Fairy-Tale Princess in the Stars

In Star Year 307, an imperial salvage ship discovered a peculiar exile on a trash planet.

She could cobble together discarded parts to make a mechanical pumpkin carriage that danced, and grow glass slippers woven from energy-draining vines in radioactive dust. Most absurd of all:

She claimed to be Jia Meng, the last princess of a fairytale star domain swallowed by a black hole.

The Alliance Military Academy's principal hurriedly dumped this hot potato into Class F. But on the night of a military exercise, someone targeted her and threw her into a reenactment map of a battle where the insect race had annihilated everyone.

"How many minutes do you bet this crazy princess will last?"

As everyone laughed, the girl switched on her mech's external speakers. "This is a special midnight broadcast of Aesop's Fables..."

A tide of scythe insects promptly collapsed across the battlefield.

When the rescue team arrived, all they found was a princess building a crystal coffin out of insect corpses. "Cinderella says she has to become an Alliance commander before midnight. Can one of you show me the way?"

-

At first, the entire universe mocked this lunatic who wouldn't stop talking about "crystal coffins" and "poison apples."

But then came the day the insect hordes descended:

The girl stood atop the wreckage of a crashed starship. Her damaged spacesuit billowed like a swan-feather cloak, and her bloodied fingertip traced the holographic parchment scroll. "I swear by Chapter 7, Article 3 of Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales..."

In an instant, starlight went berserk. Every mech weapon turned to powder, and the insect queen wept herself to death to the aria of The Little Mermaid.

Only then did people understand:

When she told Cinderella, the seven inactive mechs before her awakened and came under her command;

When she read Rapunzel to a space pirate chief, god-slaying vines grew across the space fortress;

When she softly hummed Sleeping Beauty for soldiers killed in battle, the casualty list began to shrink.

Someone once held a lightsaber to her throat and demanded, "Are you the witch of the apocalypse or the savior?"

The fairytale princess, her hands cuffed, hooked a finger into his medal:

"Shh... This is a paid chapter of Little Red Riding Hood."

Theme: Gold will always shine