[201-400] THE MECH'S TOUCH

Chapter 320: Wasteful Ploy

At first, the pirates approached without contest. Once they walked past the debris field, they bypassed the walls and trudged into the interior of the base. Their prey had gone ahead and retreated towards the center of the base, where a host of ships awaited their arrival.

Surprisingly, the pirates hardly encountered any opposition. The lack of any obstacles among the empty prefab buildings lulled them to a sense of complacency. They unconsciously dismissed any threats among the empty streets and gathered up their numbers before they approached the final defensive envelope.

A fair distance away, at the very center of the red zone, a horde of mechs started to load up to their carriers.

Badly damaged mechs entered first, followed by ranged mechs that expended all of their ammunition. Only a final defensive line of laser rifleman mechs and undamaged melee mechs held their ground.

Alongside these mechs, a large number of anti-air and anti-missile turrets dotted the massive landing field. These formidable military-grade turrets fended off the occasional orbital and missile bombardment as well as any mechs that approached from the ground. A handful of turrets specializing in fast response even reacted swiftly enough to intercept ballistic shells.

The only way to break through the final defensive line was to commit to an all-out assault. Even though the final defensive line intimidated the pirates, their courage continuously swelled as their numbers grew.

On the opposite of the pirate mechs, Raella grinned as she looked forward to the show to come, though she sighed as she thought of her Nimue.

Her light mech hadn't fared too well in recent deployments. Many of its compressed armor plates showed signs of intense blows and some of them had even been peeled away. This meant she had very little buffer left to absorb further damage.

"Will they fall for it?" She asked.

"They're not acting like they've caught on." Fadah said as he sat in the cockpit of his worn-out Blackbeak. His mech had fared better than Raella's, but consecutive battles had stripped quite a bit of layers from its Veltrex armor system. "This is our last gambit. If it fails, we'll be having a rough time."

Fortunately, the pirate mechs cluelessly congregated in the open fairways between the abandoned prefab structures. Their standard sensors detected no explosives and not a hint of undermining beneath their feet. Thus, they swarmed into the base without reservation.

Once the numbers turned from hundreds to thousands of mechs, Colonel Ilos who commanded the evacuation issued an order. "Set off the trap!"

The prefab structures blew up all at once. The explosions had been synchronised down to the microsecond, leaving no opportunity for the pirates to take any precautions at all. Over fifty percent of the base suffered devastating explosions with a familiar electric bent. It turned out those prefabs had been stuffed with overcharged energy cells!

Screams filtered out into the open channels as the lucky ones survived with mangled mechs. As for those who used the prefabs as cover, both their mechs and their pilots had been torn apart from their proximity to the blasts.

The level of violence thrummed throughout the base and even the defenders had to fight to keep their footing. The massive shockwave from the simultaneous explosions even shifted some of the ships!

As the explosions faded, Raella struggled to understand why the pirates hadn't detected the energy cells. "How did the Mech Corps managed to fool their sensors? By now, every mech has their detectors peeled for overcharged energy cells."

"It's because the Mech Corps came with a specialized design that's purpose-built as a bomb." Another pilot in the channel said. "You see, those mech sensors are calibrated towards detecting mech-sized energy cells, but the base has lots of tools that run on smaller energy cells. If the sensors picked all of those smaller energy cells up, the pilot would eventually grow deaf from all of the alarms, so they are all set to ignore the cells below a given size."