Limbus RE:CODE

Unranked Anomaly (2)

Elara finds Swan twenty minutes later, sitting on a bench in the campus gardens where holographic cherry blossoms bloom year-round. She's carrying her usual arsenal: the blood-stained notebook, a digital camera that looks vintage even though it's brand new, and a portable audio recorder that dangles from her wrist on a strap.

"You're still here," she says, and Swan can't tell if it's relief or surprise in her voice.

"Where else would I go?"

"Nowhere. Everywhere. The system is getting aggressive with erasures." She sits beside him, close enough that their shoulders touch. Swan feels her presence like an anchor, gravity pulling him back toward reality. "I lost you for three hours this morning. Couldn't remember your face. Checked my notebook and saw the entry from yesterday, but the words... they kept shifting. Changing. Like the system was trying to overwrite my external memories too."

She holds up the camera. "That's why I brought this. Physical media. Harder to corrupt than digital files."

"You want to take my picture?"

"I want to prove you exist." Elara's voice cracks on the last word. "Every time I close my eyes, I forget what you look like. I have to check my bracelets to remember your name. It's getting worse, Swan. The Anchor effect is fighting the erasure protocols, and my brain is the battlefield."

Swan sees the evidence in her eyes—red-rimmed, exhausted, flickering less today but at a terrible cost. She's bleeding from her nose again, a thin trail she hasn't noticed yet.

He reaches out, wipes the blood away with his thumb. Elara flinches, then leans into the touch.

"Take the picture," Swan says quietly.

She raises the camera. Clicks. The flash is bright, artificial, preserving a moment that reality is trying to delete. She takes another. And another. Different angles, different lighting, building a redundant archive of proof.

"Now talk," she says, activating the audio recorder. "Tell me who you are. Everything you remember. Your full name, your birthday, your favorite food. All the details that make you real."

"Swan..." He hesitates. His last name should come automatically, but when he reaches for it, there's only absence. Like trying to remember a dream five minutes after waking. "I don't... I can't remember my last name."

Elara's hand tightens on the recorder. "What else?"

"My birthday. I know I have one. I know I've celebrated twenty of them. But I can't—the date is just—" Panic rises in his throat. "Elara, I can't remember when I was born."

"It's okay. It's okay." But her voice shakes. "What can you remember?"

Swan closes his eyes. Reaches for solid memories. "Kai. My best friend since middle school. We used to—we would—" The details slip away like water through cupped hands. "He doesn't remember me now. Nobody does except you."

"What about your parents?"

The question hits like a physical blow. Swan tries to picture his parents' faces. Tries to remember their voices, their names, any single concrete detail about the people who raised him.

Nothing.

Not absence. Not amnesia. Just... nothing. Like the concept of parents exists, but his specific parents never did.

"They're gone," he whispers. "Not dead. Not absent. Just... erased. Retroactively. The system is deleting my entire history."

Elara sets down the recorder with shaking hands. Opens her notebook to a fresh page and starts writing frantically, pen pressing hard enough to tear the paper.

"Then we anchor you here. Now. In this moment." She writes as she talks, each word a desperate act of preservation. "Swan. Male. Approximately twenty years old. Third-year student at Blackwood Institute, major unknown due to record corruption. Recoded individual with reality manipulation abilities. First manifested code-sight during Daemon incursion on October 7th. Currently experiencing retroactive erasure of personal history."

She looks up. "What's your favorite color?"

"What?"

"Your favorite color. Tell me something small. Something that can't be erased because it's too insignificant for the system to care about."

Swan thinks. "Blue. Dark blue. Like the sky right before it gets completely dark."

Elara writes it down. "Favorite food?"

"I don't know anymore. But I remember I used to hate mushrooms. Texture thing."

She writes that too. "Fears?"

"Being forgotten." The words come out raw, honest. "Being alone."

"You're not alone." Elara's hand finds his. Her fingers are cold, trembling. "I'm here. I'm remembering you. And as long as I keep documenting, keep recording, you'll have proof that you existed. Even if everything else gets deleted."

Swan looks at her notebook—pages and pages of cramped handwriting, bloodstains, desperate attempts to hold onto truth in a world that rewrites itself. At her camera, building a redundant archive of his face. At the audio recorder preserving his voice.

"What if they erase you too?" he asks. "What if documenting me makes you more anomalous? More likely to be debugged?"

"Then someone else will remember." Elara's voice is fierce despite the fear in her eyes. "Ash. Cipher. Others we haven't met yet. The Recoded take care of each other. That's how we survive."

She raises the camera again. "Once more. Look at me. Let me see you."

Swan meets her gaze as the shutter clicks. For one moment, preserved in silver halide crystals and chemical reactions, he exists. Undeniably. Provably. Real.

His stomach growls. The hunger has moved beyond physical discomfort into something more existential—a gnawing emptiness that food wouldn't solve anyway.

"Here." Elara pulls a protein bar from her bag. "I brought extra. Figured you wouldn't be able to access meal services."

"You thought of everything."

"I have to." She presses the bar into his hand. "My brain doesn't work like other people's anymore. I think in contingencies and redundancies. Every possibility branching off into probability trees. It's exhausting. But right now, it's keeping you alive."

Swan tears open the wrapper. The protein bar tastes like cardboard and artificial sweetener, but his body accepts it gratefully. Physical proof that he still has basic needs. Still exists in corporeal form.

"What happened in the combat lab?" Elara asks. "I felt something. A ripple in the substrate. Time dilation, maybe?"

"I slowed down time," Swan admits. "Or I sped myself up. I don't know the difference. I just didn't want to get hit, and suddenly I could see the gaps between moments."

Elara's eyes widen. "That's... that's advanced Recoding. Most of us can manipulate small objects, maybe glitch a system or two. But affecting time itself—"

"I didn't mean to. It just happened."

"That's even more impressive. And more dangerous." She lowers her voice. "Someone noticed, Swan. Someone always notices when reality bends. The system will log it, analyze it, send something to investigate."

"Someone already noticed." Swan thinks about Kaito's expression. The determination in his eyes. "The guy I was fighting. Kaito something. He knows I did something impossible, and he's not the type to let mysteries go unsolved."

"Kaito Nakamura." Elara's face goes pale. "Oh no. Oh, Swan, that's bad."

"Why?"

"Because Kaito isn't just a combat student. He's a research assistant in the Cognitive Warfare department. He has access to Institute security systems, combat analytics, anomaly detection algorithms. If anyone can track down an unregistered Recoded individual, it's him."

Swan feels the weight of that knowledge settle in his chest. Another threat added to the growing list. The system's cleanup protocols. Shadow-puppeted humans. Daemon rifts. And now an intelligent, determined rival who's decided Swan is worth investigating.

"I need to get better at this," Swan says. "The Recoding. If I'm going to survive, I need to learn control. Not just panic-responses and desperate instinct."

"Agreed." Elara pulls out her tablet. "I've been researching. The dark nets have rumors about training methods. Visualization techniques. Ways to interface with the code-layer more deliberately. It's dangerous—pushing your Recoding too hard can cause feedback loops, system rejection, even permanent dissociation from consensus reality. But staying passive is more dangerous."

She meets his eyes. "Are you willing to risk it?"

Swan thinks about Kai's empty stare. His vanished dorm room. His deleted parents who maybe never existed. His entire life being systematically erased while he watches.

"What do I have left to lose?"

"Your sanity," Elara says bluntly. "Your physical form. Your last connections to humanity. Just because you're already partially erased doesn't mean you can't fall further."

"But I could also get stronger. Learn to fight back. Maybe even figure out how to un-erase myself."

"Maybe." Elara doesn't sound convinced. "Or maybe you'll discover that once you're deleted, there's no restore function. No undo command. Just acceptance and survival in whatever form you can manage."

Swan looks at his hands. Imagines he can still see traces of code clinging to his fingers from when he touched time itself.

"Tomorrow," he says. "We start training tomorrow. At Static Grounds, where reality is already flexible."

"Tomorrow," Elara agrees. She raises the camera one last time. "But right now, let me take one more picture. Insurance."

The shutter clicks.

In the captured image: a boy who exists in defiance of deletion. A girl who remembers everything and suffers for it. Two anomalies holding onto each other in a world that wants them gone.

Later, Elara will add the photo to her archive. Will write the date and time on the back in permanent marker. Will store it in three separate locations—physical locker, encrypted cloud backup, hidden folder in the static-space servers that the Recoded maintain.

Later, someone will try to delete it. The system will flag it as corrupted data. The image will glitch, degrade, fragment.

But it won't disappear entirely.

Because some truths are too stubbornly documented to erase cleanly.

And some people refuse to be forgotten.