Star Ship Girl Era: My Shipgirls Are Too Overpowered-Chapter 76: Taking On Another Mission

What happened in the Duskrail belt did not cause much noise on Duskrail itself after the first shock passed.

The people who had quietly backed the pirate leader through money, smuggling routes, and dirty agreements reacted exactly how you would imagine they would.

The moment they found out that the ones who destroyed the pirate fleet were connected to Polaris Naval Academy, they stopped asking questions and started looking for replacement pawns.

A dead pirate captain was nothing to them.

He had only ever been useful because he was cheap, disposable, and violent enough to stand out among other pirates.

If he failed badly enough to get himself erased, then he was not someone worth avenging, especially not if revenge meant making an enemy out of Polaris.

So the whole matter was buried quickly on Duskrail’s side, and the groups that had supported him turned their attention to rebuilding control through new crews while cursing the man they had just abandoned for being incompetent.

Aurelian, for his part, did not care what happened to the people behind that pirate structure as long as they stayed out of his immediate path.

The next day, he accepted another combat mission.

This one was different.

Instead of fighting ships in open space, the task was to clear dangerous beasts from a newly developed colony world.

Missions like that were not the first choice for most commanders, since the early path for shipgirls and commanders was usually built around void combat, route patrols, and suppression work in space.

Still, Aurelian took it anyway.

Not because the rewards were especially attractive, but because he wanted land-combat experience.

If he really intended to claim territory one day, whether near the Alliance or far beyond it, then space superiority alone would not be enough.

Ships could hold orbit, but ships could not carefully take ground without risking damage to the very world you wanted to keep.

And if he did end up moving toward Larkspur Haven later, or any other frontier world, then the first phase of real control would likely depend on autonomous mechs and shipboard support forces long before it depended on a formal human army.

That made this mission useful.

It also gave him time to wait for the blue-tier autonomous mech package he had exchanged from the academy treasury.

So, after one hard day of work and one successful return, his small group unexpectedly got a short break.

Aurelian spent it simply.

He trained.

He reviewed combat logs.

He spent time with Astra and Rhoswen because even though both had adjusted well so far, bond-building did not happen just because a contract existed.

It deepened through routine, attention, and knowing how the other person thought when things were quiet, not only when they were under fire.

He also stayed away from the academy training field after checking it once.

Most of the shipgirls there were still below level twenty, and even though Rhoswen would probably have enjoyed smashing her way through every exercise partner she found, it would not have taught her much, and it definitely would not have raised her fast enough to justify the time. 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

The textbooks liked to say that commanders in the early phase should focus on many exercises, many drills, and many controlled matches to refine command rhythm.

Aurelian did not exactly disagree.

He just felt that his path had already skipped past that clean version of early growth.

Between the Omnics, pirates, and the constant pressure of planning ahead, he was already in the practical phase whether he liked it or not.

And in Rhoswen’s case, if she really went into those training matches with her natural style, most lower-level shipgirls would either be overwhelmed immediately or spend the whole time trying to survive her collisions.

That would not help either side.

So he left the training field behind and focused on preparing for the next real mission.

The day after that, the academy’s autonomous mech package arrived.

The moment it was delivered to Black Crown, Aurelian had it installed onto Astra’s ship rather than Rhoswen’s.

The choice was obvious because Astra’s level was already high enough that the mechs could be brought up immediately to a useful standard, and her flagship role made the equipment far more flexible in the long term.

Since this was ordinary accessory equipment rather than some unique, irreplaceable relic, upgrading it only required the right source fragments, and for the first forty levels, the requirements were mostly low enough that Aurelian did not even need to hesitate.

He pushed the package all the way up to the current useful limit in one go.

That gave Black Crown a stronger mech wing and made the upcoming ground-combat mission feel much cleaner.

Then the fleet set out again.

This mission was longer than the Duskrail one in terms of travel time, because the target world sat beyond the nearest stargate’s reach.

They had to jump to the last major gate, then spend nearly a full day moving through deep space to reach the new colony world.

The place was still only a second-tier colony world in practice, which meant it had enough life and enough value to matter, but not enough development to solve its own problems properly.

That was why dangerous native beast populations had become such a headache there in the first place.

The mission itself turned out to be much simpler than the travel.

The beasts were dangerous to settlers.

They were not dangerous to fifteen hundred autonomous combat mechs supported by two shipgirls.

That was the honest truth of it.

The local wildlife had strength, numbers, and territorial aggression, but they lacked the intelligence that fleets did, and they definitely did not have the ability to adapt to coordinated mech suppression, shipgirl-linked battlefield control, and orbital overwatch all at once.

Several large beast populations were cut down in just a few days, to the point where Aurelian dryly thought that if the operation went much longer, the colony would have to start worrying more about conservation than survival.

The gains were not especially exciting.

The Destiny Points earned were acceptable, but nowhere near what large fleet battles or pirate eradication had given him.

Some low-value objects were found on the planet during the clearing work, mostly white and gray oddities that had little practical worth.