The summons from Principal Yaga arrived the same afternoon.
Not slipped under a door this time. Hand-delivered by a second-year Kaito didn't know, who knocked once, extended the envelope without making eye contact, and left before Kaito could ask anything. The envelope was heavier than Ijichi's administrative slips — proper paper, the school's formal seal on the back, the kind of material that communicated institutional weight before the contents did.
He opened it standing in the corridor.
Technique Review Session. Principal's Office. 14:00. Attendance mandatory. Bring any personal documentation relevant to your cursed technique development.
He read the last line twice.
Any personal documentation.
He went back into his room, sat on the edge of the bed, and looked at his mother's folder on the desk for a long moment.
Then he picked it up, put it in his bag, and left it there.
He would decide at 13:55 whether to bring it in.
The principal's office occupied the corner of the administrative wing furthest from the student areas, which Kaito suspected was deliberate. The walk to it passed three unmarked doors, a display case of historical mission documentation, and a window overlooking the western grounds where the older trees had grown tall enough to press against the glass.
He arrived at 13:58.
The door was already open.
Principal Yaga sat behind a desk that held the organized density of someone who worked with paper the way exorcists worked with cursed energy — purposefully, with an understanding of where each element belonged and what happened when it was misplaced. He was larger than Kaito had expected from administrative reputation alone, with the particular physical presence of someone who had spent years in the field before moving to institutional work and hadn't lost the weight of either.
He looked up when Kaito entered.
"Mori." A gesture toward the chair across the desk. "Sit."
Kaito sat. He had left his bag in the corridor — he'd decided at 13:55 — with his mother's folder still inside it.
Yaga looked at him with the level, unhurried attention of someone who had conducted enough of these sessions to know that the first thirty seconds of silence were informative.
Kaito waited him out.
Something in Yaga's expression shifted fractionally — not approval, but the specific adjustment of someone recalibrating toward attentiveness.
"You had a joint training session this morning," Yaga said.
"Yes."
"The instructor filed her report at 10:47." He opened a folder on the desk — thinner than Kaito expected, which probably meant it was a summary document rather than the full file. "Partial domain activation. Approximately one second duration. Triggered by primary technique failure under a high-mobility target condition."
"That's accurate."
"The activation produced a spatial disruption effect that caused the cursed construct to hesitate." Yaga looked at him over the folder. "Also accurate?"
"Yes."
Yaga set the folder down and folded his hands on the desk. "I'm going to tell you what a technique review session normally involves, and then I'm going to tell you what this one involves, because they're different things."
Kaito listened.
"A standard technique review is documentation. We record what the technique does, how it develops, what the activation conditions are. It goes into your file, it informs your mission assignments, it helps your supervisors keep you alive." A pause. "This session is that. It's also something else, because your technique isn't standard and the documentation process for non-standard techniques has additional requirements."
"What requirements."
"Registration." Yaga's voice was even. "Any technique that demonstrates domain-adjacent behavior — spatial generation, bounded environment creation, reality-localized cursed energy effects — requires registration with the higher institutional framework. Not just your school file. A separate registry."
Kaito looked at him steadily. "Who has access to that registry."
"Senior staff. The higher-ups. In cases of Special Grade proximity, the relevant oversight bodies." Yaga paused. "It's not a small list."
The institutional actor who had pre-flagged his file before his arrival. Yuki's archive documents. The pattern connecting his mother's objection to three subsequent deaths.
Not a small list.
"Is registration mandatory," Kaito said.
"For documented domain-adjacent behavior, yes." Yaga held his gaze. "I want to be clear about something, Mori. I'm telling you this before we begin the formal documentation because you have a right to understand what happens to the information we produce in this room today." He paused, and something in his delivery shifted — still authoritative, but with a different quality underneath it, the specific tone of someone who has institutional obligations and personal ones and is navigating the space between them carefully. "The registry exists to manage risk. That's its stated purpose. In practice, it also creates visibility for students whose techniques are strategically significant."
"Visibility to people who may not have my interests as their primary concern."
Yaga looked at him for a long moment. "You're not wrong to think about it that way."
The room was quiet. Through the window behind Yaga's desk, the western grounds were pale and still, the tall trees pressing their branches against the glass with the patience of things that had been there longer than the building.
"What happens if the review produces incomplete documentation," Kaito said.
"The session is flagged for follow-up. Another review is scheduled." Yaga's expression gave nothing away. "The process repeats until the documentation is sufficient."
"And if the technique is genuinely not fully understood yet — by me, by anyone — that's an accurate representation of its development state."
Yaga was quiet for three seconds.
"That," he said carefully, "would be an accurate representation."
Kaito understood what was being offered. Not instruction to conceal — nothing that direct, nothing that documentable. Just a precise acknowledgment that incomplete understanding, honestly represented, produced incomplete documentation, which delayed registration, which limited visibility.
He filed it without letting the filing show on his face.
"Then I'll tell you what I know," he said. "And what I don't."
The documentation process took forty minutes.
Kaito described the technique accurately — the pigment externalization, the layering behavior, the spatial anchor application demonstrated in the field. He described the containment reflex in clinical terms: an involuntary expansion response to primary technique failure under pressure, brief duration, spatial disruption effect on cursed constructs, control established within one second.
He described the domain-adjacent behavior as early-stage and poorly understood, which was true.
He did not describe the architectural outline his cursed energy traced on surfaces. He did not describe the courtyard session with Gojo. He did not describe his mother's debrief or the room-shaped intention he'd identified in his technique's behavior.
None of those things were lies by omission in the context of a technique review. They were developmental observations, personal and unverified, not appropriate for formal documentation at this stage.
He had decided this in the corridor at 13:55, standing next to his bag with his mother's folder inside it.
Yaga wrote in steady, efficient strokes throughout, asking precise clarifying questions and not asking others that he could have asked. When the documentation was complete, he reviewed it once, made two small corrections, and set the pen down.
"One more question," he said. "Off the record."
Kaito waited.
"Your mother was Saki Mori."
It wasn't a question, but it had the structure of one — the kind that gives the other person the option of confirming or redirecting.
"Yes," Kaito said.
Yaga nodded slowly. He looked at the completed documentation on his desk, then at Kaito, with the expression of someone who had carried a piece of information for a long time and was deciding whether this was the correct moment to set it down.
"She was the best spatial technique exorcist I worked with in eleven years of field operations," he said. "Her containment work in the Nagoya incidents alone saved fourteen civilians the standard response protocol would have lost." A pause. "I reviewed her final mission assignment when it was submitted. I had concerns about the solo deployment designation."
Kaito kept his face still.
"I filed those concerns through the appropriate channel," Yaga said. "They were reviewed and overridden by a senior authority above my designation at that time." His voice stayed even throughout, the careful delivery of someone making a statement that was simultaneously personal and institutional and knew the difference mattered. "I want you to know that. Not for any operational reason. Because it's true, and you're sitting in my office, and you deserve to know it."
The room was very quiet.
Kaito thought about Yuki's archive documents. The routing patterns. The three other names. The objection filed and declined eight months before the mission that didn't bring his mother home.
He thought about Yaga filing concerns through appropriate channels that were reviewed and overridden.
He thought about a grocery list with buy more cadmium yellow at the bottom, never finished.
"Who overrode it," he said.
Yaga looked at him steadily. "That information isn't within my authority to share in this context."
"But you know."
"Yes."
"And it's documented somewhere."
A pause. "Parts of it are."
Kaito looked at his hands on his knees. The pigment residue at his palm, faint and permanent. The technique his mother had used to hold fourteen civilians safe for eleven minutes while waiting for a backup that had been declined before the mission began.
He looked up.
"Thank you," he said. "For telling me what you could."
Yaga held his gaze for a moment with the expression of someone who recognized that the gratitude was genuine and precisely calibrated, and found both things appropriate.
"The documentation will be filed by end of day," he said. "The registration process typically takes two to three weeks. During that time, your mission assignments will be reviewed for technique compatibility." He picked up the pen again, returning to the administrative register with the practiced transition of someone moving between modes. "You're doing well in the field. The Sendai assignment went significantly above the expected performance threshold for your grade."
"The geometry was readable," Kaito said.
Something moved at the corner of Yaga's expression — not quite a smile, but its structural precursor.
"It usually is," he said, "for the people who know how to look."
He collected his bag from the corridor and walked back through the administrative wing slowly, past the display case and the unmarked doors and the window where the afternoon light had gone from pale to amber while he'd been inside.
His cursed energy moved at his palm as he walked.
The room-shaped outline, patient and present.
He thought about what Yaga had said — the best spatial technique exorcist I worked with — and tried to reconcile it with the red tab on his intake packet, the stability index of 1.4, the assessment team's corridor conversation about an energy output that didn't fit any established category.
His mother's technique had fit a category. Grade One, field-certified, eleven years of operational record. Whatever she'd built in that Nagoya building, it had been legible to the institutional framework.
His wasn't. Not yet.
He stopped at the window.
Below, two second-years were crossing the western grounds toward the training halls, moving at the easy pace of people with somewhere to be and no particular urgency about getting there. He watched them for a moment without focusing on them, thinking instead about Megumi's voice in the training hall — you have two applications and you're treating them as one problem.
Spatial anchor. Containment reflex.
One was a support technique — readable, applicable, already demonstrated in field conditions. The other was something that predated combat logic, something that moved from a different place in him and served a different purpose.
He needed to understand the second one.
Not for the registry. Not for Yaga's documentation or Gojo's question or any institutional requirement.
For himself.
His phone showed a message from Yuki, sent forty minutes ago while he'd been in the review session.
I made a copy of page three. You should know — I found a second name in the routing documents. Someone below senior staff level. Still active at this school.
He read it twice.
Then he put his phone away, picked up his bag, and walked toward the dormitory with the specific steady pace of someone who had received important information and was choosing not to run with it until he understood which direction to run.
The amber light stretched long across the grounds.
His cursed energy traced its outline, patient as always.
He let it.