Thanks for the chapter as always! Relatively good outcome for the Children this time. Oliver team made an important and useful discovery, lost in a believable way but also while making a fairly impressive demonstration. It remains unfortunate they've been cornered into having to reveal things like Oliver's mechanical capabilities at all, but still that's one new comer saved and without bringing discredit on the Starbearers either. Plus exciting battles will draw attention which is the other whole point here.
Today Oliver learned an important lesson about why all the good giant robots have got enclosed cockpits.
Possible for those goofs yeah, but remember that Kate doesn't actually want the newcomers disposed of, which means under these rules she probably wouldn't want any of them to win outright. But just throwing the fight under the eyes of the 3F won't work either, they'll smell a rat. So all of them have to walk the line of testing in a believably challenging way, but not winning.
One advantage they have is that this whole format is so new and so are they. That should give some leeway, Kate can say the Starbearers aren't combat focused, that they're all inexperienced, and they are just testing not commanded to kill. Thus even though the newcomers are all totally fresh it's not unreasonable if the Starbearers lose. I've been worried a little about if they can really get away with 100% losing or if somebody will have to win. Now while that's still an unintentional risk, I think Kate has at least one out in terms of being able to blame Edward and say that they did indeed lose on purpose because they thought that's what the adults wanted, "more strong shadows for GGF! How could you blame us when you surprised us to?" Thus taking a dig at his management while also pretending loyalty. Still a fine line to walk.
Granted meanwhile Anthony is lurking in the background. That could be another wild card, one of the newcomers could be about to lose and get killed or reveal dangerous things, then he sets off an explosion in the main house or something that causes the whole test to get disrupted and distracts adult attention.