Hunters exist to wipe them out. One war, one ending.

Two bodies in gravity follow ellipses. Add a third and the system has no closed-form solution: sensitive to initial conditions, unpredictable past a finite horizon. Poincaré's three-body memoir (1890). The compiler takes that as the correct mathematics for haemophage, Lycian, and Vigilans. Lotka–Volterra will describe a two-body predator-prey sinusoid. It will not describe this. None of the three populations can afford a decisive win. A haemophagic world without hunters is a shepherd's arithmetic until disclosure. A Lycian world without hunters is a lunar harvest until the same. A hunter victory is a vacuum that does not stay empty.

The managed surface is the output of that impossibility. It is not peace. It is the only trajectory that has not yet blown up. Fragility is the subject of the chapters that follow: digital disruption, detection convergence, the moment a third body gets a new sensor. The hunter is not a hero in this picture. The hunter is the third mass.