Oversight did not convene that night.
That absence was louder than any alarm.
No emergency council.
No late-cycle directive.
No sudden lockdowns dressed up as "safety protocol."
The Triangle slept.
And for the first time since its founding, that sleep was not confident.
It was defensive.
Dreyden felt it before dawn.
Not as danger.
Not as pressure.
As latency.
The campus systems were still responding—doors unlocked, lights adjusted, schedules propagated—but the responses arrived a fraction of a second slower than before.
Not enough to trigger alarms.
Enough to notice.
Institutions lagged when their internal models were being rewritten.
By morning, the change had reached the instructors.
Not the younger ones—their habits were still instinctive, reactive.
It reached the veterans.
The ones who had learned that survival inside the Triangle depended on sensing when power shifted before it announced itself.
A combat theory lecture ended early.
