What is clear as day is that, in the coming days, we clearly see who lives the stress of college applications and who doesn't. Cory and Shane have no worries, Shane works hard in class, but he claimed Tulane was his safety because he applied there under early decision – said early decision means one must attend if admitted. But if McGill was, as Cory claimed, a backup plan for Ivies, without question Marcia or Krista could consider this place as a safety if Cory considered it as such; they are much better than Cory at least from a grades and ACT standpoint. Well, I wouldn't be surprised if Krista had better than 3.6-3.7/31... As for me I only need to cross my fingers and hope that Chicago admits me in early decision! She thinks, while returning to school on the day of the season's second game.

During the resulting team meeting, where they review other d'autres questions from the AMC12 but also single-variable integral calculus questions, there's also an aside about the last game:

"Vontae, you cost us the three points that we were missing for the perfect score against Permian! And you want to enter the Vans Math Contest?" Trent admonishes Vontae.

"But why aim for the perfect game? Sorry for this question, but I didn't take part to the competitions last year, so I have no experience in this mathematical environment" Vontae asks.

"The next opponent will be much more formidable than Permian, we are playing in the highest bracket now, and Permian is in the lowest bracket. Against the four opponents that we will be playing until the playoffs, every point counts"

"But against whom will we play tonight's game?" Krista asks, anxious to know the opponent of the day.

"Walt Whitman. A magnet school in the Greater Washington region, or in the Maryland portion of its northern suburbs to be exact" Trent answers her.

Oh boy, Whitman. If there ever was a worse moment for this name to resurface, it would be in the Math Madness playoffs or in the VMC final... Geneviève rambles while she feels a temptation against which she seems less and less able to resist.

"Whitman? If I am not mistaken, they will seek to avenge us for their defeat at the Square Root of the Answer!" Gen rambles.

"What are you talking about, Gen? Never did you evoke this name, never did anyone in this town ask questions about opponents!" Marcia retorts, while Cory is synchronizing the auditorium's projector with the competition's screen.

"They represented Maryland in this competition, they finished fourteenth in the final, they believe I am the person to defeat if they are to win it all at the Math Madness or the Vans Math Contest!" Gen answers, her face going red.

"In other words, we went from a band of idiots that can barely do analytical geometry to one of the great mathletic powers for opponents and in a single week? The order risks being tall, Gen, if what you say is true!" Krista warns her teammates.

"If we win today, our three subsequent opponents will all be at this level, and we may very well face one in the playoffs! We'll then know what to expect in the playoffs" Trent warns his mathletes.

Unlike their previous opponents, the Whitman Vikings harbor a very different set of expectations towards this contest. Especially when their only member that took part in the Square Root of the Answer last year speaks before game number 2 of the season. The atmosphere is way more tense than it was at Permian last week; the latter want nothing to do with facing the Venomous Agendas again, even in the VMC! And that's assuming Permian participates at the VMC... while Whitman will seek to avenge this defeat at the final which, in their eyes, is caused by the Venomous Agendas! In a Whitman computer lab, where the team is assembled...

"These Cajuns beat us last year in the Square Root of the Answer national round; we won't lose to these guys again! That one person that caused us to lose is playing tonight!" Zhou screams.

"They're not Cajuns, they're Venomous Agendas, guys! Down with the Venomous Agendas!" another Whitman mathlete corrects Zhou.

"The Venomous Agendas have proven time and time again that they have what it takes to go all the way! Brace yourselves for a clash of the mathematical titans! We must take them out now or suffer the consequences later!" Zhou keeps screaming.

"The Square Root of the Answer is a very different kind of contest vs this one; they may have beaten us once but they must prove they can beat us without calculus!" Whitman's coach yells at their mathletes.

In the meantime, in the Louisianan auditorium, the crowd in attendance, which hasn't finished assembling, Cory's father makes the presentation of tonight's game with the scoreboard in place as well as the mathematical questions to which both sides will answer will be scrolled over on it. Granted, the crowd isn't as numerous as for the Duel of the Parishes, but is ready to use the math team as a weekly quiz game show held on Thursday nights, before playing loud music.

"Today, the Venomous Agendas will play, for the first time since the final of the Square Root of the Answer, the Walt Whitman Vikings in Maryland! One of the best magnet schools in the country will face us; they will be thirsty for vengeance for this humiliating defeat at the SRA final and tonight's game promises high-flying mathematical feats not only from our mathletes, but also the best regular season game!" Cory's father makes his presentation.

"Question before we begin, where is Maryland?" a Venomous Agendas fan asks.

"Maryland is an Atlantic coast state which marks the limit between the north of the coast and the south. On behalf of the booster club, I wish the best of luck to the Venomous Agendas against such strong opponents! The game begins in ten seconds!"

Ten seconds later, the very first question is displayed on the screens of every stakeholder, but one is wondering if the Black and White will even cover the game, that is, if the student community at Whitman will even know that their own have a big interstate rival on a mathematical level that isn't in Virginia... On the other hand, each Venomous Agendas game is covered by the student press as well as the parish newspaper. Unfortunately, this means that Gen cannot write articles on the games themselves for the student newspaper: too many conflicts of interest.

"First question: how many thêta values in the interval from zero to two pi can we have one minus three sine of thêta plus five cosine of three thêta equal to zero?" Cory's father asks the crowd, which, for the most part, is completely lost. "Marcia opens the score and scores the first point of the Venomous Agendas!" He continues while only a few seconds separate the fastest Venomous Agendas from the Vikings, who don't delay in tying, 5 to 5.

"Why wasn't Marcia part of the team earlier in her high school career?" asks another Venomous Agendas fan. She is quick on the trigger, and she has mathematical talent...

The Vikings, however, are obsessed over Geneviève early in the game, and in particular, the one who took part in the Square Root of the Answer. They do not realize that their real preoccupation is that, in reality, Marcia, as questions go on, makes it so that they are almost always trailing, even if only by one point, with her lightning answers. Why did I try to galvanize my own team by presenting Geneviève as THE girl to defeat? She might be fast, but her teammate is even faster, Zhou, the Viking of multi-variable calculus thinks, realizing that his slowness is playing tricks on him.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

"She's the captain of the quiz bowl team, she must be quick on the trigger to wear the C in competition!" Marcia's father talks to another quiz bowl parent.

"But our quiz bowl team is like the football team: not very good" a parent of a player on the quiz bowl team comments, while this parent wonders how they got there with quiz bowl. "Even with Marcia as a captain, the real problem with this team is our lack of depth: without her, we're nothing"

"Silence! We'll miss the next question!"

"But watching this Math Madness game is like the pep rally last time; we don't understand these math problems that our favorites are solving any more than we understood anything to Jacobians, these PDEs solved in open air!"

"Look! The Venomous Agendas are widening the gap to three points!"

A three-point gap which, after six questions, don't seem like much, but in an environment where the leads are made and unmade as rapidly as they can answer the questions, the crowd is simply impressed when the Vikings take the lead for the first time when they get to the seventh question.

We cannot allow them to win; we have one question left to reverse course! We blew a three-point lead for no reason and we cannot disappoint our own fans on our own turf! We must prevent them from satisfying their vengeance towards me! Geneviève thinks, while the eighth problem statement appears on the auditorium's screen.

"The final sprint is underway, and the Vikings lead by a point; will the Venomous Agendas be able to bridge the gap?" Cory's father makes his announcement.

"Venomous! Agendas! Venomous! Agendas!" The crowd screams in unison, while Marcia tries to provoke the opponent into mistakes with a burst of speed, tying the game again for the umpteenth time.

A few moments later, the answers resemble each other, so much so that there is only one person capable of contributing to the top-5 of their respective teams that hasn't answered yet. 39 to 39, therefore the burst of speed hasn't yielded the expected results. The game will boil down to her, the girl that I hold responsible for our defeat at the Square Root of the Answer last year, and I, Zhou, the last of the Vikings' top-5 thinks, without realizing that, at the other hand, the captain of the Venomous Agendas can't really force the opponent's hand.

As much as it can be tempting to answer faster than the neighbor, a wrong answer can be fatal to me, cost me the game and that I will not be forgiven for it. Now, if we replaced y by x2-a in the equation of the circle of radius a, it gives me an expression. Yet we need 2a-1 to be greater than zero and therefore a must be strictly greater than 1/2; the case a = 1/2 means we will only have x = 0 as intersection of the parabola with the circle, she thinks, and picks the answer corresponding to this inequality.

On the other side, we have the guy that attempts calculating in his head how much breathing room he had to answer after her by basing himself on the times of the rest of the top-5 vs the times of the Venomous Agendas' top-5, thus wasting a precious time by thinking of exploiting the tiebreaker. It's no use! I banged my head against the wall for nothing and these parasitic thoughts made my life harder! I may as well enter the answer as I feel it, even if it means losing on the tiebreaker! He thinks, crossing his fingers, and he loses his footing when he realizes that he committed a stupid mistake which costs Whitman the game, despite the spectacular catch-up in the last quarter of the game.

"These... Venomous Agendas beat us without calculus! Once again, she is responsible for us losing to them! How is that even possible? She was taking forever to answer the last question!" Zhou screams in anger, while becoming red after this very bitter defeat by a single point.

"Your anger blinds you. Plus I really question whether our loss at the Square Root of the Answer last year was her responsibility. They competed fair and square, and so did we. Promise us that you won't be using an opposing player as some boogeyman in the future!" the coach makes Zhou promise.

"What am I going to tell the Black and White after this Pyrrhic loss?" Zhou is wondering.

"We played our best tonight. You said it so yourself that it was a Pyrrhic loss, a close loss" another Whitman mathlete points out to him.

"You have any idea what playing against this team meant to me? A shot at revenge! To avenge a loss we incurred on the national stage against the team that won it all!" He starts crying, considering how his considers this game on a personal level, without realizing that his teammates don't hold the same perspective, and crumbles on the floor.

If, at Bethesda, the atmosphere turns into a nightmare, where the SRA veteran seems to treat this loss as catastrophic, while acknowledging that the Vikings' loss was actually very close, it was completely different for the Venomous Agendas fans. They were cheering after this hard-fought victory.

"Victory! The Venomous Agendas seem to be headed in the right direction to go far in the Math Madness this year! A perfect game in all respects!" Trent howls.

"Now you have a better idea of what the town expects from us, and also of what it takes to win the next three games, as well as go deep in the playoffs!" Geneviève expresses herself in front of her teammates. "Bravo Vontae; you improved"

"Thank you"

"But we also have a better idea of what it will take a potential opponent to defeat us. Five players with experience on the AIME, preferably with at least one of those that have some experience on the USAMO..." Krista makes her analysis.

"By now it's clear that we are here to stay, at least this season" Trent quips.

Quickly the competition's scoring makes it so that the less talented players have the impression of being useless, with the talent that crystallizes itself around their five best, game after game. Especially with the Venomous Agendas, there's a large gap between the worst of Cory and Vontae and the sixth player on the roster, players that joined the math team simply to bask in glories that clearly belong to someone else. Granted with talent that could have made them wear the C of the math team in practically any other school of the state except for this one...

The following day, the atmosphere in the football locker room, as the eighth game of the season approaches, played on the road at Church Point, is much more joyful than after the firing of the previous head coach last week. Obviously, the morale of the rest of the town is much better after what its residents consider as a great victory, be it against Iota in football or against Whitman in math. Especially since the parish media presents Whitman as a school which, like theirs, can have a shot at winning the VMC in January and in April.

"If the mathletics team can defeat such a big out-of-state opponent, then we can win tonight's game!" Randy exclaims to the team.

"But how can you make such a claim?" Ted, the fullback, asks. These are two independent things without correlation.

"We greatly improved since the beginning of the season, we can make the opponent underestimate us and we force them to commit mistakes! That's how our mathletes won against Whitman last night, Ted!" the cornerback points out.

"Whitman underestimated our speed! Thus make it so that tonight's opponents will do the same!" Curtis, the wide receiver adds, after the cornerback commented about what he called « such a big out-of-state opponent » despite the fact that everything Randy knows about mathletics comes from his friendship with two of the three star mathletes.

"The opponent believes we are forced to use the passing game to win; if we play a rushing game here, we will force them to commit mistakes!" the placekicker adds here.

So we can use the successes of our mathletes to motivate the team? With this new head coach we have more of a say about plays, Curtis, the wide receiver, thinks, while playing a rushing game makes the quarterback more vulnerable to the sack. After all, it takes a good tackle to take out a player...

"Randy is right. They can play strategically; they proved it last night. We will need to play strategically too!" the coach stays brief.

"Oh yes! Venomous! Agendas! Venomous! Agendas! It has never been so good to be a Venomous Agenda..." Curtis continues with an unbounded enthusiasm. "If we're not a mathlete anyway"

"The national anthem will be sung in two minutes; please get into position!" the coach orders the team while the captain of Church Point's mathletics team is about to sing the national anthem before the kickoff of the season's game number six.

"Let's go, Venomous! Agendas! Venomous! Agendas!" the wide receiver shouts.

"On peut les défaire mathématiquement, on peut également le faire ici, sur la route!" Randy shouts, just before the national anthem.

This game against Church Point which, it has to be said, is languishing at the mathematical bottom of the state's barrel, would bear a particular significance if the Venomous Agendas win tonight: it would be the first Venomous Agendas road win in football since the pandemic.

From the first down onwards, the Bears start taunting the Venomous Agendas, calling them nerds in uniform, of softies, or in any way whatsoever that could betray their mathletic insecurities and that they try to impose on the team in white. But it's in the third quarter that the opportunity to make the Bears pay for their defensive assumptions arrive, by a 24-yard rushing gain that results in a touchdown and the Venomous Agendas took the lead on that play, forcing, however, the latter to spend the entire fourth quarter to protect their lead. And that's two wins...