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."
They close the distance simultaneously. Kaito's bokken cuts through rain and neon-light, a perfect diagonal strike aimed at Swan's shoulder. Non-lethal, controlled, designed to disable rather than destroy.
Swan doesn't try to block. Doesn't try to dodge.
Instead, he looks at the space between them. The air itself. The rain drops suspended in fall. The photons from the neon signs painting everything in fractured color.
And he finds the seam.
Reality has boundaries. Transition points. Places where one processing cycle ends and another begins. Swan has felt them before—the stutters, the glitches, the moments when the world takes a breath between calculations.
He finds one now. A hairline fracture in causality. The space between cause and effect.
And he slips through it.
Time doesn't stop. Distance doesn't change. But for one impossible moment, Swan exists in the gap between frames. In the processing delay. In the void where reality compiles itself.
Kaito's strike passes through space Swan occupied a nanosecond ago. Through space Swan no longer occupies because he's shifted himself sideways through a dimension that has no name. Through the crack in reality.
Swan emerges three meters to the left. His entire body vibrates with wrongness—like every cell is screaming that what just happened violates fundamental laws. His headache explodes into blinding agony. His vision doubles, triples, fragments into overlapping layers that refuse to resolve.
But he's untouched.
Kaito spins, his neural interface sparking with data overflow. His biorhythm monitor—visible as a faint holographic display above his wrist—spikes into the red. Heart rate elevated. Adrenaline surging. Confusion protocols activating.
"What the hell—" He stares at Swan like he's seeing a ghost. Seeing something that breaks his understanding of possible. "You didn't teleport. You didn't move faster. You just—you weren't there. Like you stepped outside of time."
"I don't know what I did." Swan's voice is raw. His legs threaten to give out. "I just didn't want to get hit."
The rain continues to fall. Neon light cycles through its programmed sequence. Somewhere in the distance, a security drone patrols, oblivious to the confrontation happening in its blind spot.
Kaito lowers his bokken slowly. His expression cycles through emotions too fast to track—shock, fear, calculation, and finally, something that might be awe.
"You're not just Recoded," he says quietly. "You're something else entirely. Something new."
"I'm just trying to survive."
"No." Kaito shakes his head. "Survival would be hiding. Running. Accepting erasure. You're resisting. Fighting the system itself. That's revolution, not survival."
He sheathes the bokken. The gesture feels significant, ceremonial. A warrior acknowledging a worthy opponent.
"I should report you," Kaito says. "Everything I've recorded tonight is grounds for immediate containment. Daemon protocols. Memory wipes. Possibly termination if you're deemed too dangerous."
Swan's breath catches. "But?"
"But I'm not going to." Kaito touches his neural interface. Swan watches through code-sight as Kaito deliberately corrupts his own recording. Overwrites the data with noise. Erases the evidence of everything he's witnessed. "Because you're right. You're not a 'something.' You're a person. And what's happening to you isn't justice. It's systematic erasure of anything that doesn't fit the approved parameters."
He meets Swan's eyes. "I don't know if that makes the system wrong or if it makes you dangerous. But I know I need more data before I make that call."
"So what now?"
"Now I walk away. Pretend this didn't happen. Let you continue existing in whatever liminal space you've carved out for yourself." Kaito starts backing toward the alley's exit. "But Swan? Next time we meet, I'm going to have questions. Real questions. And I expect real answers. Not just demonstrations of impossible abilities, but actual truth about what you are and what you want."
"Why do you care?"
"Because the system I've dedicated my life to learning is broken if it can erase people on a whim. And I need to know if you're evidence of that brokenness or if you're the cause of it."
Kaito disappears around the corner. His footsteps fade into the white noise of rain and traffic and urban existence. Swan is left alone in the alley, standing in neon-lit puddles, his entire body shaking from adrenaline crash and code-manipulation feedback.
He collapses against the wall. Slides down until he's sitting in the dirty water. Lets the rain wash over him while his headache slowly, agonizingly, recedes from critical to merely terrible.
His phone buzzes. A message from Elara: Where are you? I lost your pattern twenty minutes ago. Worried.
Swan types back with trembling fingers: I'm okay. Had a visitor. Kaito found me.
Three dots appear immediately. Then: And???
He let me go. Deleted his own surveillance data.
WHAT. That's. That's significant, Swan. Kaito is Institute security adjacent. If he's choosing not to report you...
I don't know what it means either.
Come to Static Grounds. We need to talk about this. All of us.
Swan pushes himself to his feet. His legs protest. His head throbs. Every cell in his body wants to collapse and sleep for a week.
But he starts walking. Toward Static Grounds. Toward the Recoded. Toward the only people who remember he exists.
Behind him, in the puddle where he sat, neon light reflects in patterns that shouldn't be possible. Colors that don't exist in the standard spectrum. Evidence of his presence, his resistance, his refusal to be deleted quietly.
The rain tries to wash it away.
It fails.
Some stains go deeper than water can reach.
[END OF CHAPTER]