The Triangle didn't panic.
That was the problem.
Institutions like it were built by people who believed panic was weakness, and weakness was inefficiency. So instead of alarms, there were revisions. Instead of lockdowns, audits. Instead of accusations, updates.
On paper, everything looked normal.
In practice, the system had begun to bleed.
It started with something small enough to be dismissed.
A dungeon instance failed to load fully.
Not catastrophically—just one missing layer of terrain geometry. Students entering the simulation found themselves stepping onto invisible flooring, balance thrown off for half a second at a time.
Half a second was nothing.
Except in combat, half a second got people maimed.
Oversight quietly suspended that instance and blamed a processing error.
Then a merit reconciliation script ran twice.
No loss of data, no inflation, no obvious manipulation. Just a repeat execution that caused a seven-minute delay across three factions' internal ledgers.
