Belt (canon: charges are the cost, the belt is the ammo): cards are
CARD_TYPES indices consumed on play, next slides into the 2-slot hand;
belt cap 8; HUD shows hand glyphs + upcoming-card ticks. Card pool
grows to 4: SHOCKWAVE, HEATWAVE, DASH (impulse along held movement
direction — aimable while frozen, no aim input), IGNITE (nearest-enemy
heat spike past threshold). Rooms: spawn-budget waves (base 8 +4/room,
4 rooms/run); clear -> interstitial fork (CARD vs SCRAP +8) -> CARD
opens a 3-option draft + scrap decline (+4) -> next room; final clear
or mech destruction -> tally overlay (rooms/kills/scrap/chem) with
relaunch on 1. Interstitial owns the pause while active; the hand
yields input and time authority to it. Mech death now signals the run
manager instead of hard-reloading.
Chain semantics (same-tag surge / cross-tag chemistry trigger)
deliberately deferred to M3.
Smoke gate: belt consumption white-boxed in the card phase, _until
moved to process_frame (physics awaits deadlock under pause), run
phase covers clear->fork->draft->belt growth->room advance->tally.
3/3 green on nh3-dev headless 4.7.1.
Operator ruling 2026-08-07: v1.0 is reserved for the public RC, never
internal milestones. Greybox falsifier recorded as M1 (done, untagged);
M2 pending next-phase decision; parking-lot gate unchanged.
vh