They reached Camp Orthrus the next morning without any trouble.
The Painted Skins had not attacked Wraith Fortress during the night, so for once, Team Nemean came back to camp with real sleep in their bones instead of dread and stale exhaustion sitting behind their eyes.
That only made the sight waiting for them hit harder.
Camp Orthrus had changed.
It had become a real fort. A star-shaped one.
The outer walls stretched wide enough that Dominic stopped walking for half a second just to take it all in. From above, it would have looked like a jagged flower of war, every angle designed to catch attackers in crossfire and every approach built to punish anyone dumb enough to rush it. The camp now covered nearly a square mile, and everywhere they looked there was movement, structure, and purpose.
Jake let out a low whistle.
"We were gone for a month."
Joanne folded her arms. "Phong was bored for a month."
That sounded more accurate.
The outer layer of the fort housed the lizardmen and some of the Kamohai mercenaries. Patrols moved there with the kind of discipline only people who had spent too long living near danger could keep up for more than a day. Spears, scaled armor, sharpened bone tools, fishing hooks turned into side knives, all of it mixed together into a frontier rhythm that felt half military, half desperate town.
Further in, the middle layer had become a trade hub.
Inkborn moved between stalls with jars, dried goods, and sealed packets tied to belts and harnesses. Buforians traded herbs and reeds and bundles of lake plants. Mice from the Great Burrow ran messages, counted goods, haggled over portions and prices with the speed of people who had learned that being small was useful in cramped places like these. Giant crickets stood in clusters around wagons and drag-sleds, carrying lumber, bundles of fungus, sacks of roots, and whatever else this newborn settlement needed.
Emma looked around slowly and muttered, "He built a town."
"No," said Jake. "He built a weird kingdom market."
And then they saw the plants.
The dills had changed.
After Phong moved them to the outer layer, they had finally mutated into a defensive variant. Their stems were taller, harder, and held with a strange tension that made them look almost like a field of narrow spears waiting to be loosed. They were anti-air defense now. Whenever something hostile flew too low over the fort, the dills shot upward like arrows from a battery and struck birds clean out of the sky.
That alone would have been enough.
But the peas had mutated too.
And the peas were worse. Way worse.
One of the local citizens, a visibly tired Inkborn merchant, explained it to new comers with the dead voice of someone who had already seen far too much.
"The pods burst," she said. "Then the little peas jump."
Jake blinked. "Jump?"
The Inkborn nodded.
"They burrow into whoever they hit."
No one liked where this was going.
"What happens after that?" Dominic asked.
The Inkborn stared at him.
"They laugh until they run out of breath and die."
Silence hit the whole team. Then Joanne put one hand over her mouth and said, "Phong made Joker venom."
Jack rubbed both eyes. "We were away for one month."
"A short month," Janet said.
"And he made Joker venom peas," Joanne repeated.
Even Alex looked faintly offended on behalf of common sense.
The original Camp Orthrus sat at the center still, but not as a lonely pioneer camp anymore. It had become the governor's heart of the whole place. The first walls, the first clearings, the old lime-oak zone, all of it had been turned into an inner core where the highest-value work happened. And there, exactly where none of them were surprised to find him, sat Phong.
He was buried in reports.
Mice of the Great Burrow had clearly been doing their jobs too well, because stacks of notes, rough maps, coded symbols, and little marked pages were spread out around him in a way that made the whole room look like a conspiracy theorist had gained access to actual useful information for once.
Phong was sorting it with the stubborn focus of a man who had forgotten the existence of all mortal needs. Nearby, Rico was teaching the elf children about the superiority of Kamen Rider over every other television show in existence like it was sacred doctrine.
The raccoon stood on a crate, one paw raised like a prophet, while the children stared up at him with bright eyes and deeply unreliable judgment.
"Henshin," Rico declared.
"Henshin," several elf children chirped back at once.
One even did a little pose.
Alex stared at the scene, then back at Phong, then at the scene again. Team Nemean had only been gone a short while, and somehow this was what home looked like now. That was when she noticed it.
Phong's lips were dry.
Too dry.
The kind of dry that meant he had not eaten properly today. Maybe not drunk enough either. His focus was too sharp in the brittle way it got when he pushed past a meal and then forgot the next one too.
Alex's eyes narrowed at once.
"Stop."
Phong looked up from the notes like someone surfacing from underwater.
"What?"
"You haven't eaten."
He opened his mouth to deny it, but Alex cut him off with a look so flat and firm that even Rico went quiet. Dominic caught on right away and leaned back against the doorway, grinning already.
Emma, seeing the shape of the coming disaster, wisely moved to one side and prepared to enjoy it.
Phong tried once more. "I was about to."
"You were categorizing," Alex said. "Which means you were not about to do anything except keep working until you passed out."
"That's a bit dramatic."
"Is it?"
She stepped forward, took the nearest stack of paper out of his hand, and placed it down.
"The working session is over."
Phong blinked. "Alex."
She did not budge.
"You are going to eat," she said, "under surveillance."
That made Séline laugh first. Then the Js, Alexei, then even Dominic gave up and chuckled. Rico pointed at Phong with all the joy of a creature seeing justice at work. "Farmer is now under management."
Phong looked around the room for support and found none. Even the elf children had turned on him.
One of them tugged at his sleeve and said, "Daddy should eat."
Another nodded hard enough to bounce. "Alex says so."
Phong looked at Alex again. She crossed her arms.
And just like that, the governor of Camp Orthrus, farmer of impossible plants, accidental founder of a new lake-town alliance, and handler of enough intel to scare wealthy men, was dragged away from his papers to have brunch while his team watched to make sure he actually finished it.
Phong gave up on arguing.
That alone made everyone at the table happier than it should have.
He sat down with Team Nemean at last, still carrying the air of a man who had only surrendered because the opposition had become too coordinated to out-stubborn. Alex made sure he actually ate before speaking. Janet handed him water without comment. Dominic, Jake, and Joanne all looked far too entertained by the sight of the farmer-governor being forcibly parented.
Only after Phong had food in his mouth did Alex allow the conversation to move on.
He swallowed, took another bite, and then said, "I need a favor."
That got everyone's attention faster than the food did.
"The tomatoes, basil, and dill have all become consumables." He rubbed one hand over his face. "My appraisal is unreliable for things like that, as per usual. So I need you all to check them for me."
That made sense. The team had better appraisal than he did given his terrible stats, and they all knew by now that Phong's biggest weakness was often not in creating the impossible, but in figuring out exactly how broken it had become after the fact.
So the basil came first.
Alex picked one up, appraised it, then stared for a second longer than usual.
"What."
That was Phong, immediately suspicious.
Alex looked up.
"Bastion Basil," she said. "Consumable version."
Joanne leaned in. "And?"
Alex read off the effect.
"It gives plus 0.1 Constitution when consumed. Up to a maximum of +2."
Phong stopped moving. Then, very slowly, his eyes widened. For one brief, terrible second, it looked like he might genuinely cry.
Dominic barked out a laugh.
Phong ignored him completely.
"With the basil," he said, almost reverently, "I can finally bring my Constitution to eleven."
Jake blinked. "That's your emotional reaction?"
"Double digits Constitution," Phong said, like he was speaking of heaven. "Do you understand what that means to me?"
Emma, who did in fact understand what that meant to a level 1 farmer with the body of a civilian and a life full of reasons to be killed, did not laugh.
Joanne still did.
"Dream big, farmer."
"It was a dream," Phong muttered. "A month ago."
The dill came next.
This time Janet checked it, then passed the result over.
"Dandy Dill," she said. "It removes basic status effects."
That got Alexei's full attention immediately.
"Such as."
Janet kept reading.
"Minor curses. Paralysis. Slowness. Things in that range. Not diseases." She looked up. "And it shares the same once-per-day cooldown with the other plants."
Phong nodded slowly. Useful. No. Very useful.
Not flashy, but the kind of thing that kept people alive in the dungeon where one unlucky debuff could turn a winnable fight into a death sentence.
Then came the tomatoes.
And that was where the table got quiet again.
Emma appraised them first, then her expression changed halfway through.
Dominic saw it and frowned. "That bad?"
"That strong," Emma corrected.
She looked at Phong, then read the result aloud.
"Typhoon Tomatoes. They reduce the cooldown and mana cost of all skills by fifty percent for one minute."
That alone was absurd, then came the backlash.
"Afterward, all skills are locked for twenty-four hours."
The table went silent.
Because everyone there understood what that meant.
It was another overdrive button. Not exactly the same as Berserking Strawberry, but the same family of insanity. A push-all-chips-in button, a fight-winning option that even made even a Pillar care enough to warn her children. A ruin-your-next-day option. A fruit people would absolutely use wrong if not controlled hard. And on top of all... working scarily well in tandem with the Berserking Strawberry.
Skills scaled with stats.
The Typhoon Tomatoes gave them twice the chance to abuse the skills improved by the strawberry.
Phong's reaction was immediate. He did not even finish chewing before he started laying down usage rules. Typhoon Tomatoes were to be treated like Berserking Strawberries: restricted, controlled, and no casual usages allowed except safe testing.
No one takes one without team approval unless death is already on the table.
No one takes one and a strawberry without the team there to haul them home.
Dominic nodded along.
Alex too.
Emma shrugged, saying that Phong should be worry about the raccoon abusing the tomatoes than them. Rico gave her a betrayed look, as if to say "and I even allowed you to use me as a plushie".
Phong ignored that and made sure everyone heard the limits twice.
Only after that did the meal turn into a proper exchange of stories.
Phong went first.
He told them about the H'Re. About the worms, the prophecy, the vertical eye, and the warning about the Painted Skin. He told them about the famine around Lake Baratok, the fish losses, the dead hatchlings, and the relief effort.
Then he told them about the Painted Skins, and that pulled the whole table into a darker silence. By the time he finished describing the fluttering skins and the flesh-thing that burst out of the mouse, even Vân's earlier chaos felt cleaner by comparison.
Then Team Nemean gave their side.
The pixies and the journey through the ruin, the discovery of the cryo-tomb and the Soerai's origin, the other Dominic, the wall painting about the gray figure, the other Dominic.
Then, the adventure with the Tortura and their request, the run-in with Cà Rồng, the Nine. The replica of dǒu worshiped by the people exiled from floor 9.
And finally, Vân.
Phong listened to all of it with that still, attentive way he had when information was sinking in faster than his face showed. But the moment they reached the part about his cousin, one corner of his mouth twitched in deep, resigned pain.
"I'm sorry," he said flatly. "On behalf of my cousin."
Alex stared at him.
"That is not enough of an apology."
"It's all I have."
"He called me sister-in-law before introducing himself."
Phong sighed. "That sounds like him."
"This is still way too late of a reveal on your part," Alex said.
Phong rubbed his forehead. "I only started contacting my family in Vietnam again after the Lyon trip."
That got some looks. Because yes, that tracked. Emotionally. Unfortunately.
Alex still did not let him off easy.
"Still late."
Phong accepted that with the air of a man who knew he had no defense and did not intend to invent one. The mood shifted again when the elf children, having realized that the adults were talking about important things without them, decided this was unacceptable.
One of them climbed halfway onto the bench and announced proudly, "We level fifteen now."
That pulled every eye their way.
The children, delighted by the attention, immediately started opening status menus and shoving them toward the nearest adults with all the subtlety of tiny nobles demanding praise.
Dominic checked one.
Then another.
Then stared.
"They're nearly catching up to my stats from when I was level twenty-nine."
No one at the table had a good answer to that. The elf children looked very pleased with themselves anyway. Then Nyx, tail flicking with intellectual interest, said, "They have no class."
That made everyone look at her. Bruno nodded along. "We do. They don't."
The table went quiet again, but this time in fascination instead of dread. Because that was true. Nyx and Bruno had classes. The elf children, however, were climbing in power with no visible class structure at all. Just levels, stats, and whatever inherited logic Horns of the Earth had left in them.
Emma leaned closer, interested now in the dangerous way she got when a system irregularity showed itself.
"That changes how we think about growth."
Selena would have lost her mind on the spot if she had been there.
Dominic looked from the children to Phong and back again. Then said, with the weight of a man increasingly convinced his friend's life was fundamentally cursed in a very creative way, "You grew unclassed elf children."
Phong pointed his chopsticks weakly. "I know."
"No, you don't. You grew very over-stats elf children."
And around the table, with new plants, new allies, new horrors, and several children proud of being small statistical nightmares, brunch at Camp Orthrus somehow kept going like this was a normal thing for them now.