Path to Becoming the Greatest Space Mercenary

"Whew, we managed to wrap up things here as well."
Avery wiped some cold sweat from his brow as he looked around at the field of debris around them.
The forces he was leading had come to help out with the battle against a horde of Hinvieners.
It had honestly been more difficult than the fight against the Fluem, since there had been a lot more of the smaller type of space monster.
Their movements were also quick and unpredictable due to them using electromagnetism to propel themselves.
They could suddenly dart around in and direction, and at one point they had used their uncanny maneuverability to completely surround the Dauntless.
For a moment, Avery had really thought that was going to be the end of him.
But he barely managed to make it out thanks to some cover fire from Kasandra, Liesel, and Olivia, and a desperate maneuver he made where he spun the Dauntless around rapidly while firing all of its weapons at their maximum rate to break through the encirclement.
After that, he had ended up being a lot more cautious towards the diamond shaped space monsters and slowly worked to destroy all of them.
"I think that I’m going to have nightmares about that for the next month." Jasmine said, a shiver going up her body.
Avery understood what she meant. That had been the closest call that had had in a while.
Fortunately, all was well that ended well, and throughout the entire battle, they had only taken a few hits and had not even needed to deploy one of the Dauntless’ shield cells.
Regrettably, this meant that they were still fit to continue fighting, and it was not long until Derenkai sent out a request for assistance against a new horde of Volmargars that had just arrived.
"Is this ever going to end? We do all of these creatures keep coming from?"
The questions Avery grumbled were not met with any immediate answer.
However, after three more days of nearly nonstop fighting against wave after wave of space monsters, the assaults finally began to slow down.
On the eleventh day after arriving in the system, the extermination fleet that Zefield had put together finally obtained a moment to rest.
...
"The atmosphere here is not great." Avery said as he walked down the halls of the Intrepid with Liesel standing beside him.
"That’s just to be expected. We were under siege from those f*cking bastard monsters for basically ten days."
Liesel’s response was in a tone filled with irritation.
As one of the leaders of Avery’s company, she had ended up with a lot of work on her plate as well.
If she was not asleep, she was either out fighting in her ship or taking command of the Intrepid.
It had been a lot for her, and the fact that she was using a lot more expletives than normal showed that she was clearly agitated.
Avery had not seen this trait of hers in a while, so it was honestly a bit refreshing.
Of course, Liesel was not complaining about the assignments that had been given to her.
Everyone had been having a hard time keeping up with the relentless attacks. There had not been any time to relax at all.
And that was still true now that things had become quiet again.
There was no celebration of victory like there had been on the first day.
No one had the energy for something like that, and even if they did, the mood was certainly not right.
After grueling days of endless battles, thirty-seven ships had been destroyed, and eighty-one people had lost their lives.
Considering that their forces were made up of hundreds of vessels and thousands of people, this might not have been a lot in the grand scheme of thing. Perhaps such losses were to be expected and honestly were not too bad.
Still, those that were close to the people that died were obviously heavily effected, and their energy permeated throughout the entire fleet.
Even Avery’s company had lost a ship, and along with it, two people.
That was like hardly a drop in a bucket considering that there were more than twenty-five hundred people under his command. Nevertheless, their deaths weighed heavily on the entire crew.
What Avery felt right now was that this moment of reprieve was only just enough for them to lick their wounds before the fight began again.
Overall, they had killed tens of thousands of space monsters. Likely all of the ones in their immediate vicinity.
That would not be all of the creatures that lived in the system though. There were bound to be a lot more.
Now, it would probably be necessary to go out and hunt down the ones that remained. It was less likely for them to be continuously attacked from this point on.
This was not much comfort though, as while it had been difficult deal with unending fights, going out and searching for monsters came with its own risks.
"Avery, do you want to get out of here?" Liesel suddenly asked.
The two of them had a little time off right now and had been walking around together to clear their heads since they were both still too wired to actually get some sleep.
"What is it that your suggesting?"
Avery wondered what Liesel could be getting at, but her proposal came as a bit of a shock to him.
"You want to go out scouting the area right now?"
He was perplexed. They had finally gotten a chance to rest, but she wanted to go out and do more work?
That made no sense to him until she explained what her actual intentions were.
"Listen, that’s just an excuse. What we’re really going to do is just get away and slack off. I used to do this every now and then with Casey when we we’re still on my aunt’s ship."
A blank look came over Avery’s face as Liesel finished telling him about what her plan was.
"You know that I’m the leader here, right. I can’t just pretend to be working while everyone else is still busy." Avery said, shaking his head.
"Come on. Being in charge means that you get to bend things in your favor every now and then. We’ve only got a couple of hours left on our break, and if something comes up, you might have to call it earlier to attend to it. You can’t really take it easy here when you don’t know when you’ll have to address some issue or other."
Liesel made a compelling argument, and her words tempted very like she was some kind of devil trying to lead him astray.
He was someone that always tried to lead by example. In his mind, that was the best way to earn the respect of those that had chosen to follow him.
Right now, though, he was feeling exhausted. And it was as Liesel had said, he could not truly relax here since his role as a leader was holding him down.
Eventually, he decided to cave to Liesel’s pleading.
They would go out together under the guise of doing some light scouting.
There were no space monsters on sensor range currently and everything seemed to be clear, but it was never a bad idea to be cautious.
What he and Liesel would actually be doing though was finding a quiet spot where neither of them had to worry about any responsibility for a bit and could just goof off.
"Okay, I just told Ezra about our intentions and have left everything to him. He offered a bit of resistance and tried to get me to bring more people along, but I managed to convince him that we would be fine on our own and that I wanted everyone else to rest.
"Now let’s head to our ships and head out." Avery said, a mischievous and somewhat childish grin on his face.
While he and Liesel were adults, both of them were still young. Avery was just twenty, and Liesel had only recently turned nineteen. It was understandable that occasionally, they might still want to act like this.
Once they had left the Intrepid’s hangar and moved a few hundred kilometers out of sensor range, the two of them connected their ship’s airlocks and blew off some steam together.
Yet their fun did not last for long.
On the edge of the Dauntless’ detection range, it picked up something moving at high speeds.
Knowing that if it was a monster, they would have to get out of there, Avery checked in on it and found that it was a sole Fluem.
Except, it was not flying towards them or in the direction of the rest of the fleet.
"Where’s it going?" Avery mumbled under his breath.
"What does it matter? If it’s not coming here, we can just leave it be."
Liesel seemed unbothered, but Avery’s instincts were telling him that something was going on.
Though he had come out here to shirk his duties, a part of him could not help but feel bad about doing so.
"Our official reason for being out here was to do some scouting. If we come back with a bit of data on a nearby monster’s movements, no one will doubt us and we won’t feel as guilty since we did do a bit of work."
"Fine. Let me go over to my ship and we can follow it." Liesel replied with a sigh.
She clearly wanted to stick around and laze around. Yet she could not argue with Avery since she was the one that had tempted him out here when he normally would have stuck to his duties as a leader.
However, as they followed the single Fluem, it led them to something wholly unexpected.
A sight that sent chills through Avery and Liesel’s entire bodies.
Had they not come out here to play around, it was possible that no one would have discovered this threat that could lead to the annihilation of the mercenary fleet Zefield had assembled.