The Struggling Prodigy

Lanie Larkinson gritted her virtual teeth as her body slammed in the cockpit of her virtual mech.

"This stupid competition mech is holding me back!"

Despite the fact that she trained with the generic mech models within the MSTS for several weeks, she could never quite get used to average performance of these machines.

Each of them were designed to the standard of a second-class budget mech. That was already bad enough for a Larkinson mech pilot that had long been accustomed to piloting premium mechs designed in-house.

What was worse was that the mechs seemed to be deliberately designed to hinder skilled mech pilots. Their reaction speed was lower than average and their range of motion was… disappointing.

In case of the swordsman mech model that she currently made use of, the high mobility and high skill-based swordsmanship that the Swordmaidens and the Heavensworders favored became a lot more constrained.