Ki Lin Feng had not survived decades in the royal court by being unprepared. She did not flinch, though her heart hammered like a trapped bird against her ribs.
The moment the Revolutionary lunged, she had already extracted the mortal instrument from her roes. On her ear was a jade earring. It was one of the the SK-series, a high grade artifact made by the Grand Maker himself, Sigmund Kilgowe. All of the series were an attempt to replicate the power of a Forbidden artifact without any of the drawbacks.
This one in particular was the cause of the force field currently protecting Ki Lin Feng.
The Revolutionary's man catcher struck the barrier with a sound like a thunderclap. The force of the blow sent shockwaves rippling through the laboratory, shattering glass tubes and sending corpses swinging wildly from their chains. But the barrier held, absorbing the impact and redirecting it outward in a concussive burst that threw the Revolutionary backward once again. I
He crashed into a wall, leaving a spiderweb of cracks in the stone.
The Jade earring was designed to automatically shift its density, dynamically adapting its structural integrity to match the exact kinetic load of the incoming blow by reading the localized ambient flow fluctuations mere feet away from her skin. The force field also deflected al anormal effects that the attacks might have.
"You should have taken my offer," she said coldly.
The Revolutionary rose from the rubble, dusting off his patchwork cloak. His porcelain mask was expressionless, but his body language radiated amusement.
"Wow! That's so impressive! How long do you think you can keep it up though?" He asked and lunged again.
Same result.
Only this time he stabbed the man catcher into the ground to stop himself though he would still crash into the tube containing Free. Igor didn't hesitate— with an order he sacrificed three of his scuttling spider-automatons, causing them to jump onto the Revolutionary and throw him into a stack of half-built automaton chassis preventing the tube from getting even a scratch.
'I have to kill the Revolutionary. He's too much of a loose cannon to be kept around. Instead, I'll take Igor Patrovsky captive. I'm sure he'll cooperate after a bit of 'persuasion'.'
Lin Feng thought, deciding to go on the offensive now. The book she had pulled from her robes looked like an old leather tome from years ago that should have been buried in the deepest, most obscure part of some ancient library. But it was an artifact far from ordinary.
It was FR-0024,The Diary of the Forgotten.
A Forbidden Relic she had illegally obtained from the Forbidden Vault, using her influence and a network of bribed officials. It was a weapon of last resort she always kept on her person, one she had hoped never to use.
But today, she had no choice.
She flipped open the grimoire, its yellowed, brittle pages were a mosaic of missing sections and frantic, spidery handwriting that writhed and squirmed whenever her eyes lingered on it directly. Large swathes of text had been brutally burned away or violently scratched out, leaving behind only cryptic, bleeding fragments of sentences.
She knew its terrifying mechanics all too well. The Diary operated on the Notion layer—the foundational truths underlying concepts. It could not force brute physical reality into being without a conceptual anchor, but by reading unredacted phrases aloud, the user could manifest those notions into raw, physical law.
'Though, this is going to cost me,' she thought grimly.
She took a breath and read aloud from the remaining unredacted text.
"The ground is unsteady."
The floor beneath the Revolutionary's feet crumbled. He stumbled, his balance thrown off, and Lin Feng took the opportunity to retreat, putting distance between them.
The price of using such power was absolute: memories.
Every single manifestation cost a portion of her mind. The artifact didn't consume them at random; it devoured them in direct proportion to the magnitude of the reality she forced upon the world. The more it fed on her memories the more its corruption seeped into her mind. Left unchecked, the lingering whispers of the unknown, maddened author would seep into her psyche, eroding her sanity into paranoia, delusions of grandeur, and absolute ruin.
Of course, she had prepared for that.
"The wind is a blade." She read again.
A sharp wind blade materialized just inches away from the Revolutionary's head. Because it was a Notion, he could not dodge so instead used Advanced Flow Reinforcement. His temple quickly soaked up energy and became crystalline, just as he was knocked back by the attack. He touched the side of his head where the attack had managed to breach his reinforcement. He was bleeding but it was better than being scalped. The revolutionary chuckled as he began to pace, the man catcher dragging behind him and his gaze never leaving his target.
Lin Feng's heart was still beating in her chest.
She was using a specialized memory storage artifact—a small crystal she kept imbedded between her breasts—she had duplicated and stored her most expendable memories within it. One hundred memories. One hundred uses. Less if the manifestations were especially complex.
'That's three memories gone.'
The Revolutionary threw the pole arm.
"The air felt thick like honey."she read.
The air between them thickened, becoming almost solid and the man catcher was left floating. The Revolutionary using his sub-sonic speed as a votary ran around her while she was reading in an attempt to attack from behind.
"My arrow pierced their hearts."
The suspended man catcher spin towards the Revolutionary, attempting to impale him. Again he reinforced his body while using his authority as a Votary to influence the concept of defense to deflect the attack. However, Ki Lin Feng's attack was on a higher layer and even though the Revolutionary did manage to deflect it, it spun and struck him in the chest, his reinforcement once again saving him though he took damage from the attack and dropped to one knee as blood dripped on the floor.
Seeking to finish him off, she read, "But his wounds have been infected by maggots, how could he ever recover?"
Nothing happened and Lin Feng felt a piercing headache and staggered. It was then that she remembered that what she was actually manifesting needed to be there as an anchor otherwise her memories would just be consumed and she would feel the feedback.
'How does that disgusting troll not have maggots when his den is full of corpses?' Lin Feng wondered, already hearing a voice whispering at the edge of her hearing.
'Damnit, that failed attack cost me twenty-Nine memories making thirty five. I have already used too many, I need to finish this quickly.' She thought, shaking away the whisperings.
"The gale rips the living breath ##### live thousand of knives ready to cut, ready to kill." She read as the Revolutionary ran to the side.
A gale-force pressure materialized out of thin air, compressed into millions of razor-sharp, invisible scythes that converged on the leaping Revolutionary.
The kinetic barrage struck him dead-center. The force was catastrophic, tearing through his patchwork garments, shredding his flesh, and carving deep, bloody lacerations across his body. Yet, as the meat and bone tore, something impossible happened. A strange, iridescent shimmer rippled outward from his body.
In a fraction of a second, the physical trauma inflicted upon him was violently reversed. The shredded flesh knitted itself back together, the torn fabric mended, and the blood rushed backward into his wounds. Worse still, shock and agony of the devastation he had just endured was reflected directly back at her.
Ki Lin Feng gasped as invisible blades struck her consciousness. A wave of agonizing pain, vertigo, and soul-deep trauma slammed into her nervous system. She stumbled backward, collapsing to the ground, blood trickling from her nose.
If not for her Jade earring—the ambient-flow forcefield automatically over-clocking itself to absorb the abnormal backlash—her mind and body would have been utterly liquefied by the reflected carnage. Even so, the forcefield hummed viciously as it dimmed significantly, draining her energy reserves at an alarming rate as sparks cascaded from the jade jewelry.
'What the hell was that.'
She steadied herself slowly rising to her feet. The Revolutionary was now completely unblemished, though his breathing was slightly elevated. He tilted his head, studying her with an unsettling, clinical calmness. Meanwhile Lin Feng felt a pain in her chest as if she was the one who had be stabbed and her body ached as if she was the one who suffered all those cuts.
'So he has a deflection artifact of some kind?'
He hadn't attacked yet; he was deliberately holding back for a split second, analyzing her cadence, mapping the micro-delays in her forcefield's rhythmic adjustments, searching for the absolute blind spot in her defense.
Panic flared for the first time beneath Lin Feng's ironclad exterior. Her mind was burning. About fifty memories gone, and the backlash of his counter had nearly pierced her defenses. She couldn't afford a war of attrition.
She whipped open the Diary to another scorched page, her voice rising in a desperate, commanding cadence.
"I am trapped at all sided."
Seven more memories—gone in a blink. The whispers in her head grew louder, a chorus of raving lunatics clawing at the edges of her sanity.
The atmospheric gas instantly condensed, hardening into dense, immovable blocks of solid ice as hard as iron surrounding the Revolutionary, trapping him in a crushing cage of conceptual mass.
The Revolutionary grunted, his crystalline-infused shoulders slamming against the sudden iron barriers. But instead of breaking, he simply held his breath. He didn't try to brute-force the ice; he used his strange inversion ability to redirect the conceptual density right back at the environment.
With a deafening shriek of tearing rock, the heavy ice blocks expanded outward, violently bursting the walls of Igor's primary laboratory.
CRASH!
The sound dulled the next sentence that Lin Feng read but a ring of fire formed under the revolutionary and an explosion threw him into a wall. The force caused the stone partition to shatter into dust, and Lin Feng followed him in, reading sentences that manifested great balls of fire and huge shards of ice. A few more words and these morphed into wraiths of hot and cold that attacked the revolutionary. Her words empowered them while dealing more attacks such as shifting the apparent gravity of the ground and casting lethargy onto the revolutionary while her conjured legion attacked him.
'ki lin feng...' a voice whispered in her head but she ignored it and pushed forward.
The combat spilled out into the broader, terrifying expanse of the underground labyrinth. They broke through into a massive, cavernous disposal chute—a horrific subterranean graveyard where Igor discarded failed automaton prototypes and rotting human remains. Piles of rotted limbs, fused spinal columns, half-dissolved skulls, and mounds of decaying biological waste littered the ghastly chamber, filling the air with a suffocating, putrid miasma that made Lin Feng's stomach churn violently but she sacrificed a few more memories to temporarily revive these corpses to fight alongside her wraiths to take down the Revolutionary but he was still holding his own, knocking them back with the man catcher and reflecting whatever attacks back at her.
With each attack, the voices in her head grew louder and the more crazed she herself became, attacking haphazardly and causing more destruction to the surroundings than to the revolutionary himself. He took advantage of this only to be punched back by a flame wraith she had manifested
Struggling to pull her mind together, Lin Feng managed to get herself under control though it was a lot harder now.
She knew that he was inverting her attacks on other things other than her because he knew she was on a timer and wanted to wear her out. The memory artifact was beginning to strain against her bosom and blood began to leak from it and soil her clothes
'Damnit why wont this bastard just die!'
"####Like a dying star!"
The entire cavern the Revolutionary was in suddenly shone bright with a blinding light and the whole underground shook violently as that part of the lab exploded outward and suddenly collapsed on itself leaving an empty space. By this time, Lin feng only had less than twenty memories left.
She wiped the blood from her nose and smiled.
'I..I finally killed that bas-'
The thought was interrupted as she collapsed on all fours and retched, vomiting blood.
"No... I have never taken damage like this in my life. Life? What is life? heheheheEHAHAHAHAHAHAH..." She muttered and giggled as the corruption had taken enough root and she began to drool.
It was the shock of the Revolutionary suddenly appearing in front of her that brought her back just enough to scream.
"ARGHHHHHH! YOU! HOW DID YOU SURVIVE?!"
The revolutionary scratched the back of his head the shrugged before lifting the man catcher up and bringing it down with full force.
She used the force field to push herself out of the way and the shockwave of his strike threw her backwards into the main lab were she crashed into a stone table. Igor, who was polishing the glass tube with Free in it yelped, startled.
"You two still haven't finished killing each other? And now you're here to wreck the rest of my lab?"
The disheveled Lin Feng didn't seem to hear him and used the broken pieces of the stone table to support herself. There was the sound of whistling which grew louder as the Revolutionary casually but slowly walked out of the hole in the wall. Instead of attacking however he began pacing around the lab.
"I really hate to see my fellow citizen of this great kingdom suffer so much. You in particular have done so much for Aerthos, much more than the citizens could ever know or appreciate but why must it end there?" he said feigning sadness.
He stopped and poked a floating brain in an unbroken jar.
"You can make the ultimate sacrifice, just stop resisting. I promise I'll be gentle, you wont even feel a thing. Though, I suppose you can't hear me anymore." he observed as Lin Feng began pulling on her hair and rocking back and forth as more blood flowed from her mouth.
He lunged to attack but she blocked him with her barrier, only this time, it didn;t seem like it could push him back.
"Oh?" the Revolutionary said forcing the weapon to penetrate the shield causing sparks and a ripple of energy as he did.
'I..I..I've almost lost m-m-myself.' She thought desperately fighting off the ravings.
'I must escape and recover, Yes...Ic-can always let other do the dirty work form me-me. Infact this works-in my favour. I can arrange and make it seem like I was attacked and frame some-someone. Yes.'
She bit her lip.
With less than twenty usable memories she forced enough of her psyche together and once again opened the book. This action caused the revolutionary to instinctively jump back. She sacrificed fifteen of the remaining memories for one final attack she hoped would incapacitate the revolutionary enough for her to make her escape.
"As if enveloped by smoke####### his heart would stop."
The Notion of a head being severed materialized directly around the Revolutionary's neck as smoke suddenly enveloped the entire room, ready to shear his head from his shoulders as an absolute truth of the universe.
The Revolutionary seemed to have sensed it and forced his body forward with blistering speed, his Flow Infused weapon hand shooting out like a spear.
Lin Feng was already dashing out the entrance and the force field materializing to deflect the attack. The Revolutionary took advantage of a flaw he had observed during their fight.
Lag.
By stopping short of the barrier he was able to exert force to break through it before it could adjust itself. He continued forward with the man catcher and with a swift motion used it to take off her ear. Lin Feng screamed and dropped to the ground but as she did she managed to turn and pull of the mask covering the Revolutionary's face.
It clattered as it rolled away and she whimpered covering her ear.
With a sharp strike the revolutionary broke her right hand and she screamed as the book dropped to the ground. She began to groan as she attempted to crawl away.
The Revolutionary stood over her. He studied her for a long moment, as if deciding what to do. Then, with deliberate slowness, he crouched beside her and removed his mask.
Lin Feng's breath caught.
The face beneath was handsome—strikingly so. But there was something wrong. His eyes were wild, deranged, and the skin beneath them was withered, cracked like ancient stone.
She knew that face.
She had seen it before. Years ago.
The Aerthos-Kemet War.
At a funeral of one of the people from her region...
"N-Nostrad?" she whispered.
The Revolutionary smiled—a wide, whimsical expression that sent drool running down the side of his mouth. He wiped it away with the back of his hand.
"You remember me," he said softly. "How flattering."
Lin Feng's mind raced.
Cynn Nostrad.
The healer. The pacifist. The man who had served alongside the Death Three during the war. The man who had sacrificed himself so they could win the war.
"How? How are you alive? How are you the Revolutionary?"
The Revolutionary—Nostrad—stood up and looked at the man catcher in his hand. He examined it with the eye of a connoisseur, turning it over, testing its balance.
He looked back at Lin Feng, his smile widening.
"The death of a Lord," he said, drool running down his chin again.
"That's going to fuel the revolution."
His left eye glowed and his iris changed to form a silver Celtic Five Fold knot.
'An arcane eye?' Lin Feng thought in horror.
She tried to summon her barrier, but the ear was gone. She tried to summon her energy, but her body was too weak. She tried to scream, but her throat was dry.
He looked back at Lin Feng, his smile widening.
"The death of a Lord... a genuine noble bloodline spilled in the dark. Surely, this is the kindling that will fuel the revolution, no?" He asked as he kicked her back down and raised the man catcher.
"W-wait, spare me! I will-"
SHHLINK.
Her head spun through the air, her eyes wide with shock and absolute horror, before falling heavily into a pool of stagnant blood and mud on the grotesque floor. Her body twitched a bit before going still.
Silence crashed over the ruined laboratory, broken only by the rhythmic dripping of fluid and Igor's frantic, scuttling footsteps approaching from the archway.
Nastrod stood in the pool of her blood, breathing heavily. He remained completely motionless, standing as still as a carved stone statue for several long, agonizing seconds.
Igor poked his head around the shattered doorframe, trembling slightly and half-expecting the madman to turn his bloodlust onto him next.
Instead, Nastrod slowly lowered his hand. He looked down at the blood-stained man catcher he still held, a look of serene appreciation crossing his features.
He bent down gracefully right beside the spreading pool of blood, his fingers reaching out to pick up The Diary of the Forgotten where it had slipped from Lin Feng's fingers.
He then returned his gaze to the corpse as thick, clear drool began to pool and run down the side of his mouth. He raised a hand, absentmindedly wiping the saliva away with the back of his blood-soaked sleeve, his eyes gleaming with manic fervor.
"Say, Igor..." Nastrod asked, his voice dripping with casual warmth as he took a slow step forward.
"Can I borrow a few of those corpses you happen to have lying around in stock? I have an idea for a new exhibition."