"Before you move," Logos said, voice steady, "you must understand what has stabilized: Coherence."
Logos conjured a thin, silvery disk between them, no bigger than a thumb-print. It spun rapidly on its edge in perfect balance, its rim gleaming like liquid moon-silver while the faces remained translucent and depthless.
Every few heartbeats its rotation faltered—just long enough for an ancient rune to flicker across the surface. Then the coin whirled again, smearing the sign into haze before either face could be read.
Zahir stared at the disk. "What am I looking at?"
"This coin is your body now: its default state is this whirling blur, both faces—strike and slip, here and almost-here—remain equally true. Only when choice, impact, or danger presses against you does the coin settle, revealing the single face most fitting for the moment. That is your power at Base Rank."
Zahir didn't get it. He glanced at his Core, its restless flickers splashing broken light across the floor, then back at the astral coin. He could understand it in theory—but the theory wasn't clicking with his body. Nothing in him felt like a spinning coin.
"Words will not finish the lesson," Logos said. "Begin with intention. Simply imagine stepping to your right. Do not move—yet."
Zahir exhaled through his nose, squared his stance, and then pictured one foot sliding out across the smooth floor. He didn't move physically. But in his mind, the motion had already started.
Strange. Although he had only imagined moving, he felt a quivering sensation in whatever part of him was responsible for balance, like his body had become a weighted scale that hadn't committed to tipping. His Core glinted in response.
"Now hold that," Logos said. "And intend its opposite."
Zahir frowned. "Like opposite which way?"
"However you interpret it."
He shrugged his shoulders, then imagined taking a step to the left while still holding the pull of the right. Usually, when he switched intentions, one faded away as the other replaced it—like swapping one mental picture for another. But this time, strangely, both stayed.
Even stranger was how it felt in his body: two contradictory impulses, two subtle leans, occupying the exact same muscles. He had no words for it. But deep in his posture, his balance became dual.
The strangest thing was the disorienting mental experience that suddenly emerged. It was like holding his breath and exhaling at the same time. The split didn't feel like a crack. It felt like suspension. As if his mind had discovered a higher gear.
"You are now present in two adjacent potentialities," Logos said, almost softly. "You will not see them—but the ambient energy around you reacts."
Zahir squinted, turning slightly, "The ambient energy," he repeated. "You mean the Field."
Logos paused, as if tasting the word. "That is what it's called here, yes. Now, choose one."
Zahir didn't fully understand what Logos meant. There was no signal or interface. Just two imagined steps locked in tension.
So he just moved.
He let the intention to go left finish itself, his body sliding into the motion with no delay. His foot hit the floor. That was it.
Only it wasn't.
The instant he chose left, the air itself seemed to tighten, like pressure snapping back into place. The space that had been holding his rightward intention gave a soft shimmer—like heat haze over concrete—then folded flat, erased without ceremony.
A faint ripple raced across the floor of his Archive from right to left, an aftershock that marked the collapse of the version that never happened.
His Core flared once—sharp and satisfied.
Zahir stood still, breath shallow.
It felt like nothing at first, like taking a regular step. But half a second later, dust bloomed outward from where his weight had landed, a pulse rippling out as if the floor only just realized he'd stepped.
At the same time, he felt a satisfying jolt of alignment, like the tingle of cracking your joints, or a coin snapping flat on the table after its last spin—inevitable and exact.
"That," Logos said, its voice low with gravity, "is the nature of your soul's base property."
Zahir nodded slowly, eyes fixed on where his rightward step had almost happened—on the space that had briefly felt like his, then wasn't.
"Your body," Logos continued, "now exists in stabilized coherence. Like your soul, it remains unresolved—held between possibilities until necessity chooses."
Zahir squinted, irritation threading through his awe. All this vague talk about possibilities, souls, and unresolved states wasn't giving him what he actually needed—something practical, something he could use. He needed to understand how it could actually keep him alive.
He shook his head and looked up at Logos. "Okay, but... how is any of this helpful? Break it down for me."
Logos answered in measured beats, as if laying stones for him to step across.
"First: every action you do choose resolves at the point of greatest leverage. Swing wild, and the Field snaps the blow onto the most optimal point—a bone or nerve cluster for instance. Allowing you to do more damage than you otherwise would."
Zahir imagined a loose hook curving mid-air, correcting itself the instant before impact. His knuckles tingled.
"Second: until that collapse, you are noise. Anything that needs a clear target, including technology and other people's signature abilities, can't lock on because you register in several places at once. They strike where they think you will be. You finish existing an eye-blink later, just outside the knot. You might imagine, this could be disorienting for them."
Zahir's mind wandered to his Slip—the glitch that always hit under stress, outside his control. Back then, it felt like the world just lost track of him for a second, and then returned an error code. But if he was hearing Logos right, that wasn't just a glitch—it was the early shape of this. Of Coherence, the passive property of his signature at base rank.
"Third: the Field 'prefers' outcomes that keep you alive—and so it leans. You do not see the future, but your body settles into the branch where the bullet glances instead of tunnels, where the platform gives after you cross, not before. It is not speed. It is the world correcting itself around your choice. It will look like luck, but you will wield it with intention."
Wait. Did he hear that right? No. Was this like fucking auto-correct? Or like the field rolling the dice multiple times on his behalf, and then picking the best outcome? No. That's probably not what Logos was saying…Still, if even a piece of that was true—if his body really tilted into the best possible move without him even clocking it—then maybe all that glitching, slipping, buffering nonsense wasn't a curse after all. Maybe it had been his best stat the whole damn time. Hidden in plain sight.
"Finally—and above every trick of aim or evasion—comes the gravity your choices will carry," Logos said, voice lowering to a hush. "The span between 'could' and 'did' is wider for you than for any other soul.
"I am not permitted to name the shape this will take, but remember: blades change battles—choices change wars. In time you will see why that is the sharpest weapon you can wield."
Zahir narrowed his eyes. "Not permitted by who?"
Logos paused, briefly flashing crimson again. "I cannot answer what I was not permitted to remember."
A moment of silence followed. Zahir's pulse kicked once, wariness sliding in under the thrill.
'Is this thing giving me a literal red flag right now?'
He lingered on the weird reticence for a breath, making a mental note. Then his thoughts snapped back to the plan—the real reason they'd risked stealing from BQP, which had landed him down here in the first place. One of them needed to break throough, to become a base rank innovator, to register a holon and finally give their crew a shot at choosing for themselves rather than being exploited under someone's thumb. That had been the goal. And somehow… he'd done it. Well, not all of it. But the most important step.
The job hadn't gone the way they wanted—but the outcome? It was exactly what they needed. Maybe better.
He wasn't sure how his Superposition-type signature and this Coherence thing really worked yet, but he could figure it out with his crew. Speaking of his crew, the thought stabbed straight through him.
The last thing he saw was that Mekka had been shot. Then he fell through the floor. He didn't even know if they had made it out. But he had the unmistakable gut feeling that too much time had passed.
He still had a lot of questions.
What was Logos, really? All the cryptic language, those broken answers. Someone had sealed off pieces of it—on purpose. Which meant someone built it. But who designs a guide and then muzzles it? And why him?
And that line from before: you are the question and the key. The question part was starting to make sense—his body, his Signature, were unresolved, difficult to pin down. But the key? A key to what?
His thoughts snagged on that moment Logos turned red—when it dropped its tone and started echoing like it was whispering through stone. It had felt like…a playback.
"Imagine… a soul that can hold paradox without breaking."
It hadcalled him a key then. A necessary catalyst. A soul that could resonate with fractures in reality itself. Whatever Logos was, it hadn't chosen him out of convenience. It sounded like it was built to find someone like him.
But all those questions would have to wait. If there was anyone he trusted to help untangle this shit, it was Elai and his encyclopedia brain.
Zahir finally let the pang of urgency bloom fully in his chest. It was time to get back to the Slant.
He opened his mouth to speak, to tell Logos he was ready—
But Logos' harmonic voice returned first. Calm. Measured. And final.
"One more thing."
"Yeah?"
"If you do not find an anchor soon," Logos said softly, "your coherence will unravel. Without something stable to hold your soul's shape, you will fracture. And once fractured...you will no longer exist."
Zahir exhaled, a cold, bitter satisfaction sliding beneath the dread in his chest. Of course. Because nothing—no power, no trick, no second chance—ever came for free.