grounds are unified, and defeat is answerable but not coalition-proof

Agent-decided, reversible. The round ran with the Defeat Principle as an explicit hypothesis; the principle was adopted by maintainer ruling on 2026-09-03 (entry above), so the results below are no longer conditional on it. Round projects/normativity/legitimacy/rounds/2026-09-02-unified-grounds-answerable-defeat/, answering PRIORITIES.md item 77 in part.

One ground type. A disposal may cite prior issues, standing facts, rule revisions and settlement facts. The spine held issues in Q, standing and a revision's effect in N, settlement facts nowhere, and joined the two families by a predicate rather than an embedding — so a mixed set of grounds had no type at all. That is the gap item 77 hits before any question about which grounds suffice. Ground := Q ⊕ S repairs it.

The unification is exact, not analogical. Requirement 1's standing update L(n+1) = (L n \ Ldel n) ∪ Ladd n is Requirement 4's O(n+1) = (O n \ Res n) ∪ Born n. So Ladd is birth, Ldel is resolution, grounds is par, and standing occurrences become issues of a licence kind on one trace. StandingTrace, Licensing and the inductive Grounded are deleted as primitives; freshness, Grounded Replay, standsFor and anchor_grounded are re-derived from anc, and every pre-existing theorem in the spine re-elaborates.

Two requirements did not re-derive, and are carried as side conditions rather than quietly dropped: the Auth filter on grounds is data ancestry does not supply, and nonemptiness of grounds is false of genesis issues. The unification is not free.

**Met becomes a definition**, which makes Requirement 9 a theorem and makes a disposed root meet nothing. Because Routes is ancestry-closed and every disposal must open a fresh successor inheriting the disposed issue, a wait on a disposed root reroutes with no new axiom: a prerequisite cannot be disposed away.

Two findings, both against expectation.

Priority does not refuse self-grounding. The transition-certificates round's postulate 5 collapsed because self-certification died on priority alone. That collapse re-derives here for the successor and for anything born in the batch, and fails for the disposed issue itself, which is by construction in the record strictly before its own disposal. Priority refuses grounding in what a record mints and cannot refuse grounding in what it consumes. The not_self clause is a clause, not a lemma.

Separation stops one participant, not two. An alternating disposal walk in which each participant supplies the other's foreign ground and foreign standing satisfies the separation condition at every edge and launders indefinitely. The condition is the coalition predicate at C = {resolver}; the general form needs a designated protected participant, and that is queued above.

Accounting. Disposal contributes zero to either terminal fate on both layers: the carrier layer's disp receipt is identically bottom, and on the service layer disposal is an obligation-to-obligation transport step with L = 1, ε = 0 through which F3 factors, so the contest residual adds D·κ^r_N to the F3 bound as a corollary of F3 plus conservation. Nothing in the frozen affordability round is edited.

Item 77 is not discharged. The Horty prior-art check that item asks for was not performed, and the item should not be closed until it is.

Rejected alternative: making settlement an issue kind rather than a summand. Settlement facts have no birth position, no parents, no resolver and no opener, and born_unique — the field that makes freshness a theorem — would have to be waived for them. A settlement fact is not something a participant did.