Morning found them where the night had left them: in the outpost's reading room, with the green-lit egg resting on a nest of folded blankets and the air holding its breath.
Aiko yawned without sound and rubbed her eyes. Pulsebun, who had sworn he could stay awake for three days straight, was slumped over a chair with his ears draped like tired flags.
Kenji closed his notebook and stood. He looked like he hadn't slept at all and also like he wouldn't have noticed if he had. "I need to test something," he said.
"Can it wait until after tea?" Pulsebun asked from the chair cushion, voice woolly.
Kenji pushed his glasses up. "If Aiko can activate ancient systems by stepping into the right pattern, there might be a way to reproduce—safely—a part of that interface here. A low-risk simulation."
"Low-risk," Pulsebun repeated. "Two of my least favorite words when put together."
Aiko folded her hands. The whisper that had threaded through her thoughts in the ruin had dwindled to a memory, yet the memory still glowed. Identity verified. Access granted. The egg pulsed once, as if nodding along with the words in her head.
"What do you need?" she asked.
Kenji's answer was already moving. He cleared a large table, spread paper across it, and, from a shelf, fetched a box of thin charcoal sticks and a roll of oilcloth marked with faint circles. The cloth had taken on a shine from use; its surface held, in negative, rubbings he'd made of the ruin's etched lines.
"I copied segments of the platform's pattern before we left," he said, unrolling the oilcloth until concentric rings mapped the table like ripples on a pond. He set small glass weights along the edges to keep it flat. "I think these aren't merely decorative. They're channels. Guidance tracks."
Pulsebun peered over the edge, eyes slow-blinking. "Pretty. Complicated. Potentially explodey."
Kenji ignored the last adjective. He positioned the lantern—Pulsebun's reliable, non-overheating one—so its light washed evenly across the surface. Then he laid three slim coils along specific arcs and connected them to a copper ring. "If the array needs a carrier signal, maybe a faint pulse can stand in for whatever energy it used."
"Carrier signal," Pulsebun muttered. "You've been reading my notes again."
"They're in your handwriting," Kenji said mildly. "They're practically a cry for help."
Aiko smiled despite her nerves. "What exactly is my part?"
Kenji looked at her, and some of the scholar in his face stepped back to let the friend through. "Stand at the center when I ask. If nothing happens, we stop. If something happens, we stop even faster."
"That's not how time works," Pulsebun said.
"Then we stop wisely," Kenji said. He took a breath. "Ready?"
Aiko glanced at the egg. The faint lines under its surface—those frost-like threads of pale gold—had reappeared in the night and then dimmed again. Now they lay quiet. "Ready."
Pulsebun set a paw on the lantern's switch. "Say the word."
Kenji adjusted the coils and tapped the copper ring with the back of his fingernail. "Now."
The lantern brightened by a hair, a pulse more felt than seen. Aiko stepped onto the center ring drawn on the oilcloth. Paper whispered under her feet. For a heartbeat nothing happened. Then a small current walked up her calves like cold water. She didn't fall. The room did not dim. But words weren't what came to her; shapes were. Not images—relations. This to that. That to those. A sense of doors and their hinges.
"Do you feel anything?" Kenji asked, not looking up from the ring as if the ring could answer him better than she could.
"Not like in the ruin," Aiko said slowly. "Less like a voice. More like… a diagram teaching itself to me."
Pulsebun's ears perked. "She's getting something."
Kenji's pencil hovered over his notebook. "Can you describe—a metaphor is fine."
"Like being shown where the steps go," Aiko said. "Not the dance. Just the floor."
Kenji finally looked up, and for an instant the years fell off him; he glowed with the kind of joy only a discovery can grant. Then his face sobered. "I want to try something else. May I stand in the center?"
Pulsebun squinted. "Uh, do we want a Kenji-shaped scorch mark on the table?"
"If it goes wrong, pull me back," Kenji said with a steadiness that made Aiko's throat tighten.
She stepped off the pattern. Kenji took her place. Pulsebun feathered the lantern down to the faintest shimmer and then up one notch.
Kenji's eyelids flickered. His hands didn't move, but his breathing did, changing cadence in a way Aiko recognized from storms: the air deciding to do something different.
He didn't speak at first. When he did, his voice had dropped. "It doesn't accept me."
Aiko's stomach went hollow. "Kenji—"
"Wait," he said quickly, not opening his eyes. "Not rejected. Not… denied. 'Insufficient credentials' is the closest phrase I can think of. It knows I'm here. It knows I'm human. It doesn't trust me yet."
Pulsebun's paws tightened around the lantern's handle. "Define 'yet.'"
Kenji's brow creased, then smoothed. The pencil in his right hand rattled once against the table and stilled. "It's offering an alternative. A test."
"The kind where the floor opens?" Pulsebun asked.
"No," Kenji said. "The kind with questions."
Aiko's fingers found each other and laced. "What kind of questions?"
"The kind that decide what you are," Kenji whispered. "Not what you know."
The room faded, not in light but in consequence. Aiko crouched, ready to grab Kenji if his knees wobbled. Pulsebun edged closer to the switch that would kill the signal.
Kenji breathed in. Spoke out.
"I'm Kenji Arakawa, Guild outpost scribe," he said, and then paused as if listening. "No. Names don't matter to it. Roles do." He straightened. "I'm a caretaker of records. A builder of questions. I do not command. I observe. I preserve."
Aiko didn't know what he was hearing, but he was answering something that mattered. She glanced at the egg; the lines under its surface brightened a fraction and then faded, like a heartbeat telling a secret.
Kenji nodded at whatever lived in the rings. "I won't lie for you," he said. "And I won't lie to you. If the past broke, I want to know why. If the present depends on it, I won't look away."
The table's oilcloth didn't glow. The coils didn't sing. And yet Aiko felt pressure ease in her ears as if a door somewhere had been opened in a sealed house.
Kenji's shoulders loosened. A single word left him, different from his own: "Witness."
Pulsebun's mouth fell open. "Was that you or—?"
"Both," Kenji said softly. He stepped off the center ring, and the strange air folded itself back into ordinary.
Aiko reached for him. "Are you all right?"
He smiled, tired and bright. "I don't think it will let me drive. But it might let me ride shotgun."
"In plain words?" Pulsebun said.
"I can't activate what Aiko can," Kenji said, "but I can interface in a limited way. It recognized me as… a witness. Someone allowed to see, to record, to verify." He laid a hand on the table's rings. "It trusts the question I carry more than the answers I don't."
Aiko let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding. Relief washed over her too quickly to name. "So… what did it give you?"
"A fragment," Kenji said. He pulled a fresh page and sketched quickly. Lines spiraled under his pencil in the same careful script he used for maps. "Handshake protocol. The thing in the ruin—the platform—wasn't just a switch. It's a V-Link node. Human vector required. Secondary roles available: caretaker, witness, steward." He underlined the last word. "Steward. Different from owner. Different from master."
Pulsebun leaned in, whiskers twitching. "What about me? Do I get a fancy title?"
Kenji hesitated. "It… didn't have a word for you. Which is strange, because it clearly knew you were here."
"Rude," Pulsebun said, then softened at Aiko's look. "Maybe it doesn't have a word yet. I'll give it time to invent 'genius.'"
Kenji's pencil moved again. "More: the system expects fragmentation. It's designed to operate even when pieces are missing. It routes around damage."
"Like a river splitting around a rock," Aiko said.
Kenji nodded, pleased. "Yes. And it waits for compatible signatures to close circuits that have been open for a very long time."
"Signatures like Aiko's," Pulsebun said.
"Exactly," Kenji said. He turned a page, wrote a single word, then circled it: Arca. "It used this term once. Quietly. As if it were obvious."
"Arca," Aiko repeated, and the echo inside her chest agreed with the sound of it.
Pulsebun rocked back on his heels. "So what now, Witness?"
"Now we test responsibly," Kenji said, equally to them and to himself. He dismantled the little array, coiling each wire with a care that looked like gratitude. "No more today. No pushing the system. No forcing answers."
A knock sounded at the outpost door.
All three froze.
No one knocked this early unless it mattered. Pulsebun's ears rose. Aiko looked at the egg. Its glow didn't change, but she felt seen anyway.
Kenji crossed the floor and opened the door a hand's width.
On the step stood Sayo, the courier who handled messages between Kyoten and the nearest Guild hub. Her coat was still damp from the morning mist. She lifted a satchel with both hands and kept her voice low. "From the capital," she said. "Marked urgent. For you."
Kenji's throat moved. "Thank you."
Sayo hesitated, eyes flicking past him to the lamplight and the neatness inside. "You've felt it too, then."
Kenji didn't answer the way a liar would. He answered the way a careful man does when he hasn't decided who to trust. "We've heard things."
"Everyone has," Sayo said. "Stay safe." She turned and was gone down the lane before the next breath finished.
Kenji shut the door, set the satchel on the table away from the egg, and undid the knot. Inside lay a thin stack of papers with the capital seal and, beneath them, a small, rectangular device no one should know how to make anymore.
Pulsebun leaned in until Aiko tugged his ear back by reflex. "Is that—"
Kenji didn't touch the device. He touched the papers. He scanned the first page, then the second, and then looked up at them with a face that contained three things at once: excitement, fear, and the certainty that choices were no longer luxuries.
"What is it?" Aiko asked.
"A request," Kenji said. "No—an order dressed like a request. The capital wants any anomalous V-Monster activity reported immediately. And they're sending an investigator to Kyoten."
Pulsebun blew out a slow breath. "Well. That's great timing."
Aiko thought of the ruin breathing under the forest, of the egg learning how to be. She thought of the word the system had offered Kenji, and how it fit him like an old coat finally tried on.
"What do we do?" she asked.
Kenji set the papers down. He looked at Aiko, then at the egg, then back at the circles he'd traced on the table and the empty space where he'd stood. "We do what witnesses do," he said. "We tell the truth we can prove. And we protect what can't survive a lie."
Pulsebun raised a paw. "And we keep the lantern charged."
"Especially that," Kenji said.
Outside, Kyoten went about its morning—water bucketing from wells, bread cooling on racks, voices weaving in and out of the square. Inside the outpost, the egg pulsed once, twice, each beat a soft, patient yes.
They had taken a step into something that had outlived names. The system had offered Kenji a role, and he had accepted. The next step would not be kinder. But it would be theirs.