Star Ship Girl Era: My Shipgirls Are Too Overpowered-Chapter 96: Plants Elevating The World

Both of them were enough for the interception at the edge of the system.

Aurelian was certain of that much.

Right now, the most troublesome part was not the follow-up Kharov fleet that was still on its way, but the state of Larkspur Haven itself.

From Astra’s orbital readings alone, the number of infected monsters still moving on the planet was absurd.

Whole regions were thick with them. Even after accounting for destroyed population zones, military counterattacks, and areas that had already burned out, the remaining number was still in the billions.

That was the real problem.

He did not have the kind of biological weapon the Kharov had used to trigger this disaster, and even if he did, he would not have used it.

The world still had too many living people. Survivors were hidden in shelters, sealed towers, research facilities, emergency bunkers, military fallback compounds, and all sorts of improvised strongholds.

Large-scale cleansing fire from orbit would kill as many of them as it killed the monsters.

So the only option was still the same.

Mechs.

Precision landings.

One zone at a time.

The good news was that the infected were not impossible enemies. Their growth ceiling seemed limited.

They could evolve, yes, but according to the Kharov records, the upper edge of that evolution was still capped.

They were dangerous in huge numbers, horrifying in cities, and more than enough to collapse a normal world’s order, but they were not something his fleet could not handle.

There were just too many.

Which was why Aurelian was not expecting miracles when Elowen requested a direct line to the bridge only a few hours after the planetary operation began.

"Commander," Elowen said, her voice calm as always, "the situation on Larkspur Haven may be better than we first assumed."

That got his attention.

He had been in Black Crown’s internal training room, moving through a cultivation cycle while keeping half his attention on the tactical feed, and he stopped almost immediately.

"How so?" he asked as he stood and reached for his coat.

"Come to my ship," Elowen replied. "I need to show you something directly, and I would also like a few additional mechs assigned for testing."

Aurelian didn’t waste time after that. He left the training room, called Astercourt over, and had Astra prepare a shuttle immediately.

By the time he boarded, Elowen had already sent over some preliminary survey images, but not enough to explain the full point.

When they arrived on Elowen’s ship, she was already waiting in one of the biological analysis halls near the inner ecological zone, where several projection screens had been arranged and were already filled with planetary scans.

Her white hair was tied back more tightly than usual, and there was a focused energy to her that made it clear she had found something important.

The moment Aurelian stepped in, she got straight to it.

"Commander, Larkspur Haven is not a low-grade life world," she said. "It is much higher than that. Based on the environmental density, biosphere resilience, mineral resonance, and planetary vitality, this world is already in the upper range of second-tier world, very close to the next threshold."

Aurelian’s eyes narrowed slightly.

"That high?"

"Yes," Elowen answered without hesitation. "If I use the old classification standards I know best, it is at least level twenty-eight, possibly close to twenty-nine. It is not weakening either, not in the way a world usually does after this kind of collapse."

That was not what he had expected to hear.

From the outside, Larkspur Haven looked like a frontier colony world, important perhaps, but not exceptional.

But Elowen’s work was not guesswork, and when it came to life-bearing environments, he trusted her judgment more than almost anyone.

Aurelian stepped closer to the display.

"Then why does it still look so stable after everything that’s happened?"

Elowen touched one of the projections, and the image changed.

At first glance, it looked like a normal botanical density map. But once the overlays settled, the point became obvious.

The world was full of extraordinary plant signatures, and not just in isolated pockets. They existed across continents, in forest systems, inland wet belts, mountainous ridges, and even at some outer urban boundaries, where civilization had clearly grown around them rather than fully replacing them.

"The primary life backbone of this planet is not human," Elowen said. "It is botanical. The human civilization here is meaningful, of course, but the world’s deeper life-value comes from its extraordinary plant network."

She shifted to another image.

This time, Aurelian saw it immediately.

It was a tree.

Not merely large, but immense.

Its trunk looked like a silver mountain rooted into the planet itself, its crown spreading outward like a continent of pale branches and shimmering leaves.

The surrounding terrain had clearly formed around it over a very long time. Even from the aerial scans, there was something unnatural about its presence, something that made the whole region around it seem quieter and more intact than the rest of the world.

Caelan, who had come with them after being called in by Astra, froze upon seeing the image.

"The Whiteheart..." he said under his breath.

Elowen turned to him. "So it has a local name."

Caelan stared at the projection as if he were seeing it properly for the first time.

"Everyone on Haven knows the stories," he said. "The Whiteheart Basin. The old tree. Some people thought it was sacred. Some thought it was just a symbol. I didn’t know it was... this."

"It is alive," Elowen said. "And intelligent, or at least very close to it."

That changed the room.

Aurelian looked back at Elowen. "And?"

"And its biological fluids have a very strong suppressive effect on the infected," she said.

That made Astercourt, who had been silently reviewing the data beside him, finally look up with more visible interest.

Elowen continued before anyone interrupted.

"My drones sampled contamination zones near the Whiteheart Basin. Weakly infected exposed to the tree’s sap broke down rapidly into an unstable flesh mass. Stronger infected individuals did not die immediately, but they weakened sharply. Their regenerative ability dropped, their aggression destabilized, and their mobility was reduced."

Aurelian understood the implication at once.

"You can spread it."

"Yes," Elowen said. "Or more accurately, we can help it spread. If the Whiteheart agrees to cooperate, I can use atmospheric dispersal and the distribution of artificial rain to carry processed sap over major infected zones. It will not solve everything on its own, but it should significantly reduce the global number of infected people and weaken the stronger variants. After that, clearing the rest will be much faster."

That was the first genuinely scalable answer they had found since arriving.

Aurelian folded his arms and looked again at the colossal silver tree on the display. If Elowen was right, then the planet had not been resisting this disaster by accident.

It had been doing so through something living on it, something powerful enough to anchor the biosphere against collapse.

"And if the Whiteheart doesn’t agree?" he asked.