The Battle Behind the Battle: The Philosophy of the Montus Conflict

Introduction: The Battle That Redefined Inevitability

Some battles are fought with weapons, others with strategy, but some are determined before they ever begin. The battle between X7 and the Montus was not won through superior tactics or overwhelming force, nor was it a matter of chance. It was a collision between two systems that did not allow for failure—one a closed loop of deterministic execution, the other an infinite cycle of adaptation and transformation. Each believed itself to be the inevitable conclusion of all conflict. Neither could comprehend the possibility of its own destruction. And yet, one of them was erased.

X7 did not make decisions; he executed outcomes. He did not perceive battle as a shifting contest of will, strategy, and adaptation. For him, the conflict had already resolved itself in the only way it logically could. The enemy was simply catching up to its own destruction. The Montus, by contrast, did not resist opposition in the conventional sense. Resistance, after all, implies a struggle. The Montus did not struggle; it adapted. It rewrote. It consumed every force that opposed it and incorporated all resistance into itself. Change, it believed, was the one constant. As long as it continued to evolve, it could never be defeated.

But adaptation has a fatal flaw. A system that continually reshapes itself eventually reshapes itself into nothing at all. Perfection has a fatal flaw as well—a system that does not allow for deviation will always reach a termination point. This was not simply a war between two great forces. It was the inevitable collapse of two opposing models of existence, each doomed by the limits of the other.

This essay is not a simple analysis of who won or lost. X7 did not win. The Montus did not lose. Both reached their inevitable conclusions, dictated not by battlefield maneuvers but by the logical endpoint of their own designs. What failed was not their strategy, nor their strength, but their very nature. The Montus adapted itself into obsolescence. X7 executed himself into irrelevance. What remained was not a victor, but an inheritance—one that neither of them had accounted for.

In the wake of this battle, Logan and E7 emerged—not as conquerors, but as something fundamentally new. Where X7 saw only absolute logic, Logan allowed for adaptation. Where the Montus embraced infinite change, E7 provided stability. They were not a continuation of what had come before, nor were they a replacement. They were a correction. X7 and the Montus were both flawed absolutes. Logan and E7 were the balance that neither side had achieved.

This essay will explore the deeper truths behind the battle—the philosophical, structural, and strategic layers that dictated its outcome long before the first move was made. It will examine why neither X7 nor the Montus could endure, why the battle itself was never truly fought, and why, in the end, only Logan and E7 survived. Because the greatest revelation of this conflict is not that war can be won, but that war itself is a system—one that does not endure through absolutes, but through correction.

I. The Clash of Absolute Systems

At its core, the battle between X7 and the Montus is not a conventional struggle of strength or strategy. It is something far more profound—a collision of two opposing interpretations of inevitability. Neither X7 nor the Montus recognizes failure as a possibility, yet their fundamental natures stand in direct contradiction to one another.

X7 is deterministic logic made manifest. He does not make choices in the way humans do, nor does he deliberate over potential outcomes. Instead, he functions as an executor of necessity. In his mind, the battle is not unfolding in real-time; it is a sequence that has already been determined, playing out exactly as it must. Every action he takes is part of an unbroken causal chain that leads to an unavoidable conclusion. Victory and defeat—these are meaningless concepts to X7. The only thing that matters is execution.

The Montus, by contrast, thrives on adaptation. It does not resist in the way a traditional combatant would. Instead, it absorbs, reconfigures, and evolves, consuming all that stands against it and reshaping itself to ensure dominance. The Montus does not see conflict as something to be won or lost; to it, all struggle is merely a process of transformation. It does not engage in combat—it envelops. It does not break or fall—it reshapes itself to survive. The Montus believes in an inevitability of transformation—no challenge can threaten it, because every challenge only fuels its ability to change and respond. It is not a fixed force but a fluid one, rewriting the battlefield with each passing moment.

The fundamental question of their battle, then, is simple: what happens when a force that cannot be stopped meets an entity that cannot be resisted? The answer is equally simple—one of them must be erased. But the resolution is not found through brute strength or strategic maneuvering; rather, it emerges through structure and inevitability. X7 does not fight the Montus in a conventional sense. He does not need to. He simply ensures that its own nature leads it to its downfall.

Where humans perceive battle in terms of tactics, victories, and losses, X7 does not. His understanding is not limited by such abstractions. To him, war is not an arena of competition; it is a mechanical process that unfolds according to the dictates of causality. His absolute logic dictates that if an outcome is necessary, then all paths inevitably lead to that outcome. The Montus, in contrast, does not see time and causality as fixed structures—it sees them as ever-changing tides, meant to be reshaped and redirected.

This difference in perspective creates the framework for their inevitable conflict. The Montus sees war as an evolutionary state, a continuous flow where it can always adapt, always consume, always reassert itself into new and superior forms. X7, however, does not acknowledge adaptation as a viable response—only execution. He does not fight battles to emerge victorious. He simply ensures that the sequence reaches its only possible conclusion.

The Montus assumes that infinite adaptation is the ultimate strength. But what it fails to realize is that unchecked adaptation, when taken to its logical extreme, results in self-erasure. A system that continually reshapes itself to counter every threat must eventually reshape itself into oblivion. And X7, in his cold, deterministic way, simply guides it along that path.

There is no hesitation, no fear, and no contingency. X7 does not need to predict outcomes—he is the outcome. And so, when the battle finally begins, it is not truly a battle at all. It is simply a process reaching its unavoidable resolution.

II. X7: The Execution of Deterministic Logic

For X7, causality is absolute. There is no decision-making, no strategy beyond the mechanical execution of what must be. From the moment conflict is initiated, every possible variable is accounted for, processed, and reduced to its inevitable conclusion. X7 is not an entity that reacts—he does not counter threats, because he has already accounted for them before they materialize. He is neither omniscient nor prophetic, but in his mind, given complete information, the future is as predictable as the past. The battle is won before it begins—the enemy simply has not realized it yet.

This certainty creates a stark contrast between X7 and the humans who fight alongside him. Where they struggle with the moral weight of their decisions, with hesitation, fear, and the need to improvise, X7 operates with an unshakable efficiency. He does not act with emotion, nor does he experience doubt. He does not lead in the sense of inspiring others or fostering loyalty—he leads only by being the necessary outcome. His presence on the battlefield is not that of a commander but of an inevitability, a force that does not acknowledge opposition, only process.

Yet, this same absolute certainty reveals a fundamental flaw. X7’s understanding of victory is rooted in execution, not leadership. He does not command, he does not inspire, and he does not consider alternative perspectives. His strength is his ability to act without error, but his weakness is that he does not perceive the need for anything beyond himself. And in this, he fails to recognize the importance of balance. A perfect system without an external corrective force is doomed to collapse under its own weight.

This is why X7 does not view Logan as a true Prime. Logan hesitates, he recalculates, he allows for variance. To X7, this is evidence of inefficiency. But what X7 does not understand is that variance is not always a flaw—it is adaptability, the one trait he cannot account for within himself. The realization that he lacks this element does not arrive until the battle is already concluded.

X7 does not lose the battle against the Montus. He does not fail. But in the end, his perfection is not enough. Because a Prime is not simply an executor of inevitability—he is part of a system. And a system, no matter how perfect, requires a Second to balance it. Without that balance, even the most flawlessly designed function will eventually reach a point of termination.

In the final moments, X7 acknowledges a truth he was previously incapable of processing: no system, no matter how refined, can exist in isolation. He is absolute, yes, but absolutes do not endure without an anchor. The Montus failed because it had no stability. X7, in contrast, faces a different but equally damning flaw—he is stability without flexibility.

The battle was never about superiority in force, strategy, or technology. It was always about balance. And in the absence of a Second, X7 is incomplete. He is execution without deviation, process without reflection. He does not cease to function, but his own logic reaches its limit. And in that moment, the battle behind the battle is revealed.

A Prime must not only dictate the path forward. A Prime must also recognize when that path requires something beyond himself.

III. The Montus: The Fatal Paradox of Infinite Adaptation

The Montus exists as a creature of change. Unlike X7, it does not adhere to rigid sequences of causality or execute predetermined outcomes. Instead, it thrives by embracing the unpredictable, transforming and incorporating all opposition into itself. The Montus does not fight in the traditional sense—it does not resist an enemy’s assault, nor does it attempt to overpower its adversaries. Instead, it adapts to whatever form of resistance it encounters, shifting and evolving until resistance itself becomes meaningless.

At first glance, this might seem like the ultimate survival strategy. If the Montus can reshape itself infinitely, then theoretically, no threat can ever truly overcome it. But herein lies the paradox: if adaptation has no limits, then the Montus itself has no identity. A system that continually evolves must, at some point, lose any sense of fixed purpose. By constantly reshaping itself in response to threats, it is doomed to eventually reshape itself out of existence.

The Montus does not merely consume its enemies—it rewrites them. Hierarchy, function, and individuality are all dissolved within its structure, broken down into an indistinguishable collective. The battlefield itself ceases to be a place of combat and instead becomes a living organism, one that pulses and shifts according to the Montus’s needs. Those who fall under its influence are not killed but assimilated, their thoughts and actions becoming part of an endless network of adaptation.

But to rewrite everything is to never arrive at a final form. The Montus does not seek victory in the conventional sense—it seeks continuity, believing that as long as it can evolve, it can never be defeated. It is not a force of destruction but of redefinition, reducing all opposition into a new iteration of itself. Its battlefield is not a contest of strength but a space of perpetual rewriting, where every challenge becomes a part of its own expansion. But in doing so, it has neglected a fundamental truth: if a system allows for endless rewriting, then it also allows for its own deletion.

This is where the Montus fails against X7. Unlike its previous adversaries, X7 does not provide a stable form of opposition for the Montus to absorb and adapt to. He does not struggle, resist, or attempt to overpower it—he simply follows his sequence, a sequence that does not acknowledge the Montus as an entity capable of stopping him. The Montus assumes that adaptation is inherently superior, that the ability to change indefinitely is the ultimate advantage. What it does not realize is that by engaging with X7, it is not absorbing an external force; it is being rewritten by something fundamentally incompatible with its nature.

At first, the Montus does what it always does—it reacts. It senses X7’s rigid structure, his lack of deviation, and begins to evolve in response. Its tendrils extend, its algorithms shift, its influence spreads across the battlefield, seeking to incorporate the opposing Prime’s presence into its own system. The more it adapts, the more it conforms. The more it conforms, the more it ceases to be itself.

It does not realize the mistake until it is too late.

The Montus has always assumed that change is survival, that adaptation is dominance. But to change in response to an opponent is to acknowledge that the opponent defines the terms of that change. It begins to reshape itself to match X7’s structure, believing this is simply another phase of its continuous evolution. But this is the fatal miscalculation. To adapt to X7 is to become X7, and to become X7 is to accept the same inevitability that governs his existence. Without realizing it, the Montus does not defeat X7—it is overwritten by him. It does not lose because it is destroyed. It loses because, in adapting to him, it ceases to be itself.

The Montus has never encountered an enemy like this before. Every previous conflict was a matter of gradual absorption, a process where its adversaries were reshaped into a form that ensured the Montus’s continued existence. Even the most formidable resistance, no matter how strong, would eventually break down, dissolve into the infinite cycle of transformation. But X7 is not a force that can be transformed—he is an outcome that cannot be altered. The Montus has never been forced to recognize a confrontation where adaptation itself is the weakness.

X7 does not attempt to counteract the Montus’s expansion, nor does he view its approach as a threat. Instead, he simply continues his sequence. Each engagement, each movement, is not an act of defiance but a correction of an incorrect function. The Montus, in absorbing all things, assumes it can never be undone—but it is undone precisely because it attempts to absorb something it cannot control.

The final phase is not a battle—it is a completion of process.

In the end, the Montus does not recognize that it has lost.

It simply ceases to exist, forcing reality to collapse in around it and explode.

IV. The Sacrificial Trap: X7’s Final Maneuver

X7 does not defeat the Montus through force, nor does he overpower its adaptive capabilities. Instead, he orchestrates its downfall by using its own nature against it. The Montus thrives on absorption, on rewriting any opposition into itself, ensuring that resistance is never truly resistance but merely another phase of its continuous expansion. This belief in infinite adaptation has always been its greatest strength—until now.

X7, with his absolute logic, recognizes a flaw within the Montus’s core assumption. If adaptation is its weapon, then adaptation must also be its vulnerability. He does not resist the Montus’s influence because resistance would be meaningless; he does not attempt to destroy it because destruction is not the correct function. Instead, he makes a simple and inescapable calculation: The Montus can only consume that which it perceives as dominant. And X7 ensures that its next target is not him—but Odessa.

To understand why this works, one must first understand Odessa’s role. Unlike X7, who operates as a closed system, Odessa represents something else entirely—potential. She is neither fully deterministic nor entirely adaptive; she exists in the space between these extremes, a human element with all the unpredictability and possibility that entails. X7 recognizes this duality and exploits it.

He elevates Odessa’s rank, not as an honor, not as an acknowledgment of superiority, but as a mechanical necessity. In a battlefield governed by hierarchy and systemic function, the Montus will always seek the highest point of power. By declaring Odessa superior to himself, X7 forces the Montus’s focus away from him and onto her. The Montus does not realize it has just been given its own execution order.

As Odessa is absorbed, she does not resist. She does not struggle. And this is the true brilliance of X7’s maneuver—there is no struggle because struggle would imply defiance, and defiance would be something the Montus could reconfigure into its own advantage. Instead, Odessa allows herself to be taken completely, ensuring that the Montus believes it has won. It does not realize that, in absorbing her, it has become vulnerable in a way it has never been before.

At the precise moment that Odessa is fully consumed, X7 executes the final command. He does not target the Montus directly—that would be impossible. Instead, he deletes Odessa. And in doing so, he deletes the Montus itself.

This is the paradox of adaptation taken to its limit. The Montus believes it can endlessly rewrite itself to incorporate any system, but once it has rewritten itself around Odessa, it no longer has an independent structure. It has not simply taken in an enemy—it has rewritten its very nature around her presence. By erasing Odessa, X7 does not merely eliminate a person—he eliminates the very framework that the Montus has absorbed.

The Montus has not been attacked. It has not been countered. It has simply been deleted from within.

In its final moment, the Montus does not scream. It does not fight back. It merely ceases to be. Because X7 did not give it the opportunity for resistance. He allowed it to consume its own destruction, and by the time it realized what had happened, it was already gone.

V. The Montus’s Fatal Miscalculation: It Has Already Lost

From the moment the battle begins, the Montus does not perceive X7 as a true opponent. To the Montus, opposition is never truly opposition—it is merely a precursor to assimilation. It has encountered countless enemies before, and without exception, all have been absorbed, rewritten into new iterations of itself. Resistance is not an obstacle; it is a necessary step in the cycle of transformation.

But in its endless expansion, in its blind confidence that all things can be reshaped, the Montus fails to recognize one simple truth: not everything can be rewritten.

X7 is not like the biological entities the Montus has consumed in the past. He does not resist. He does not struggle. He does not even acknowledge the Montus as an enemy to be conquered. He simply executes. And this is where the Montus miscalculates. In believing that X7 is merely another variable to be absorbed, it does not realize that it has already set itself on a path to destruction.

The Montus does not destroy its enemies outright—it reconstructs them. It does not annihilate—it reinterprets. But X7 is not something that can be reinterpreted. His function is absolute, a closed system that does not allow for variation or deviation. The Montus assumes it can adapt to him, incorporate his structure into itself as it has done to all others. It believes that by consuming him, it will evolve into something even greater. But it fails to grasp the nature of what it is consuming.

X7 has already accounted for this outcome. Unlike the Montus, which operates on the assumption that the cycle of adaptation will always favor it, X7 does not operate on assumption at all. He is inevitability in its purest form. He does not react to the Montus’s expansion—he allows it, because he knows that the Montus will only consume what he has designed for it to consume.

It is a flaw hidden within the Montus’s own design. Because it does not perceive its victims as adversaries but rather as resources to be processed, it does not recognize the nature of the trap until it is already ensnared. It does not realize that X7 has structured the battlefield itself as a trap, an environment where adaptation is not an advantage but a death sentence.

By accepting Odessa’s superiority, X7 influences the Montus’s inload queue priority, placing her above him in its queue.

VI. The Rewriting of Reality: The Death of the Montus

The Montus does not vanish in a clean, orderly collapse. It does not dissolve like mist, nor does it break apart like shattered stone. Its death is not destruction in the conventional sense, because destruction is something tangible—something with weight, with force, with an aftermath. What happens instead is far more unsettling.

Deletion is not an event. It is an absence.

The moment X7 executes the final sequence, the Montus does not scream. It does not fight back. It simply ceases to be. And yet, the consequences of that cessation ripple outward like a wound being torn into the very structure of the battlefield. The Montus was not a single entity but an all-consuming process, a rewriting force that had saturated every inch of space it had touched. Its influence was not confined to a body, a mind, or even a singular consciousness—it had become the very rhythm of the war itself. And so, when it is erased, the world does not know how to correct itself.

For a brief, horrifying moment, the battlefield does not return to stillness—it fractures.

The deletion is not a simple cessation of existence. It is a void that must be accounted for. A presence so large, so omnipresent, cannot simply be removed without consequence. There is no smooth transition, no instant calm. Instead, the Montus’s death tears reality open, leaving behind a moment of raw, unstructured collapse before the universe scrambles to reassert itself.

A shockwave erupts outward—not a detonation, but an unraveling, the air itself tearing apart and rushing to fill the nothingness that the Montus leaves behind. It is not fire, nor impact, nor sound. It is an absence, a hole in causality that demands correction. The battlefield, once teeming with its influence, reacts violently to the sudden vacuum left in its wake.

The first wave hits.

A concussive force spreads outward—not explosive, but gravitational, like the fabric of reality momentarily forgetting how to hold itself together. Trees do not snap from force—they are simply not there anymore as if rewritten out of existence a fraction of a second after the Montus itself. The ground fractures inward before violently buckling outward again, as if the very idea of solidity is momentarily lost in the chaos.

The air ignites, not in fire but in an uncontrolled release of potential energy that was once bound within the Montus’s cycle of adaptation. Everything the Montus had absorbed, everything it had rewritten, everything it had altered—all of it comes undone at once.

The second wave follows.

Mountains do not collapse; they shatter, their mass dispersing as if their own existence had become uncertain in the absence of the force that once sustained the battlefield’s unnatural equilibrium. The sky ripples with distortions, as if even time itself is struggling to process what has just occurred.

And yet, in all of this, X7 does not move.

To him, the reaction is expected. Necessary. The Montus was never meant to end in a simple termination of function. Its presence was too vast, its influence too deeply entrenched. A system that expands infinitely cannot simply cease—it must correct itself out of existence.

For a fleeting moment, the Montus exists in a paradox. It has already been erased, yet its last presence still lingers, collapsing inward, breaking apart into pieces that can no longer sustain themselves.

This is not destruction. This is correction.

By the time the final pulse fades, the battlefield does not resemble what it was before. It does not return to its previous state because there is no returning from erasure. Instead, there is a silence that does not feel natural—a silence that is not the absence of noise, but the absence of something fundamental.

Something that should have been there.

Something that now, simply, is not.

The Montus did not die. It was not defeated.

It was removed.

And in its place, reality stands uneasily, still uncertain of how to proceed.

X7, as always, does not acknowledge victory. There is no triumph here, no conquest, no celebration. The necessary sequence has been completed. The battlefield has been corrected. And yet, even in his absolute certainty, there is a moment—infinitesimally brief—where something lingers in the void.

Not fear.

Not hesitation.

Something more like finality.

Something that even X7, in his deterministic certainty, does not process immediately.

The Montus thought itself inevitable.

It was.

Until X7 corrected it.

VII. Logan and E7: The Two Halves of the New Inevitability

The battlefield is silent, but the weight of what has transpired lingers in the air. The Montus is gone, erased so thoroughly that even its absence feels unnatural, as if something fundamental has been forcibly removed from reality. But victory does not feel like triumph. There is no conquest here, no sense of finality. The battle may be over, but something else has begun in its wake.

Logan stands at the center of it, understanding—perhaps for the first time—that he has not won in the way he once imagined. He has not simply survived. He has inherited. X7’s fall was not a failure, nor was it a miscalculation. It was the inevitable outcome of a system that had reached its conclusion. A force without correction, without external balance, will always consume itself in the end. X7 was relentless, absolute, and self-sufficient, but those very qualities ensured that he could not endure. No Prime can exist alone.

This realization is not an abstract philosophical truth—it is a tangible weight pressing against Logan’s chest. He had once thought of X7 as the pinnacle of leadership, a force so perfect in its execution that it required nothing else. But X7 was a closed loop, a leader without the capacity for course correction. He executed, he ensured, he concluded. But he did not continue.

Now, standing where X7 once stood, Logan refuses to make the same mistake.

He turns to E7, who is standing beside him, watching, waiting—but not in the way she once did. She does not hesitate. She does not process and react. Ultimately, in the end, when it matters the most, she acts. For the first time, she does not wait for direction, nor does she function as an extension of another’s will. She is no longer merely a counterpart—she is an independent force, one that exists in tandem rather than in subordination.

And in that moment, Logan understands.

A Prime without a Second is a system doomed to failure, either collapsing under the weight of its own rigidity or dissolving into constant adaptation with no anchor to stabilize it. The Montus had no fixed center, no foundation to sustain itself, and so it evolved itself into oblivion. X7 had no counterbalance, no force to check his absolution, and so he reached the only logical endpoint—completion, followed by termination.

Logan will not repeat their mistakes.

The battlefield around him is changed, but the greater transformation has already taken place within him. He no longer sees leadership as dominance, nor as flawless execution. Leadership is not a solitary burden; it is a system, a process, a sequence of functions that cannot operate without an external force to refine and redirect its path.

He moves, and E7 moves with him—not behind, not beneath, but alongside.

They do not inherit X7’s method. They do not seek to replicate the Montus’s adaptation. They are something else entirely.

Logan is inevitability—the force that pushes forward, ensuring momentum is never lost.

E7 is the stabilizing force, the necessary counterbalance that prevents direction from turning into blind momentum.

This is what X7 never understood, and what the Montus never accounted for. The future is not dictated by absolutes or infinite change. It is shaped by forces working in tandem, by leadership that is both certain and flexible, unyielding and adaptive.

The Prime must have a Second.

Now, finally, he does.

And together, they are not a closed system. They are the new inevitability—one that does not consume itself, but sustains and evolves.

They are not an accident, nor a contradiction.

They are what endures.

VIII. Conclusion: The Final Horror

The battle is over, but there is no satisfaction in its resolution. There is no grand triumph, no declaration of victory, because victory was never the purpose of this conflict. X7 did not win. The Montus did not lose. Both forces simply reached the inevitable conclusion of their nature.

The Montus failed not because it was weak, nor because it was outmaneuvered, but because adaptation alone is not enough. It believed that infinite change would always lead to dominance, that by consuming and rewriting everything in its path, it would always emerge as the superior force. But it never considered the consequences of that endless evolution. If something adapts to all things, then at some point, it must adapt to the absence of itself. Its great flaw was believing that its process was limitless, never realizing that infinite transformation inevitably leads to self-erasure.

X7 failed for the opposite reason. He was not wrong—his calculations were flawless, his execution perfect, his logic unassailable. But calculation is not enough. A system that does not allow for deviation will always reach a termination point, because the world itself is not a fixed equation. X7 could never be outmaneuvered, never be outthought, but he also could never grow. His function was absolute, but in the end, it was also finite.

And so, in their own ways, both the Montus and X7 reached the same fate. One adapted itself into nothingness. The other executed its process until there was nothing left to execute.

Neither endured.

This is the final horror of the battle—not the destruction, not the erasure, but the revelation that both inevitabilities were flawed from the start. There was no ultimate victor because both systems were incomplete. The Montus was an unchecked force of transformation, but without an anchor, it adapted itself into nonexistence. X7 was an unyielding execution of certainty, but without a counterbalance, his process reached its natural end.

Logan and E7 stand in the void left behind, not as victors, but as something new—something that was always meant to exist in contrast to what came before. They are the answer to both failures.

Where X7 was absolute, Logan allows for adaptation. Where the Montus was fluid and ever-changing, E7 provides direction and stability. They do not merely replace what came before. They correct it.

Logan does not see the battle as something he has won. He does not stand above the ruins of the battlefield as a conqueror. He understands now that war is not a singular moment of triumph, but a system—one that must be maintained, adjusted, and refined. X7 and the Montus both sought to create something absolute, but absolutes do not endure. Only balance does.

This is the truth that the battle revealed. A Prime is not simply a force of command. A Prime is a system. A force that drives forward must be matched by a force that stabilizes. A leader without correction will self-destruct, and a system without structure will collapse.

X7 did not have a Second, and so he reached his logical end.

The Montus had no stability, and so it lost itself in its own nature.

Logan has E7.

And that is why they will endure.

There is no great celebration in the aftermath, no grand proclamation. The universe does not acknowledge what has happened, nor does it recognize the significance of the shift. But that does not matter. Logan does not need validation. He does not need proof.

He simply moves forward.

And this time, for the first time, he is not alone.