Next morning, camp life returned to its usual madness.
Phong emerged from his lodge looking like a man whose soul had been tenderized overnight. His hair was a mess, his eyes looked half dead, and his steps had that soft, slow drag that made it clear Alex had been very pleased with herself.
Alex, for her part, looked deeply amused and far too refreshed.
Joanne took one look at them and booed loudly.
"You're showing off."
Emma, who had the instincts of a drama queen and no patience for missing a punchline, turned at once.
"What is she showing off?"
Joanne pointed at Alex like a prosecutor in court.
"Getting her dose of Vitamin P."
That broke the whole camp.
Jake doubled over laughing. Jack covered his face. Janet nearly choked on her drink. Even Séline and Camille lost the fight with their own mouths for a second. Emma slapped the table in delight. Alexei made a sign of respect toward Phong for surviving. Alex, instead of being embarrassed, looked pleased enough to make Joanne groan louder.
Phong just sat down with the air of a man accepting that public shame was now part of breakfast.
Dominic spared him by dragging the elf children off for boxing drills.
That turned into its own problem almost immediately.
The moment Dominic started teaching them basic stance and short punches, he realized the little leafy gremlins hit way above what children their size had any right to hit. One of them snapped a punch into his guard and made his whole arm ring.
Dominic blinked.
Then looked down at the child.
Then back at his arm.
"What."
The child puffed up proudly.
Around them, Phong cooked.
Moletatoes had become breakfast. He made fried moletato cakes, a version of bánh khoai changed to suit what the camp had. Crisp outside, soft inside, sweet and earthy. Then he made lệ phố moletatoes, a type of cake that was traditionally made with taro, rich and warm and dense enough to win loyalty from anyone with a soul.
Rico was bribed by food as always.
That much of the world remained stable.
Once breakfast settled in everyone's stomach, Rico picked a fight with Dominic.
Or rather, asked for a spar with all the dignity of a raccoon trying to pretend he was not still here mostly because Phong kept feeding him.
Dominic agreed right away. He wanted more practice with the slower style Vân taught them, and with prana coat. So they squared off in the yard while the others gathered to watch.
Rico used Judgment Form.
That was the first mistake Dominic made, underestimating just how much of a fight that little menace could bring.
The armor formed around Rico in a rush of bark, mushroom plates, and thickened plant matter. Then the raccoon came in low and fast and hit Dominic so hard with the first clean fist that the bigger man nearly left the ground.
"Holy shit," Jake muttered.
Rico cackled and pressed the advantage. Judgment Form hit like a truck with bad intentions. Dominic defended, adjusted, and started trying to use slower, heavier counters through prana coat, but Rico's weird armor and wild little body made the angle awkward. Twice, the raccoon nearly stole the win outright.
Only the timer saved Dominic.
At the eight-minute mark, the young treant gave out.
Judgment Form collapsed.
And Rico went face first into the dirt.
Dominic stood there breathing hard, then looked down at the raccoon with new respect.
The rest of Team Nemean had much the same reaction.
Especially Emma.
The raccoon had spent so long as comic relief, emotional support, caffeine goblin, and a louder, stranger version of Phong's chaos that it had been easy to forget what he could do in a real fight.
Not anymore.
They had all known Rico hit hard. But only after standing this close to one of his Kamen Rider forms did they understand what Josh and his divers must have felt that night on the troll mountain.
Phong, still soft in the bones from Alex's affections, went to his room to fetch Rico some coffee as reward.
Then he found out the raccoon had already stolen every single instant coffee pack during the night. Phong stood there in silence, holding an empty container, and felt a deep tired admiration.
Rico had moved that quietly while both he and Alex were in bed. And, for once, the raccoon's intrusive thoughts had not won. He had stolen the coffee and left. No weird comments. No life-ruining questions shouted at the wrong moment.
Growth, apparently, was possible.
By the time Phong came back out, Rico had already run off to do "Rico's stuff." Phong knew the real reason.
The elf children had started getting bored with morning training again. Which meant they were about five minutes away from deciding that playing horsy with Uncle Rico was the natural and correct reward.
The raccoon had fled before that judgment could fall.
Phong let him go.
Then he made egg bánh mì for the children and fed them one by one.
Celine.
Lôi.
Joachim.
Tara.
Jordan.
And Yokojima.
That last one was Dominic's contribution. He had decided Yoko Taro and Kojima would make an excellent name if glued together by bad judgment and confidence. No one had been able to stop him in time.
After breakfast, the elf children were sent down to Floor 1 again to train with the Greencap knight. No one warned the knight that six tiny monsters with growing stats and new names were on the way as well, apparently.
At noon, Phong got one of the biggest surprises he had received in years.
The lizardmen queen requested a meeting. Not alone either. She came with several of her elite women, and the first thing Phong noticed was their tails. Thinner. Noticeably so.
Proof that even the elites had started burning their reserve fat to keep the young and the old fed. That made the whole conversation feel sharper before it even began.
The queen got to the point quickly. Some humans had contacted her, and they were no divers.
They were representatives. People speaking on behalf of "Mr. Harlan."
They offered a contract.
The lizardmen kingdom would not attack them. In exchange, the humans would pay regular tribute in food, wine, and surface luxury goods every month. The queen had already been given samples. She thought little of the luxury items. Trinkets, useless surface vanity. But the food was harder to dismiss. In a time like this, steady extra food was the kind of temptation that could make even a careful ruler listen.
So she had come to Phong for counsel. Because, in her words, he clearly knew more about his own kind than she did.
Phong understood at once what this meant.
Daniel Harlan was closer than he thought.
He explained the basics of his feud with Daniel while trying to not spill the queen of the most the important parts. But that was enough for the queen to understand why his opinion could not be called neutral.
He told her not to take the deal.
But also not to reject it immediately.
"If you turn it down now," he said, "Daniel will be alarmed. Let him think you're considering it."
The queen listened. And in exchange for that caution, Phong paid her in the amount that she would have been paid by Daniel if she had taken the deal.
Bonktatoes.
With the Timatoes around and Camp Orthrus expanding into a real lakeside town, the old lines of bonktatoes had become less necessary where they were. So Phong harvested them quietly and handed them over. A weapon. A labor crop. A signal of trust.
The queen accepted.
Only after she was gone did Team Nemean press him.
"What's the plan?" Dominic asked.
Phong answered too easily.
"The mice from the Great Burrow will carry in an army of Timatoes."
The room went quiet.
Phong continued like this was a normal sentence.
"For divers who haven't seen them before, the Timatoes are almost impossible to notice. No one in their right mind looks for sentient fruit." He folded one paper and set it aside. "And they're vicious enough that a large group should overwhelm Daniel's bodyguards fast."
Janet stared.
Alex stared.
Dominic stared.
Phong finished calmly.
"Just to be safe, I'm planning to release about five hundred Timatoes there."
That was the moment Dominic, Janet, Séline, Camille, and Alex all visibly swallowed. They had seen the Timatoes work, seen them tear through Soerai, seen them rip apart feline monsters and bully things that should have frightened normal people into prayer.
To them, what Phong had just said felt less like a tactical plan and more like bringing a nuke to kill a mosquito.
Even standing there, inside the safety of Camp Orthrus, they could already imagine Daniel Harlan surrounded by five hundred tiny tyrants with tiger faces, boiling juice, and zero mercy.
And that image alone sent a cold shiver through the room.
Phong said it like a man talking about crop yield.
"During the test runs, most Timatoes couldn't stay away from their tree for too long."
That took some of the edge off the room. Only some.
He sat with his notes spread in front of him, fingers tapping lightly on the table as he thought aloud.
"So I feel bad sending too many away just for one kill, even if they already had a tendency of smashing themselves against enemy and exploding on their own. On the practical side, I don't want to thin them out that much while the Painted Skins still exist."
Dominic, still looking like a man who had just been told his friend's answer to a rich problem was fruit-based mass death, slowly asked, "How many were you planning to send originally?"
Phong answered without shame.
"Two thousand would be ideal."
Silence hit the room again.
Joanne made a small choking noise.
Jake stared at him. "You said five hundred like that was restraint."
"It is restraint."
"That is not helping."
Phong only shrugged.
To him, it really was restraint.
That somehow made it worse.
That night, after the plans were set and the right people warned, Phong handed the running of the town over to the lizardmen and moved Team Nemean back to Camp Stymphalian. There was too much ahead on the surface now. The league. The cameras. The brands. The public game they had to play if Phong wanted an alibi strong enough to survive what he planned for Daniel Harlan.
But before they surfaced, he made one more trip.
He brought the elf children to Lyon.
He had already given them access to the lime-oak network. He had already stocked Camp Stymphalian with enough premade meals to last them at least a month or two. But Phong knew the children too well to trust a pile of food and a teleport tree to replace adults entirely.
They needed someone to show off to. Someone to be children around. Someone to remind them to bathe, wash their faces, and stop acting like changing clothes was an optional social custom.
So he took them to Maison Delacroix and Restaurant Lambert and explained the situation as best he could. Mrs. Delacroix and Mrs. Lambert needed very little convincing. By the time Phong finished, both women already looked ready to spoil the children past salvation.
"Every two days or so," Phong said. "Please feed them. Make sure they bathe."
Mrs. Lambert ensured him that the elfs would be in good hands.
Mrs. Delacroix nodded firmly.
And because she had thought faster than he had, Mrs. Lambert had already knitted wool beanies for the elf children so their ears could be hidden when needed.
The children accepted the hats with varying levels of outrage and confusion. Celine wore his immediately because he liked the color. Lôi only accepted hers after being told it made her look fierce. Tara tried to wear two at once. Joachim inspected hers as if it were military issue. Jordan chewed the edge of hers before Phong stopped her. Yokojima declared his "dramatic."
Before leaving, Phong made the rules painfully clear.
He showed them again where the premade meals were stored in Camp Stymphalian, how to heat the food, told them not to eat any lime-oak clone saplings the tree produced. And most important of all, he gave them their mission.
"Guard the sapling. Guard the camp. For daddy."
That part they understood at once. The children straightened.
Lôi even hit her chest with one fist like a tiny soldier.
Then, once Phong was as sure as he could be, he left with the team and surfaced.
At the gate, Emma broke off from them.
She still had to return to the Tannenbaum estate and make her report. There were family expectations, public expectations, and all the sharp little duties that came with being Emma Tannenbaum.
She bid them farewell with more warmth than she would have admitted in public, then left.
It took only minutes after Team Nemean settled at Dominic and Janet's house for the brands to arrive. The first wave knock came while people were still taking their shoes off. The second came before Dominic had finished answering the first.
By the time the third voice started shouting an offer from the street, everyone realized the situation had already become absurd.
Team Nemean had Alexandra Vogel. That alone was enough to make sponsors line up like starving gulls. Add Emma Tannenbaum's recent attachment to the team, even if she had stepped away for the evening, and the whole thing turned into a feeding frenzy.
Deals got shouted from across the street. Contracts were slid through the window. People yelled numbers. Someone offered a premium logo placement on the uniform in exchange for six figures paycheck.
Another promised a whole ad campaign if Alex merely held their product for one short video.
A third wanted Emma and Alex together in a photo.
A fourth offered performance bonuses and travel coverage.
Rico, naturally, saw the only part of the situation that mattered.
He climbed onto the couch and pointed dramatically.
"Rico wants coffee sponsor. Or energy drink sponsor."
Phong caught him by the scruff before he could leap at a contract.
"No."
"Raccoon can bring great brand value."
"You are not signing the team away for caffeine."
Dominic stepped into the hall like a tired father about to fight a wall of salespeople.
"We're not interested in sponsorship," he called out.
That did nothing. If anything, the brands got louder.
Jake peeked through the curtain and whistled.
"There are more cars coming."
Joanne looked delighted in the way only someone watching other people suffer could be.
"This is amazing."
Phong stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by contracts, shouting, and Rico trying to negotiate his own face onto an energy drink can, and realized he had no clue what to do.
So he did the only sensible thing.
He ordered pizza. That somehow solved the moment enough for the team to retreat into the house and let Dominic ignore the door with the full authority of a man who had chosen grease and cheese over capitalism.
That night, they sat around with pizza boxes open and let themselves enjoy surface life again.
It felt strange. Good. Almost too normal after so much time in the dungeon.
The lights were steady. The walls did not creak with moving trees. No one had to listen for painted skin or body snatchers or a floor boss deciding to become petty for fun. Even the air felt softer.
Then Jack looked at Phong's slice. Then at Phong. Then back at the slice.
"You are a menace."
Jake leaned over and made the same face. On Phong's pizza sat chicken, pineapple, and corn with zero shame. Phong bit into it and shrugged.
"I enjoy it."
"That is a war crime against Italy."
"It's delicious."
"If Phong's pizza is a knife to Italian cuisine," Joanne said, "then Rico is about to commit a full terror attack."
Because Rico had chosen that moment to dump an entire stick of instant coffee onto a slice of cheese pizza. Everyone stopped and watched. The raccoon folded the slice once, bit in, chewed, made a face, and declared, "Liquid coffee still better. I need caffeine-infused cheese."
People broke.
Even Alex laughed at that.
Then Rico inhaled wrong, got coffee powder up his nose, and sneezed so hard he nearly fell off the chair.
Jake immediately said, "Oh, our raccoon snort powder coffee now I see."
Alexei pointed at the raccoon with complete seriousness.
"He brought this upon himself."
Rico sneezed again in angry agreement with no one.
Dominic finally coughed once and got enough attention back to make himself heard.
"Rest."
That cut through the laughter.
He looked around at all of them.
"In two days, we go to the press conference for the diver league."
That settled the room.
Because just like that, the normal little pizza night turned into the edge of something bigger.
Cameras.
Questions.
Public eyes.
A stage.
And somewhere behind all of that, Daniel Harlan.