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It starts, as many disasters do, with Cole opening the pantry.
He stares.
He blinks.
He stares again.
There is exactly one snack left.
A single, lonely bag of Sweet Chili Crunch Buns sits on the shelf like a divine artifact.
Cole closes the pantry very slowly.
Cole opens it again.
The snack does not multiply.
“Okay,” Cole says calmly, rationally, and with the voice of a man about to commit crimes. “No one else needs to know about this.”
Behind him, Jay gasps.
“Ohhh, is that the last one?”
Cole turns. Jay is already halfway into the kitchen, eyes locked on the bag.
“I saw nothing,” Jay continues loudly, “except the LAST SNACK IN THE MONASTERY.”
Within thirty seconds, everyone is there.
Kai crosses his arms. “I call dibs.”
“You can’t just call dibs,” Nya says.
“I just did.”
Lloyd looks between them. “Should we maybe… share it?”
The room goes silent.
Zane tilts his head. “Statistically, that suggestion was doomed from the start.”
Cole slowly pulls the bag out and holds it to his chest. “I need you all to understand something. This is not about greed. This is about survival.”
“I haven’t had a snack in, like, an hour,” Jay says tragically.
“That is not a real problem,” Nya says.
“It is to me.”
Wu clears his throat from the doorway.
Six heads snap toward him.
Wu smiles serenely. “Ah. I see you have discovered the final snack.”
“Sensei,” Lloyd says quickly, “can you help us decide who gets it?”
Wu strokes his beard. “Hmm. No.”
And then he leaves.
Nya squints after him. “He did that on purpose.”
“Okay,” Lloyd says, clapping his hands. “Fair competition. No powers. No destruction.”
Kai grins. “You always add that rule because of me.”
“Yes,” everyone says at once.
They agree on a series of challenges.
This is their first mistake.
Round One: Stealth
Cole hides the snack somewhere in the monastery.
The rules are simple: whoever finds it keeps it.
Jay immediately trips over nothing.
Kai yells, “WHY IS IT ALWAYS DARK IN HERE?”
Nya finds the snack in under thirty seconds, takes it, replaces it with a rock, and says nothing.
Lloyd later finds the rock and spends five full minutes yelling.
Zane knew where the snack was the whole time but didn’t say anything because “the social experiment was fascinating.”
Round One is declared a draw.
Round Two: Strength
Cole wins instantly.
No one argues.
They just stare at him as he casually lifts a training dummy, a bench, and Kai (who did NOT agree).
“This seems unfair,” Jay says.
Cole hugs the snack tighter.
Round Three: Intelligence
Nya wins.
Somehow it wasn't Zane.
She didn’t even explain how she knew the answer to the question.
Zane nods respectfully.
Round Four: Speed
Jay vibrates so hard he briefly becomes a blur, grabs the snack, trips, drops it, and sends it skidding across the floor.
Everyone dives.
There is shouting.
There is sliding.
Kai breathes fire. This breaks several rules.
Lloyd somehow ends up on top of the fridge again.
The snack lands in the center of the room.
They all freeze.
Cole slowly crawls forward, eyes wild.
“I haven’t eaten since lunch,” he whispers.
Jay gulps. “You had three lunches.”
“Yes,” Cole says. “And I will have more.”
They argue.
They negotiate.
They attempt democracy.
Democracy fails.
Finally, Nya sighs, grabs the bag, opens it—
—and pours the contents into six bowls.
Everyone stares at her.
“What?” she says. “This was the obvious solution.”
Cole looks down at his bowl.
It’s smaller than he’d like.
But it exists.
He exhales. “Okay. Okay. I can live with this.”
They all sit.
They eat.
Peace returns to the monastery.
From the doorway, Wu smiles.
“Excellent,” he murmurs. “They have learned the value of cooperation.”
Behind him, Cole quietly reaches into Jay’s bowl.
Jay screams.
Peace ends.