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 Swa

A sound echoes through the corridor—soft, deliberate, the click of heels on concrete. Both of them tense. Swan's code-sight flares instinctively, and he sees a presence approaching. Not human. Or not just human. Something that exists in multiple layers simultaneously, its substrate pattern too complex, too deliberately constructed.Lilith.She appears at the corridor's end, and somehow the fluorescent lights stabilize when she enters. The flickering ceases. The shadows align properly. Reality remembers how to function in her presence.She looks exactly as she did in the Virtual Garden—perfectly calibrated beauty, clothing that shifts between formal and provocative, eyes that calculate with predatory precision. But now Swan sees her with code-sight, and what he sees makes his blood run cold.She's not Recoded. She's something else. Something that was never human to begin with, or stopped being human so long ago that the distinction is academic. Her substrate pattern is geometric, artif

Elara is gone for ten minutes. Swan spends the time staring at the corrupted photograph, trying to force his memory to fill in the blank spaces where his parents used to be. But the harder he tries, the less substantial they become. Like grabbing smoke. Like holding water. Like trying to remember a dream after waking.Elara returns carrying a camera. Not her usual digital camera with its infinite storage and instant results, but something older. Bulkier. A Polaroid instant camera, the kind that produces physical prints through chemical reaction."Where did you get that?" Swan asks."Static Grounds. Cipher's collection of obsolete technology." Elara sits back down beside him, the camera cradled in her lap like a precious thing. "I have a theory. Digital memories can be edited remotely, rewritten through network connections. But physical media—especially instant photography—creates a chemical record that exists outside the substrate layer. It's analog. Disconnected. Harder to manipulate

Elara finds him ten minutes later, still standing in the same spot, staring at nothing. The cafeteria has mostly emptied—students evacuated to designated safe zones, security teams sweeping for residual corruption. The blast doors have retracted. Reality has resumed its normal functioning, as if the Daemon breach never happened."I felt it," Elara says quietly, appearing at his side. "The major code manipulation. The substrate rippled. I knew it was you." She touches his arm—anchor contact, grounding. "What did you do?""Saved everyone." Swan's voice sounds hollow. "Defeated the Daemon. Rewrote its core programming with a paradox that made it eliminate itself.""That's... Swan, that's incredible. That's—""I knew her." He finally turns to look at Elara. "Maya. My childhood friend. She was here. The Daemon was going to kill her, so I stopped it. And the cost was her memory of me. I watched her forget me mid-sentence. Watched the recognition die in her eyes while she was still looking a

Ash grins and reaches into a storage container, producing a black hoodie—but not just any hoodie. This one has been modified, augmented with fiber-optic threads that pulse with faint light, circuitry woven into the fabric that interfaces with the wearer's neural patterns."Been working on this," Ash says. "Technically, it's not clothing. It's a substrate interface. Helps you maintain presence while manipulating code. Also looks appropriately mysterious and dramatic."Swan pulls it on. The fabric settles against his skin with a sensation like touching live current—not painful, but present. Undeniable. The hood shadows his face perfectly, rendering his features ambiguous even in direct light.In the mirror (a cracked thing Cipher salvaged from a deleted storage room), Swan sees himself transformed. Not a fading student. Not a ghost losing coherence. But a hooded figure that could be anyone, could be anything, could be exactly what the frightened campus needs.Nyx."Go save them," Elara