Contract 9.12.2

Every database read is bounded (review §3.1-3.3). A read-only tool waits at most 5 s for a lock and answers query_timeout instead of holding a connection behind a migration. battles_deck_sets and battles_deck_upgrades stop their search at a 4 s time budget as well as the node budget, so exhausted: false can mean either; the values are the best found. Explore and /api/v1 now race the same read deadline MCP does, so a slow read answers query_timeout there too rather than timing out the request.