Engine::cross is the one place a dot product is computed during agglomeration — when two groups become adjacent through a third and their sub-threshold pairs, never summed because they were never interesting, have to be accounted for. It was calling the portable loop while the scan beside it had AVX2 or NEON, which on the reference library was 1,753,514 dot products taking 0.54s. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>