One hour later, they are standing in a field of glorious, untamed chaos.
Talia Verdurex's family farm isn't a sterile agricultural factory like Elysian Fields. It's a rambling, beautiful mess of a place, buzzing with the sound of bees and smelling of damp earth and living things.
And Talia herself is a force of nature. With sun-streaked hair tied back in a practical braid and dirt under her fingernails, she radiates a calm, grounded energy that makes the entire high-strung academy feel a million miles away.
"So," Talia says, gesturing with a sweep of her arm to the fields around them, a twinkle in her green eyes. "You said you wanted ugly."
She leads them to a series of large wooden bins behind a rustic packing shed. It's the cull. The agricultural Island of Misfit Toys.
And it is magnificent.
There are carrots twisted into gnarled, fantastical shapes, looking more like ancient runes than vegetables. Tomatoes with odd lumps and bumps, colored in a riot of reds, yellows, and purples. Potatoes that look like lumpy, misshapen faces. A zucchini so massive it could be used as a baseball bat.
To Nyra and Lucien, raised on the sterile perfection of curated produce, it is a gallery of mutants. A horror show.
To Caelan, it is a choir.
He runs his hand over a lumpy, strangely beautiful heirloom tomato. He closes his eyes. And there it is. A story. It's not a sad story of neglect, but a vibrant, quirky one. He can taste the struggle against a stubborn patch of clay in the soil, the extra day of sun that deepened its color on one side, the playful kiss of a cool morning dew. It is an ingredient that has lived.
"These are amazing," he breathes, a look of pure, unadulterated joy on his face.
Talia laughs, a rich, happy sound. "The supermarkets won't touch them. They say they 'lack shelf-appeal.' I say they have character. Most of this just gets tilled back into the soil or used for animal feed."
Nyra picks up a forked carrot, turning it over in her hands. Her finely honed instincts scream at her. How do you possibly peel something like this? How do you create a uniform dice? Every classical technique she knows is designed for geometric predictability. This… this requires a whole new philosophy.
"This is our secret weapon," Caelan says, his mind already racing, the silent, blank page of the Elysian Fields produce replaced by an epic novel of flavor. "Holt thinks he's taken away my power by denying me leftovers. But he's made a critical mistake."
He holds up the lumpy tomato for them to see. "He thinks 'leftover' means trash. But it doesn't. It just means overlooked. The Audit is about eliminating waste. We're going to eliminate waste at the source. We're going to prove that the real waste isn't the scraps on the plate. It's the perfectly good food that never even makes it to the kitchen because it's not beautiful enough."
A slow, revolutionary understanding dawns on Lucien's face. "You're not just breaking the rules of the competition. You're rewriting the entire definition of 'waste.'"
"Exactly," Caelan says.
The three of them—the God of Leftover, the Crimson Flash, and the Silver Prince—begin to sort through the bins, not as chefs looking for ingredients, but as curators selecting works of art. Talia joins them, her knowledge of each vegetable's unique personality encyclopedic.
"This potato here?" she says, holding up a particularly knobby specimen. "The Stargazer variety. It's a nightmare to peel, but it has the highest sugar content of anything on the farm. Roasts up like a dream."
"These tomatoes with the cracks in their skin?" she continues, pointing. "They're called 'cat-faced.' Ugly as sin. But the cracks mean the flesh had to fight to stay together, so the flavor is ten times more concentrated."
They fill crate after crate with the rejects, the outcasts, the misfits. Their larder for the week-long war ahead.
They load the final crate onto a small, beat-up farm truck Talia loans them. As the sun begins to set, casting long, golden shadows over the fields, Talia puts a hand on Caelan's arm.
"I saw what you did in the refectory," she says, her voice quiet and sincere. "The video Zadie posted. That wasn't just cooking." She gestures to her fields. "My family has been working this land for generations. We listen to it. We try to understand what it needs. You… you cook like a farmer thinks."
She gives him a small, conspiratorial smile. "Give 'em hell, Vest Boy."
They drive back to Aurum Academy, the back of their rusty truck a treasure chest of glorious imperfection.
As they pull up to Emberwood Hall, they see a small crowd has gathered. Zadie Nightwell is there, her camera rig already set up and broadcasting live. Milo Patch stands beside her, practically vibrating with hype. And watching from a distance, with an unreadable expression, is Chef Barthol Maillard.
"They refused the Elysian delivery!" Zadie is shrieking into her microphone as they pull up. "Sources say The Leftover League has dropped out of the Audit before it even began!"
Caelan, Nyra, and Lucien hop out of the truck.
"Not dropping out, Zadie," Nyra calls out, a confident, wolfish grin spreading across her face. "Just upgrading."
Lucien throws open the back of the truck. He pulls out a crate and dramatically dumps it onto a clean tarp they've laid on the ground. A cascade of gnarly carrots, lumpy potatoes, and gloriously ugly tomatoes spills out under the glare of Zadie's broadcast light.
The watching students gasp. It's the antithesis of everything Aurum teaches about ingredient selection.
Zadie's camera zooms in on a carrot that looks like a miniature eldritch horror. "What… what is that?"
Caelan steps forward, picks up the bizarre carrot, and holds it up for the camera. The setting sun glints off its strange, twisted form.
He doesn't need to shout. His voice is calm, clear, and carries the weight of an unshakable truth.
"This," he declares to the entire academy watching Zadie's stream, "is what a real vegetable looks like."
He looks directly into the lens. "And this week, we're going to show you what they really taste like."