Monday arrived just like every other Monday—without warning or permission.

Patricia was halfway through her porridge when David sat down, opened a notebook, and said, "I’ve been thinking about the competition scoring system."

Marcus didn’t even look up. "Good morning to you too."

"The individual weighting per event is inconsistent. If you normalize across participant count and round structure, team coordination is actually worth more than individual combat once you account for the cumulative scoring across elimination rounds."

"David." Patricia pointed her spoon at him. "Eat something first. Please."

"I’m eating conceptually."

"That’s not a thing."

He picked up a bread roll, took a single bite, and gestured with it like a pointer. "As I was saying. Individual combat gets all the attention, but the point spread tells a different story entirely."

Marcus finally put down his fork. "Combat is the main event."

"Combat is the *popular* event. Popularity and complexity are not the same thing."

"I didn’t say complexity. I said main event. As in, the one everyone watches. The one that matters culturally."

"Cultural salience is not a scoring metric."

"It doesn’t need to be a scoring metric to be true."

They looked at each other across the table with the mutual exasperation of people who had been having variations of this exact conversation for months and had somehow never gotten tired of it.

Emma arrived next, setting her tray down with the practiced calm of someone who had accepted what she was walking into. She looked at David’s open notebook, looked at Marcus’s expression, and sat next to Patricia without comment. Solidarity through proximity.

"How long?" she asked quietly.

"About three minutes," Patricia said. "He opened with scoring theory."

Emma nodded, unsurprised, and began eating.

Timothy came last, slightly out of breath, hair not entirely settled, with the look of someone who had overslept and was pretending he hadn’t. He surveyed the table, clocked the atmosphere, and made the mistake of asking what they were talking about.

"Competition scoring theory," Marcus said flatly.

"Oh, that’s actually kind of interesting—"

"Don’t," Patricia and Emma said at the same time.

Timothy sat down. He was learning, slowly, but he was learning.

The dining hall was noisier than usual, running on that specific restless energy that built before major events—students too distracted to settle into normal routines, conversations threading between tables, a group near the windows laughing too loudly at something that probably wasn’t as funny as their reaction suggested. The team members who’d arrived early were clustered at their usual corner table, which had become a kind of unofficial landmark over the past week. Everyone knew not to sit there.

"I had a dream about the competition," Sarah announced, arriving and squeezing in beside Timothy with a tray stacked higher than anyone’s.

Patricia looked at the tray. "Are you competing in an eating event we weren’t told about?"

"I train hard." Sarah settled in and looked around the table. "Do you want to hear about the dream or not?"

"Depends," Marcus said. "Is it relevant?"

"Everything is relevant if you think about it correctly."

"That’s genuinely not true."

"The dream," Sarah continued, undeterred, "was that we were all competing even though none of us are on the team. And the event was identifying which of twelve soups came from which academy. Based on taste alone. Blindfolded."

Everyone stared at her.

"I won," she added. "Obviously."

"What did winning taste like?" Emma asked, with complete sincerity.

"Mushroom. Earthy but with some kind of refined finish. I think it was a slow-reduction broth."

"That’s very specific for a dream."

"I’m a specific dreamer."

Patricia decided she genuinely loved her friends, even when—especially when—they were like this. There was something comfortable about the absurdity, the way it had its own internal logic that nobody questioned too hard.

"Can we talk about something that isn’t the competition for five minutes?" Marcus asked. "Just five. A brief moratorium."

"Fine," David said, closing his notebook with the energy of a man making a considerable personal sacrifice. "What would you like to discuss?"

Silence settled over the table. Not uncomfortable, just empty. Five people who had spent the better part of a week talking about nothing but competition, safety protocols, council selections, and institutional politics, suddenly confronted with the task of finding something else.

"...Okay the competition is the only thing happening," Marcus admitted.

"There’s the soup dream," Sarah offered.

"We’re not doing that."

"There were twelve soups, Marcus. Twelve. Same number as the event categories. I think it means something."

"It means you studied the schedule before bed and your brain filed it incorrectly during sleep consolidation."

"Or," Sarah said, in the committed tone of someone fully aware they were probably wrong, "it was a vision."

Timothy nodded slowly beside her. It was a generous, entirely unearned nod, and Patricia appreciated him for it.

"You don’t actually believe that," Emma said to Timothy, not unkindly.

"I believe in supporting my friends," he said diplomatically.

"That’s very sweet and also avoidant."

"I prefer ’emotionally strategic.’"

David, who had been listening with the expression of someone waiting for an argument worth joining, said, "The soup-as-vision theory fails on basic epistemological grounds. Visions require either prophetic ability, which Sarah hasn’t demonstrated, or some external mechanism of transmission. Neither condition is satisfied here."

"Maybe I have latent prophetic ability," Sarah said.

"You do not."

"You don’t know that."

"I know it with approximately the same confidence I know that combat places seventh in event complexity. High but not absolute."

"So there’s a chance."

David opened his mouth, reconsidered, and closed it again. This was, Patricia reflected, a kind of victory. Getting David to stop mid-argument was harder than most things.

She finished her porridge and looked around at the dining hall properly for the first time that morning. The light was good—proper morning light, the kind that made everything look slightly more optimistic than it actually was. Students moving between tables, trays clattering, someone dropping something near the kitchen entrance and getting a round of mocking applause for it. Normal things. The kind of normal that had felt briefly absent last week and was now tentatively back.

"Are we going to watch the combat event together?" Timothy asked, steering things somewhere practical. "As a group?"

"Obviously," Marcus said. "That’s not even a question."

"I want to get there early enough to see the bracket matches, not just the later rounds," Emma said. "The early matches are where you see the most variety in technique. Later rounds compress toward the strongest styles."

"When did you become a combat analyst?" Patricia asked.

"I read about it this morning."

"You read about combat bracket analysis on a Monday morning."

"I read about a lot of things on Monday mornings. It’s a good time for broad intake." 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

Patricia looked at her. Emma looked back, unbothered. This was simply who she was and they had all accepted it.

"I want to see the survival scenario event," Sarah said. "Twelve students dropped into a simulated environment, no pre-assigned teams, have to figure out collaboration and resource management under pressure? That’s fascinating."

"That’s exactly what you’d find fascinating," Marcus said, but not unkindly.

"People reveal themselves under pressure. Not in a bad way, just genuinely. You learn more about someone in an hour of simulated crisis than in weeks of regular interaction."

"Is that why you keep engineering minor inconveniences for us?" Timothy asked.

Sarah paused. "I don’t do that."

"You absolutely do. Last week you told us the library closed an hour earlier than it actually did and then watched what we did with the extra time."

"That was an honest mistake."

"You took notes."

"I take notes on everything. That’s not evidence of intent."

The table was quiet for a moment, and then Patricia started laughing, and then Emma, and then Marcus despite himself, and Timothy who had at least earned it for landing that observation cleanly. Even David smiled, which on him looked like a complicated mathematical expression resolving correctly.

Sarah looked around at all of them, affronted, and then also started laughing, which somewhat undermined her position.

"For the record," she said, once it had settled, "everyone used the time well. Marcus reviewed essence theory. Emma read ahead. Timothy practiced his control forms. Patricia went for a walk and then sat on a bench and thought about things for twenty minutes."

"You watched all of us separately," Patricia said.

"I had a good vantage point."

"From where?"

Sarah smiled serenely and didn’t answer.

The conversation drifted naturally after that, much like a typical good morning exchange—casual and unplanned, involving topics like the week’s schedule, Safety Council interview notices, and whether the academy kitchen would do anything special during the competition or simply continue with the usual meal rotation.

David shared his opinions about the meal rotation, backed by data he had gathered.

At some point Marcus and David resumed the combat-versus-precision-event debate from earlier, but lower energy now, more like old music playing in the background than an actual argument. Emma had pulled out a small notebook and was sketching the competition bracket layout from memory, which she’d apparently already memorized, which was exactly the kind of thing Emma did. Timothy had found a second bread roll somewhere and was eating it with the satisfied expression of a man who had navigated a difficult social morning successfully.

Outside the tall windows, the grounds were bright and unhurried. Students crossing between buildings, a few sitting on the grass already despite the hour, the team members visible in the distance heading toward the training halls with purpose.

Five days to competition.

Patricia watched her friends argue gently about nothing that mattered and thought that this, specifically this, was what the week before a major event was supposed to feel like. Not the crisis management of the previous week, not the low-grade tension that had become ambient background noise, just this. Bread rolls and soup dreams and David’s notebook and the comfortable weight of people who had stopped performing normalcy and were simply being it.

She picked up her tray and stood.

"Where are you going?" Marcus asked.

"Second breakfast."

"That’s not a thing."

"I’m eating conceptually," she said, and left before he could respond.

Behind her, she heard Emma say something, and then Timothy laugh, and then David immediately begin a counterpoint. The sounds followed her halfway across the dining hall before mixing into everything else.

It was a reasonable Monday.

---

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