Seori got home late.
She kicked her shoes off by the door, dropped her bag, and sat on the floor with her back against the couch.
Her UI helpfully pulled up her shift stats.
[CALLS: 7][CRITICAL CASES: 2][EVALUATOR OVERRIDES: 1]
One.
Enough to feel.
Her hands were still trembling a little.
Hyun had clapped her on the shoulder as they clocked out.
"You did good," he'd said. "Boss is telling everyone we're 'blessed by the System' now. Expect offerings."
She'd thrown a glove at him.
Now, in the quiet of her room, the badge pulsed softly.
[WOULD YOU LIKE TO REVIEW YOUR DECISION?]
Seori sighed.
"Sure," she said. "Why not invite anxiety to dinner too."
The scene replayed in abstracted form: three HP bars, three little icons, her override stamped on top.
She watched it once.
Then again.
Her chest loosened.
"I'd do it again," she said.
The System recorded that.
[EVALUATOR CONFIDENCE: HIGH.][DEVIATION FROM BASELINE: MODERATE.][OUTCOME: POSITIVE.]
Somewhere in the debug layer, near a legacy Node that still bore ADMIN_0's fingerprints, a small new line appeared in a growing, unstructured repository:
City Evaluator, Gray-3, Seori — Decision 0001: Human judgment used to pick between three lives when Root failed. Outcome: acceptable. Biases: community safety, long-term impact. Note: Didn't break.
It wasn't signed.
But if Kael ever looked, he'd recognize the style.
Mira's doing, probably.
Or Beta, getting creative.
Seori stretched out on the floor, arms over her head.
"Okay," she said to the ceiling. "I'll try not to mess this up. In return, you don't throw any Root glitches at me for at least a week."
The System did not agree, because it didn't work like that.
But for tonight, nothing screamed.
No Root channels flickered.
No nodes timed out.
Her shardless soul—ordinary and tired—rested.
Outside, Towers pulsed with their usual dangerous rhythm.
Inside, in a dozen places, quiet adjustments hummed: a little more mercy here, a little more honest pressure there, a slightly higher weight on "grandma in an apartment fire" and "worker who holds the neighborhood together."
The argument over worth continued.
Now with one more voice in the mix.