Chapter 11: Formatting Feedback and the Traitor\'s Blade

📖 Previous Chapter / 上一章： The Biometric Gate and the Duplicate Face

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[8, 7, 6...]

The cold countdown hammered against my brainstem like a sledgehammer. With every ticking number, my past memories—the rainy nights at the orphanage, Grandpa's face, the pungent reek of motor oil—began to curl and peel away like photographs scorched by open flames.

I couldn't let them wipe my mind! With a feral roar, instead of pulling my hand free from the biometric socket, I slammed my entire body weight forward into it. "You want my memories? Then choke on my pain!"

I willingly dropped the firewalls of my cerebral cortex, dumping the lethal, agonizing physical pain my body was currently enduring straight back into the network through the nano-tentacles. Hell's Eye let out a violent, deafening hum, its crimson light flaring exponentially, washing the entire hall in the color of fresh blood.

The fake Old Chen's face twisted. The neural-stripping matrix gun in his hands erupted with a shrill screech, its ghostly blue arcs flickering violently due to a logical conflict in the system's root layer.

"Fire! Sever his physical connection!" the fake Old Chen shrieked, his raspy voice tearing completely to reveal pure, grating mechanical static.

A dozen thick, blue electrical arcs tore through the air like vipers, lunging straight for me. In that split second of imminent death, Lu Yan, whose entire body was still glitching with electronic snow, moved. She didn't dodge; instead, she executed a brutally ruthless maneuver—she reversed her grip and jammed the pulse crowbar directly into the neural port at the back of her own neck!

Sparks exploded. Lu Yan let out a muffled, agonizing groan as she forcibly severed her body's hacked bionic network. Her eyes rolled back for a fraction of a second, but then her auxiliary combat core booted up. Her dark pupils refocused, freezing over with an absolute absence of human emotion.

She blurred into a silhouette, drawing a high-frequency vibro-blade from her outer thigh. The blade shattered the two leading electrical arcs. Using the momentum, she launched herself into the air, driving her knee brutally into the fake Old Chen's chest. With a harrowing shriek of parting air, the vibro-blade pierced straight up through his jaw, pinning him dead to the metal pillar behind him.

No blood spilled. From the fake Old Chen's wound poured a thick, viscous black nano-sludge that looked like corrupted mercury. "Yun Feng..." The fake Old Chen's jaw was impaled, but his vocal projector still emitted a blood-curdling laugh against the pillar. "Did you really think... she was saving you?"

Simultaneously, the formatting countdown in my mind locked up at the exact moment it hit [2]. The Hell's Eye feedback loop had worked. The colossal "inverted flesh-ball" in the center of the hall began to convulse violently. Countless optical fibers snapped, thrashing wildly in the air like decapitated pythons as the hub crashed into total paralysis.

The surrounding cloned soldiers in hazmat suits collapsed stiffly to the ground like unplugged toys, melting into puddles of putrid black waste fluid.

"Thank god! Yun Feng, you did it!" The real Old Chen scrambled up from the deck, stumbling toward me with the sheer, unadulterated ecstasy of having survived painted across his withered face.

"Stay back!" I yanked my hand free from the socket, panting heavily as I turned my head. However, the sight before me turned my blood to absolute ice.

Lu Yan slowly pulled the vibro-blade from the fake Old Chen's corpse. She turned around. The electronic snow-screen on her arm was completely gone, replaced by a layer of pitch-black scales resembling a synthetic exoskeleton. She stepped over the wreckage, slowly raising the tip of her vibrating blade until it pointed directly at the space between my eyes.

Her pupils pulsed with the dead, crimson light unique to a cold-blooded hitman, her voice mechanical and hollow:

"System reboot complete. Sleeper protocol disengaged. Target: Yun Feng. Executing termination."

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Author's Note: This serial novel is 100% original content written by me. It was initially drafted in Chinese and then manually translated into English. I strictly stay away from AI-generated creative writing. Thank you for supporting genuine human creators!