They sent Shinra and a small team out that afternoon.
Not to fight.
To walk.
To be visible.
To let people see a human-sized person moving through the city, not a walking headline.
Kaizen argued it would stabilize optics.
Mizuki argued it would give her more data.
Yuna argued it kept Shinra from wandering alone.
Shinra let them win the debate.
He wore a simple jacket. No insignia. No extra flare.
He wanted to be ordinary for a few hours.
The market district was a thrum of small lives.
Vendors called prices. Children chased one another between stalls. Steam rose from food carts.
People watched him, then pretended not to.
That pretending was an art form here — polite, quick, efficient.
A woman selling skewers gave him a small nod.
A delivery rider slowed, helmet in hand, just long enough to look.
Shinra noticed. He catalogued nothing in the showy way he had in the plaza.
He counted micro-tensions, the catch in a voice, the speed at which a smile returned.
It told him what charts could not.
They moved as a group: Yuna at his left, Hana and Riku flanking, Daren and Kaizen a step behind with Mizuki watching on comms.
The shard in Sanctum's lab felt like a rumor.
Here it had consequences — the root's touch on distant seams.
Mizuki's voice was a thread in his ear.
"Two micro-distortions this block," she murmured.
"They spiked when you were in the plaza. Residual pattern consistent with anchor-probes."
"Anchor-probes," Shinra repeated. The words had teeth.
"Meaning?"
"Markers," she said. "Reference points. They'll let the root route avatars more accurately. If those markers network…"
She didn't finish.
The implication supplied itself: directed strikes, surgical payloads, less random carnage and more targetted pressure.
Yuna's jaw set.
"We find them and we document," she said.
They did.
The first distortion was a smear of wrong air tucked between two shuttered shops.
It smelled faintly metallic, like ozone and old rain.
Riku stepped forward with a scanner.
It chirped, then stalled.
"Hm," Riku said. "It's reading different fields. Low coherence, high intent."
Hana placed a stabilizer barrier and gestured for distance.
Daren readied himself with the sort of expression that said, if this goes loud, I go louder.
Shinra knelt. He did not reach for power.
He listened.
Memory overlay came like a sigh: a columned corridor, banners torn, a younger face he could not place watching him kneel and nod.
He blinked it away.
A small entity spilled from the seam. Not huge. Not refined. It moved like a script reading its lines for the first time.
The team hit it.
Not with everything. With patterns selected by Mizuki: low-grade dispersal to test regeneration, short arcs to see adaptation, targeted non-lethal strikes to appraise learning speed.
The thing dissolved and then remade. This time it moved with a slightly altered gait.
It carried a filament at its shoulder — a tiny tether that had been missing before.
Mizuki's breath made a soft sound.
"They're anchoring faster," she said.
They collected data, bagged residues, and pulled back.
No one wanted to make an impression they couldn't control.
That lesson from the plaza still pressed against everyone's ribs.
On the walk back through narrow alleys, the city felt smaller and more intimate.
Faces were fewer. Language was blunt.
Shinra paused in a doorway to let a pair of elderly men pass.
They spoke in low tones about taxes and the stubborn robin in the park.
One of the men glanced up at Shinra and smiled with an odd, private kindness.
"You saved us," he said, as if it were the only fact that mattered to him.
Shinra nodded, awkwardly.
"Just doing what I could," he said.
The man's hand lifted in a brief salute of sorts, then he shuffled away with his friend.
Shinra's chest tightened — not with pride, but with an old muscle memory that had nothing to do with this era.
The memory overlay that came then was of a crowd bending into a lower light, hands raised.
Not this crowd. Another one.
It left a metallic aftertaste.
A small voice snapped him back.
"Sorry!" someone cried, breathless, at his right.
A collision — brief, polite, human — sent a lightweight bag sprawling.
A girl stood there, flushed, palms full of parcels. Her hair was cropped short. Her jacket was too light for the wind.
She looked like someone late for a shift, like someone used to carrying other people's schedules in her shoulders.
She bowed his apology; the bow was polite not theatrical.
"I'm—sorry," she said. Her voice was careful. Not too loud, not too soft. She sounded like someone who learned to measure her volume by the distance her world allowed.
Yuna moved forward automatically, reaching for the girl's dropped parcels, but the girl waved her off.
"It's fine," she said. "I'm fine. It's my fault — I should have watched."
Shinra bent to help, hands steady. The bag smelled of cheap paper and lemon soap.
As their palms touched a moment, the girl's fingers brushed his. Not an electric jolt. No ancestral chorus.
Just a human contact that registered, in his head, like a question:
Why him?
She straightened. Their eyes met for the smallest slice of a second.
She was cautious, no bravado. Not openly curious, either. Just a kind of quiet observation.
"You okay?" Yuna asked.
"Yeah," the girl said. "Thanks." She hesitated, then added, "You're that—" — she searched for a term — "—from the plaza."
Shinra found his voice before he could stop it.
"Good to know the rumor mill works fast," he said lightly.
She smiled, small and professional. "It's good that you were there."
"Thank you," he said.
The girl nodded, eyes flicking to the place where the shard would be stored, to the way the team stood protective.
"I should go," she said. "Sorry again." She turned and walked away with a careful swing of her shoulders.
Yuna watched her go, then murmured, "She looked like she was in a hurry."
Shinra watched the girl's back until she vanished between stalls.
A pendant flashed at her neck as she moved: a small, dull disk on a worn cord. Nothing fancy. Something carried for years.
His eyes caught it and the overlay came — the throne room again, distant and jagged, and a name in a shape he barely wanted to touch.
He blinked.
Arios' voice was soft, strained.
[Peripheral scan: the girl registered on local anomaly sampling. Not a marked target. Observer-level presence. Unknown motives.]
"Did you get that?" Shinra asked.
"Yeah," Mizuki said. "Her signature was… unremarkable. Except for a residual trace on her left shoulder — like a faint echo of old tech."
"Old tech?" Riku echoed.
Mizuki frowned. "Small. Maybe an heirloom. Nothing that screams Breach. But given our current context, anything odd is worth noting."
They let it sit.
Kaizen said, "We don't recruit on the market."
"No," Yuna said. "But we do keep our eyes open."
They finished their lap and returned to Sanctum.
That night, back in the low-light common room, the guild traded food and frayed jokes. The shard was under a double lock, hidden away in a field-cooled container in the lab. Mizuki was still pulling strings of analysis.
Shinra listened. He didn't speak much. He let the group speak around him. He watched faces. He watched a world slowly reassess the category he occupied.
At one point Riku nudged him with a grin and said, "So — noted a new fan today?"
Shinra didn't answer.
He had the image of the girl's face lodged behind his eyes. Not because she was striking. Because she'd been cautious and kind — traits that fit, paradoxically, with the inherited memory of other ages.
Arios stirred.
[Subject linked to partial-era residue. Low probability of direct connection. Recommend monitoring. Do not approach without roster backup.]
Shinra let the advice settle. It felt correct.
The night outside the guild was cool. The city slept in a kind of alert slumber. Sensors pinged their slow song. Somewhere a radio repeated an advertisement that promised easier lives.
Inside, a small shard glowed faintly in its case. The black edge of it absorbed light and made the air feel colder by association.
Shinra rose from his seat and walked to the lab door. He stood there a moment, listening to the machinery, the quiet conversations, the muffled laughter.
He thought about the girl with the worn pendant and the way she'd looked at him — cautious, like someone who'd once been asked to hold a truth and chose to keep it light.
He thought of the filament, the anchors, the root learning faster.
He thought of the word that had come to him in the dark: Found you.
For the first time in a long while he allowed himself a small, honest worry.
Not for himself.
For the people around him.
If the root could mark, it would. If the root could route, it would. If the root could find a way to call a node into a spotlight, it would.
They would be the ones to pay for the attention.
He closed his eyes.
Arias' voice replied, less brittle than earlier, but not kind.
[We will learn. We will adapt. We will not be found unprepared.]
Shinra opened his eyes.
He looked at the locked container where the shard slept and at the city beyond the lab windows.
He thought of the girl with the pendant and how small gestures could become maps.
He thought of Yuna's hand on his — anchor, simple and quiet.
He walked back to the table and sat.
"We keep walking," he said. "We map. We look. We protect."
The guild echoed the phrase in half-joking chorus, but the sound steadied something in him.
Outside, the net pinged, and somewhere in the dark a node lit again.
The root had learned how to aim.
They had to learn how to move.