The sky still carried the aftertaste of light when the evacuation finished. Robots hummed in tidy rows. Soft transport pods lined the plaza like sleeping insects. Children clustered around survivors who had suddenly become guardians and strangers who were—against all odds—kind.
Takumi stood on a low dais he had conjured from Imaginary Space, watching the scene. The Herrscher of Reason in him had been busy for hours: airdropping housing modules, compiling relocation manifests, rewriting municipal protocols into the broadcast he'd forced into every screen. Now his hands were folded, eyes half-closed, and for a breath he let himself feel the weight of everything he'd unmade and remade.
He enjoyed the taste of order. That pleasure had a razor at its edge.
The Seat of Law
Within an hour of the arrivals, Zhongli stepped out onto the plaza — stone-cloaked, solemn, like a man carrying an old world's patience.
He walked to Takumi and bowed once, not out of deference but because it fit the moment.
"We should legislate," Zhongli said quietly, to the murmurs and frightened gazes around them. "Not because law is power, but because structure comforts those who have known chaos."
Takumi opened his eyes. "Right. Give me a template."
Zhongli raised an amused eyebrow. "A template?"
Takumi's smile was small and dry. "Herrscher of Reason. I make law literal."
He raised a hand. The air shimmered. In seconds, blueprints hovered like trading cards: school districts, resource-distribution algorithms, legal charters with clauses that smelled of common sense and impossible enforcement.
Zhongli reviewed them, nodding slowly. "Article 1: Sanctuary — any individual under fourteen or any registered Initiator is under state protection. Article 2: Freedom of Relearning — education shall prioritize healing and craft. Article 3…" He read and amended, then asked, "Who will draft it into a charter that holds in both moral and practical terms?"
Takumi answered in a voice that carried both amusement and something colder. "I will. But the charter will be an enforced technology, not a threat. A civic framework operating at the code level."
He pressed an imaginary stamp. Reality folded. The charter unfurled across the plaza in impossible letters everyone could read. It had a gentle heartbeat; it tuned into citizens' devices and into the drones that became municipal clerks. It would not obey tyranny. It would not allow children to be used as weapons. It would reward aid. It would punish abuse with economic locks and social sanction that could be deployed without bloodshed.
Zhongli let the charter wash over him and then, ever the careful statesman, murmured, "We must be cautious. Laws are not spells — but you have turned them near-magical."
Takumi shrugged. "I prefer pragmatic magic."
EDU-AI & The First Teachers
If laws were bricks, then education would be mortar. Takumi had already seeded the settlement with EDU-AIs — soft-voiced tutors spawned from his knowledge stacks. Himeko had suggested modular curricula, Zhongli had provided moral frameworks, Sagiri wanted a manga class, and Chika insisted on "festival planning" as an elective.
Inside the main school dome, an EDU-AI named Lumen greeted the first frightened students. Its voice was deliberately warm.
"Welcome. This is a place to feel safe. Your stories matter. We will begin with small steps."
Kisara hovered near the entrance, arms crossed, watching the children. Some clung to Miori. Others stared at the sky as if afraid it might open and take them again. The school had a therapy wing; the EDU-AI interfaced with Yu's visceral reports about feeling overstressed, with Bronya's mechanical control to craft soothing devices, with Sagiri's Illustration Manifestation that could draw calm into existences.
Yu, who had recently had pain relieved by the group's healing item, supervised a quiet room where children learned breathing exercises. Her expression flickered between priestly focus and a new curiosity.
"How do you… draw?" one boy asked Sagiri, holding a limp paper crane.
Sagiri's eyes lit and she concentrated. The crane filled with color, then folded itself into a tiny boat that bobbed serenely on the desk. The kid grinned.
Takumi watched through a thin portal at the side of the classroom. He felt a small, honest warmth bloom in his chest. Civilization, he reminded himself, was not only rockets and railguns. It was this: shared laughter, stitched into a day.
The Psychological Weather — Takumi's Quiet Storm
As dusk folded into night, Takumi wandered to the rim of the settlement. His hands sculpted the air and small, efficient drones repaired roofs. He'd ordered a festival square — a soft place for children to tumble — and the lanterns drifted on a breeze that smelled faintly of Sagiri's world: paper, ink, roasted sweet.
He found himself thinking about the broadcast that had once frozen every screen. The sound of his own voice rolling over cities. The sight of warships like a scream in slow motion.
Why had he done it? To protect, yes. But there was something more animal behind it: the pleasant awareness of being feared and obeyed in the same heartbeat.
He tested a fragment of thought — a small psychological push — and reality answered. An ephemeral sculpture of a child's hand formed in the air, and then dissolved. He almost laughed. The Herrscher of Reason could craft whole new epistemologies solely by thinking them.
But power leaves impressions. That night, in the thin hours when even the robots dimmed, Takumi sat awake. The voices came like summer rain: whispers of possibilities, of entire planetary orders kneeling beneath a design he could imagine. They were seductive: bring more people, more worlds, more consolidation; become a god who remakes cultures into the tidy shape of efficiency.
He felt the first cold glance of something darker inside himself: the godhood not just of creation but of judgment. It pleased him dangerously.
He closed his eyes and summoned an honest question, the one his new authority could not answer for him.
What will you become, if you keep building and taking?
The thought had no immediate echo. Only the wind answered.
Governance as Play: Chika's Festival, Megumi's Calm
Not all governance had to be stern. Chika, energized by the joviality of new citizens, announced a "Welcome Festival" in the group chat and immediately deputized Sagiri as Art Director. Akeno offered a lightning-light show (low intensity; Takumi vetoed orbital cannons). Megumi, quiet as ever, volunteered to run logistics because she liked things to be predictable.
Chika:
[President Chika will inaugurate the silliest festival in history! Cake! Confetti! Certificates for everyone!]
Megumi:
[I will handle scheduling. No accidents, please.]
Takumi:
[Supply chain verified. I'll arrange floats that don't explode.]
Bronya:
[I will produce a soft shuttle for children who get tired.]
Familial, absurd, practical. This was civilization: small rituals that stitched people to place.
Megumi's voice in the chat was matter-of-fact. "We should include a 'story hour' where refugees can share favorite memories. It helps continuity."
Takumi approved. He liked the idea because it both comforted and archived. He instructed EDU-AI Lumen to record the oral histories and to code them into a cultural seedbank. "Memory as infrastructure," he grinned when he explained it to Zhongli.
First Enforcement: A Gentle Demonstration
The charter Takumi had stamped into the town's code included mechanisms: nonlethal but binding. When a faction of opportunistic scavengers attempted to requisition a house set aside for a family of Initiators, an AI mediator hummed into existence. It offered arbitration, compensation, and—when the humans refused—economic locks that froze accounts and anonymized reputations across the settlement's market nodes.
No blood spilled. The robbers stalled, then folded when their credit evaporated into a paperless black hole.
Takumi watched it happen. He felt the same pleasant shiver as before — order imposed, and the world aligned.
But when the leader of the little group looked at him through the mediation screen, fear and anger braided into a single look, and Takumi noticed something uncomfortable: obedience could breed resentment as efficiently as it bred safety. People might come willingly now, but if they ever felt governed into submission, they could turn, and his machines might be asked to do unpleasant things.
He could redesign the mediator to be more pedagogical, less punitive. He made a note. The Herrscher of Reason liked solving problems before they metastasized.
A Quiet Promise
That night the children slept under new roofs. Kisara patrolled the perimeter on short shifts, every so often sitting under a lamplight and watching the horizon. She did not smile, but she hummed a low, private tune: an old ritual's cadence to let her bones remember something gentler.
Miori plotted the conversion of family assets into industrial capital that could be transported with minimal friction. She messaged Takumi: "We'll buy stakes in the textile factory. Kids need clothes first."
Takumi answered simply: "Make it a community enterprise."
He lay back, watching the stars he had once been taught to worship as scientific curiosities. Now they were not so far. He could reach them, should he choose. A thought flickered — a temptation — that the stars themselves might someday be cataloged like libraries.
For now, the city grew like careful mold. Law and school, therapy and festival. The charter hummed in the infrastructure, the EDU-AI learned how to recognize nightmares, and the kids learned that a night could pass without fear.
Takumi closed his eyes and, for the first time since he had ripped the world's network to make his announcement, he felt something like fatigue. Not of muscle — Herrscher energy had none — but of conscience. Building a civilization required restraint as much as imagination.
He whispered into the dark, to no one and to everyone in the same breath:
"I'll keep them safe."
Whether that promise became gentleness or dominion would be written in the small choices of tomorrow.
The chat never truly slept. Even after midnight the group pinged with small, human concerns: Chika's cake recipe, Sagiri's new doujinshi idea inspired by the kids, Bronya asking for a maintenance schedule for the Reinforced Bunny, Zhongli quietly uploading an essay on ethics for public consumption.
Takumi read them all, felt the web of connection tighten. The universe had given him a tool, and he had chosen to open his hand instead of closing his fist. For tonight, that would have to be enough.