He stood and walked to the main viewport, looking out at the planet below.
Cinderleaf Star looked peaceful from orbit, just lights and clouds and a slow spin, like nothing bad had ever happened here.
He knew better.
Astra stepped up beside him, as she also watched the view, but her attention was mostly focused on her commander.
"More updates?" he asked.
Astra checked the sensor log. Faint signals still ca and went at the edge of range, scattered and annoying, like soone tapping a knife on glass far away.
"Nothing firm yet," she said. "But it’s out there."
Aurelian’s eyes stayed fixed on the darkness beyond the system lanes. "It’s a vanguard pattern," he said quietly. "They test, they asure, then they commit, but we are here, and we wait till they are ready."
He paused, then spoke again, like he was thinking ahead aloud.
"And if the academy fleet arrives, then we can just call it a small vacation and enjoy ourselves," he said.
Astra’s lips twitched. "I wouldn’t mind that."
Aurelian exhaled once, steady.
Down on the planet, Governor Halden Rourke was already filming a public address, trying to sound calm while promising mobilization and safety, trying to convince people they weren’t being left behind.
Up here, the ship that had beco their symbol of survival sat quiet in dock, fully loaded again, engines ready, commander watching the map like a man waiting for the next move in a ga that was way too serious to lose.
Sowhere out beyond the corridor lanes, the Omnics were still coming, and the only question left was whether they would arrive before the alliance finally gathered enough force to crush them the right way.
Soon, the days passed as everyone busied themselves preparing for the battle.
The main waiting part of war was always the most annoying, because everything important was happening sowhere else, and all you could do was stare at charts, read updates, and try not to imagine what the enemy might be doing while you stood still.
Aurelian had already done what he could for now. Black Crown was resupplied, the dock crews had finished loading the fresh charge packs, the local port had logged everything properly, and rrick had pushed the governor’s staff away from anything that looked like it could waste ti.
The academy’s direct fleet was on the way, the local sector fleet was moving, and the outposts were sharing signal traces like people passing around whispers in a crowded room.
Which ant Aurelian, for the first ti since the vanguard fight, had nothing urgent to command, and that felt almost wrong.
One person was enough to watch the radar, and in that one area, humans were never going to beat shipgirls, because Astra could filter noise, track patterns, compare older recordings, and still keep Black Crown ready to move without getting tired or losing focus.
So Aurelian ended up in the one place he kept returning to whenever the universe gave him a gap.
The training room.
After the first battle, he finally understood how ridiculous early commander leveling could be when your flagship started high, and your enemy was generous enough to die in front of you.
His Commander Network had grown fast, but physical strength was still the bottleneck that ruined people, and he had no interest in becoming one of those commanders who looked strong on paper and then collapsed the first ti a real ntal load hit them.
He trained hard and kept it simple, steady breathing and controlled circulation, letting the Arcturus thod do what it was built to do, which was build a body that could carry an ocean without cracking.
They had prepared properly before leaving the academy, so the ship’s storage had enough ingredients and dicinal supplents to support a month of cultivation without needing to rely on local markets, and that alone put him ahead of most new commanders who left port with excitent and returned with empty cupboards and headaches.
Still, training out here was slower than training back at Polaris, because Polaris sat in a cultivation environnt that was basically a sacred place by alliance standards, and Cinderleaf was not that.
Cinderleaf was a working world with a thin, practical atmosphere, a place that survived by being useful, not by being blessed, so even the background energy felt flatter.
It didn’t bother him. Slow progress was still progress, and progress mattered more than comfort.
The days of waiting passed in that rhythm, training, eating, checking updates, and sleeping lightly, because even when the ship was quiet, the situation wasn’t.
Astra stayed on radar duty without complaint, and once in a while she would co by the training room doorway and stand there for a second, watching him like she was trying to understand how humans could willingly do sothing so boring when they weren’t being forced.
The next day, when the local sector support fleet was still about five hours away from Cinderleaf’s system, the situation shifted.
It wasn’t dramatic at first. There was no alarm screaming through the ship, and no sudden explosion of red markers like the vanguard battle, just a sharp change in Astra’s posture that made the air feel tighter even before she said a word.
Then her voice ca through the ship’s broadcast, calm but clipped in a way Aurelian had already learned to take seriously.
"Aurelian, co to the command core."
He didn’t waste ti. He finished the breath he was on, steadied himself, and moved fast, because if Astra called him like that, it ant she had already seen sothing she didn’t like.
When he entered the command core, Astra was already building a map layer by layer, highlighting an incoming contact that wasn’t part of the local fleet, wasn’t part of the academy fleet, and sure as hell wasn’t a rchant convoy.
Aurelian straightened his jacket out of habit, then stepped up beside her.
"How is it?" he asked, voice steady. "What changed?"
Astra zood in on the map and narrowed her eyes slightly.
"It’s an Omnic Tier III Foundry Core," she said, and the words landed heavy because it was the exact kind of thing that wasn’t supposed to be this close to a planet that still had cafés open and children going to school.
"It broke away from the main body, and it’s arriving ahead of schedule, and based on its vector, it’s coming here to check what happened to the vanguard."
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