Star Ship Girl Era: My Shipgirls Are Too Overpowered-Chapter 78: Buy One And Get Another One For Free?

Two days passed quickly, and by the end of the second day, Aurelian finally reached the coordinates tied to the carrier clue.

Even from a distance, the place was hard to miss once he knew where to look.

A massive distortion hung in the dark ahead of them, wide and ugly, like space had been stretched open and then left to heal badly.

Before coming here, Aurelian had expected something smaller, maybe a narrow fold breach hidden behind dead rock or nebula dust, but what floated in front of them was much larger than that, enough that if the surrounding region had been cleaner and brighter, it would have been impossible to miss.

But the location had been chosen well by the universe itself.

Scattered nebula haze, dead sensor pockets, and the general emptiness of the surrounding systems hid it from casual traffic, which was probably the only reason something like this had lasted unnoticed for so long.

As Black Crown and Crimson Bulwark moved closer, the wormhole-like corridor became clearer.

Its edges were unstable and looked like they would collapse at any second.

The inside flickered strangely, as if it could not fully decide what shape it wanted to take.

Aurelian stood on Black Crown’s bridge with his hands behind his back and watched it for a few silent moments.

Then he gave the order.

"We go in now."

Neither Astra nor Rhoswen questioned him.

Black Crown took point, Crimson Bulwark just behind her, and the two ships entered the unstable fold corridor without lingering at the edge.

The passage looked longer than he had expected; at least, it was more than Aurelian liked.

The inner route was narrow in some places and rough in others, and the corridor walls shifted just enough to remind him that this was not a man-made lane held together by maintenance and regulation, but a natural break in space that only happened to still be usable.

After more than ten minutes of controlled movement, the two ships finally emerged on the other side.

The place waiting for them was quiet in a way that felt unnatural.

There were no signals of life.

No active navigation lights.

No beacon traffic.

No patrol signatures.

Only wreckage.

Starship wreckage lay everywhere across the ground below, twisted hulls, broken spines, shattered structures, and long-dead machines that had clearly fallen together in the same disaster.

Judging from the design language of the wrecks, most of them came from the same fleet or at least the same broader civilization. Whatever had happened here had not been some scattered collapse.

It had been a battle.

A bad one.

Aurelian looked across the graveyard in silence, but he did not spend long trying to guess the history behind it.

"Start the search," he said.

This was where autonomous mechs became priceless.

Large numbers of them poured out from both ships and began spreading through the graveyard, moving in coordinated search patterns over the dead field below.

They were not just looking for the damaged carrier.

They were also scanning for anything else valuable enough to bring back.

It did not take long for the first interesting find to come in.

It was not the carrier.

It was a blue-tier object.

One of the search teams had found a piece of old equipment that had, over time, become a rare, usable item instead of simply rotting into useless scrap.

Then another came in.

Then another.

At first, Aurelian thought it was luck.

After the tenth or so useful find, he stopped thinking that.

This whole place was a gold mine hidden inside a dying fold space.

A lot of the old ship parts that had survived in partial condition had transformed into artifacts over time, and the more he saw, the more obvious it became that this trip was going to pay for itself even if the carrier turned out to be in worse shape than expected.

Astra and Rhoswen both focused fully on the search.

Aurelian did not need to tell them twice that this place mattered.

The graveyard itself was huge, stretching across such a wide area that a complete search would have taken much longer than they had, and that was the real problem.

The fold space was getting worse. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

The instability was subtle at first, but it was there, and everyone could feel it.

So Aurelian had no choice.

He ordered the search teams to prioritize speed over completeness.

It irritated him a little, because leaving valuable things behind always did, but he was not stupid enough to stay until the entire place collapsed around them.

A full day passed.

By the end, Rhoswen finally brought in some good news.

One of the search patterns had uncovered a ship that was not too badly damaged, and, better yet, part of its power system was still working.

Unfortunately, it was not the carrier.

It was a supply ship.

Still, that was not something to ignore.

Aurelian did not hesitate long.

"Take it with us," he said.

A working supply ship was useful no matter what, especially at his current stage, and leaving it behind just because it was not the exact target would have been dumb.

The search continued.

The second day passed with more artifact finds but no carrier.

Aurelian kept his patience, though the growing instability in the fold space was starting to press at the back of his mind.

Then, on the third day, the breakthrough came.

Astra’s search teams found it first.

At the center of a denser wreck zone, buried under layers of fallen hull fragments and debris, they found the outline of an aircraft carrier.

Once the first report came in, Astra immediately shifted more mechs to the area and began clearing the wreckage above it at high speed.

Slowly, the shape emerged.

The hull was damaged, yes, but the core frame looked intact.

More importantly, the main structure had not been split open the way most of the graveyard wrecks had, which was a huge relief.