Morning didn't get the chance to be ordinary.
The first trouble was the sound—not shouting, not carts, but a wrong hum that seemed to come from under the cobbles. Aiko knew the square's music by heart. This wasn't it. Cups rattled on tabletops. Sparrows lifted as one and vanished into the eaves.
Pulsebun was already at the door when the second trouble arrived: a scream that cut off too fast.
"Aiko," Kenji said, voice steady in a way that made her stomach dip. "Stay behind us."
Reina Hoshino—coat buttoned, badge clear, eyes sharp—snapped her case shut. "We move. Now."
They spilled into Kyoten's square. Lanterns still hung pale in the daylight; market stalls opened like sleepy flowers. Half the village had frozen mid-task, staring at the thing pacing out from the alley between the tea shop and the cooper's.
A V-Monster. Insectoid, thin as a knife and twice as mean, its body a lattice of chittering plates. Gold light crawled under its carapace like trapped lightning. It wasn't hunting. It was listening to something only it could hear.
Then it jerked toward the nearest noise.
"Down!" Pulsebun shouted. He bolted, a yellow streak that put himself between the creature and a cluster of kids. Electricity snapped across his fur. He bared his teeth, not in a smile.
The children scattered. One boy tripped. Aiko lunged and caught him under the arms, hauling him into her chest as the V-Monster's forelimb scythed the air where his head had been.
Kenji dragged a table into the creature's path. The blow sheared it like wet paper. Wood flew. Reina didn't flinch. She palmed a slim tool from her case, the kind that shouldn't exist anymore, and thumbed it on. It didn't glow. It didn't sing. It simply made the air change.
"Behavior is not feral," she said, voice clipped. "It's entrained. Something is pulling signal."
"V-Link," Kenji said.
Aiko felt the word touch the bottom of her ribs like a bell.
Two more figures came skittering from the far end of the square—V-Monsters, smaller, twitching, eyes blown wide as coins. Villagers backed and bunched, pulling children, grabbing hands. Doors banged. Someone shouted for the Guild. The Guild was here. That had to be enough.
Pulsebun threw a bolt. It danced across the insectoid's frame, lit its seams, and went into the ground like water down a drain.
"Grounding again," Kenji called. "Joints, Pulsebun!"
"On it," Pulsebun growled. He juked left, drew the thing's gaze, then slid low and hammered a precisely ugly punch into a rust-softened seam. The creature stuttered and staggered, regaining balance on a shriek that made teeth ache.
Aiko felt it—the hum that wasn't sound. A pattern under the noise. It wanted to pull everything into line and then snap the line.
Reina glanced back without moving her feet. "Tachibana," she said, as if she'd known Aiko's name all morning. "Can you do what you did in the ruin?"
Aiko's mouth went dry. "I don't know what I did."
"Try," Reina said, not unkindly. "I'll keep them off you for ten seconds."
Kenji's hand found Aiko's elbow. "You don't have to."
Aiko looked at the boy she'd pulled from the stones. He clung to her sleeve. His mother reached, eyes wet, lips forming thank you without sound. Aiko nodded once, breathed once, and stepped into the square's center where the stones were worn smooth by years of feet.
She didn't have a circle here. She had a village.
She closed her eyes. The hum rose. She didn't push at it. She listened, the way she listened to dough under her palms, to water when it went from hot to right. Shapes came, not words. Hinges. Doors. She was not a key. She was the part of the door that let the hinge be a hinge.
Aiko opened her hands.
Something breathed back.
Light didn't flare. Nothing dramatic happened. And yet the air made room. One of the smaller V-Monsters—mouse-sized, quivering, froth at its mouth—shuddered and blinked as if coming up from a bad dream. It froze, then bolted for a shadow and hid there, trembling but present. The second small one stalled mid-rush and sagged to its haunches with a soft clack.
The insectoid didn't stop. It lifted both forelimbs and brought them down like a judge's hammers.
"Move!" Pulsebun shouted.
Aiko did not move.
Pulsebun hit the creature side-on, wrenching its aim. Blades scraped stone and sparked. Reina stepped forward and made a swift, almost delicate motion with the tool. The wrong hum hiccupped. The insectoid wavered.
"Now," Kenji said, but he wasn't talking to Pulsebun. He had slid beside Aiko, not touching her, but there the way a handrail is there. "Witness," he whispered, almost to himself. "Record the path. Don't fight it. Shape it."
The hum bucked. Aiko shaped anyway.
She didn't force quiet. She folded the loud into a different shape. Her breathing measured out the pattern—four beats in, four beats held, four beats out. The air took the count. The hum tried to ignore it and couldn't. For a heartbeat, it aligned with the small, human rhythm.
The insectoid's blades faltered. Pulsebun didn't. He was motion and line and an ugly grace born from a thousand bad ideas and one very good instinct. He cut in low, popped up inside the creature's reach, and drove his fist into an exposed pivot where time had done what electricity could not.
The joint sheared with a sound that would live in Aiko's bones. The creature pitched sideways, catching itself on one bladed arm, now half hanging.
"Down!" Reina commanded. She slammed the tool against the air, and the hum fractured—no, Kenji thought, cataloging even now, it didn't break; it rerouted around a sudden absence. He filed the difference. He would need it.
The insectoid swung wild. Pulsebun slipped the arc by breath, not by distance. He hopped backward and nearly tripped over a basket of pears. Aiko's father stepped from a doorway, grabbed the basket, dumped the pears, and shoved the wicker into Pulsebun's hands.
"Thanks!" Pulsebun yelped, and he wasn't sure for what until his body decided. He jammed the basket over the creature's remaining blade. The wicker bit and held just enough to turn the next strike into a clumsy jab.
"Creative," Reina said dryly.
"My specialty," Pulsebun panted.
Aiko's breathing kept count. Kenji's eyes moved like a metronome over the square, taking in vectors: who was where, which way fear ran, which windows had faces behind them. He filed paths and names with the same care he gave dates and maps. It mattered to remember.
A shadow fell.
A second large V-Monster slid into the square from the bakery lane—low, quadruped, carapace like layered slate. Its eyes were wrong. Not angry. Empty.
"We're not done," Pulsebun groaned.
Aiko felt the hum split. Two threads now. She could hold one. Maybe both for a breath. Not forever. "Kenji," she said. "If this keeps happening…"
"I know," he said. He didn't say out loud that the capital would make rules for them. That Reina was already making decisions Aiko couldn't see. He didn't have to.
Reina did not waste questions. "Priorities," she said, efficient and cool. "Civilians clear the square, small ones stabilized, larger targets disabled, not destroyed."
"Not destroyed?" Pulsebun echoed, incredulous.
"We're not here to make more eggs than we can carry," she said.
The quadruped charged. It moved wrong, like a puppet with half its strings cut. Kenji's throat tightened. He had seen that wrongness before—in ledgers where pages stopped, in records that went quiet mid-sentence.
Aiko stepped, not away but into the space between motions. She offered the breath again. The hum fought again. Something in the quadruped answered again. It wasn't obedience. It was relief.
"Now, Pulsebun," she said, and it surprised her that it came out steady, like calling an order in the bakery.
Pulsebun went. He was a flurry of short, fierce decisions: here, not there; now, not later. He chose a seam above the forepaw and drove a jolt into the smallest possible place. The jolt didn't spread. It unstitched. The leg buckled, the body tipped, the stone caught it, and momentum did what it always does.
The beast slid and crashed, skidding to a stop inches from a stall stacked with pottery. Aiko's neighbor, who had made those bowls, didn't scream. She pressed her hand to the stack and kept it standing. Later, she would cry. Now she saved her work.
The square breathed again. Not safe. Not yet. But breathing.
Villagers ran. Not away—around, ferrying each other, pulling the slow, watching the doors. The Guild had taught them to organize in emergencies. Life had taught them better.
Reina flicked her tool once more and then snapped it shut. "They'll re-synch if something keeps transmitting," she said. "Whatever is speaking to them is not done."
Kenji's gaze flicked to the outpost across the lane. To the wooden box that wasn't a box. To the atlas with a spine that could hold a device that should not exist. To Aiko, whose breath had become the difference between chaos and not.
Reina followed his eyes and said nothing. That decision was a choice too.
The insectoid twitched, tried to rise on its single good blade, failed, and lay still. The quadruped shuddered and went quiet. The wrong hum receded, not defeated, only choosing another road.
Aiko's knees shook. Kenji's hand was there. She took it. Pulsebun leaned into her leg for exactly one second and then pretended he had been leaning on nothing.
"Good work," Reina said, and meant it. "Now we talk."
"Here?" Pulsebun said, scandalized. "In front of an almost pile of pottery that almost died?"
"In the outpost," Reina amended. "Five minutes. If there are more, we need to be ready."
Kenji nodded. "We will be."
They turned. Aiko glanced back once. In the shadow by the tea shop, the tiny V-Monster—the one that had blinked awake—watched her. It lifted one paw, small and unsure, and set it down again. Aiko lifted her hand in answer. It mattered to say hello, even like this.
Inside the outpost, the door shut on the square's noise. The egg's soft green steadied the room. The air smelled like paper and tea and a new thing trying to be born.
Reina stood at the table. She didn't touch the wooden box. She didn't look at the atlas. She looked at Aiko.
"The capital will ask for compliance," she said. "I'm going to ask for trust."
Aiko held her gaze. "Those aren't the same thing."
"No," Reina agreed. "They aren't. I can't promise you protection from the city. I can promise you discretion and a decent strategy."
Kenji set his notebook on the table. "Strategy starts with terms."
Reina's mouth ticked. "You'll make a good steward," she said, and Aiko's breath caught at the word. Kenji heard it too. He did not react, which was its own reaction.
Pulsebun hopped onto a chair, then onto the table, then sat cross-legged, absolutely not nervous and obviously nervous. "If we cooperate," he said, "we keep the village safe. If we don't, the capital comes with more badges and fewer ears."
"Correct," Reina said.
Aiko looked at the egg. The faint gold threads under its surface had returned, fine as hair. They moved like thought. The ruin had whispered to her. The egg was listening. The world was speaking in pieces. She couldn't bake this back into simplicity.
"We'll tell you what we can," she said. "We won't hand you what can't survive a rumor."
Reina inclined her head. "That will have to do."
Outside, the square began to sound like itself again—brooms on stone, voices rising in the old, ordinary ways. Aiko closed her eyes and breathed with it. The hum was gone for now, but she could still feel the shape it had left behind, the way a heavy basket leaves a mark on a palm.
They hadn't won. They had held.
Sometimes that is all a morning gets to be. Sometimes it is enough.