SmackDown: MadMike's Revenge!

Round 8: Shadowhunter - @bloodsword (WINNING STORY!)

Again the niski reached out, her senses riding along the lines of energy that connected the passive grid to the control station and its more active scanners. Sliding through their security protocols and lockouts was child's play from there and she owned it within seconds of penetrating the firewall.

Once inside it was easy to find the commlink and down she went, intent on diving into the network the humans had set up for communication, security and military purposes.

There the human defenses again proved useless against the determined niski and her abilities within a network. Within moments of her first push past the passive grid and its projectors, Imrulan was deep inside the network with full access to protocols, personnel and systems.

Knowing that time was getting short, the niski quickly crafted a persona for the human body she was growing in the belly of her ship. The target with the highest value on the floating city the humans were using as an HQ was the garrison's governor. If she could drop him, the human command structure would shudder under the pressure.

That shuddering, and the hesitation it would create, would then give the people of Nuranis, aquatic reptiles that had evolved to take maximum advantage of a planet covered 99.1 percent by water, the opening they needed to storm Atalan and cripple the human garrison.

Whether the Nuranisians could actually topple the conquerors' oppressive government or not didn't matter to her. She wasn't paid to help them get their planet back. Just to kill somebody important enough to create the opening they needed to begin their attack. Beyond that, it was totally on the locals to get the job done. She'd jump offplanet, collect her pay and move to the next job. It was as simple as that.

Now, to do the most amount of damage possible in the shortest period of time, she needed to be somebody close to the governor. Perhaps somebody in his or her guard detail, tasked with keeping the locals from killing him before his time.

There! It was the roster for the governor's personal guard, a handful of highly trained warriors that accompanied the governor at all times. It was protected by several more levels of security protocols, tighter than anything she had encountered before on her inward journey through the human network.

Tighter, perhaps, but no less immune to her deft touch. Within seconds Imrulan had pushed by the protocols to insert her persona onto the roster, putting her in the next rotation of the guard. Which, according to her internal chronometer, was scheduled to change in the next ten minutes.

Cementing her persona on the roster, she quickly but carefully drew back. Now she was on the clock. She needed to get down onto the planet, spin up her human body and get onto Atalan within the next ten minutes or all the work she had just finished to hack the network would be for naught.

By the time Imrulan managed to withdraw out of the human network and pull her senses back into her body, that time had been trimmed by three minutes. Seeing that was enough to tighten her wispy features into nearly a solid mask. She knew it would be cutting it close to insert herself into the rotation at that particular point in time, but seven minutes to get her ship close enough for the insertion, spin up her human body and reach the ground in the right spot to make the guard change?

"There's always something," she grimly muttered. Then, with a sign of resignation, she was pushing herself out of her control cluster to slip down into her ship's belly. Might as well get her suit on first before she tried to do anything else. After all, the resonance process she used to innervate a somnolent body was the most time consuming of all the processes she now had to get exactly right, or risk failure.

The completed body, a combat-enhanced human female with relatively unremarkable features and build, hung unmoving in the fluid-filled grow tank, surrounded by feeding and maintenance tubes, monitors, and power supplies. A quick scan of the monitors confirmed that the body's maturation cycle was complete and that it was ready to go.