BOOK 1: PRAXIS IS WHAT REMAINS
They called it Praxis because no one could agree on a better lie.
Praxis was not a city or a nation. It was a sprawl of structures grown around training halls, contract courts, and crematories. People arrived with reasons and left as ash, debt, or something sharpened enough to survive elsewhere. Power was not gifted here. It was engineered under rules everyone knew and no one escaped.
Ability was learned through Constraint Doctrine.
You defined a boundary. You suffered inside it. You optimized until something new emerged.
No lineage advantage. No latent spark. Only compliance and cost.
No one had ever finished learning.
---
I. Ilex Rane — Contract Auditor
Ilex Rane died at 09:42 in Corridor C after a mistake that would not make the archives.
She had no combat specialization. Her ability was Audit Compression: the capacity to process contractual clauses, power limitations, and consequence chains at inhuman speed. She earned it by living under a vow of silence for eleven years. No speech. No writing by hand. All communication routed through standardized forms. The mind adapts when expression is starved.
She saw the violation three seconds before it mattered.
A courier named Halden Vox had entered Corridor C carrying an unregistered optimization shard. Illegal. Unstable. Weaponizable. The shard pulsed with borrowed constraints, a stitched abomination of other people's limits. Praxis law demanded immediate seizure.
Ilex raised her hand. The corridor cameras recorded the gesture.
Halden Vox did not stop.
He was optimizing momentum. His discipline required never breaking stride once movement began. He had amputated the instinct to hesitate. The shard in his chest glowed hotter as he committed.
Ilex calculated outcomes. She could step left. She could step right. Either path intersected with someone else's death later. She chose the one with fewer dependents.
Halden hit her at speed. Her ribs folded. Her heart ruptured against bone.
He did not slow.
Her body hit the wall and slid down. Blood pooled with bureaucratic efficiency.
The shard would be logged later. Her name would be misspelled once.
---
II. Halden Vox — Courier
Halden had not planned to kill anyone that morning.
That was not how planning worked for him anymore.
His ability, Vector Continuity, was built on a single condition: once he chose a direction, he could not stop until the objective was complete or he was dead. He learned it by running—years of it—through broken districts without food, without rest, without deviation. The body learned to obey. The mind learned to narrow.
He saw the auditor too late to change anything.
Impact registered as data. Bone density insufficient. Velocity maintained.
He hated that he noticed the blood. He hated that noticing felt like inefficiency.
The shard in his chest screamed. It wanted release. He had bought it from a man who had sold his left lung to afford the extraction. Halden had not asked what powers it contained. Only that it made him faster.
Corridor C emptied ahead of him. Security bulkheads slammed down behind.
Objective recalculated.
Escape.
He burst into the open yard as suppression fields activated. His speed degraded. Muscle tore. The shard destabilized, leaking other people's limits into his nervous system.
He tripped.
Momentum doctrine allowed one exception: collision with immovable force.
Praxis enforcement was immovable.
They did not shoot him until he tried to stand.
---
III. Serrik Vale — Enforcement Captain
Serrik Vale believed in clean endings.
His ability was Threshold Authority. Within a defined radius, any action he declared complete became irreversible. He learned it by enforcing endings on himself: no second chances, no retries, no reversals. Every decision final. Friends lost. Limbs lost. Marriage ended with a signature he did not contest.
He arrived at the yard in time to see Halden Vox bleeding from everywhere that mattered.
"End of pursuit," Serrik said.
The words settled like law. Halden's muscles locked. The shard cracked, unable to reconcile competing constraints.
Serrik approached. He saw the courier's eyes, wide and lucid. Not evil. Just optimized past mercy.
"You killed an auditor," Serrik said.
"I didn't stop," Halden replied. Honesty, not defiance.
Serrik nodded. He understood systems that punished deviation from rules you chose yourself.
He drew his sidearm. Fired once.
Death was immediate.
He marked the case closed.
That night, Serrik drank alone and did not dream.
---
IV. Lorne Pax — Sanitation Engineer
Lorne Pax cleaned Corridor C three hours later.
His ability, Matter Yield Adjustment, let him soften or harden substances by accepting proportional fatigue. He learned it hauling refuse until his joints failed, then continuing anyway. The world bent when his body learned it would not stop asking.
He scraped blood from the wall where Ilex Rane had died.
He did not know her name. He did not need to. He cataloged the splatter pattern, adjusted solvent density, and worked until the corridor looked indifferent again.
As he worked, he thought about quitting Praxis.
Everyone did. Few left intact.
He finished the job. His hands shook. He accepted the tremor as payment.
---
V. Cael Oris — Independent Optimizer
Cael Oris watched the incident from a public feed while eating cold grain.
Her ability was Recursive Self-Modeling. She could observe her own thought processes as manipulable systems. She learned it by living under a self-imposed rule: never act without first predicting the regret. Years of paralysis forged clarity.
She saw the courier. The auditor. The enforcement captain. The sanitation engineer.
No heroes. No villains. Just optimized roles colliding.
She turned off the feed.
Cael had been considering a new constraint. Something severe enough to push her further. She had avoided violence. It simplified too much.
She wrote a condition on a slate and sealed it.
From that day forward, she would intervene when prediction said it would fail.
Not succeed. Not save.
Just fail less.
The cost would be hers.
---
VI. Praxis — Later
Ilex Rane's position was filled within a week.
Corridor C remained functional.
Halden Vox's shard was dismantled. The lungless man who sold it died two days after the refund was denied.
Serrik Vale enforced three more endings before retiring. He took a job measuring thresholds for civil construction. He was precise. People liked that.
Lorne Pax left Praxis with chronic fatigue and enough savings to open a repair shop in a quieter sprawl. He never optimized further. He slept.
Cael Oris intervened fourteen times over the next decade. In eight cases, people lived who would have died. In six, they died anyway, slower and angrier. She did not regret the rule. Regret was data, not judgment.
Praxis continued.
No ceiling was reached.
No meaning was granted.
What remained were choices made under pressure, paid in full, and finished without ceremony.
That was the system.
It worked.