Star Ship Girl Era: My Shipgirls Are Too Overpowered-Chapter 75: Boarding The Pirate Ships 2

If they had blown everything apart, the fragments would not have made up for the loss.

Capturing the surviving Tier III ships was worth far more than reducing them to drifting scrap.

By the end of the operation, Crimson Bulwark had gained a lot from the battle and the cleanup that followed, climbing fast enough that even Aurelian had to admit her leveling pace was good.

His own level rose too, though more slowly, which was expected.

Shipgirls always gained combat growth more directly than commanders did.

Aurelian cared less about that right now anyway.

What mattered more was the location of the clue.

Once the pirate problem had been crushed hard enough that no one nearby would be foolish enough to interrupt him again, Astra sent mechs into the marked section of the asteroid field to begin excavation.

It took time.

Far more time than the actual battle had.

That was just how these things went.

Fights were often decided quickly.

Digging through rock was not.

Aurelian waited without impatience because he already knew the location was right, and because there was no point in hovering over the excavation teams as if anxiety would somehow make the process faster.

About half an hour later, the mech team found it.

A sealed blue-green object was brought aboard and delivered under controlled containment, and once it reached Black Crown’s command section, Aurelian examined it personally.

It was not a piece of ship equipment.

It could not be converted into a weapon or a regular system module.

Instead, it was a special mineral formation known as Void Ore, the kind that could be directly integrated into a hull to alter its spatial attributes and improve the ship’s underlying potential.

That made it valuable in a very different way; although it was not a flashy item, it could be important to some.

Aurelian handed it over to Astra for secure storage.

"It might have been worth the trip," he said quietly.

Astra nodded once.

"It was," she agreed.

Then his gaze shifted toward the captured pirate ships now strung out behind them like a shameful parade.

There was no clean way to describe the result other than this.

The mission had become a complete success.

He had found the clue object.

He had crippled the pirate strength in the local belt.

He had gained experience, fragments, and captured hulls.

And he had done all of that because Rhoswen’s aggressive behavior had provoked the exact kind of overreaction he had needed.

Aurelian thought about that for a few moments, then opened a private line to Rhoswen.

Her voice came through quickly.

"Commander."

He did not drag out the moment.

"So being bait was the main goal, huh?" he asked aloud, even though he kinda knew the answer.

There was a short pause.

Then Rhoswen answered, sounding just a little self-conscious.

"I thought if I stayed in visible range and kept pressuring the smaller groups, someone bigger would eventually come out. I wasn’t fully sure they would, so I didn’t report it in advance."

Aurelian leaned back slightly.

So she had not simply been acting on impulse.

Not entirely.

That changed things.

There had still been flaws in her execution, but the idea itself was not stupid. It was bold, simple, and dangerous, but it seemed that Rhoswen knew what she was doing from the start. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝚠𝕖𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝕖𝚕.𝚌𝗼𝗺

Which, in this case, could be considered as doing a good job, but he still felt like something was wrong about that kind of thinking.

He let the silence sit for a second, then answered in the same calm tone he used for everything important.

"You should have told me first," he said. "But the plan itself was not bad."

Rhoswen went quiet again, clearly waiting for the rest.

Aurelian did not make her wait long.

"For a first real operation, you did very well. There were flaws, but the result was good, and not many shipgirls can say their first extended mission ended with this many kills and this many captured ships."

This time, the relief in her voice was easy to hear.

"Thank you, Commander."

Aurelian ended the line after that and shifted his attention back to the wider situation.

There was no reason to drag all these spoils to Duskrail itself.

If anything, that would just invite complications.

A local government dealing with this much pirate activity was usually entangled with the same pirate ecosystem one way or another, whether through corruption, tolerated black markets, or simple incompetence.

Bringing a string of captured pirate warships into the local jurisdiction would only waste time and likely cost him money.

So he chose the clean option.

They headed back through the stargate network toward Polaris, taking the captured ships with them.

That alone caused enough of a stir when they passed through.

A line of damaged pirate warships under tow was not a normal sight, especially not behind a commander who had only recently returned from his first major combat deployment, and by the time Black Crown re-entered the Polaris side of the route, the starport had already started buzzing.

Aurelian did not stay for the reactions.

He contacted the family first, then reported the mission to the academy.

The person responsible for handling combat mission submissions looked genuinely stunned after watching the battle feed.

"You accepted the contract this morning," the man said, still staring at the footage. "And by the afternoon, you had already broken the pirate structure in the Duskrail belt and brought back captured ships?"

Aurelian did not feel the need to act modestly about the obvious.

"They gathered in one place," he replied. "That made it easier."

The mission handler gave him a look that clearly said "easier" was not the word he would have chosen, then kept scrolling through the footage.

"These pirates had organization behind them," the man muttered. "They may even have had a deeper base structure still hidden in the belt."

Aurelian nodded once.

"Probably," he said. "But clearing that completely would take more time than I intended to spend there."

That answer seemed fair enough.

The academy had its own people for aftermath work, salvage processing, and follow-up suppression.

Once Aurelian handed over the captured route data and the likely pirate nest region, they would know what to do with it.

More importantly, the academy was very interested in the fact that one of their new commanders had just cut the local pirate strength badly enough to destabilize the whole balance of that belt in one afternoon.

The mission handler approved the completion and immediately forwarded the aftermath location.

By the time Aurelian left the submission office, academy support teams were already moving to handle the rest.