[BL] Transmigrated as the Villain CEO's Mermaid Secretary

Chapter 447: Build Loadout

Neville let out a sigh, faint warmth still lingering on his lips.

Focus.

He shook his head and breathed out slowly. The HUD bloomed across his vision in pale neon, threading lines of light through the dark.

[WELCOME TO MECHA WARFARE ONLINE]

[PRIVATE LOBBY: HOST G.M.]

[GUEST: UNREGISTERED]

A pleasant chime — bing — followed by the soft mechanical purr of the system spinning up.

Without Shelly nattering in his ear, the cockpit felt too quiet. Eerily so.

He had grown used to her shrill cheerleading and her unhinged way of squeaking in the middle of a fight.

[CREATE TRIAL AVATAR — Y/N?]

Neville flexed his fingers; the haptic gloves appeared as he tapped Y.

A blank silver mannequin slid into view, frictionlessly rotating against a starfield. The cursor blinked on a name field.

He typed it out one letter at a time.

N — E — V — I — L — L — E

Simple is the best.

Neville didn’t bother with the customization options for the avatar’s face or armor color either. It seemed like a new update; it was interesting, but he wasn’t here to look pretty.

His usual account, Gravy, was tucked safely with his real grind history, his weapon presets, and his carefully curated build.

Neville didn’t want to use it here even if it was possible. Also, he thinks that anything he built in this trial would also be dissolved the moment the pod opened. After all, this was a rented place, not private property.

The room around the mannequin shimmered and rebuilt itself into a private workshop. Walls of neat translucent racks flickered into being, each one stacked with components.

There were cockpits, frames, joint clusters, propulsion units, plating tiers, and weapon mounts. Holographic price tags floated next to each, but in this private game, everything was free.

A child in a candy store would have wept.

But Neville wanted to cry at the list of things he needed to do before he could run around and play freely.

But what could he do?

Neville cracked his knuckles inside the gloves and got to work. He started from the bones outward.

A slender humanoid frame called Reaper class, Mark IV, appeared. Its silhouette was long-limbed and almost feminine in its proportions.

Most pilots dismissed the Reaper builds as fragile. But Reaper frames were built for one thing: speed for violence. It was light enough to dance, sharp enough to bleed.

Neville skipped the broad chest plating and selected a layered scale plate instead.

It looked a little funny, but oh well, there’s no Shelly to nag me otherwise.

He half-smiled and moved on.

For weapons, he tapped for twin plasma blades.

It was long, single-edged, but both of them were transformable into single-shot plasma barrels with cartridge feeds tucked into the forearm.

Two modes from one weapon, good for versatility.

Then, for the projectile systems, Neville added hidden ports along the calves and shoulder pauldrons. He opted for the one that wasn’t too flashy, so the whole mecha had to look like it was barely armed.

Neville also added a mini-shield generator at each joint — elbows, knees, and hips. He had thought about this before when he was playing with Shelly.

If there was anything important to protect but didn’t want to look for a bulky plating, mini shields on vital points would suffice.

[Heel thrusters: heavy-grade.]

[Wing thrusters: doubled.]

Neville upped the fuel-cell rating until the energy cost monitor began to blink yellow.

Speed, he thought. I need to be impossible to track.

If a Reaper frame could hit terminal velocity inside the atmosphere, the kinetic momentum alone could shear a heavy frame in two if he aimed at a critical seam.

Neville stepped back and circled around his half-built mecha, frowning. His finger hovered over the alternative weapons tab.

Guns.

A standard light pulse rifle.

A machine gun was mounted on the back.

Neville flicked through the options, considered some things, and dismissed the others.

Each one shaved a hair off his speed rating. Each one stacked a kilogram onto the ideal weight he wanted.

The Reaper’s whole point was that it didn’t lug a war’s worth of armaments around, but he couldn’t have anything for spare either.

Neville scrolled lower.

Lower.

Lower into the dregs of the weapons list, past the legendary tier and the standard tier, and into the section labeled MISCELLANEOUS / UNCATEGORIZED.

The icons here were old-looking, like nobody had even tried to update them in a decade.

Inside were a bunch of boomerangs, bolas, net-launchers, and smoke pots.

It looked like the whole section was something that the developers clearly considered novelty crap.

Then he saw something interesting.

A Slingshot.

Neville snorted.

They actually made a slingshot to fit a mecha?

It was a Y-shaped frame with a cord that looked like an elastic band for mechas. It was classified as a hand-held projectile multitool.

The text said it could load almost anything within a defined mass range: debris, scrap, spent shells, even severed mecha components.

Most players would never look at it twice. But why would they when they got a whole bunch of cool options? They would just pass it off as a joke of a weapon.

It was the digital equivalent of bringing a peashooter to a tank fight.

But Neville’s eyes were dead set on something else in that text.

That ammo flexibility, anything in the map would be free ammo. In a pinch, he could weaponize whatever the world handed him.

Neville excitedly added it.

Then, for a safer fallback, he added a single sidearm. It was a light handgun with three magazines.

He also added three returning daggers, the kind that flew on tiny built-in repulsor cores and snapped back to magnetic forearm holsters after a throw.

[BUILD COMPLETE — CONFIRM LOADOUT?]

Neville hit confirm.

The mecha bloomed into full color: matte charcoal plating with a thin silver line tracing each scale-edge.

It looked like a knife somebody had wrapped in silk.

Fwoosh.

The walls dissolved, and the floor became glass.

Neville was pulled forward through a corridor of light into the waiting room.