Overall Score: 94/100

Movement Accuracy: 9/10

Movement Timing: 9/10

Pace Consistency: 10/10

Bonus Recovery Action: 5/10

Ellowyn stared at the screen, a bitter smile formed on her lips. *I supposed this is my limit for now.* She had spent the last two days tinkering with various movement combinations that would fit best with her poor choreographing skills and practicing them until her tired mind couldn't take it any longer.

She wanted to try practicing with live simulated targets but stopped from the mental fatigue.

She exited the soul room only to wake up in a sweat drenched body. *Ew.*

Beep. Beep. A small glowing blue sphere flew around her as she opened her eyes, giving out a series of beeps and indicating its excitement.

"Good morning to you too, RB-121" She reached out her hand and patted it.

RB-121: Beep [happy]. The small bot cuddled itself by rubbing at her open palm.

She stood up and took a moment to marvel at the bed's self cleaning mechanism, had it been any normal bed, the room would stink beyond measure.

She took some water to refill her dehydrated body and dived into the cool shower.

How are you doing?

I'm okay. Although I'm worried about the new education policy, you've heard of it right?

Yes, thats what I'm going to address.

Do you know the motive behind the Allied Church?

Ellowyn, I'm not even a living entity in your world. I have neither the means nor the authority to look deeper into the world. The only access I have currently are from the logs you sent me.

Thats too bad. I was looking for some advice to live through this.

From the look of it, I'd say theren't much to worry about. Being the largest religious organization, I'm sure they won't resort to mass murder unless they have a death wish. There might be kidnapping attempts though, those shouldn't be life threatening.

So you're saying I shouldn't be worried about getting kidnapped?

You'll be alright. You can handle small threats with your current skills.

I will need a way to carry the thurstered combat suit though, would people not give me weird looks if I carry a bunch of thrusters around?

Hold on.

Module found: Subspace Storage

I just made the storage module available. It is still broken however. If you can fix it then you can use it to store your combat gear.

And I'm supposed to repair a interspatial storage module how? My knowledge of physics is hardly useful.

You're a smart girl, go figure it out.

She wanted to make sense of the broken module, half of its code were corrupted and the other half weren't very clear on what they were doing either. Cough Cough. Only after reading through the whole module did she realized her body was freezing from being in the cold shower for too long.

She walked out of the bathroom and began working immediately on the module, ignoring the subtle shaking of her still cold body.

RB-121: Beep beep beep [agitated] Ignored by its creator, the sphere flew around her while beeping incessantly.

"Quiet down will you, I'm trying to focus!" She reached out her hand again to rub its surface.

RB-121: Beep [happy].

"I have some really important work so please don't bother me. I'll make you some friends later."

RB-121: Beep Beep [confused] The bot's simplistic firmware couldn't understand her complex statement.

"Sorry, I'll have to keep you deactivated for now."

RB-121: Beep [sad] Understanding her intention, it flew reluctantly to the wireless charging station and went into sleep mode.

Try as she may, the code functionality was too obscure and incomplete for her to patch it together. From what she could gather, each person with a hero system was allocated a certain amount of storage space depending on their contract terms. The procedure to safely connect to the subspace and modify its content was completely broken and trying to backtrack to restore it was impossible.

She decided to take a break and play WoM to relax her tired mind.

Looking at the figure of her character pulling various combat moves against its enemy, she could help but let out a chuckle. After three days of experimenting and practicing various aerobatic maneuvers, her mind could see well that the moves performed by the in game character was not only useless and unrealistic, they even managed to look less graceful than some of the more intuitive ones she came up with.

I haven't seen you on Sentria lately, lost interest?

I haven't the time to for the last few days. Though I'm free right now so I'm going to try to get some ranks

Thats great! Tell me when you get to Knight rank and we can do some requests together. I'll show you the ropes.

You don't have to waste time helping a noob like me. I can figure things out myself :)

I just have a crap load of free time right now so I figure I could earn some extra income. I know you are more than capable, but wouldn't it be more fun if you can learn things with another human being?

Alright, I'll pm you later.

Her fingers glided across the holo keyboard as she hummed a long forgotten pop song of a different world.

Assessment completed, you are now ranked Serf

She took a moment to stretch and grabbed a drink before continuing.

Assessment completed, you are now ranked Baron

Assessment completed, you are now ranked Knight

Hmm, that wasn't so bad. She leaned back and smiled. It was quite challenging to gain three ranks within the hour, but not as hard as she thought.

I knew you can breeze through it, but not that fast.

I also got 2 more levels in WoM.

...

What? It was easy

Lets just get to the request board and pick one that you like. I'll show you the dos and don't. Try not to get cocky for getting caught can lead to jail time.

She was glad to find the Sentria server much more secure at Knight rank, while it meant she had to put more effort to bypass the authorization checks, it meant there was less chance to get traced.

The list had requests of various difficulty and reward, from hacking into various websites and change user information to fabricating personal backgrounds on government sites and even rendering entire servers inoperable.

As a hacker with a moral, she couldn't bring herself to do petty theft and vandalism. What she looked for were requests to expose the misconduct of business competitors by gathering evidence such as logs and emails of their illegal activities. Not exactly white hat work, but it'll have to do. She accepted a medium difficulty job.

The operation was rather simple, she only needed to bypass the target server's outdated firewall and do a quick port hack. Then she'd grab the target data and listen to Dave's speech on how to erase her trail, which she already knew from previous researches.

The procedure went smoothly as neither of them were inexperienced in the field. Ellowyn decided to take it a little further by accepting progressively harder requests.

At their fifth task, however, things went sour as the security rating of the target site was much higher than what the client had stated. She only discovered the horrid fact after the server started its trace operation. With a dwindling time window, she had to slow the trace down by tunneling back from her complex web of proxies while waiting for Dave to nuke the server.

A small cluster of data caught her attention as she was erasing the server logs. They were hidden quite well, as if the data were kept from the server admin himself.

Are you done yet? We need to pull out now.

One sec.

She made quick a copy before disconnecting and watched as Dave crashed the entire server to stop the trace.

The data was of a business transaction between two unidentifiable people, however, she did a small trace on their origins and what she found caught her full attention. She had gained access to the Crystal Lane, one of the largest online black market in Liona.

She decided against looking into it for the moment, as previous experience with such entities told her without security precautions, she could easily be caught or blacklisted from the place. She needed to polish her skill more before attempting to access it.

Let’s do one more request

Okay

It wasn't a coincidence that the last request involved acquiring a thesis on subspace storage from a University's database. She wanted to get a hand on the data in hope of repairing her module.

The Usage of Subspace and Its Relation to the Soul Stream

Prof. Alizka Zander

University of Saramay

Was the research's title. She blinked. Soul Stream, Isn't that a top secret thing? She knew well that besides those who had the system, the Soul Stream to the rest of the world was simply a myth. For someone to have detailed research on the stream itself was both terrifying and exciting to her. Then a thought came to her, Alice said the Allied Church was looking for more resources to research the Soul Stream.

She concluded that the researcher or the client could be related to the church, but dismissed the idea since other parties might be involved. Still, she decided to keep in contact with the client by offering them a cheaper payout in exchange for a monopoly in accepting their tasks.

Look at what I found

~Ellowyn has uploaded a file

That is alarming

Can you stop them?

Its not against the World Law to have knowledge of the Soul Stream, but it is illegal to exploit an existing Hero system for those information. And if my guess is correct, they have access to someone with a partially exploited system similar to yours.

What are you going to do then?

Nothing for the moment. If I were to reveal this, my superiors would know about you. Just keep an eye on them for now, both the client and the researcher. But don't do anything rash.

Okay.

She started working on the broken module again, using the research as reference to fill in the incomplete blanks left by corrupted code. The article wasn't very helpful for it consisted mainly of assumptions and mismatched info when she compared it to her system data. However, it did have a well planned design for how to set up a working subspace

After hours of rewriting the whole module from scratch using the little knowledge she gained, Ellowyn managed to set up a minimal working version.

She put some unused robotic components onto her table and started the testing procedure.

Connecting to allocated subspace... success

Validating arguments..... done

Starting space transfer

A small outline of a box surrounded the components, glowing brighter every second until she had to close her eyes.

Begin transfer...

Energy overflow detected, venting excess energy

She had to step back as blue electric sparks were surrounding the box. The storage procedure lasted five minutes, producing so much light and heat that the temperature of the room became warm. Everything on the table was then inside her subspace.

Checking over the logs, she was glad to know it worked well aside from some minor errors. However, there was a serious efficiency problem as the system used almost a quarter of its total power to store only a very small area. The energy required to store and retrieve larger areas would increase exponentially.

At least it works right? That is some impressive results when you had to rewrite the whole thing.

But the energy efficiency is so low and it takes too long I can't use it in battle at all!

I never said its for use in combat. You only need it to smuggle the combat gear to school. Maybe if you spend more time to fine tune, it wouldn't cost so much energy?

Maybe, but I need more info before attempting to streamline it. Don't want to blow myself up.

Its fine if you just mess around a little, the system has its own countermeasures to prevent the ripping of space.

If you say so.

She continued experimenting with the module until sleep overtaken her mind once again.

“Ellowyn!”

A hug from behind pulled her awake.

"Don't sleep on the table, it will ruin your back!" Alice said.

"Good morning. What bring you here so early?" Ellowyn made a long yawn.

"Did you study so much that you forgot, silly?" Alice knocked gently on her head, "Its assessment day."

Ellowyn could only widen her eyes at the alarming realization. She had been too focused on combat practice, bot designing and module repair to do any study for the school assessment day.

Very sorry for the late release! I was rather busy for the past week.

HOWEVER! It is now Spring Break and I have ... slightly more free time to write now >.

GDoc link feel free to edit suggestions for errors and better phrasing.