The afternoon sun hit the quad at that specific angle where everything turned gold and the Pacific looked like somebody had dumped glitter into it. Three forty-five on a Thursday in California, the day before we walked into a C-rank gate that had abnormal readings and a professor who thought pairing us with Blair’s squad would build character rather than body bags.

I should have been reviewing formation protocols or studying the forest biome data Naomi had compiled into a color-coded binder thick enough to stop a crossbow bolt. I should have been running through Reaper’s Edge forms in my head, cataloging the differences between Copper-rank death energy and the Wave Motion spirals I’d grown comfortable with over the past three weeks.

Instead I was sitting on the grass behind Building C with my back against a maple tree, a half-eaten turkey sandwich balanced on my knee, watching Belle and Naomi argue about chip flavors like the fate of civilization hung in the balance.

"Barbecue is objectively superior." Belle held up a chip the color of burnt sienna and examined it with the same reverence she normally reserved for rare mana crystals. Her blue hair caught the afternoon light and her Obsidian blazer hung open over the yellow dress shirt she’d unbuttoned far enough to give HR nightmares. "The smoke. The sweetness. The way it hits different after physical training. This isn’t opinion, it’s science."

Naomi sat cross-legged on the grass beside me, close enough that her knee pressed against my thigh through the fabric of her tights. Her pink and black striped hair fell loose today instead of the braid I usually did for her, and her shell necklace caught the sun every time she turned her head. She held up her own chip with the solemnity of someone presenting evidence in court.

"Salt and vinegar. It cleanses the palate. It wakes up your taste buds. Barbecue just coats everything in sugar and tells you to be grateful."

"Coats everything in flavor, you mean."

"Artificial flavor."

"All flavor is artificial, Naomi. That’s what seasoning means."

I took a bite of my sandwich and let them go at it. This was the third chip debate this week. Monday had been sour cream and onion versus cheddar. Tuesday covered the controversial territory of kettle-cooked versus regular, which nearly ended their friendship when Belle called Naomi’s preference for kettle chips bougie. Wednesday they’d declared a ceasefire to focus on gate prep, but the truce obviously couldn’t hold.

"Jace." Belle pointed her barbecue chip at me like a weapon, amber-brown eyes narrowing in mock accusation. "Tell her she’s wrong."

"I’m not getting involved."

"You’re already involved. You’re eating the barbecue ones right now."

I looked down at the open bag between my legs, the evidence damning me in real time. She was right. The barbecue chips were excellent, actually, in that cheap junk food way that scratched a particular itch normal people called nostalgia and I called distraction from tomorrow’s mortality risk. Jordan had sourced them from the East Tower vending machine at two points a bag, which made them the cheapest luxury available on campus. I’d been stress-eating them since noon, destroying the bag one mechanically perfect crunch at a time.

"I’m eating whatever’s closest to my hand." I grabbed another chip to prove my point, holding it up like exhibit A. "That’s not an endorsement, that’s geography and convenience in equal measure."

Belle’s eyes went flat. "Geography. You just said geography about chips. About snack food."

"I said what I said."

Naomi laughed softly beside me, the sound vibrating through where her knee pressed against my thigh through black tights and uniform pants. She stole a barbecue chip from the bag with the casual confidence of someone who’d been given free access to my food three weeks ago and never looked back, popping it into her mouth with scientific interest. Belle’s eyes tracked the motion like a hawk spotting prey.

"Traitor."

"I’m gathering data." Naomi chewed the chip slowly, performance-art thorough in her evaluation. She even made thinking noises, little hums of consideration that would’ve been adorable if they weren’t so clearly designed to piss Belle off. "Confirming my hypothesis that barbecue tastes like someone dissolved truck stop jerky in artificial smoke and called it seasoning."

"A delicious truck stop."

"There’s no such thing as a delicious truck stop, Belle. That’s an oxymoron. That’s like saying ’nutritious fast food’ or ’comfortable public transportation.’"

"You’re just mad because your salt and vinegar chips taste like battery acid and regret."

The argument continued, escalating into increasingly ridiculous comparisons involving flavor profiles and sodium content and something about MSG that I was pretty sure neither of them actually understood.

I let my head fall back against the maple tree’s trunk and closed my eyes for exactly three seconds, timing it internally the way I timed everything now. The bark was rough through my shirt.

The air smelled like cut grass and ocean salt and Belle’s expensive perfume, the one Aurora had picked out during their shopping trip that cost more than my monthly stipend and came in a bottle the size of a shot glass.

Someone on the floor above us had a window open and music leaked down, something with acoustic guitar and a voice too pretty for a Thursday afternoon full of prep anxiety and chip-based arguments.

Six weeks. That’s all it had been since I woke up in that amphitheater with seventy-two hours to live and a system that ran on supernatural lactation.

Six weeks since I couldn’t run a mile without wanting to die, when my thighs burned after two flights of stairs and my reflection in the bathroom mirror looked like someone had given up on the character creator halfway through and said fuck it, good enough.

Now I sat at two hundred and five pounds instead of two-forty, with a jaw that actually had angles and arms that filled my sleeves in ways the original Jace Monroe never managed. C-rank Strength and Endurance. A stolen ability that could carve through reinforced training dummies like they were made of wet cardboard. A mentor in Dominic Vale who was either the greatest teacher alive or the most creative sadist in California, possibly both.

Also three girlfriends who knew about each other. Plus Addison, who was either a fourth girlfriend or a beautiful disaster wearing thigh-high stockings and a lollipop addiction. Plus Hikaru, who was a woman pretending to be a man while sleeping four meters away from me every night and now owed me her life after I’d spent forty minutes in a blood-soaked bathroom keeping her from dying on the tile floor.

The protagonist of a harem light novel would kill for my roster.

The protagonist of a harem light novel would also probably have a plan for how to survive tomorrow’s gate without getting anyone killed, which was something I was still working on between chip debates and stolen moments of peace.