Arming (ensureInit) was awaited before the Promise.race hard backstop, so its bounded settings fetch was additive to the 55s ingest budget: a stalling search endpoint could stretch a tick to ~63s, past the 60s cron interval, overlapping the next tick and breaking the documented "ticks don't overlap" invariant. Move arming inside the race, ahead of ingest, so arming and ingest share ONE budget bounded by HARD_TIMEOUT_MS. Ordering is preserved (the sink must be armed before ingest upserts). Widen the failure log to cover the arming step now that it runs inside the guarded block.