Some still slipped through, especially the earliest deserters who had broken away before the reserve ring fully formed, but not many.

Most were caught, dragged into killing range, and destroyed.

The close fighting lasted another half hour before the last meaningful resistance ended.

Then, gradually, the battle quieted.

The tactical display cleared in stages. The surviving contacts dropped, then dropped again, then finally shrank into only a few distant returns already too far gone to matter.

Around them, Redglass space was filled with the drifting dead. Great broken bodies, clouds of biological debris, wrecked aircraft, damaged frames, scattered metal, and cooling fire.

Rhoswen exhaled hard and leaned back slightly, still alert, but with the edge of battle excitement finally starting to settle.

"That," she said, "was worth the trip."

Lysara, by contrast, was already looking over the post-battle spread with clinical calm. "We should begin recovery quickly. Some of the remains will drift out too far if we leave them."

Aurelian agreed.

But first came the count.

The final numbers took a little time to settle, and while they did, Solenne brought in the aircraft that could still fly cleanly while the damaged ones were tagged for recovery and tow.

Her own losses were not light, but neither were they crippling. For a hunt of this scale, they were acceptable.

When the battlefield estimate finally stabilized, it was substantial.

Roughly four thousand Voidshade Fenrir were killed within the engagement zone, including around a hundred confirmed fourth-tier specimens and the alpha itself.

More had likely died later from mortal wounds beyond the immediate net, but those did not matter nearly as much as what had actually been secured.

The yield would be enormous.

Fragments alone would make the trip worthwhile. Biological recovery would matter too, especially for later material work.

There was also the chance of rarer drops from the higher-tier kills, particularly the alpha, and those mattered even if they did not immediately fit into his current plans.

The experience gained mattered too.

Aurelian felt that one directly, not as a visible number hovering in front of anyone else, but as the internal pressure of progress settling further into place.

He had already been advancing steadily through repeated campaigns, but this hunt had been unusually efficient.

These were not broken Kharov frontier crews or desperate local fleets. They were third-tier and fourth-tier space beasts in large numbers, and they had fed that advancement accordingly.

Not enough to push him over the line yet.

But close.

Very close.

Another opportunity on this scale, or a proper campaign against the right Kharov force, and Tier III would stop being a future step and become an immediate one.

That thought stayed with him only briefly, because the battlefield itself still demanded attention.

Among the recovered outputs were two rarer items, both almost certainly from the alpha.

One was a blue-grade defensive artifact with stealth-linked properties, more useful than he had expected at first glance.

The second was a high-value biological modification material drawn from the alpha’s core structure, the kind that could eventually be worked into hull improvement or other deeper shipgirl enhancement once he had the right plan and enough supporting material to make it worthwhile.

Rhoswen, unsurprisingly, looked interested the moment the second item was identified.

"Can that be used for a ship?"

"Eventually," Aurelian said. "Not by itself." 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

She nodded, not disappointed so much as already thinking about what "eventually" meant.

Lysara, meanwhile, had focused on another detail.

"The alpha avoided detection longer than it should have," she said.

Aurelian looked at the recovery note tied to the stealth artifact and nodded slowly. "Yes."

That explained it.

The thing had possessed some form of radar-evasive trait, not true invisibility, but enough to blur the early sensor picture until it moved aggressively enough to make itself obvious.

That was useful knowledge. More than useful. It was the sort of feature that killed complacent people.

"Record it," he said. "If we encounter this species again, I don’t want anyone assuming the biggest target will be hardest to kill."

Lysara sent the notation through at once.

Once the battlefield work truly began, the mood shifted from combat to labor. There was too much dead mass here to drag all of it home.

Priority recovery went to the fourth-tier bodies; the alpha remains, rare materials, damaged equipment, and whatever else justified the transport space.

Most of the lesser third-tier corpses would have to be stripped selectively or left to Redglass itself in the end.

That was unfortunate, but acceptable.

Solenne’s munitions expenditure turned out to be heavier than Lysara’s or Rhoswen’s, which made sense.

Carrier warfare always burned through more material when used at scale, and she had been the one most exposed to the chaotic close of the battle. Even so, compared to the overall value of the harvest, the cost was low.

Rhoswen took great satisfaction in that once she heard it.

"So we killed thousands of them and didn’t even have to pay that much for it."

"That," Lysara said, "is something I would love to do more often."

Rhoswen looked at her and nodded as she agreed with her statement.

Aurelian let them continue.

Because in truth, Rhoswen was not wrong.

The hunt had been good.

Very good.

They had tested the new drives, proven the movement plan, blooded Rhoswen further under controlled but real pressure, confirmed Lysara’s improved pursuit performance, made full use of Solenne’s carrier arm, gathered a large material return, and pushed his own advancement forward significantly in the process.

For a frontier commander building almost from nothing, that was exactly the kind of efficient gain he needed.

As recovery operations continued and Redglass’s twin stars burned on either side of the dark, Aurelian stood for a moment at the main display and looked over the slowly clearing battlefield.

This would not be the last hunt.

It could not be, not if he wanted to keep growing fast enough to stay ahead of the frontier’s dangers.

Soon enough, his attention would need to return to the Kharov, to the ruin field ten light-years out, to the engineering ship upgrade, to Haven’s growing intake burden, to Helion Bastion Twelve and the preserved Tier IV warship still waiting in its sealed bay.