Another gate, another change. Neon figured that going from sterile confinement to open air should’ve been jarring, but after those punishing overhead panels, his eyes were practically thanking him for the relief this muted shade gave them. The rookie blinked as his pupils adjusted, dappled light filtering through what had to be the thickest canopy of leaves he’d ever witnessed in his life.
Which wasn’t really saying much, considering this kind of view was one he had only ever experienced through the synthetic light of a screen.
Towering trees stretched high and low around them, their trunks and exposed roots forming foundations more hermetic than entire city blocks from his hometown. Ferns unfurled like verdant umbrellas while vines spiraled upwards in lazy helixes. The wind itself felt different —humid, heavy, carrying earthy scents his nose couldn’t name. Beneath his cautious steps forward, the soil gave way under his feet like concrete never did. Authentic. Breathing.
In his world of stacked apartments and urban decay, nature only existed in wilted pocket parks crammed between corporate towers, or perhaps in rooftop gardens flaunted like jewelry in the upper districts. He’d seen them countless times, in every megacity he passed through while chasing for anything that kept him moving. But each of them wore that same gray mask. Everything was sanitized. Controlled. Suffocated by endless asphalt.
Nothing even remotely close to the wild abundance of this jungle. Every surface crawled with moss, painting the landscape in shades of greens that his city-trained eyes were not equipped to catalog. Midday sun carved golden streaks through the dense foliage, creating a dance that shifted with every heartbeat in the wind.
It was beautiful in a way that made his chest ache. He had expected utter nothingness in death, yet before him was something that felt more real than anything a city could offer in their chrome skyscrapers and shopping malls.
“Is this… Heaven after all?” The words escaped before Neon could catch them, wonder seeping through his voice as he surrounded himself with the impossible verdancy.
His partner appeared to have taken personal offense from such question.
“You’re not dead.” Nomine’s correction came out bluntly, as if Neon had somehow insulted his mother or something. It didn’t sound like he had any real concern for him, only defensive irritation. “Speak that way in front of me again and I’ll send you to the afterlife myself.”
Owa. Had Nomine just offered to show him heaven? Awfully bold now, wasn’t he? Neon’s lips twitched for a smile, but he raised his palms in mock surrender nonetheless. Teasing the edgelord wasn’t really a hill worth dying on.
A flicker of movement made Neon jump in surprise again. Behind them, the white lobby they had just stepped out of began to dissolve in a digital death throe. Walls stuttered like a corrupted video feed, pixels bleeding into static as the entire structure melted in streams of code. He stumbled away, watching reality smooth over the leftover gaps, as if deciding that this particular piece of architecture was no longer of any use.
“Because of course it does that…” Neon breathed in, watching the last fragments of their former prison disappear into the green background. The seamless erasure of it all made him feel uneasy.
He knew the technology already sort of existed, but never to this scope. More in the vein of rich folk paying premium to teleport a new luxury purchase. Not editing a damn fucking building like backspacing through a document.
Ah well. What else was new? By this point he might as well be a caveman gawking at fireworks.
His depleted mind was given no time to rest, yet another shift in the air pulling Neon’s attention back into more immediate concerns.
Unfazed by everything, Nomine extended his left hand as he began trailblazing his way into the jungle. The space around his fingers rippled briefly like a heat mirage, reality bending until it birthed a weapon from the techno-ether.
A katana, its blade so perfectly, absolutely black that it seemed to devour the sunlight instead of reflecting it. It had no crossguard to interrupt its clean angle, no decorative elements to soften its brutality. Just a flawless length of midnight steel that settled into Nomine’s grip like a missing puzzle piece returning home.
Neon’s interface sparked to life unbidden, eager to display the data crystallizing near the sharp edges of that dark blade.
[Skill: Black Metal Lvl 4]
Black is the code for tonight.
<>
The prompt hung there in his peripheral vision, patient and tempting. So this was an activated skill he could copy. One mental command and he would have his own version of that lethal elegance. A means to mirror some of Nomine’s casual deadliness with his own borrowed strength.
But… What good would it do him?
Neon had never held anything more dangerous than a kitchen knife, and even then, he’d managed to nick himself more than once whenever he tried to follow the fast slices of cooking tutorials. His fingers were more deft with game controllers. Perhaps keyboard and mouse. Not the unforgiving physics of a sword.
Meanwhile, Nomine held the blade like it was an extension of his nervous system. Perfectly balanced, utterly ready, completely at ease with its capacity for destruction.
Smarter would be to let the pro handle the sharp objects, and to keep himself the possibility of encountering another skill better suited to him. Because… There were other contestants scattered throughout this jungle, weren’t they?
His dread was cut short by Nomine’s voice, forcefully snapping him back to reality. Neon wondered if he’d ever get used to that.
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“175. Read me the rules.”
Such shameless attempt at dehumanization made his mind reel like in a car crash. Not Neon. Not partner, teammate, or even buddy. Just a number, as if he were some cumbersome key item hogging inventory space instead of a person standing a couple feet away.
Perhaps in a different timeline, Neon would have chosen to be agreeable. Swallow pride, let cruelty slide, and focus solely on their mutual survival.
But honestly? Fuck that.
This was his proverbial line in the sand. He wouldn’t let himself be reduced to a mere number in anyone’s machine, no matter how hard the world tried to.
“Neon.” His voice came out harsher than he had envisioned, but he made no attempt to soften it. A natural conclusion for when the grace he tried to give others was abused and depleted to this extent. “It’s Neon. I know you at least saw it on the monitor earlier.”
Tension stretched between them, crackling with the things left unsaid —like how he hadn’t even bothered to get the number right. Nomine acknowledged the standoff with little more than a brief flick of his eyes, and other gestures so small that they might as well have been more dismissal. Quickly, he returned to a vigilant scanning of their surroundings.
His katana remained at the ready, most likely ensuring that no opportunistic ambushers lurked near their deployment zone. Neon didn’t care though. The edgelord could very well be fending off a horde and he wouldn’t have ignored that level of disrespect.
In that loaded quiet, Neon finally noticed something that perhaps should’ve been obvious from the beginning. The jungle was dead silent.
If this place truly was the sanctuary of nature it pretended to be, there would have been birdsong threading down the canopy, small rodents rustling through the undergrowth, reptiles skittering across bark. But here? Not even the tiniest of insect buzzing reached his ears through the thick, humid air. Complete and utter silence, aside from their breathing and the soft whisper of leaves.
Getting disturbed would have to wait. More pressing was dealing with a partner who seemed to believe basic human decency was an option. In Nomine’s lack of response, Neon decided to insist.
“Apologize.” Was this a childish tantrum? Might be. An insidious part of Neon begged him to back down. The larger one held firm. “Otherwise you can go ahead and do your homework yourself.”
“Don’t think I need you to win.” Nomine replied begrudgingly, as if displaying annoyance would be enough to deter Neon’s resistance. “Follow my orders or I’ll leave you behind, 197.”
And he went and did it again, pettily wielding the numbers like they were a weapon. The carelessness of it all was what got to Neon’s guts the most. Was he not even worth the effort of an accurate cold shoulder?
“No. That won’t do.” His refusal came out unbudging and steady, fueled by a core of stubbornness he was incredibly good at reaching. “I’d rather face this alone than with someone who can’t give me even a little respect.”
>> “You’re not going to walk over me time and time again, 29.”
Neon hoped the role reversal might serve for something.
It was a naive expectation.
“Call me whatever you want. I really couldn’t care less.”
The response came wrapped with such flat indifference that it made Neon actually clench his jaw in vexation. How was it possible for someone to be this obtuse? It was like bashing his head against a glacier.
“Gosh, I swear… You’re like a petulant child.” Neon’s exasperated sigh couldn’t have been more genuine, coloured with the kind of frustration that came from trying to reason with someone that refused to listen. “What if I call you that, then? Brat. Fits you rather well.”
For the first time since they’d been thrust together, Neon witnessed Nomine’s composure crack. Nothing too stark —a compulsive twitch of his upper lip, his fingers tightening subtly on his weapon’s grip— but it was unmistakably there. He lowered his blade, tuning out their surroundings to give him a glare that had grown fiercer, somehow.
Had that finally managed to get under that thick skin of his?
“You say I’m the one who’s like a child? Don’t make me la—”
Nomine caught himself mid-sentence, perhaps realizing himself that he was no longer looking at Neon like he was a piece of furniture to measure. The shift seemed to have caught the veteran off-guard, at least until delivering a sigh of his own.
“Fine, I apologize.” His words were stilted, unpracticed. “I’ll probably keep doing it, though. Out of habit. It’s really nothing personal.”
“Kid.” Neon snorted before he could stop himself. It just wasn’t something he had the ability to control. The look in Nomine’s face was so genuinely bewildered, like he had just suffered the worst kind of betrayal, that it made it very, very difficult to bite back the grin.
He wanted so badly to tease him some more. The urge was almost overwhelming. But something in Nomine’s sudden stiffness made Neon feel a little mean. A flush had crept up his neck and ears, his eyes narrowing like those of a feral animal readying to bolt or to bite. It seemed wiser to refrain, considering he was probably close enough already to the edgelord’s sharp edges. And that probably wasn’t even much of a metaphor.
“Copied, understood, and forgiven.” Neon’s mood recovered with a whiplash that only he could sustain, warmth flooding back into his voice like sunlight through a cloudy sky. Confrontation faded away entirely, replaced by his usual easygoing brightness. “Was that really so painful?”
Nomine stared at him with strained disbelief, probably questioning himself if he had done the right thing after all. But it really wasn’t anything complex, or so Neon thought at least. He just had a base instinct of when to push, and when to let go. Didn’t mean that he ever stopped to think much about it.
Thinking was the real danger, after all.
“So let’s take a look at what we’re dealing with, then…”
Neon called upon his full interface, the translucent panels spreading in front of him in their soft blue glow. A neglected information panel sat in a corner with two unread notifications, and he quickly navigated his fingers towards it. Maybe he should’ve checked on them earlier, but—
The thought was interrupted by a sudden gurgling sound tearing from above, followed by a wet impact hissing sickeningly.
Something thick and viscous splattered across Nomine’s right shoulder, yellow-green bile streaming down his clothes and emitting steam on contact as it pulsed with a life of its own.
“Tsch.” Nomine’s reaction was an instant turn on his boots, transferring the weight of his katana to his untouched hand and immediately raising it in a defensive posture. “Look what your immature bickering brought us.”
Whatever offense or guilt that Neon could’ve felt at his remarks would have to wait. Not the time to feel now that the rancid stench was followed by menacing snaps from the jungle.
“I got ‘im, Rei! I got ‘im!”
Branches splintered as something charged through, coming at them fast. Too fast for Neon to think, much less to prepare. In its wake, all those rules and interface notifications couldn’t have felt less important.