Nobody wanted to speak about the trials directly. Nero had noticed this and found it understandable. Speaking about them at length involved the acknowledgment of concrete odds, and the concrete odds were not numbers that invited optimism — two hundred candidates, twenty survivors at the upper estimate, and the shape of the mathematics in between was not a thing most people found improved by repeated examination. Better to train, eat, sleep, and keep moving, which was the only advice that remained valid regardless of the calculation.
