Limbus RE:CODE

Duel in Neon (1)

Rivals clash, but who will remember the pain?

The rain starts at midnight, and with it comes Kaito.

Swan is walking the back alleys behind the Engineering Complex—the routes that don't appear on campus maps, where delivery drones dump their corrupted packages and graffiti artists tag walls with AR signatures that only code-sight can read. He's looking for somewhere dry to spend the night, somewhere the surveillance grid has blind spots, somewhere he can exist without editing himself out of every passing camera.

He doesn't hear Kaito approach. Doesn't sense the danger until a voice cuts through the sound of rain on pavement.

"I've been looking for you."

Swan spins. His heart rate spikes immediately—adrenaline flooding his system, code-sight threatening to activate on pure instinct.

Kaito stands ten meters away, backlit by the neon glow of a malfunctioning advertisement display. The cycling colors paint him in strobing reds and blues and sickly greens—a figure caught between light sources, cast in multiple shadows that don't quite align. He's changed since the combat arena. No longer wearing the pristine tactical gear. Now it's street clothes, practical, dark, designed for movement. But his neural interface still glimmers at his temple, and Swan can see the faint outline of something strapped to his back.

A weapon. Real or simulated, Swan can't tell from this distance.

"I don't want trouble," Swan says, backing up. His foot splashes in a puddle—neon light refracting through dirty water, creating patterns that hurt to look at directly.

"Too late for that." Kaito takes a step forward. "You've been trouble since the moment you glitched that drone in the adjudicator's chamber. Since you bent time in the combat arena. Since you started leaving corruption trails everywhere you go like a virus spreading through the Institute's infrastructure."

"How did you—"

"Track you?" Kaito's smile is sharp. "You're not as invisible as you think. Your erasure left scars. Data inconsistencies, memory gaps, system logs that reference a student ID that doesn't exist. I just had to follow the holes in reality until I found what was making them."

He unslings the weapon from his back. It's a bokken—a wooden practice sword, traditional, elegant, deadly in the right hands. Kaito's grip suggests these are very much the right hands.

"I'm not going to fight you," Swan says.

"Yes, you are." Kaito shifts into a ready stance—weight balanced, blade held at perfect angle, every muscle coiled with trained precision. "Because I need to understand what you are. And the best way to understand something is to see how it breaks under pressure."

The rain intensifies. Water streams down Swan's face, plastering his hair to his skull. The alley around them is a canyon of concrete and flickering neon, puddles reflecting fragmented advertisements for products that don't exist, services that were discontinued, dreams the city has forgotten.

"I'm not a 'something,'" Swan says. "I'm a person."

"Are you?" Kaito's neural interface pulses. Swan sees data streaming across his vision—biometric readings, threat assessment algorithms, combat prediction matrices. "Because according to every database, every record, every official system, you don't exist. You're a ghost in the machine. An error. A null reference walking around pretending to be human."

The words sting precisely because they're true.

"And that offends you?" Swan asks. "That I exist outside your precious systems?"

"It fascinates me." Kaito takes another step forward, closing distance. "The system is supposed to be absolute. Ordered. Predictable. But you... you're chaos. Pure, walking chaos. You break rules I didn't even know existed. And I need to know if that makes you dangerous or if it makes you necessary."

"So what, you're going to beat the answer out of me?"

"I'm going to push you until you show me what you really are." Kaito's stance shifts. "And then I'm going to decide whether to report you to Institute security or help you disappear properly."

He moves.

Fast. So fast that Swan's untrained eyes barely track the motion. The bokken cuts through rain-thick air, water droplets scattering in its wake like a liquid contrail. Swan throws himself sideways—pure panic, no technique—and feels the wooden blade pass close enough to displace air against his cheek.

He stumbles, catches himself against a wall. His code-sight flares involuntarily, and suddenly the alley is overlaid with data streams. He sees Kaito's movements rendered as physics calculations, sees the bokken's trajectory mapped in real-time, sees his own biorhythm monitor spiking into dangerous territory.

"Don't just dodge," Kaito calls out, already repositioning for another strike. "Fight back. Show me what you can do."

"I don't want to hurt you!"

"Then you're going to lose."

The second strike comes low—a sweep aimed at Swan's legs. This time Swan doesn't dodge. Can't dodge. His body is too slow, too untrained, too human to match Kaito's neural-enhanced combat reflexes.

But his code-manipulation isn't.

Swan reaches into the substrate layer. Finds the puddle he's standing in—water and pavement and reflected neon light. Changes its friction coefficient. Just slightly. Just enough.

Kaito's strike connects, but instead of sweeping Swan's legs, the bokken glides across the suddenly frictionless surface like a blade on ice. Kaito's balance falters for just a fraction of a second.

Swan runs.

He makes it five meters before Kaito recovers and gives chase. The alley narrows ahead, becomes a corridor of dumpsters and emergency exits and forgotten infrastructure. Swan's lungs burn. His legs ache. He's not built for this—not built for running, fighting, surviving through physical prowess.

But he doesn't need to be.

A fire escape ladder hangs overhead, rusted, probably non-functional. Swan looks at it with code-sight. Sees the structural integrity calculations, the weight limits, the probability of failure. Reaches out and changes one value.

The ladder drops.

Right into Kaito's path.

Kaito slides under it without breaking stride—pure reflex, perfect execution—but it buys Swan three seconds. Three seconds to round a corner, to find cover behind a dumpster that smells like corruption and organic decay.

His code-sight is still active, the world refusing to resolve back into normal perception. Swan sees the alley as a maze of light and shadow and processing power. Sees the neon signs as display functions wrapped around electrical current. Sees the rain as water molecules obeying gravity simulations.

And sees Kaito as something more complex. More dangerous.

The neural interface isn't just feeding him combat data. It's recording everything. Every movement Swan makes, every anomaly, every moment of code manipulation. Kaito's entire body is a walking sensor array, logging the impossible for later analysis.

"Clever," Kaito's voice echoes from somewhere close. "But you can't hide from someone who's tracking data corruption. You leave a signature, Swan. A wake in the substrate. I can follow it like footprints in fresh snow."

Swan presses against the dumpster, heart hammering. His headache is building—the cost of sustained code-sight, sustained manipulation. He can't keep this up much longer.

"Why are you doing this?" he calls out. "What do you want from me?"

"The truth." Kaito appears at the alley's end, silhouetted against cycling neon. "The system told me you don't exist. But systems lie sometimes, don't they? Get corrupted. Make errors. I need to know if you're an error that needs fixing or an evolution that needs protecting."

"And beating me up will tell you which?"

"Observing how you fight will tell me what you're capable of. What you're willing to do. Whether you use your power to destroy or to survive." Kaito raises his bokken. "So far, you've only run and dodged. Defensive manipulations. Small edits. You're scared of your own abilities, and that makes you less dangerous. But also more vulnerable."

He's right. Swan knows he's right. Every instinct screams at him to stay small, stay invisible, use his powers minimally. Because every manipulation is a risk. Every edit could spiral out of control, could corrupt reality beyond repair, could transform him into the very thing the system is designed to eliminate.

But defensive won't win this fight.

Swan steps out from behind the dumpster. Faces Kaito directly. His hands shake, but his voice is steady.

"You want to see what I can do? Fine. But don't blame me when you don't like the answer."

Kaito's expression shifts—surprise mixing with something that might be respect.

"Show me."

And Swan is about to show him something that will change everything between them. Something that will prove he's not just running from the system—he's transcending it.