**Snowlight Valley – Twelfth Week**
Daigo had seventy-two hours to live.
Not in body. In record.
The High Council wasn't going to kill him.
They were going to erase him.
Clean. Silent. Legal.
So Daigo made a choice.
He would erase them first.
---
**Day One**
He filed a maintenance report. Standard. Harmless.
A small request to investigate seal glitches in the East Cluster.
But the clause he activated—**Protocol T3**—unlocked low-level scroll traffic for review.
For twelve hours, Daigo had access to the Council's shadow.
He moved fast.
He copied scroll logs, command seals, detention orders.
He found proof: blacksite prisons, forged ledgers, purges signed after the fact.
He encrypted the files. Sent them three ways:
- To Ichi.
- To the old scribe who stood for him.
- To a sealed vault beneath the merchant hall.
Then he burned the access trail.
---
**Day Two**
He vanished—on paper.
Daigo used an old loophole in the audit registry. Classified himself as a roaming liaison. Hid his movement under overlapping patrol routes.
The Council's eyes blinked.
By midday, the Black Quill flagged it.
By sunset, Kuroji issued a warrant.
But Daigo was already below ground.
With the resistance.
They didn't greet him with smiles.
Only silence. And ink.
They handed him what he needed:
Maps. Channels. A seal-reactive flare.
The tools of a rebellion not yet declared.
---
**Day Three**
Daigo stood in the tallest tower on the edge of the valley.
The frost-bitten wind screamed across the peaks.
Below, the purge caravans rolled in. Rows of masked enforcers. Cold banners. The beginning of erasure.
He didn't move.
He didn't run.
He activated the failsafe.
One flare. One pulse.
And across every hidden merchant scroll, every sealed vault, every whistle-coded channel—
The truth released.
Names.
Crimes.
Every page the Council tried to bury, now scattered to the wind.
---
At dusk, the Speaker returned.
The same mask. The same voice.
"You've gone too far," they said.
Daigo stepped forward. "I followed your doctrine. I just finished the audit."
A pause.
Then the Speaker did the unthinkable.
They removed their mask.
A young face. Eyes like Daigo's. Tired. Ash around the collar.
"We were trying to hold the world together," they said. "Piece by piece."
"You built a cage," Daigo said. "Now everyone sees the bars."
---
The purge halted.
Not from mercy.
From exposure.
And when dawn broke, Daigo wasn't gone.
He was everywhere the truth had reached.
And the High Council—for the first time—was on defense.