The judges ruled at nine in the morning after arguing eleven hours about a team they had already disqualified. Their problem was arithmetic rather than politics, since Ruinwood had scored survival points across nine days before anybody suspended anything.
Blackforge held the highest raw survival total in the event by a margin of four hundred points. Nobody had beaten it, because nobody else had spent nine days mapping manipulated ground instead of shooting staged targets.
Survival points had been designed as a consolation column for teams that failed to score anything. The Association had never expected the column to decide an event, which is why nobody had thought to cap it.
The rescue count sat underneath it in a column the Association had never expected to matter. Forty-three hunters off the stampede, seven from the vehicle line, sixty-three out of a chained cut, plus eleven camps warned before the drainage.
