The warehouse is silent, save for the hum of fluorescent lights.

Light sits confidently at the table, pen poised, Death Note open. Across from him, L crouches, as inscrutable as ever.

Light (thinking):
>This is it. He’s cornered. With regex, I don’t need his real name. All I need is a pattern... and I’ve already prepared one.

He begins to write:

/L(awliet)?/

A smug grin creeps across his face.

But L speaks, cutting through the silence:
>“Interesting. You think I’d reveal my identity so carelessly? You misunderstand regex, Light. Patterns are only as reliable as the data they’re matched against.”

Light freezes for half a second.

L:
>“You assumed my name fits into a pattern you could guess. But names are arbitrary strings. I made sure mine was encoded, scrambled, and legally changed multiple times. To the Death Note, I don’t exist as L Lawliet anymore. I exist as… something else.”

L slides a document across the table: a court record, showing his current legal name:

/_DeletedUser\d{6}_/

Light’s eyes widen. The name is practically regex-proof, a random machine-generated handle.

Light (thinking):
>No… it can’t be. Did he anticipate this from the start?