Astra finished preparing the secure family ssage next, and Aurelian listened to the wording before it went out.
It asked whether any purple-tier candidates had already been prepared, and whether a purchase team could secure a specific heavy destroyer hull from a limited trial batch at a Polaris-linked market, because the acquisition window was short and he was currently deployed.
Nothing more.
Nothing less.
When the ssage was sent, the Destiny System interface faded, leaving the ship’s normal quiet in its place, and Aurelian stared at the star map again as if to remind himself that even the best cheats did not remove the need to survive the next few days.
Astra’s sensors kept listening for scattered machine chatter.
The silence still felt wrong.
But now, at least, he had a path to solve the advancent gate when the timing allowed, and he had begun shaping the future fleet in a way that matched the promise he had made to himself.
Purple and above.
After cleaning up the battlefield, Black Crown did not rush straight back to Cinderleaf Star at maximum speed, because the safest ti to get careless was always right after a win, and Aurelian had no intention of giving the Omnics a free mistake to exploit.
Astra kept the ship on a controlled return path, using the ti to scan the surrounding lanes again and again, checking for stray contacts, hidden relays, or anything that looked like a delayed response unit, while Aurelian watched the map and the sensor logs with the sa patient focus he used when he was waiting for an opponent to reveal their habits.
The second interception had been cleaner than the first in one important way, because the target had been a Tier III core moving alone with a few other ships, which ant most of the force on the field had been tied directly to it, and once it died, the rest had collapsed into confusion and slow, useless behavior that Astra had cut down without wasting main ammunition.
That difference showed up in the loot report, too.
When Astra finished the last extraction cycle, she brought the numbers up without hesitation because she knew Aurelian would ask anyway and preferred to show him before he had to dig.
"This battle produced higher-grade fragnts," she said, keeping her tone steady, even though there was a faint satisfaction under it. "The Foundry Core was the main contributor, and the surrounding Tier III units contributed the rest."
Aurelian looked at the breakdown and nodded once, because it matched what he expected, and because it made the first battle’s "mostly gray and white" output feel like a reminder of how low-tier the vanguard had really been.
Most of the yield this ti sat in the blue tier, with a smaller but noticeable amount stepping above it, and even if the numbers were not enough to change his life overnight, it was still the first ti he could say, without lying, that a single engagent had paid for itself in a aningful way.
More importantly, they were close to Cinderleaf, which ant they did not have to leave value drifting in space like a discarded al.
Aurelian had already sent the salvage tags and coordinates to Commander rrick and the planetary defense fleet, and rrick had responded with a tone that soone who can’t wait to help in any way possible, short and hopeful and already moving before the sentence ended.
Cinderleaf’s defense fleet did not have the strength to fight the Omnic main body, but they absolutely had the strength to tow wreckage, tag debris, and harvest what was worth harvesting, and they were not about to let a field of machine wreck remain unclaid when their entire planet was preparing for war expenses.
rrick’s fleet handled the cleanup under a simple agreent: they would do the physical collection and processing, and in return, they would take a small percentage of the total resale value as paynt, because their crews would not work for free while the planet was under ergency budget stress.
Aurelian accepted it without argunt because it was fair, because it saved ti, and because he had more important things to do than play accountant in the middle of an incursion.
Astra ran a quick estimate based on the density of remaining intact fras and the amount of recoverable alloy and core residue, and even with her conservative assumptions, the number still landed in the millions in standard credits, which made the situation feel both absurd and grim at the sa ti, because it ant the war could pay you while also trying to kill you.
Credits were still what ordinary people used, because they were light, digital, and safe to store in civil accounts, while source fragnts were not sothing most civilians could keep or protect, and they could not even interact with fragnt storage the way commanders and shipgirls could.
Aurelian did not waste ti imagining what he would buy with it, because he had already decided that credits were not the bottleneck for him right now; quality was.
So Black Crown returned to Cinderleaf’s lanes, Astra kept scanning, rrick’s salvage crews went to work, and the planet below kept breathing, still afraid, still mobilizing, but no longer blind.
Then the day shifted again, as everyone who was not involved in the fight started their work, never understanding the dangers of being a commander.
The closest sector support fleet arrived that sa day.
It ca in with friendly codes and hurried spacing, the kind of arrival that you can tell is because they had been pushing engines harder than peaceti, and as the ships slid into Cinderleaf’s orbit lanes, the starport traffic control nearly choked trying to assign them holding zones without creating a collision hazard.
From the port’s glass corridors, people watched those ships arrive like they were watching a storm wall form between them and disaster, and even though the fleet was not pretty, not luxurious, not polished, it still brought sothing the planet needed more than comfort.
It brought numbers, which is sothing they need to even put up a fight and not lose many ships.
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