The rain quit. The tests didn't.
By noon, Kyoto looked rinsed—tile roofs winking like they forgave the sky. Markets reopened. Aunties negotiated with fish like they were in court. The city pretended to be ordinary again.
It wasn't.
Alaudi and Ren were summoned—not to Yasaka this time, but to a squat concrete building that felt like a utility box with windows. A brass plaque out front read: Urban Ritual Coordination Office.
Inside: fluorescent lights, sandal racks, clipboards, three separate altars the size of lunch trays, and a receptionist who held eye contact like a jō staff.
"Guardian," she said without moving her mouth. "And apprentice."
Ren straightened hard enough to pull a muscle. "Y-yes, ma'am."
She slid a form across. "Temporary field authority. Stamp here. Say aloud you accept responsibility for edges you touch."
Alaudi scanned the kanji. Responsibilities. Disclaimers. You break it, you buy the paperwork.
He stamped.
No sirens. No speeches—just a red seal and a line that said "Authority: situational."
The receptionist produced an armband from a drawer: white cloth, inked fox crest. It looked like a festival prize and a threat.
"Wear it when you don't want a fight," she said. "Take it off when you do."
"Useful," Alaudi said, and looped it on.
They were assigned a liaison: Tanaka, mid-thirties, suit jacket, prayer beads under the cuff, smile like he'd learned it from a seminar.
"Thank you for your community partnership," Tanaka said, and handed over a folder. "We traced last night's anomalies to a supply chain hiding inside renovation permits. You stop the corner-folds; we stop the money."
Ren leaned in. Maps. Serial numbers on bead shipments disguised as dehumidifiers. Photos of three men who looked interchangeable from the nose down.
Alaudi tapped a red-circled alley. "This one?"
Tanaka's smile didn't change. "Black Bay Crane Rentals. New management. Very active around shrine-adjacent properties. If you find a device, don't break it. Disable and log. If you find a person, don't break them either."
"Strong theme," Alaudi said.
"We like court," Tanaka said. "Jail lasts longer than fear."
On the way out, the receptionist slid a lollipop across the counter toward Ren without looking up. Ren accepted it like a knighthood.
They hit Crane Rentals first.
On paper, it was forklifts and clipboards. In the back lot, it was coils of cable with sigils printed so faintly you only saw them if you were rude enough to stare. A bead emitter sat under a tarp pretending to be a generator.
Alaudi crouched, peeled the tarp. The "generator" had a nice faceplate and a worse soul—three nested rings that hummed off-key until you wanted to sand your teeth.
"Can I try?" Ren asked, bouncing on the balls of his feet. "Not with flame, just… with the thing you showed me. Attention first."
"Show me your plan," Alaudi said.
Ren inhaled deep, hands open. He didn't touch the device—he touched the air around it, sensing where the world refused to sit down. He found the seam, the place between ring and ring where wrongness leaked, and he did the simplest thing: he looked at it without permission.
The hum tripped, went embarrassed-quiet.
Alaudi smiled a millimeter. "Now give it the option to be a bad generator."
Ren angled his hand, a slow belonging gesture, like offering a chair at a table. The rings decoupled by a fraction and the device forgot its second job. It coughed into mere electricity.
Alaudi killed the breaker, pulled the fuse, tagged it with Tanaka's sticker.
"That," he said, "is how you turn a trick into equipment."
Ren tried to hide his grin and failed. Hibird sang a smug three-note melody. Roll nose-bonked the sticker like a signature.
They logged three more sites before lunch, all minor. Enough to irritate whoever was counting on them. Alaudi wore the armband. Doors opened without arguments.
They were halfway down a narrow arcade when the day decided to be interesting.
A bus—a small one, school-lunch yellow—hit a ripple in the road and decided brake lines were a rumor. It didn't careen; it drifted, twenty degrees wrong, wheels humming above grooves that shouldn't exist.
Ren swore soft. "Edges moved."
Two options presented themselves, clean and ugly:
Chase the hand doing it—the person already exiting the ramen shop with a duffel and a bad idea.
Or stop the bus.
Alaudi didn't pretend there was a third option.
"Map," he said.
Ren slapped the back of his hand against the bus-stop pole like it was a drum. "Three bad seams under the front axle. One at the curb cut."
Alaudi opened Sky Crown to exactly those coordinates.
Not a flare.
An answer.
Cloud went thin. Staples. He set them where Ren pointed. The street remembered friction. The bus's odd angle bled down into ordinary physics. It hissed to a stop with a hurt look.
People stared like reality had hiccuped and then apologized.
The man with the duffel looked back—saw a Guardian with a white band and a kid with a lollipop and a bird—and ran.
Alaudi could have caught him. He'd done faster. He could have been unkind and been right.
He didn't move.
Ren blinked. "You're letting him—"
"Tanaka likes long game," Alaudi said. "So do I today."
As if cued, a scooter slid out from an alley—fox-tail keychain snapping in the wind. The three-tailed lieutenant from yesterday wore a courier helmet and a grin.
"Delivery," she said, and shoulder-checked the runner into a stack of recycling with a mercy that looked like accident. Paper everywhere. The duffel skidded. Two bead emitters clanged out like stupid fish.
Alaudi stepped on one, rolled the other to Roll. Roll sat on it with the gravity of a small god.
"Tag," the lieutenant said, tossing him a sticker. Sirens didn't wail. A municipal bell chimed two blocks away: the sound Kyoto uses when it wants adults to come back inside and fill forms.
The runner groaned, tried a story. The lieutenant wrote it down like it was a poem, which is to say she was going to translate it into something that would get him three years.
"Bus okay," Ren reported, breathless.
"People?" Alaudi asked.
"Confused, bored, two selfies."
"Fine," Alaudi said. "Log the generators. Request Tanaka."
The lieutenant saluted with the pen.
They ate on crates behind the arcade—meat buns again, tea in paper cups that scalded fingers into humility.
Ren picked at sesame seeds. "Is this… what it is? Not battles? Just… edges and forms and making sure corners behave?"
"Most days," Alaudi said.
"And the other days?"
"You'll know," Alaudi said. "They make you miss the forms."
He meant it as a joke. It landed like weather.
Tanaka arrived on foot, tie tucked, shoes not quite made for alleys.
"Excellent restraint," he said cheerfully, and then, less cheerfully: "We intercepted communications. Your friend from the ramen shop wasn't freelance. He's on a schedule. A larger event clock is ticking."
Alaudi didn't sigh. He let his shoulders forget a fraction of tension. "Where?"
"Rail yard. Two nights. A load of 'ballast'. Which is to say, glass. Which is to say, you will not sleep."
"Good," Alaudi said.
"Bad," Tanaka said, but liked that they agreed on the label.
He handed Alaudi a slim envelope—photocopies of permits, a contact list, one small glossy photograph: a ring device bigger than the ones they'd seen, shoulder-large, with an inscribed phrase in Latin that had the smirk of a first-year seminar.
Ren read it under his breath and made a face. "Pretentious."
"Foreman toy," Alaudi said. "They'll try a fold in public. Crowd. Cameras. 'Kyoto can't hold its shape.'"
Tanaka nodded. "Exactly. Can you hold it?"
Alaudi looked at Ren, then at the white band, then at Hibird, who had fallen asleep face-first in a tea lid, and Roll, who was currently testing whether the confiscated emitter could be a throne.
"We can," he said. "But we'll need first choice of corners."
Tanaka smiled in relief. "I'll make the map listen to you first."
"Do that," Alaudi said. "And tell the receptionist she owes the apprentice two more lollipops for community morale."
"I heard that," the receptionist's voice said from Tanaka's phone, on speaker the whole time. "He gets one if he files his training notes legibly."
Ren groaned. "Paperwork…"
"Edges and exceptions," Alaudi said. "Write the first so we can handle the second."
Evening came in with the stubborn gold Kyoto prefers. Training resumed. Ren worked the slow parts: seeing the seam before it sang, tracing a corner without making it self-conscious, putting down a staple and taking it back clean. He fell over twice. He stood up twice.
Kunou appeared with a paper fan and the solemnity of a small judge. "Mother says you may have two more meters of annex on rail-yard night. No more. Do not make the city think it owes you."
"Understood," Alaudi said.
She eyed the armband. "That suits you in a ridiculous way."
"It's bureaucratic armor," he said.
She nodded like that made perfect sense. "Roll looks like a mayor on that thing."
Roll did, somehow.
Hibird woke, chirped something that sounded like a stamp.
The Crown prodded him—polite, patient. He let it trace the rail map Tanaka sent, marked four bad corners only a fool would leave alone.
No destiny. No omen—just prep: tape on the floor before you choreograph the fight.
Ren leaned over his shoulder, reading the same lines without flame. "If they hit here," he said, pointing, "the cameras get temple roof and train lights. It'll trend."
"Then we make that corner boring," Alaudi said. "Boredom is a weapon."
Ren grinned. "You're really going to beat them with forms."
"Forms and staples," Alaudi said. "And if that fails, fists."
"Optional," Ren said.
"Optional," Alaudi agreed.
He dismissed the Crown's map, let the shrine settle back into night sounds. The city felt awake but calm, like a musician uncasing an instrument and checking the tuning, not performing yet.
He liked that feeling.
Tomorrow, rail yard.
Tonight, drills and notes that would make the receptionist stop threatening his candy.
He watched Ren practice the quiet things that make loud things possible.
He watched Kyoto not fall apart.
He let himself believe that a title you didn't ask for could fit like a tool in your hand instead of a chain on your throat.
No fanfare. No parade, just a plan, a map, a promise.