Star Ship Girl Era: My Shipgirls Are Too Overpowered-Chapter 74: Boarding The Pirate Ships

Despair spread through the pirate flagship faster than fire ever could.

Once the crews inside started pulling up the damage reports, they realized the truth almost immediately.

The propulsion system was gone, which meant the ship was no longer a warship in any meaningful sense, only a crippled hull drifting in place and waiting to be finished.

The shuttle hangars had also taken heavy damage, so even running was no longer simple.

Then came the final blow.

The internal communications grid began failing in sections, and the long-range command array stopped responding properly, leaving the flagship unable to call the rest of the fleet back into formation or even scream for help in any useful way.

And in a pirate fleet, that was the same as being abandoned.

Because pirates did not die together out of loyalty.

They ran.

The captain of the pirate flagship knew that better than anyone, which was why the look on his face shifted from anger to something much uglier.

Around him, the bridge crew looked at their failing systems and understood that they were trapped inside their own ship.

No one said it out loud, but everyone knew what they were waiting for. 𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶

The next volley, which would most likely be the kill shot.

But it never came.

For a while, at least.

That almost made it worse.

One of the pirates, pushed by fear and curiosity, finally risked a glance through an exterior feed and then paled so fast that the men near him immediately knew something had changed.

"The enemy’s not shooting," he said, voice shaking. "They’re sending mechs."

That got everyone’s attention.

A huge number of autonomous mechs were already moving through space toward the crippled flagship and the other damaged Tier III hulls, fast, organized, and with the kind of controlled advance that made it obvious they were not coming to kill a dead ship.

They were coming to take it.

The pirate captain understood the danger at once.

If he could not escape, then at least he should destroy his own ship and deny the other side a prize.

Unfortunately for him, the ship was too damaged for even that.

Too many systems were down.

Too many command links were broken.

The flagship was no longer listening properly, which made matters ever worse.

And that was the cruelest part.

He could not save himself.

He could not save his fleet.

He could not even destroy his own property out of spite.

Outside, the battle had already shifted.

The surviving Tier II pirate ships that tried to flee were hunted down and destroyed in short order, because once Astra and Rhoswen stopped pretending this was a normal pirate engagement, there was nowhere left for weak hulls to hide.

The remaining Tier III ships fared only slightly better.

Black Crown’s secondary batteries and Crimson Bulwark’s sustained fire tore into them hard enough to strip away any fantasy of resistance, and by the time the first boarding units reached their hulls, most of the pirate crews inside had already figured out that surrender was the only option left that involved breathing later.

A large number of autonomous mechs from both ships flooded into the captured pirate vessels.

The resistance they met was scattered and weak.

Some pirates fired a few desperate shots.

Some tried to barricade corridors for a minute or two.

Most simply dropped their weapons the moment they saw what was coming through the doors.

The mechs moved room by room, section by section, seizing control of engineering, command nodes, armories, and life-support corridors, then herding the surrendered pirates into isolated compartments where they could be locked down and monitored.

By the time the first round of seizures was complete, three damaged Tier III pirate warships and a large number of smaller surviving support hulls had already fallen into Aurelian’s hands.

Only the pirate flagship remained unresolved, still hanging there half-dead in the dark.

Astra did not slow down.

Once the first captured ships were secured, she left only a small mech presence aboard each one and concentrated the rest of the boarding force on the flagship.

Her voice stayed calm through the command line, but there was a faint chill in it now that the fight had turned into a cleanup.

"The final objective is the flagship," she said. "If they resist, they die. If they surrender, they get processed with the rest."

Rhoswen answered immediately, clearly energized by the whole thing.

"Yes."

The mechs boarded the pirate flagship.

And what they found was almost anticlimactic.

There was resistance, but not organized resistance.

A few frightened men tried to stand their ground.

A few others fired wildly from cover.

Most of the pirates on board had already broken.

By the time the boarding force reached the command sections, a mutiny had already happened inside the flagship.

The pirate crews, having realized they were abandoned and unable to run, had turned on their own captain and his closest loyalists in a final attempt to improve their chances of surviving surrender.

It was ugly.

It was fast.

And it saved Astra the trouble of having to personally hunt the pirate leader through a broken ship.

Reports came in from the boarding teams one after another, and the conclusion was simple enough.

The captain was dead.

His inner circle was dead.

The remaining pirates were surrendering in groups.

Astra accepted the update without emotion and had the surrender processed the same way she handled everything else, efficiently and without any special treatment.

The flagship itself, however, was in worse shape than the others.

It could no longer move under its own power.

That meant towing it back.

Aurelian watched the whole thing from Black Crown’s command deck with his usual calm, though he did not deny that the sight of a whole pirate fleet collapsing into salvage and prisoners felt oddly satisfying.

Once the boarding operations were complete, the source extraction also finished.

As expected, it was not especially impressive.

There were some blue-tier fragments, yes, but not many.

Most of the extraction yield sat in gray and white because pirate warships, no matter how noisy or dangerous they were, were simply not built on the same level as real military assets or the Omnics they had faced earlier.

Still, Astra had made the right call.