diff --git a/scripts/frank-archon.env b/scripts/frank-archon.env
index 0d4b363..287372c 100644
--- a/scripts/frank-archon.env
+++ b/scripts/frank-archon.env
@@ -47,10 +47,13 @@ FRANK_ARCHON_TP=2
 # MAX_SEQS x (1 + SPEC_TOKENS) below.
 FRANK_ARCHON_TP_WIRE=wht6
 # Decode slots. A slot costs KV, never decode; the pool is sized to this
-# contract and nothing more, so a FOURTH full-height conversation is REFUSED as
-# too large to fit — never squeezed, paged or truncated. That is Frank's
-# explicit trade: the freed MiB went to the expert slab.
-FRANK_ARCHON_MAX_SEQS=3
+# contract and nothing more. At 1.8.1 the budget resolver caps the cache at
+# 556,348 fp8 tokens — 2.8 sessions at 200,000 — so a THIRD full-height
+# conversation answers 400 while /health and every shorter chat work fine
+# (3 x 50k streams run at 77.6 t/s aggregate). Frank's trade: declare the two
+# slots the engine can hold and let the freed ~1.1 GiB go to the expert plane,
+# instead of advertising a third slot that only exists at shorter prompts.
+FRANK_ARCHON_MAX_SEQS=2
 # Served window. The engine treats `kv group tokens >= max-model-len` as a HARD
 # limit, and models.yml contextWindow MUST quote this number (over-length is a
 # refusal, not a truncation). The pool is sized for seqs x maxlen, not one
@@ -63,12 +66,11 @@ FRANK_ARCHON_PLACEMENT=expert_tiered
 # rest, so growing the pool moves experts off the card and shrinking it spills
 # them onto VRAM the cache wanted. Under-sizing it is a boot failure (36,864
 # refused a boot). The ledger's coverage line is the referee, not this file.
-# Sized so the cache clears the 3 x MAX_MODEL_LEN contract: the 1.8.1 boot at
-# 44,928 resolved the cache to 556,348 tokens — 2.8 sessions — and three
-# concurrent full-height requests came back 400 in 0.0 s. Tokens scale with the
-# GiB the cache wins, so +640 MiB a rank buys ~44,000 tokens of ceiling with
-# ~2.5% off the expert slab.
-FRANK_ARCHON_HOST_POOL_MIB=45568
+# Measured, not guessed: 45,568 (PR #30) moved host_pool to 45.09 GiB and left
+# vram_kv byte-identical at 4.20 GiB / 556,348 tokens on both ranks — extra
+# host RAM above what the expert plane's footprint needs buys no cache. Back at
+# 44,928, the size that boots clean.
+FRANK_ARCHON_HOST_POOL_MIB=44928
 # VRAM left unclaimed per card (publisher default 96 MiB); the engine's settle
 # floor is built from it.
 FRANK_ARCHON_GPU_HEADROOM_MIB=96
@@ -117,9 +119,8 @@ FRANK_ARCHON_NGRAM_PLACEMENT=ram
 # mid-pin with an anonymous allocator error. ttm-preflight.sh raises the knob
 # itself before refusing by name, so recovery is a boot, not a visit.
 # Floor = 2 x HOST_POOL + 48,824 (static weights + arena) + PREFIX_CACHE + MNBT
-# per the bats ledger test; at the 45,568 pool that computes to 150,200 MiB, so
-# the floor sits just above it.
-FRANK_ARCHON_TTM_MIN_MIB=152000
+# per the bats ledger test; at the 44,928 pool that computes to 148,920 MiB.
+FRANK_ARCHON_TTM_MIN_MIB=150000
 FRANK_ARCHON_TTM_TARGET_MIB=204800
 # Escape hatch for experiments. Unset -> no extra argv; the serve script expands
 # this unquoted on purpose, so keep multi-flag values as one string.
diff --git a/tests/frank_archon_unit.bats b/tests/frank_archon_unit.bats
index 73682ba..de4ed5a 100755
--- a/tests/frank_archon_unit.bats
+++ b/tests/frank_archon_unit.bats
@@ -135,14 +135,17 @@ nosudo_bin() {
     grep -q '^FRANK_ARCHON_MAX_MODEL_LEN=200000$' "$ENV_FILE"
     ml=$(awk -F= '/^FRANK_ARCHON_MAX_MODEL_LEN=/{print $2}' "$ENV_FILE")
     [ "$ml" -ge 177356 ]
-    # Concurrency: 3 slots x the served window is the capacity contract, and
-    # the fused TP all-reduce is declared over seqs x (1 + spec) = 9 rows,
+    # Concurrency: 2 slots x the served window is the capacity contract at
+    # 1.8.1. The budget resolver caps the cache at 556,348 fp8 tokens — 2.8
+    # sessions at 200,000 — so three concurrent full-height chats answer 400,
+    # and the shipped CLI has no KV-size flag to raise it (removed at 1.3.0).
+    # The fused TP all-reduce is declared over seqs x (1 + spec) = 6 rows,
     # under the 25-row bound at which the wht6 wire stays bit-exact. The
     # "seqs 2 cannot boot" law belongs to the retired tcclaviger vLLM fork
     # (torch.compile query_start_loc constraint, 2026-10-02); radiance booted
     # seqs 2 in the fp8-native era and the 2026-10-06 sweep had seqs 2 and 3
     # tied inside the +-3% noise floor — slots buy concurrency, not speed.
-    grep -q '^FRANK_ARCHON_MAX_SEQS=3$' "$ENV_FILE"
+    grep -q '^FRANK_ARCHON_MAX_SEQS=2$' "$ENV_FILE"
     grep -q '^FRANK_ARCHON_TP=2$' "$ENV_FILE"
     grep -q '^FRANK_ARCHON_TP_WIRE=wht6$' "$ENV_FILE"
     grep -q '^FRANK_ARCHON_SPEC_TOKENS=2$' "$ENV_FILE"
@@ -155,7 +158,7 @@ nosudo_bin() {
     # so the pool's token count is a boot-ledger line — verified live by the
     # capacity leg of scripts/probe-frank-archon-kv.py at every cutover.
     grep -q '^FRANK_ARCHON_PLACEMENT=expert_tiered$' "$ENV_FILE"
-    grep -q '^FRANK_ARCHON_HOST_POOL_MIB=45568$' "$ENV_FILE"
+    grep -q '^FRANK_ARCHON_HOST_POOL_MIB=44928$' "$ENV_FILE"
     grep -q '^FRANK_ARCHON_KV_DTYPE=fp8$' "$ENV_FILE"
     grep -q '^FRANK_ARCHON_NGRAM_PLACEMENT=ram$' "$ENV_FILE"
     # Prefix cache: pinned host RAM only (the disk tier was removed), and the