Limbus RE:CODE

The Watcher's Offer (1)

Seduction isn't always sexual. Sometimes it's the promise of being seen.

The Virtual Garden exists in the space between physical and digital—a campus sanctuary where holographic flora intertwines with living plants, where reality and simulation blur so completely that even the air can't decide which state it prefers. Swan discovers it by accident, following a glitched campus map that leads him through a service corridor that shouldn't exist and into a greenhouse that registers on no official blueprint.

Inside, the humidity is thick enough to taste. Circuit-vines crawl up transparent walls, their leaves flickering between organic green and phosphorescent blue. Flowers bloom with petals made of light-responsive polymers, opening and closing in response to data streams rather than sunlight. The ground is soft moss interwoven with fiber-optic threads that pulse gently beneath his feet, like walking on a living heartbeat.

Swan comes here because surveillance drones can't parse the space properly. The overlapping layers of real and unreal confuse their sensors, create blind spots in the Institute's otherwise omniscient monitoring grid. For someone who's supposed to be invisible, it's the perfect hiding place.

He's been practicing.

Small things, like Ash suggested. Seeing the code-layer, touching it, making minor adjustments. Yesterday he managed to change the color of a holographic flower from red to blue. This morning he convinced a malfunctioning sprinkler system that it had already completed its watering cycle. Baby steps toward control.

Now he sits on a bench made of living wood and crystallized data, trying to see past the physical layer into the substrate beneath. The garden peels back reluctantly—reality here is stubborn, reinforced by the competing systems that maintain it. But slowly, patiently, Swan's perception shifts.

Code emerges like constellations. The circuit-vines are growth algorithms rendered in chlorophyll and copper. The flowers are display functions wrapped in biological matter. Even the air is programmable—temperature, humidity, oxygen levels all governed by elegant loops of environmental control.

And something else.

Someone else.

Swan's code-sight catches movement that doesn't belong to the garden's autonomous systems. A presence watching him, its pattern too complex to be automated, too focused to be ambient. His perception snaps back to normal vision, heart rate spiking.

She's standing three meters away, and Swan has no idea how long she's been there.

The woman is beautiful in a way that feels dangerous—not because of any individual feature, but because of how precisely calibrated everything is. Dark hair that falls in waves too perfect to be natural, styled with the kind of deliberate effortlessness that takes hours. Clothing that shifts between professional and provocative depending on the angle: a blazer that could be boardroom appropriate, a skirt that could be club-ready, accessories that catch light like liquid mercury.

But it's her eyes that hold Swan's attention. They don't flicker like Elara's. They calculate. Processing him with an intensity that makes him feel like a problem being solved in real-time.

"You're getting better," she says. Her voice is smooth, modulated, with an accent Swan can't quite place. "Yesterday you could barely hold the perception shift for thirty seconds. Today you maintained it for almost three minutes before I disrupted you."

Swan stands, muscles tensing for flight. "Who are you?"

"Lilith." She takes a step closer, and Swan notices her heels click against the moss-fiber floor with crisp precision. "And you're Swan. The boy who doesn't exist but refuses to stop existing. Quite the paradox."

"How do you know my name?"

"I know everything that happens in this Institute." Lilith's smile is subtle, controlled. "Every system breach, every anomaly flag, every desperate act of reality manipulation by frightened students who've discovered they can see the code. You're not as invisible as you think, Swan. You're just invisible to the right people."

She gestures at the bench. An invitation, not a command. Swan doesn't sit.

"What do you want?"

"The same thing you want. Understanding. Control. Survival." Lilith moves past him, trailing her fingers along a circuit-vine. Where she touches, the vine's patterns reorganize, shifting from chaotic growth to geometric precision. "You've been stumbling through your Recoding like a blind person learning to walk. Impressive that you've survived this long, honestly. Most erasure victims don't make it past forty-eight hours."

"I'm not a victim."

"No?" She turns to face him, one eyebrow raised. "Your student ID is nullified. Your dorm room occupied by a stranger. Your best friend doesn't remember your name. Your parents—assuming you can still remember having parents—have been retroactively deleted from history. What would you call that if not victimhood?"

The words hit like carefully placed knives. Swan forces his voice steady. "I call it a problem I'm going to solve."

"There's that defiance." Lilith's smile widens fractionally. "That's what makes you interesting, Swan. Most glitched individuals either break or hide. You're trying to fight. It's admirable. Doomed, probably. But admirable."

She produces a data pad from seemingly nowhere—one moment her hands are empty, the next she's holding a sleek tablet that gleams with an oily iridescence. She taps the surface, and holographic displays unfold into the air between them.

Swan sees security footage. Multiple angles, multiple timestamps. Himself in the adjudicator's chamber, freezing the drone mid-flight. Himself in the combat arena, bending time around Kaito's attack. Himself in various locations across campus, leaving corruption trails that shimmer like wounds in reality.

"The system flags you as a Class-Three anomaly," Lilith says, scrolling through the data with casual expertise. "Significant reality deviation, high probability of cascade corruption, recommended response: immediate termination. Daemon protocols have been authorized. Cleanup crews are being assembled. You have, at most, seventy-two hours before something very unpleasant comes looking for you."

Swan's mouth goes dry. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because I'm offering you an alternative." Lilith dismisses the holographics with a gesture. "The Institute sees you as a bug to be debugged. I see you as a feature to be cultivated. Your Recoding ability is raw, yes. Uncontrolled, dangerous, leaving corruption everywhere you touch. But with proper training, proper guidance, you could be something remarkable."

"What kind of guidance?"

"The kind that keeps you alive. The kind that teaches you to manipulate reality without tearing holes in it. The kind that shows you how to exist outside the system without being hunted by it." She takes another step closer. Swan can smell her perfume now—something digital, impossible, like vanilla and ozone and data compression. "I can teach you to be a ghost with a legend, Swan. Not a forgotten error, but a story people whisper about. Powerful. Controlled. Free."

There's something hypnotic about her voice, her presence. Swan feels his resistance wavering, drawn in by the promise of understanding, of not being alone in this nightmare.

"Why would you help me?"

"Because talent is rare, and wasted talent is a tragedy." Lilith reaches out, and before Swan can flinch away, her finger traces a line down his cheek. Her touch is cold, electrical, leaving a tingling numbness in its wake. "Because you interest me. Because I collect interesting things."

She pulls her hand back. On her fingertip, Swan sees his own code—fragments of his substrate identity clinging to her skin like phosphorescent dust. She examines it with clinical fascination before brushing it away.

"The cost of Recoding doesn't have to be agony," she continues. "Elara suffers because she doesn't know how to manage the contradictions. She lets them pile up, stack, fracture her perception. You're heading down the same path—losing memories, losing history, losing yourself piece by piece. But it doesn't have to be that way."

"You can stop the erasure?"

"I can teach you to control it. Direct it. Erase the parts of yourself you don't need, keep the parts that matter. Become something new instead of being deleted entirely." Her eyes gleam. "What's a ghost without a legend, Swan? Nothing. Just static in the void. But with the right story, the right presence, you could haunt this Institute for years. They'd know your name even if they can't find your records."

It sounds too good. Too easy. Every instinct Swan has developed over the past forty-eight hours screams warning.

"What would you want in return?"

"Small things. Information. Access. Occasionally your unique perspective on certain problems." Lilith waves her hand dismissively, as if the price is negligible. "Nothing you'd miss. Nothing that would compromise your precious independence."

She sets her data pad on the bench. As she does, Swan notices a lipstick mark on its edge—perfect, crimson, deliberate. She catches him looking and smiles.

"Consider it," she says. "You know where to find me. Everyone does, once they know to look."

"I didn't agree to anything."

"Not yet." Lilith turns to leave, her heels clicking precise rhythms against the moss-fiber floor. "But you will, eventually. They always do. The ones who survive long enough to realize they need help, anyway."

She pauses at the garden's entrance, looks back over her shoulder.

"One more thing, Swan. Your friend Elara? The Anchor girl with the bleeding nose and the stacked memories? She's dying. Slowly, yes. Gracefully, even. But the contradictions are eating her alive from the inside. Six months, maybe less, before her neural architecture collapses entirely." Lilith's expression is almost sympathetic. Almost. "Unless someone teaches her to manage it. To control the cost. Something to think about."

Then she's gone, leaving behind only the click-fade of her footsteps and that strange digital perfume lingering in the humid air.

Swan stands frozen, the weight of her final words crushing down on him. Elara dying. Six months. The girl who remembers him when no one else can, the only anchor keeping him tethered to reality—she's being consumed by the same system that's erasing him.

And Lilith dangled the solution right in front of him, wrapped in promises and invisible chains. Swan stares at the dead data pad on the bench, at the perfect crimson lipstick mark, and feels the trap closing around him even though he never agreed to anything.

The question isn't whether he'll need her help.

It's whether he can afford to refuse it.