Path to Becoming the Greatest Space Mercenary

Now that the second event had come to an end, the nine competitors were directed back to the Alliance Police cruiser that had brought them to this location in the first place.

"Looks like were free to do as we want aboard our own ships until its time for event number three in a few hours."

"Which is great, since I need some time to unwind. That was way too stressful for just the second part of this thing. Who thinks of throwing only nine small ships at a pirate group of that size." Kasandra whined.

Though, since they had actually won the fight, her complaints were not all that convincing.

Still, Avery had to admit that this event had been more difficult than the first by a wide margin. This made him hopeful for the other event of the day to be on the easier side.

"There still calculating the scores for this one. The message we just received says that the rankings will be updated in an hour at the latest."

Avery had wanted to see where his placement in the second event would be, but the scoring this time was not as straightforward as the first event.

An anonymous committee was going to be ranking them on vague criteria that had not been explained in detail. It was not possible to know exactly how things would turn out just based off performance.

"Well, maybe this is a good thing. Perhaps your taking charge of the situation complicated their process and now they're trying to figure out how much that should be take that into account. And there's no real reason to worry. We'll find out at the same time as everyone else, and there's nothing we can do about it right now. So, let's have some fun instead." Kasandra said, getting up from her own seat and plopping down into Avery's lap.

She then titled her head to look up at him, a wide grin on her face.

In her hands was her terminal, and she had pulled up the home screen for a popular, recently released cooperative adventure game.

"Sure, it's been a while since we've done something like this. It kind of reminds me of when you first came onboard and we were stuck on patrol duty with practically nothing to do. Let's kill some time and have some fun."

Avery swiftly downloaded the game onto his own terminal, and the two of them connected their devices to the Dauntless' main viewscreen.

All at once there was what appeared to be a new world before their eyes, and they dove into the gameplay and story to take their minds off of the real world for just a bit.

Thanks to their distraction, an hour went by quickly and without Avery or Kasandra thinking about the results of the second event once.

Nevertheless, once the placements had been announced, they paused their game and took a break to check the current scores.

"I really thought that we'd get first place this time. After all that work, it still wasn't enough." Kasandra said, frowning.

Avery was likewise mildly upset, but it was hard to really complain.

Just as in the first event, they had managed to snag second place again.

"It all just comes down to the mistake we made at the beginning. I should have been more attentive and not got caught up in what the others were doing." Avery said, chiding himself

Only after he had noticed Stifur's representative not joining in on the pirate hunt and wholeheartedly protecting the cargo vessels had Avery realized the true intent of the second event.

Had he not been trying to catch up to and compete with the other seven, he certainly would have understood what needed to be done sooner.

While he had worked hard to come back from his error in judgment at the beginning, it had not quite been enough to close the gap between him and the single competitor that had acted perfectly from start to finish.

Stifur's ships had placed first, naturally. With Avery trailing behind in second, followed by Ravasz Dynamics in third, and Star Road Enterprises in fourth.

The five that had focused solely on hunting pirates ended up in the bottom half of the rankings as expected. With their placements being almost solely decided by who hunted more pirates.

"We're second again, but considering that Ravasz Dynamics got third this time, that means that were currently tied for first place. If we can score ahead of them in another event, we'll take the lead for ourselves." Kasandra said, shrugging her shoulders.

"Yeah, it's unfortunate that we failed to get first place again in an event, but our overall score is still good enough. The problem is Stifur. While they might be trailing slightly behind right now, I feel like they might be the biggest threat." Avery said, staring intently at the current third place.

So far, in both competitions, the crew manning Stifur's vessel had shown what appeared to be uncanny intuition.

Avery could only think that they were somehow receiving information on the events beforehand.

Unfortunately, he had no way to prove these suspicions, and if none of the competition organizers were able to find anything, then there was pretty much nothing he could do.

'The other dubious party was more well behaved this time. They ended up in sixth this time and didn't appear to be pulling any stunts to end up ranking lower.' Avery thought, analyzing some of the footage centered on the other competitors.

He still was not sure about what to make of their performance in the first event. Maybe it had just been a system error of some kind. Although he was doubtful of that.

"There's just way too much going on here. I wish that this could have just been something simple that I hardly had to think about." Avery muttered under his breath.

Still sitting in his lap, Kasandra heard what he said even if it was just some absentminded grumbling on his part that he was not even really thinking about.

"Then we should stop caring about anything else for a while. We've seen the scores, so we don't have anything to do until the third event." Kasandra said, switching the display on the Dauntless' viewscreen back to the game they were playing.

"Alright, we'll go until they send over the details of the next part of the competition." Avery said, pulling out his terminal and resuming the game.

For the next couple of hours, he and Kasandra simply engrossed themselves in the game world in front of them.

Of course, as expected, reality came knocking once again before too long.

When a message came in that told them what the contents of the third event were going to be, the two of them dropped what they were doing and focused on preparing.

"At least this one's simpler. It won't take nearly as much energy." Avery said, wearing a relieved look.

"Yep, this shouldn't be too hard. I won't need to do much of anything other than some sensor tracking." Kasandra said, unperturbed by the contents of the third event.

Unlike the large-scale and chaotic fight they had recently been through, all they needed to do this time was eliminate groups of moving targets within a certain designated area.

All nine competitors would be participating, so it would be a contest to see who could take out the most targets.