered from the same fatal flaw. If the Flagrant Swordmaidens ever came into hostilities with the sacred gods at Mulak, then they wouldn't be able to resist, because their lack of mobility and ranged firepower completely turned them into sitting ducks!

Though the Swordmaidens heavily favored melee mechs, they hadn't completely sworn off the use of rifleman mechs themselves because they faced many situations where a monopoly on ranged superiority proved decisive.

Besides, even if their rivals attempted to take advantage of their lack of ranged firepower, they would quickly find out that the Swordmaiden melee mechs made up for it by closing in quickly with the help of their superior mobility!

The wild gods and sacred gods completely lacked this capability. Perhaps the only sacred god that could inflict some losses to the mechs was Hokaz. The Tyrant of the Wastes possessed a formidable range with his lightning powers, but the problem was that the lightning storm only covered so much ground.

As long as the mechs dispersed and surrounded the city from all directions, even the king of the gods wouldn't be able to clean them all up. The sacred gods who plodded along for several days in indecision and willful ignorance began to realize that these strangers from beyond the vault of the gods might not take no for an answer.

Burying their heads in the sand wouldn't make the looming threat go away.

In fact, the Vandals possessed the ability to destroy the city of Mulak at an even further range than that. Having witnessed a small taste of the might in the hands of the ace mech-like Hokaz, the Vandals came up with a means to bombard the city of Mulak from a distance to break their will.

Though orbital bombardment from the fleet wasn't too feasible due to the tendency of the astral winds diverting all of the artificial meteorites off course, the Vandals could still construct a makeshift artillery cannon and have it fire shells so powerful that they flew far despite the influence of six times standard gravity!

Still, the Vandals would rather not resort to this means. They wanted to conclude a quick and painless trade so that they could quickly get moving. There was no point in trying to subjugate Mulak, and as descendants of spacers in the service of the CFA, they enjoyed a lot of rights, even if they seemed to have forgotten their roots!

Therefore, from what Ves had heard, Commander Lydia took charge of the negotiations herself and lightly coerced the ancient city into agreeing to a substantial trade.

It could have backfired on her. For all the threats she induced, the Flagrant Swordmaidens actually had no intention of following through with them. It was all smoke and mirrors in an attempt to bewilder the natives into choosing the least-bad options of placating the outsiders.

All of this happened over a span of a few days. Ves didn't particularly care about the methods, though he admired Commander Lydia's savvy. She exerted just enough pressure to force the city to acquiesce, but not enough to set off their pride and provoke repulsion.

"So what's the trade deal?" Ves asked Ketis.

"According to Mayra, we agreed to repair some of their ancient broken-down machinery. We're also supplying them with basic power reactors, antigrav modules, food synthesizers, water purifiers, luxury food stock as well as a library's worth of basic handbooks and manuals related to agriculture and mechanics."

"Sounds like a good mix of short-term and long-term benefits. Mulak will definitely be able to soar with these goods."

None of the items Ketis mentioned sounded particularly valuable to Ves. Their 3D printers could easily fabricate them from extremely basic materials such as iron, copper, titanium and the like. Their designs were so obsolete that even Ves could cobble them together by hand if need be.

Naturally, the yokals wouldn't be able to tell the difference. To them, all of these gifts had been machined so precisely that only a god of craftsmanship could build such divine products!

Ketis snorted contemptuously at the amazed natives. "In exchange for goods that's worth as much as a cheap third-hand mech, they've agreed to trade us with knowledge in the form of lore and history about the ancient cities, the wildlings, the wild gods, the godlings and some other stuff like that. However, their biggest concession by far is that they finally agreed to hand over a pure god crystal!"

"They really gave up on one?!" Ves looked amazed.

While the natives and the sacred gods didn't really care about sharing their folklore, they had always been extremely stubborn about the idea of trading away a god crystal.

These valuable crystallizations of higher-dimensional energies directly represented strength to the sacred gods! According to the lore the Flagrant Swordmaidens had already obtained, as long as they implanted them to one of their godling offspring, that creature would have a straight path to becoming a sacred god!

While it was possible for a wild god to be turned into a sacred god, the cost in god crystals made that expenditure too costly to contemplate.

A full-sized god crystal could be broken up into smaller pieces and be embedded into the hide of a newborn godling offspring. As the exobeast slowly grew, accumulated a bunch of intermediate energy through their diet, and through some unknown means contributed to the growth of the crystals implanted in their bodies.

This was in fact one of the main ways to create new god crystals! For some reason, calling down an energy tornado only filled the god crystals with higher-dimensional energy. However, this energy was extremely potent and unstable at their purest forms, so the sacred gods needed to make use of it quickly before their god crystals cracked!

"Maybe this is one of the main purposes of why the exobiologists engineered these god species." Ves speculated. "Maybe they tried and failed to interact with the astral winds through purely technological means. I don't know how they came across the so-called god crystals and how they thought that implanting them onto exobeasts was a good idea, but evidently it worked."

The successful trade with the natives had parted some of the mysteries of Aeon Corona VII's past! Now that they obtained another piece of the puzzle, the Flagrant Swordmaidens finally obtained some bit of hope of solving their energy budget deficit.

"Mayra told me that we're about to move out soon. Since we successfully completed the trade, we won't be able to squeeze anything more out of the city without spoiling our relations with them. It's much better to try our luck with other cities."

The natives of Mulak only traded away a single god crystal. While its potential was potentially infinite, they would rather have more.

"There's a handful of ancient cities along our route that may also be open to trade. Even if they aren't willing to hand out a god crystal, perhaps we can obtain some other goods from them instead." Ves mused.

In any case, the order had been given. Everyone needed to be ready to move out!

In the following couple of days, the support personnel rushed into action, eager to get a move on now that Captain Byrd. Mech technicians quickly serviced the mechs and performed some final tweaks, while machinists and other technicians constructed a considerable amount of legged transports.

Finally, the day had come. The Flagrant Swordmaidens tore down the camp and packed up the prefab structures onto the newly-constructed legged transports.

Only a handful consisted of the fast transports that could keep up with a mech on a jog. The majority instead consisted of heavy transports that possessed a much larger cargo capacity as well as stronger legs.

Due to design and energy constraints, Chief Dakkon didn't bother with incorporating antigrav modules onto the heavy transports. Even if they lightened up their weight, their means of locomotion emphasized power over speed. It couldn't move any faster even if it walked on the surface of the moon with only a sixth of the gravity of Old Earth.

When the legged transports started to walk, they did so at a crawl. Their six heavy legs moved up and down with considerable weight. Each time they dragged themselves forward, they used up a large amount of energy.

Ves looked at the hundreds of mechs and the scores of heavy transports and winced at the energy expenditure of it all. The periodic energy cells shipped from orbit helped stem the bleeding, but eventually the ground forces needed to come up with a way to generate their own portable energy source.

Conventional means wouldn't work in their case. The Vandals had already started building some energy generators that used up locally-sourced reactants that they dug up from the soil, but feeding the collective appetite of five-hundred mechs along with fifty legged transports that each bore a massive amount of cargo simply burned through their energy reserves like nothing else!

The Flagrant Swordmaidens pinned all of their hopes on unlocking the secrets of the god crystals.

At one of the heavy transports converted into a mobile lab, Ves and Ketis had come to take a visit. Chief Dakkon led a research team of science officers and experts in charge of figuring out how to make use of their new treasure. Right now, Ves stepped inside an observation chamber that separated the occupants from a highly isolated vault that contained the god crystal.

Nobody knew for sure if it was safe to come into close proximity to the crystal. Though the natives didn't show any fear, that didn't mean that other people would remain unharmed.

For now, the research had only reached a preliminary stage.

"What did you find out, chief?"

"Nothing much, Ves." The chief engineer shrugged. "The crystal isn't anything biological, so at least we don't have to call upon the exobiologists. Dr. Tillman took one good look at it before she returned to the biolabs to poke at her wild god tissue samples. Still, we found out several details after we compared the murky crystal we dug out of the wild god's brains with this purer god crystal that we obtained from the city."

"Well?"

"They react with each other."