They called it a drizzle. Kyoto called it a field test.
Ren was halfway through stance drills when the first corner went wrong—roofline on Kaji Lane sagging like a shrug, streetlight reflection bending a degree off true in the puddle.
"See it?" Alaudi asked.
Ren squinted. "The… tilt?"
"Good. Don't chase it with your eyes. Feel where your feet argue with the ground."
Ren blinked, steadied. "Left heel says the street is lying."
"Then the street is lying."
Hibird went quiet. Roll bristled, a violet thimble of spikes at Alaudi's boot.
The tilt spread soft as mold. Doors that had fit yesterday breathed open; a temple gutter decided it was slightly uphill to heaven. Not dramatic. The sort of wrong that stacks until people fall down stairs they've used for twenty years.
No alarms. No panics. Just the wrongness making itself comfortable.
Alaudi tapped the old offertory box with two fingertips.
"Sky," he murmured.
The Crown didn't flare. It threaded—thin lines across his ribs, the city diagram pricking in like pins. Drain to drain. Shrine gate to lamppost. Three new knots lit in a color he didn't like.
"Same bead signature?" Ren asked.
"Close." He handed Ren a folded map. "Mark the stubborn corners when I call them."
"Copy."
They moved. Past the fishmonger steaming mackerel at seven in the morning. Past a florist who had given up on umbrellas and stapled clear plastic to her awning with honest fury.
At the first knot—a tea warehouse built when ceilings were lower and men were shorter—the gravel under their soles hummed wrong. Alaudi crouched, set Roll down.
"Anchor," he said.
Roll bloomed from hedgehog to disk, spikes flattening, Cloud Flame running through him like a sewing machine. The air in the doorway sighed back into being ninety degrees.
"You're… stapling the world," Ren said, too awed to disguise it.
"Corners like to be corners," Alaudi said. "You remind them."
They hit the second knot by the canal where a railing had decided to be longer than the walkway. A kid's bicycle wobbled. Alaudi caught the handlebar before the tire learned to invent a new radius.
"Cool trick," the kid said, oblivious.
"Don't brag about it," Alaudi said, and nudged him toward gravity he trusted.
Ren marked, rain dotting the ink. Hibird used his head like a squeegee on the map edge and chirped in single, careful clicks: one corner cured, two corners breathing, third corner wants to be a circle.
They cut left.
The third knot sat behind a convenience store, in the thin concrete space where smokers pretend laws don't count if you're polite. A bead—fogged glass with geometry sickness—was glued under the eaves, wrapped in tape and a discount sticker like a joke.
Alaudi didn't touch it. He pressed Cloud into the wall, let the concrete admit what weight had pushed there last night.
"Same runner as the cranes," Ren said, reading his face.
"Supervisor this time," Alaudi said. "No curry. Cologne. Keys with a chip fob. He thinks this is clever." He considered the bead. "He's not wrong."
"How do we—"
"Gently." Alaudi let Mist brush the bead first—soft illusion of a stray cat nose, harmless attention. The bead calmed, expecting nothing predatory. Then Cloud slid in behind it like a hand between shirt and skin.
He turned the wrongness off. Not a break. Not a crush.
A refusal.
The bead cracked with a sound like a throat clearing and fell into his palm. He wrapped it in Ren's handkerchief and dropped it into the pocket that never held anything nice.
Ren exhaled.
"Good," Alaudi said. "Next."
They didn't get a next.
The tilt rolled back toward them from the east—deliberate now, not drift. Somebody noticed their audit and decided to lean.
"Tests hate being failed," Alaudi said.
"Is it them?" Ren asked. "Hero Faction?"
"Or their subcontractors." He tasted iron. "Either way, they'd like a small spectacle. Not enough to wake the dragons. Enough to make the news."
Ren looked toward the market. "A stall collapse would do it."
"Then we don't give them one."
He opened Sky wider.
Not a flare.
A layout.
No banners. No announcements—just the quiet grid you use when the city asks if you're serious.
Lines came in: gutter hum, vending-machine buzz, the breath under the bridge, the old copper line the power company forgot to pull fifteen years ago. The Crown traced them and waited for a decision.
Alaudi put two fingers to the pavement. "Guardian annex," he said, mostly to himself.
The Crown agreed.
Cloud spread thin, not to smother—just to make choices obvious. Corners brightened like cooperative animals. The wrongness lost places to hide.
Across the lane, the florist stopped swearing in mid-staple, staring at nothing. "Did the street… fix itself?"
"Drainage," Ren said brightly. "Temporary audit."
"Bless you," she said to whoever had done it.
The push from the east hesitated. Whoever was leaning expected panic, not resistance with a permit.
"Find me the hand," Alaudi said.
Ren shut his eyes, map held flat against his chest like a shoji. The boy didn't have flame yet—he had attention. He let it settle.
"There," he said, pointing without looking. "Cigarette machine alley. The one with the old sign."
"Good nose," Alaudi said. Hibird clicked once like a little gavel.
They moved.
The alley was a slice of damp with posters from three years ago slowly returning to pulp. A man in a cheap rain poncho stood with his back to them, phone up, watching corners splay and un-splay on the screen through some bootleg app that never should have made it out of a lab.
Alaudi didn't announce. He took the phone first.
The man spun, startled into honesty. Not a priest. Not a fighter. An office predator—good with invoices, mean with memos, soft where it counted. He'd used the beads like party poppers for a paycheck.
"Company policy," Alaudi said, pocketing the phone and the battery in separate places. "Leave."
The man swallowed. "You can't—"
"File a complaint," Alaudi said. "Use the form that asks if you attempted to fold a public right-of-way without permit."
The man made the mistake of letting his mouth speak before his brain, and a word that included "youkai" and "pet" came out shaped like culture.
Ren's stance changed by accident—knees bending, hands out, just enough to remind the alley that the boy had learned not to be a target.
Alaudi heard the old, bad rhythm in his blood: the one that fixed disrespect by removing problems.
He put it down.
"Walk," he said.
The man walked, knees making bad choices. He turned left toward where people might save him with uniforms. Alaudi let him. The lieutenant was already there, clipboard loaded, smile sharp. Paperwork would cut him cleaner than fists.
Ren watched him go. "You wanted to hit him."
"Every second word he's ever written is a bruise," Alaudi said. "Hitting him would be charity."
"Is restraint… Guardian policy?" Ren asked, careful.
"It's optional," Alaudi said. "I'm choosing it until I don't."
Ren nodded like that was both horrifying and comforting.
They backed the annex down street by street. Cloud thinned. Corners remembered themselves. The Crown folded its map with a neat mental click and slid it back into the drawer behind his ribs.
By afternoon, the rain decided it had said enough. The florist brought out a bucket with the decent chrysanthemums. Hibird demanded a petal and got one. Roll stole a rubber band and pretended it was treasure.
The lieutenant arrived with a bag of warm meat buns and news.
"Phones seized," she said. "Two more vans fined out of their profit margin. Yasaka-sama says, 'Well done,' and also, 'Stop doing my job better than me in front of my staff.'"
Alaudi took a bun. "Tell her we filed under 'assistance.'"
"I told her you filed under 'audacity.' She laughed." The fox's gaze flicked to Ren. "Good pointing."
Ren glowed as if someone had offered him a rank.
"Go eat," Alaudi told him. "Then nap. Then drills."
Ren deflated and accepted joy like it owed him interest. "Yes, Guardian."
The word still landed strange. Not heavy. Not light. Just… accurate.
That night, Kyoto hummed the way a machine hums when it's cooling. Alaudi sat on the shrine steps, elbows on knees, watching fireflies argue politely five feet above the gravel.
Sky Crown reached, patient.
He let it.
No coronation. No abyss. Just an agreement.
No vows. No collars—just a promise you can say out loud when someone asks who you are.
Guardian when present. Storm when gone. Cloud before crown. Hands before speeches.
He felt someone approach and didn't tense.
"Mother says thank you," Kunou said, sitting two steps down, hands tucked into sleeves, tails swishing like commas. "For the forms. For the corners. For not breaking a man we could prosecute."
"Your mother's smarter than me," Alaudi said.
Kunou considered this gravely. "She says you're smarter than you think."
"Don't tell anyone."
"Secret." She tilted her head back, looking at the dark like it owed her stars. "Do you miss where you came from?"
"No," he said, surprised at how easy it was. "I miss the version that might have existed if people had been braver."
Kunou hummed. "Then… make that version here."
He looked at the little princess, who had offered him a crown made of permission and paperwork.
"I'm trying," he said.
She smiled like that counted.
When she left, Ren took her place, a blanket over shoulders, hair still damp from a shower that failed to convince his bones the day was done.
"I kept the map," he said. "I want to draw the lines better next time."
"Good," Alaudi said.
"And… I didn't want to hit that guy," Ren added. "I wanted to scare him forever. Does that make me worse?"
"It makes you honest," Alaudi said. "Now learn the difference between scare and scar."
Ren nodded until his head slept on his own shoulder. Hibird tucked into his hair with professional tenderness. Roll guarded the sock with a dignity that would have been funnier if it weren't so sincere.
Alaudi watched the city settle and let the Crown draw one more line—thin as a pencil mark, from the shrine threshold to the far edge of the ward net where the Hero Faction liked to loiter with clean hands.
He didn't pull it tight.
He just made sure they could see it.
No trumpet. No warning—just a boundary that would not move first.
Work tomorrow.
Fights later.
Corners will stay corners.