No drums. No marble busts, just folding chairs, stale tea, and a whiteboard missing its cap.
Kyoto's neighborhood chiefs, a pair of onmyōji, three foxes in work kimonos, Tanaka in a loaner suit that fit like a dare, and Yasaka at the end of the room with a pen that could sign treaties or parking tickets with the same wrist.
Alaudi took the wall. Ren took notes he'd actually read later. Hibird positioned himself as a brooch with opinions. Roll hid under the table like a fuse.
Tanaka clicked the remote. Slides. Blurry door-cam photos. Envelopes. Stamps.
"Not bombs," he said. "Paper."
The onmyōji woman tapped her tablet. "Petitions. Complaints. 'Citizen audits.' All normal on the surface. Hidden array when stacked. If City Office stamps these in order, the ward grid hiccups for sixty-one minutes. Enough time to make us look slow and them look inevitable."
"They want headlines," Yasaka said. "I want boredom."
Alaudi nodded once. "Where?"
"Central Filing," Tanaka said. "Basement. Conveyor belts and people who know every form number like a prayer."
Yasaka looked at Alaudi. "Quiet and clean."
"Always," he said.
—
Central Filing smelled like toner and stubborn dignity. Belts hummed. Bins clacked. Clerks moved with the precision of people who learned to count before they learned to talk.
The envelopes were marked with a cheerful stamp: a carp that winked if you tilted it. Ren tilted it. The carp winked… clockwise.
"Direction matters," Ren said. "They're trying to land these in sequence."
"Break the rhythm," Alaudi said.
He walked the line. Cloud, thin as tape, ran under the belts. Sky Crown overlaid a ghost-grid—routes, patterns, bottlenecks. He saw where the room wanted to move on its own, where hands sped up, where attention sagged.
"Excuse me," he told a clerk, voice level. "Your bin's mislabeled."
She bristled. "I've done this twenty years—"
"Exactly why I'm asking you," he said. "If I'm wrong, I owe you tea."
She checked. She swore. She fixed it with the violent joy of a professional saving the day from a sticker.
One cog shifted; six microflows changed course. The array's timing wobbled.
Ren set Mist—not to lie, but to dull—on three cameras and two very motivated volunteers who were here to "help the city." They blinked more. They cared less. They drifted to the wrong line and, for ten precious minutes, alphabetized in hiragana while insisting on romaji.
Hibird hopped the belts like a conductor, chirp-chirp-chirp—hold, drop, skip. Clerks adjusted by instinct.
Roll ate a rubber band. Ren retrieved him and apologized to the gods of stationary.
At Station Four, a man in a grey vest flipped his stamp clockwise like a party trick. Ren's hand shot out and caught his wrist.
"Counterclockwise," Ren said, too calm. "For the carp."
The man's eyes flicked. The stamp hesitated.
Alaudi was already there.
"Show me the stamp," he said.
The man tried to be insulted. He tried to be ordinary. He tried to be somewhere else.
When that failed, he showed the stamp.
Cute carp on top. Tiny sigil etched into the rim where the ink never touched: a gear-tooth mark, same artisan as the ring, petty Latin tucked between spokes.
Alaudi took it. Cloud covered the rim the way you cover a socket before a toddler finds it. He handed the stamp back, face bland.
"Counterclockwise," he said.
The man did not argue. He left two minutes later, dignity intact, usefulness degraded.
"Leak mapped," Ren whispered, eyes half-shut, sensing the micro-pulls through the floor. "Three more carp in play. Office across town. Post kiosk. Mobile van."
"Split?" Alaudi asked.
Ren shook his head. "I can dull one from here. You take van."
Tanaka had the van on his phone before Alaudi finished blinking. "Lot C, municipal annex. Driver thinks he's doing civic outreach. There's a second stamp under the tape roll."
"On it," Alaudi said.
—
Lot C's van had balloons and a clipboard smile. The driver wore the expression of someone at peace with line management and death.
"Petitions?" he chirped.
"Maintenance," Alaudi said, showing the same white armband from last night. It had become a passport to everyone's business. "Stamps are skewing ink on this route. QA pull."
The driver brightened. "I knew it! They've been too juicy."
He produced both stamps like contraband citrus.
Same carp. Same rim-sigil. Same idea: turn the city's paper hands against itself.
Alaudi set them on the counter. Cloud flattened the sigils like unflattering laundry. Sky Crown pinged the micro-array they were meant to feed, traced it back along three courier legs, and lit a dot on his inner map: a one-room apartment above a bicycle repair shop, where someone had a laser printer, a kettle, and a dream.
"Keep stamping," Alaudi said. "Counterclockwise."
"Quality!" the driver said, saluting with sincerity that could move mountains or at least forms.
—
The apartment smelled like toner, dried noodles, and the threadbare optimism of a side hustle. Young guy at a folding table. Laptop open to a spreadsheet called civic_tasks_final2.xlsx. A box of carp stamps. A roll of envelope charm-paper with watermark you only saw if you had a reason.
He looked up, already rehearsing the speech where he was the good guy and the city was an idea.
Alaudi closed the door behind him. Didn't posture. Didn't reach for a weapon.
"You're running someone else's ladder," he said. "They gave you a pattern and a payoff and told you you're special."
The kid's throat moved. "Transparency matters."
"It does," Alaudi said. "Which is why I'm telling you: your pattern got traced five minutes ago. If I'm here, Tanaka's paperwork is here soon. You want to be a witness or a defendant?"
The kid looked at the floor, at the kettle, at the future in the wrong shoes.
"…witness," he said, very small.
"Good," Alaudi said. He took one carp and pressed two Cloud fingers into the rim, soft as a warning and hard as a lock. "This one flags the network. You'll give it to Tanaka. You'll keep boiling water like nothing in the world is happening. When he knocks, you'll be relieved."
Roll hopped out of Alaudi's hood and sat on the laptop. Screen saver. Hibird pecked the caps lock light until it behaved.
The kid nodded three times, as if each nod bought him one inch of air.
"Counterclockwise," Alaudi said, for no reason except that it made the kid smile like he understood a secret.
—
Back at Central Filing, the array died the way dumb plans die: in paperwork.
The belts sang their simple song. The carp stamps turned the right way. The petitions went into bins that weren't secretly friends with each other.
Ren held up his notebook. "They needed sixty-one. They got forty-two. The grid yawned twice and went back to sleep."
"Very adequate," Kunou announced from the doorway, having arrived with the timing of a judge and the pockets of a grandmother. She handed Ren a lollipop. "For neat stamps."
Ren tried not to preen. Failed.
Tanaka arrived with a satisfaction that smelled like warrants. "Our man upstairs had a spreadsheet and a conscience. Both very chatty."
The three-tailed lieutenant rolled in the scooter like a trophy. "I'm not apologizing for my methods."
"No one asked," Alaudi said.
Yasaka's text to the group thread—adequate+—buzzed three phones at once. The room relaxed without losing focus.
Alaudi set his palms on the counter and let Cloud slide out in a thin sheet. It touched the belts, the bins, the clerks' feet. Kyoto's wards brushed back, amused: you came to the basement to fight a spell with etiquette?
"Worked," he told the city.
It agreed.
Sky Crown settled—not pushy, just a hand on the map, lines between people who didn't know they were a team five minutes ago.
Ren leaned in. "You felt the grid flinch when we broke the stamp order?"
"Yeah," Alaudi said. "Like teaching a river to take the old path."
Ren grinned. "We bored them again."
"Keep that as Plan A," Alaudi said. "It scales."
—
They walked out at dusk. No trumpets. No headlines—just clerks who didn't have to stay late and a van driver who would tell his friends about the day quality control noticed him.
Kunou waited on the shrine steps with a small cloth charm. "For maps," she said, cheeks proud. "It helps you remember where you put the edges."
Alaudi tied it to the strap of his bag. It warmed once, politely.
He put the white armband on the offertory box again, a stupid little flag in a place that had already decided whether to tolerate him.
"Tomorrow?" Ren asked, mouth red with candy.
"Tomorrow," Alaudi said. "Train. Paperwork. Edges."
Hibird sang a short, rude song about bureaucracy. Roll stole the lollipop stick and carried it like a banner.
No fireworks. No title bump, just fewer paper cuts and a city that breathed.
Good day.
Next one soon.