*Stellar Union of Mankind LCDR Ricardo Santángel*

It was a sight to behold.

That woman was… a force of nature.

Even though she was bitten, slashed and clawed, she kept on killing those freaking hounds.

Everyone knew that a pack of hounds of Tindalos could easily overwhelm a squad of trained soldiers with it’s sublime coordination and deadly maws, but that woman just killed, and killed, and continued killing them.

As soon as she got on the ground, I knew who it was.

Commander Lilith Zsofia, assigned to lead our crew at the Sleipnir. An unknown soldier that suddenly was assigned one of the best ships in the Union and who was now supposed to be my direct superior. When i first heard of it i couldn’t accept it, and the high ups just brushed me off, telling me that this was a way for me to pay for my past insubordination, that i just had to deal with this for some time and everything would be forgotten.

The rest of the crew had similar experiences. I felt especially sorry for Hartman, he was the only survivor of the last crew, and now had to be part of a farce made by some snot-nosed cunts that had the authority to command us.

Even with the promise of erasing my record, I still had to come here. Should I sit down and wait while there’s people here dying? I enlisted because of an ideal, and even if i want to have a good life, i can’t put those ideals behind.

And now, looking at that woman, who’s back is the only thing we can clearly see about her, i feel like i’ve been invigorated, that the fatigue of defending against the hounds is washing up, and a clear minded focus is replacing it.

“Support the Commander! Move!” I shout as I fire a continuous stream of plasma bolts from my IPAR-07 “Interdictor”, providing some assistance by taking care of approaching hounds, and the rest of the team and colonists follow suit, firing whatever they have at hand.

She told one of the colonists that we should take care of stragglers, but i don’t think she realizes that there aren’t any, she’s killing most of them, and the rest is targeting here exclusively. The beasts are smart, so they’ve decided that she’s the priority threat to them. We were worried that the stream of beasts was endless, but we’re slowly starting to see their numbers dwindle.

We even start advancing forward, our position now secured. The ground below us is slippery from the amount of blood, a good part of it belonging to other humans, most of them colonists, some of our own crew at the Sleipnir. Their deaths weigh on my mind, even though everyone agreed to help the colony, their wellbeing was still my responsibility as their commanding officer.

Commander Lilith starts to show signs of fatigue as well, although her face, now visible from time to time, is still full of righteous fury, her body receives more wounds, and she’s covered in blood from head to toe. That auburn hair that fluttered with the wind when she arrived, now is sticking to her body with a different hue of red.

The sight pushes me forward, and I start moving faster, and I see the same happens to several other defenders, as we form a small group that closes the distance between ourselves and the commander.

Just as the thought of victory crosses my mind, a guttural howl comes from the direction of the forest. The hounds continue attacking as if there was nothing, but some of us shake in place. We know that howl, not from experience, but from recordings shown to us as training.

The hounds of Tindalos are a mutation of quadrupedal alien creatures in some systems near the border region, these ones were wolf-like beasts without hair that hunted herbivores in the forests. The original report said that those wolves were acting more aggressively than usual, and that the colonies were requesting assistance.

By the time we got here, the attacks had intensified, and the reports were increasingly worrying. We feared that a mutation had occurred and they might have turned to hounds, and we were correct. And now, the pack leader of those creatures, catalogued by the Union as a ‘kill-on-sight’ and ‘extreme caution suggested’, was in front of us. An Avatar of Mh’ithrha.

The beast showed itself and its figure was enough to make us want to run away. At least three times the size of the average hound, the same jaw and tongue, and a couple of fiery eyes that looked like they were set on fire. It’s body looked like it was constantly shifting in and out of reality, looking semi translucent in some parts and suddenly looking solid as titanium.

An intense pain in my leg returns me to reality, and I see that a hound I thought I killed stood up and was now biting me at the calf. I grunted in agony, but I saw the commander looking straight up at the Avatar of Mh’ithrha, and the creature did the same, as if acknowledging a foe.

I quickly reloaded my Interdictor rifle, and with a mighty throw, launched it towards the commander, who although surprised, managed to catch it with her right arm. She just looked at me and nodded, and I did the same.

When I glanced below, I grabbed the head of the hound while my arm started bulging as a balloon, and with a squeeze, crushed its head. The bulging receded while steaming, and the arm started heating up right away. If she could murder a hundred of these things with her hands, how can i not follow my commander by at least crushing a dozen of them?