A token-cap diagnostic is a separate evaluation in which two retrieval systems are compared after a shared token-aware serialization policy is applied to their returned context. Because the policy that serializes candidates into the LLM context (ordering, truncation, length-awareness) is held identical across the compared systems, any remaining difference reflects the ranked retrieval output rather than serialization choices. In this paper the token-cap diagnostic is reported separately from the strict-parity (SP) headline retrieval contract: SP fixes encoder, candidate pool, cutoff, split, and matching rule; the token-cap diagnostic adds a matched serialization layer on top so that tight-budget behavior can be inspected without conflating it with the headline retrieval comparison.