diff --git a/.github/workflows/release.yml b/.github/workflows/release.yml
index 3dc7c73..b358394 100644
--- a/.github/workflows/release.yml
+++ b/.github/workflows/release.yml
@@ -31,10 +31,15 @@ jobs:
             os: windows-latest
             archive: zip
             cargo_flags: ""
+          # Intel Mac: drops the old --no-default-features workaround. That
+          # flag was added to sidestep ort-sys lacking Intel Mac prebuilts,
+          # but fixing the feature propagation in vestige-mcp (embeddings
+          # now fully flows through fastembed) means the download-binaries
+          # feature reaches ort-sys the same way it does on aarch64.
           - target: x86_64-apple-darwin
             os: macos-14
             archive: tar.gz
-            cargo_flags: "--no-default-features"
+            cargo_flags: ""
           - target: aarch64-apple-darwin
             os: macos-latest
             archive: tar.gz
diff --git a/Cargo.lock b/Cargo.lock
index 410e4d6..c365449 100644
--- a/Cargo.lock
+++ b/Cargo.lock
@@ -4456,9 +4456,9 @@ dependencies = [
 
 [[package]]
 name = "usearch"
-version = "2.24.0"
+version = "2.23.0"
 source = "registry+https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index"
-checksum = "09657b7d3d88992d7475be6f345d3cb3b388d13c152dbd4742e0b955e3a2b632"
+checksum = "0a03c05af8d678ec19f014c734ab667c20ea54128b4f9a1472cb470246a9b341"
 dependencies = [
  "cxx",
  "cxx-build",
diff --git a/crates/vestige-core/Cargo.toml b/crates/vestige-core/Cargo.toml
index 212cde6..ecc1e3a 100644
--- a/crates/vestige-core/Cargo.toml
+++ b/crates/vestige-core/Cargo.toml
@@ -90,7 +90,11 @@ fastembed = { version = "5.11", default-features = false, features = ["hf-hub-na
 # ============================================================================
 # OPTIONAL: Vector Search (USearch - HNSW, 20x faster than FAISS)
 # ============================================================================
-usearch = { version = "2", optional = true }
+# Pinned to 2.23.0 — 2.24.0 introduced a Windows MSVC compile break because
+# its memory_mapping_allocator_gt template references the POSIX MAP_FAILED
+# macro from <sys/mman.h>, which doesn't exist on MSVC. Tracked upstream in
+# unum-cloud/usearch#746. Unpin when the upstream fix lands.
+usearch = { version = "=2.23.0", optional = true }
 
 # LRU cache for query embeddings
 lru = "0.16"
diff --git a/crates/vestige-mcp/Cargo.toml b/crates/vestige-mcp/Cargo.toml
index a8851f8..37d9777 100644
--- a/crates/vestige-mcp/Cargo.toml
+++ b/crates/vestige-mcp/Cargo.toml
@@ -34,8 +34,12 @@ path = "src/bin/cli.rs"
 # VESTIGE CORE - The cognitive science engine
 # ============================================================================
 # Includes: FSRS-6, spreading activation, synaptic tagging, hippocampal indexing,
-# memory states, context memory, importance signals, dreams, and more
-vestige-core = { version = "2.0.4", path = "../vestige-core", default-features = false, features = ["bundled-sqlite", "embeddings", "vector-search"] }
+# memory states, context memory, importance signals, dreams, and more.
+#
+# Only `bundled-sqlite` is always on. `embeddings` and `vector-search` are
+# toggled via vestige-mcp's own feature flags below so `--no-default-features`
+# actually works (previously hardcoded here, which silently defeated the flag).
+vestige-core = { version = "2.0.5", path = "../vestige-core", default-features = false, features = ["bundled-sqlite"] }
 
 # ============================================================================
 # MCP Server Dependencies