A mercenary marauder launched himself through the breach.

He was dead before he hit the ground.

The rest of the mercenaries kept on going. Heavier armored marauders led the charge. Man after man fell. All the hundred or so Umojans inside the room had their weapons trained at that single entrance, and that was including twenty ghosts. Marauders had quite the armor, but it simply isn't enough. Against this much firepower, even a zealot would be ripped apart.

“We can hold them.” A marine commented. All this stress and fear of death made him sweat, and he was glad to find out he might live to see another day. Silently, he made up his mind to propose to his girlfriend if he gets out of this alive.

His mind wandering when a series of grenades smashed into another blast door on the side and shattered it. Before the Umojans realized what happened, mercenaries poured in from that opening.

A dozen marauders entered the room. A mixture of light taps appeared, and half of the marauders collapsed with a hole in their helmet. Shadowguards sniped them before the marauders could even see what was in the room. But the survivors had a brief second before the Umojan marines and marauders fired on them. Instead of wasting the shots on marines, the marauders turned to a couple seemingly empty area and pulled the trigger.

A dozen EMP grenades sent most of the twenty shadowguards to the ground.

Shadowguards were cloaked, but in order for the other Umojan units to cooperate with the shadowguards, they needed a way to tell the Umojans where the shadowguards were. Umojan enginers did that by uploading the location of the shadowguards to the helmets of other units. Unfortunately, when the mercenaries changed into those Umojan armors, they gained that same visio.

The rest of the marauders perished in a wave of gunshots, but now the Umojans had to defend two positions, their firepower for each location was cut off by half. Adding fuel to the fire, most of the shadowguards were disabled. Without their psionic power, these shadowguards were no longer capable of sniping. They couldn’t cloak or defend themselves with psionic energy either. Their melee psionic blades were useless. They could still fire ordinary shots and even engage the terran with hand to hand combat, but they were much less menacing.

The table turned when a mercenary sacrificed his life and tossed a stun grenade into the room. The grenade exploded and sent a large portion of the Umojans into a state of confusion. The mercenaries used that chance and pushed forward from both directions.

Without the defender’s advantage, the Umojans were outnumbered and outgunned. After hundreds of casualties from both sides, all the Umojan defenders were exterminated. The mercenaries were down to around one hundred, but the survivors had a high spirit. After all, they have won.

All the senators were taken captive. Colonel Hays had no such luck. A stray bullet went through his heart.

“Send in the forces and surround the Senate House. Do not engage.” Seeing the situation through a security camera, Jean ordered.

Hancock moved quickly. Thousands of Umojans were ferried into position by dropships and medivacs. However, these men didn’t launch an attack on the barricaded building. Hancock explained it was because the intruders have already taken the senators alive. An attack might lead to their demise.

After passing down the orders, Hancock turned back to Jean. A frown on his face. “Why aren’t the mercenaries executing the senators. For the moment I am at the top of the chain of command, but even I can’t keep the military back for long. I don’t want the senators to be rescued by a strike team.”

Hancock needed the senators gone so he could be the highest ranking officer in the Protectorate and therefore the dictator, but Jean had something different in mind.

“I tried to get them to do it, but they refused. Apparently, they are worried about being abandoned. They want us to give them a way out before they finish their part of the deal.” Jean lied. In fact, she specifically ordered Madison to keep the captives alive through the transmitter, but Hancock didn’t need to know that. As far as he know, the mercenaries made that decision based on their own self-interest.

“Then what? If the senators are saved...I didn’t take all this risk for nothing!” The rogue admiral complained. This was not part of the plan.

Jean thought about it before answering. “Give me command of a Warden team. I’ll lead them and terminate the mercenaries and, if possible, the senators. I can cancel the information inside the Warden units afterwards to erase the trail.”

In reality, she didn’t need Hancock to give her the Warden units. She could say an order and the Warden units would simply obey her. The only catch was that she needed Hancock to have absolute trust in the Warden units.

Hancock nodded. “Get it done. I’ve got twelve hundred Warden units on the ground. Take what you need.”

Jean got to the siege lines outside the Senate House in less than five minutes. As soon as she got there, she took command of five hundred Warden marines and marauders. She herself got into a modified white armor.

“All units, move forward. Clear the barriers and form an assault formation.” She ordered.

As Warden marauders started blasting apart the rocks and debris that blocked the entrances, Jean got on her transmitter and texted Madison.

“There is a group of Umojan units with Ws on their armor. They’re friendlies. Let them through.”

“Quiet down! Do what we say and you’ll be fine!” Madison was having some trouble quieting down her captives. She didn’t dare to execute some of these politicians because if her boss wanted her to keep them alive, they must be worth some value. Madison didn’t want to completely piss them off. The experienced politicians saw that and tried to abuse it. This reached a climax when Madison caught one of the senators attempting to contact the outside world. But even then she couldn’t kill him. She could only order her men to watch over the captives more carefully.

That was when she saw Jean’s message.

The mercenaries offered no resistance as the Warden squad got into the Senate House. The senators were glad at first when they saw the familiar and somewhat comforting sight of Warden units. They turned much more negative when the mercenaries didn’t even try to stop the Wardens.

There was only one explanation. They were on the same side.

“Colonel Madison?” Jean asked quietly as she walked up to the mercenary leader. Beside her, a few senators were obviously taken by surprise when they heard the woman’s familiar sound, but none of them said anything. At this pace, they might get to live. If they showed Jean they knew she was involved, Jean might just silence them.

“Yes.” Madison smiled, trying to act nice. Whoever this armored girl was, she was much more trusted by their boss than Madison was. “What do you want me to do?”

“Well…” As Jean started speaking, Madison suddenly saw the Warden units Jean came here with spreading out. At first she didn’t think anything of it. They might just be securing the perimeter. But she quickly realized the placement of the Warden units was somewhat familiar.

It didn’t take her long to come to a terrible realization. The formation the Warden units were in was the same formation her mercenaries were in when they stabbed the Umojans in the back.

Jean keenly noticed the shocked look on Madison's face, and she knew she couldn’t wait any longer.

“Now!” She whispered in the comm.

“Yes, Creator.”

Hearing the order, every single Warden unit reacted. Before they walked in, Jean has already used the administrator passcode to give herself top level clearance. She used this power to assign a codeword to these units. Whenever they hear she say the word “now”, they would label the mercenaries as hostile, and that was exactly what happened.

Within a wave of almost simultaneous gunshots, all the Warden units executed the mercenaries in the back. They were five hundred Warden and twenty percent that number of mercenaries. Even in a fair fight, which this wasn’t, the mercenaries didn’t stand a chance.

Madison eyes widened. She didn’t take the time to turn and be gunned down. Instead, she threw herself to the side and barely dodged the grenades of a Warden marauder. She cowered behind the cover of a desk and fired a string of bullets into the marauder, but the marauder acted as if nothing happened. There were some sparks, but there was neither blood nor flesh.

“What the...Ah!”

Madison collapsed with a hole between her eyes. Behind her, Jean returned her pistol back into her holster. If someone thought she wasn’t dangerous due to her sex and size, they would be terribly wrong.

Inside the room, all the mercenaries were dead. The only two parties remaining were the Ruling Council and Jean’s men, and only one side was armed.

Admiral Thorn stood up. He wasn’t armed as well, but he was a soldier, and he was done with being treated as a captive who had absolutely no control of his own fate.

“I don’t know who you are or what your connection to these men is, but you have saved us. If you let us go now, you will be hailed as a hero throughout the Protectorate. We will pay you handsomely.”

Thorn wasn’t blind. He was one of those who recognized Jean’s voice. He knew there must be some conspiracy between Jean and the mercenaries, but through his words, he was telling Jean he was willing to forget about her conspiracy as long as she let them go now. Whether Jean believed his words was another matter, but Thorn gave Jean a choice.

Jean didn’t answer. If she didn’t want the senators to know her real identity, she wouldn’t have came here herself in the first place. Her presence here meant she didn’t care if the Umojan Ruling Council knew who she really was.

Instead of answering, she took out a small container from her modified armor and placed it in front of the Ruling Council.

“Restrict their movement without damaging their health.” Jean had to be clear, otherwise the Warden marines might just blast open the captives’ spines, which was something she didn’t want to see.

The Warden marines tackled the senators and locked their arms behind their back. As the Ruling Council was defenseless, Jean opened the container.

Dozens of small insects crawled out.

Unlike normal villains who would endlessly babble about the deadliness of their weapons to their enemies, Jean went straight to action. The insects started crawling up the bodies of the senators. The Umojans resisted, but the Wardens didn’t even budge. There was nothing those men and women could do as the insects crawled into their mouth and moved upward.

The zerg had two different ways of controlling those from other races. On one hand, zerg infestation could turn the victims into zerg in a cellular level. In some cases the victims would lose their mind. Side effects could include tentacles, pustules, and other gross parts. This method was usually used to create a large number of cheap combatants in a short period of time.

On the other hand, zerg infestors could control others with neural parasites. All the infestors had to do was insert a bug into their victims’ brains, and these bugs would then take over the minds of the victims and make the slaves of the infestors. Neural parasite was much more discreet than infestation. There wasn’t much difference between someone who fell victim to neural parasite and someone who didn’t.

In this case, Jean used these neural parasite bugs to control the senators. She could enslave the entire Ruling Council and no one would know it.

Several senators collapsed with blood coming out of their mouths, eyes, and noses. Their mind weren’t strong enough to handle the bugs. But the rest survived. Jean ordered the Warden units to stay back, and the senators stood up.

“Command me.”

Jean got these bugs from Stukov, who has been expanding his brood in some distant planets. Stukov told Jean he made her the master of these bugs. Jean believed him. She really did. The hundreds of Warden marines behind her with their weapons aimed at the senators was just for show. After all, it was impossible that Stukov would order these bugs to control the senators to jump onto Jean and attempt to neural parasite her…

From the very beginning, Jean didn’t want to truly make an alliance with Hancock. The admiral was greedy and unreliable. She was merely using him as a stepping stone to get to the Ruling Council.

Everything Jean promised Hancock, whether it was the dictatorship or total control over the Umojan Fleet, was a lie.

The admiral wouldn’t be so happy to find that out, but Jean wasn’t worried.

After all, there was no point in being concerned over a dead man.

A single a tap on her phone activated the Warden marines in Hancock’s office...