Snowlight Valley – Eleventh Week
They didn't reprimand him.
They didn't send a scroll. Didn't summon him for questioning.
Didn't revoke his clearance.
They did nothing.
Which was worse.
Because it meant they were waiting.
Watching.
Planning.
Daigo found his name missing from the regional task ledger.
His daily reports no longer received confirmation seals.
Requests he sent into the archive queue vanished without response.
He wasn't frozen.
He was erased—quietly, surgically, like a bad statistic.
"I'm out," he told Ichi.
"Not yet," she said. "If you were out, they'd have sent the Masked Guard."
"So what is this?"
"Isolation. They're letting the valley chew you up. So they don't have to."
But the valley didn't turn.
The girl he saved in the seventh week? Her brother left a bundle of fresh ink at Daigo's door.
The merchant who stopped taking Council subsidies? Passed him a scroll hidden inside a sack of rice.
Inside: maps. Escape tunnels. Emergency lines.
The resistance was moving.
They didn't call him ally.
They called him necessary.
And then, at dawn, came a mask.
Not white. Not porcelain.
Iron.
A Masked Guard.
Daigo opened the door. The figure stepped in.
Silent. Tall. Heavily sealed.
"Daigo," the voice rasped, "you've been reassigned."
Daigo didn't flinch.
"To where?"
"To nothing."
Ichi appeared in the doorway.
"You'll have to go through me," she said.
The Guard tilted its head. "You don't have the authority."
"I don't need it. I have memory. Test me."
Silence.
Then:
A second voice. Behind the Guard.
A new figure.
Civilian robes. Council seal. Scroll in hand.
"I'll speak for the Auditor," the scribe said.
Daigo knew the voice.
The senior clerk who'd fed him the doctrine clause back in week five.
The one who still remembered.
Together, they stalled the Guard. Forced a review.
A temporary freeze.
Daigo had seventy-two hours.
After that, if nothing changed—
The Council would erase him the proper way.
By record.
By law.
And this time, there would be no emergency writ to stop it.