Locking Strategy

Reed knew: that Adrasteia could no longer stand on pure logic.

Form without defense was not freedom,

but an invitation to erasure.

And if war was to come—

not a war of weapons,

but a war of forms,

a war of meaning,

a war of narrative existence—

Then Adrasteia needed something it had never had before:

An army.

Reed called Rina and Shia.

"We cannot force one form to win.

But we also cannot allow our forms to be slowly dismantled.

By a system that comes to save by replacing."

Shia answered first:

"We have no military."

"We have no hierarchy."

"But we can have… guardians of the forms."

Rina added:

"Not to attack.

But to prevent foreign firms from locking us in from the outside."

They agreed on one thing:

This army would not carry a banner,

Would not claim that Adrasteia's system was the only right one.