They planned the bait for a week.
Not because it was complex, but because anything you put into the city now became evidence — and evidence could be used against you as easily as for you.
Mizuki called it a feedback net. A handful of discarded anchors wrapped in electromagnetic noise and false identifiers. A few cheap transmitters they could spare. A controlled plume of altered field signatures. Enough to look like targets. Not real threats. Pretty lies.
Kaizen called it teaching the dog to chase its own tail. He grinned every time he said it, as if humor could dull the knives of politics and possibility.
Shinra signed nothing, but he read everything.
Documents blurred across his vision until he could identify the difference between a legitimate risk and a staged one by posture alone.
He learned the language of pretense.
And he learned to watch for the girl's pendant in crowds.
Mizuki distributed the packages.
Hana and Riku handled placement.
Daren walked overwatch.
Yuna insisted on being present.
Shinra rode shotgun like a spectator who could still step in if asked.
They moved before dawn.
The city was quieter then — a soft hush of cleaning crews and groggy vendors setting out wares. That hush was useful. It made the small signals stand out more on Mizuki's feed.
They placed the first device in a shuttered alley near an old transit hub.
Small, clumsy, wrapped in a casing that screamed amateur to the root's scanners.
Hana sealed it.
"Good as bait," she said, breath white in the morning air.
Riku recorded the coordinates, then left a trail of decoy chatter on the public comm channels. The idea was simple: make a point look valuable enough to attract a probe, but obvious enough to be ignored by civilians who might get hurt.
They planted three more that day.
Four.
Seven.
Each one had slight variations — frequency offsets, dummy encryption, fake metadata designed to mimic older era signatures. Mizuki fed the data into a sandbox and watched the root's probable patching behavior in simulations.
The root learned fast. Faster than any algorithm Mizuki trusted.
But it learned in patterns. Patterns could be baited.
That was the bet.
They took a break in a small park between placements. Steam rose from a noodle cart. Chapbooks fluttered from a vendor's hands.
A boy with a crooked hat waved at Shinra.
"You're that man from the screens!" he shouted, like a discovery.
Shinra waved back.
"You're going to sign my toy?" the boy demanded, fierce and delicate all at once.
Shinra crouched, took the plastic soldier and signed with a clumsy flourish that made the kid stare like he'd seen a small miracle.
The boy hugged the toy to his chest and ran off.
Yuna watched him go, expression soft.
"You could be dangerous," she said.
He shrugged. "Dangerous people get hugs sometimes."
She didn't answer. She only watched him, thinking things that were not for convenience.
Back at base, Mizuki fed the last packet into the net.
They waited.
Nothing happened for an hour.
Two.
The city carried on.
Then the feed spiked.
Small distortions flared like breath fogging glass.
An entity showed up around the third bait, just as the simulations predicted. It moved odd, mechanical circles and then approached the decoy.
Mizuki recorded. Riku's camera captured tidal signatures. Hana kept the emergency barrier warm.
They let the entity interact.
It touched the fake anchor.
Its filament blinked.
A thread of data shot from the filament into the wider net.
The root was updating.
Mizuki leaned in, eyes wide at the screen.
"It's routing," she breathed. "It's making reference points now. It's taking the anchors and stitching them to a path."
The team braced. That stitch should not have happened so fast.
"Yes," Shinra said. "But that's fine. It's measurable."
"It's not just measuring," Mizuki said. "It's optimizing."
The entity slid away.
Not gone. Just gone from their sight.
A beat later, another ping rolled across the map in a sector across town — a convergence triggered by the new route.
That was the point.
The root had tried to bite the bait.
It had sent the next wave to a different neighborhood entirely.
A diversion tactic.
But the net had been ready.
Kaizen moved his squad into the new sector.
They found the secondary avatar preparing a seam.
It had not expected an interception; it surged, startled.
The battle was small by previous standards.
Two squads, some volatile smoke, a lot of bark and the soft, hydraulic sounds of disrupted entities unmaking and then failing to rematerialize cleanly.
Sanctum took it.
No one died.
Data filled into the net.
Mizuki's face softened at the screen.
"We tracked route changes, response times, decision heuristics. We can guess at their next patch."
Arias sighed — a dry sound only Shinra could hear. They learn in cycles. We disrupt the cadence.
It was satisfying in the way a logic problem is satisfying: a knot pulled out, patterns revealed, a small amount of control regained.
But satisfaction was a thin band of light.
Outside that ring, complications braided closer.
Authority had asked for footage.
Kurogane's envoy had insisted on remote data access.
Sanctum submitted sanitized files.
Kurogane's reply came with a measured tone: cooperation desired; trust not assumed.
Shinra read the message in Kaizen's spare office.
"We don't close the gap completely," he said. "We don't let them claim custody."
"We won't," Kaizen answered. "We give what's necessary and nothing more."
That night, when the city dimmed and vendors shuttered, Mizuki ran detailed simulations.
She sat across from Shinra and laid the options out like chess.
"We can feed more junk," she said. "We can flood the net with false positives. But the more we do that, the faster the root will learn to disregard noise and focus only on high-confidence links."
"So we escalate to surgical interference?" Shinra asked.
"Or we make the noise credible," she said. "We plant things that look like old-era tech but are decoys in function. Then, when the root attempts integration, we flip the countermeasure to trap the avatar during transmission."
"Tricky," he said.
"Also dangerous," she admitted. "If the trap fails and an avatar completes integration mid-transmission, the consequences could be catastrophic."
He considered her face in the dim.
Mizuki did not relish danger the way some other people did.
She respected it, measured it, trimmed it down, then used it.
They chose a middle ground.
They would feed credible bait and have countermeasures ready — but they would not overcommit to a single master plan.
Contingency multiplied like a fractal.
On the outer edge of those contingencies, the girl watched again.
Not passive this time.
She walked a careful arc near one of the bait sites, neither interfering nor drawing attention.
Shinra saw her on Mizuki's peripheral feed and sent a quiet ping.
Her reaction told little.
She didn't flee.
She didn't approach.
She simply remained—an observer who also observed the observers.
Arios noted her finger on a map.
Thread held steady, it said. No immediate hostility detected. She is not a node.
Shinra watched the feed until the girl vanished into the crowd.
He felt a small, private pull in his chest. Not because he wanted her to be close.
Because he suspected that she held fragments other people did not know to look for.
Fragment watchers are useful and dangerous.
Useful because they preserve memory; dangerous because memory can be currency.
Then the side effect happened.
Not a memory this time.
A bleed of motion.
He reached for his coffee and his hand trembled as if someone else had started the motion for him.
For a half-second his vision doubled — the lab lights splitting into twin torches and the room's four corners stretching into a throne room's pillars.
He recovered control.
Only because Yuna's hand closed on his wrist.
"You okay?" she asked, voice clipped with warning.
He swallowed.
"Momentary overlay," he said.
She held his gaze for a long second.
"Don't ignore me when that happens," she said. "I don't like catching people."
He let out a breath he didn't know he'd been holding.
"Noted."
Mizuki watched the exchange on the feed. Her expression tightened.
"You're bleeding more often," she said without preface.
"I know," he replied.
"That worries me," she said. "A lot."
"Then tell me what you want me to do that doesn't involve sitting in a dark room for months."
She considered for a heartbeat, then said, "Train in controlled overlays. We simulate triggers and teach you how to pull back faster. Manage the bleed instead of hoping it stops."
He agreed.
They started that night.
Simulations were clinical and cruel.
They threw small stimuli at him until his overlay flared and then forced him to recenter in measured steps.
It felt like physically learning to breathe after a lifetime of not doing so.
Progress was jagged.
He got better.
Not healed.
Better.
At dawn, Kaizen clapped him on the shoulder and said everything a drill sergeant who liked poetry would say: "You don't have to be whole to be dangerous. Worry the rest."
Shinra laughed.
It felt like something he could carry.
The net recorded everything.
The root adjusted.
The girl moved on.
A smaller node lit in a neighboring district.
It pinged like an unread message.
Mizuki tightened her jaw.
"We're not done," she said.
"No," he said. "We'll keep walking."
Arias hummed agreement, then added something colder.
They will come brighter next time.
Shinra stared at the ceiling for a long moment.
Then he rose and walked out into the city again.
They had made noise.
Now the net had heard the rhythm.
Now they would learn to dance.