Denahi asked Alex to step down.
He did it from the ring, one hand lowering his bow slightly, voice carrying just enough for the referees and the front rows to catch.
"She's drained," he said. "And I don't like a win like that. Even if this would probably be my only shot at taking one off her."
The crowd reacted at once, because sportsmanship always sounded better under stadium lights than it felt in the body. There were cheers. A few boos. A lot of phones rose higher.
Alex, still breathing harder than she liked after grinding Kenai and Tara down back-to-back, looked like she intended to stay anyway. Pride had not left her body just because exhaustion had entered it. She turned half toward Team Nemean's corner, jaw set, clearly ready to ignore Denahi's courtesy on principle and continue until the ring itself stopped her.
Phong made the right decision for her without the need to raise his voice. He simply stood, walked to the edge of the platform, and raised one hand to the officials for time.
Alex looked at him.
Phong held her gaze for a second.
Then said, "He earned that."
That was enough. She clicked her tongue softly, annoyed but not truly unwilling, and stepped back from the center. The audience, sensing a small but meaningful moment, hushed just enough to watch it properly. Alex Vogel, who the East Coast now treated like a storm with citizenship, was stepping down because Phong had decided Denahi's sportsmanship should be respected.
Phong climbed up to the edge of the ring himself, ignoring the sudden frenzy of cameras angling for a better shot, and called across, "Then who do you want?"
Denahi grinned.
"Do you even need to ask?" he said. "Dominic."
That pulled a roar from the crowd.
Ex-special forces, Curses Archer, controlled, disciplined violence.
Against Dominic Torres.
Semi-pro boxer, Raging Judgenaut, relic-wielding wall of a man who kept surviving things the commentators had already built obituaries for.
Dominic entered the ring with no drama.
That, more than anything, fit him. No crowd play, no extra flourish either. He stepped in, rolled one shoulder, and gave Denahi a small nod that carried real respect. Denahi returned it.
Then, while the ring reset around them, Phong used the break for something more important.
He led the rest of Team Nemean over to the Rangers' corner.
Tara was already seated, breathing easier now, a medic checking her pulse while another pressed a cool pack against the back of her neck. She looked annoyed at her own body for fainting, which Phong found reassuring.
Kenai saw them coming and stood.
"She just blacked out back then," he said before Phong even asked. "Too much pain. Too much pressure through the nervous system. No lasting damage."
Phong nodded once, shoulders loosening.
That was all he had needed.
Alex, despite having been the one to put Tara down, still watched her for another second with wary guilt.
Emma, seeing the chance and perhaps wanting to lock this whole brutal chapter into something cleaner, stepped forward with all the social certainty only she could weaponize this elegantly.
"Dinner," she said. "To celebrate the end of the group stage."
Tara blinked up at her.
Emma continued, "All of us. No press. No cameras. Just food."
Kenai looked toward Denahi, then at Koda, then back to Team Nemean.
The answer was already yes.
"We're in," he said.
Back in the ring, Denahi and Dominic had started.
Their fight was the opposite of Alex and Tara.
The former had been spectacle and grandeur where one natural disaster fought another.
This one was simply two men who understood pain as part of the grammar of work.
Denahi opened with exactly the sort of precision Phong expected from an old operator. He began by applying problems immediately. A debuff arrow angled low to clip movement. A curse-marking shot that burst just against Dominic's shoulder and laid a haze of slowing irritation across the muscles there. A second arrow, darker, meant not to wound but to make the body feel heavier than it had any right to.
Dominic absorbed them with irritation and no panic.
That was where the stalemate started taking shape.
Raging Judgenaut was built to take punishment and answer with terrible force. But status effects were not damage, not in the way his class counted them. Denahi's curses and slowing effects were exactly the kind of thing that made Dominic's life miserable without feeding his retaliation in the same clean way as a punch to the ribs or a spear to the thigh.
The commentators noticed it quickly.
"Those debuffs are ruining Torres's rhythm."
"Raging Judgenaut can't bank curse pressure the same way they did damage."
"Denahi's forcing him to work uphill."
They were right.
But Denahi had his own problem: mobility. Or rather, the lack of enough of it.
He was not slow by any definition. The background as special force and the stats given by his class and level made Denahi more agile than the top 3 athletes of the pre-dungeon world combined. But compared to Kenai and Tara, he was grounded. Sharp, experienced, and disciplined, but not built to live in the sky or vanish off lines. Which meant that every time Dominic got a clean read, God's Roar Canon became a looming threat in a way it had not against the others.
Denahi grazed Dominic three times with curse shots before the first real exchange broke open. One mark made Dominic's left leg feel heavier. One set a mild bleeding effect dancing under the skin. One made the edges of his vision blur for a heartbeat every few seconds.
Then Dominic closed.
Denahi hit the backstep perfectly, let one glancing shoulder-check pass, and sent a short-range curse burst into Dominic's side at point blank. Dominic answered by planting Eyeless Heaven and firing God's Roar Canon with barely enough angle to avoid flattening the referee.
The beam clipped Denahi's outer shoulder and took a whole line of the ring barrier with it.
The audience screamed.
Denahi didn't stop.
That was what Phong respected most about him. He never let the big moments affect his rhythm. He rolled the damage, changed lane, and kept forcing Dominic to choose between forward pressure and wading through misery. One curse arrow made the right side of Dominic's chest seize if he breathed too sharply. Another marked his forearm so every block felt half a second slower than it should.
But Dominic, once again, proved he was the kind of problem you could torment for a long time and still fail to solve.
He got hold of Denahi twice.
The first time with a short body shot that nearly folded the older man.
The second with a shield-assisted rush that forced Denahi all the way to the edge and made one of the commentators scream that the ring was "starting to look too small for honest fight."
The fight became brutal in a restrained way.
No one spectacularly dominated. No one took clean control.
It was discipline against discipline. An ex-special forces man who understood attrition and a former semi-pro boxer who had become a divine wall with anger stored in the seams. Every exchange hurt. Every adjustment mattered. Every breath carried calculation.
In the end, neither could take enough from the other before the horn and the state of the match demanded the truth. Draw.
The crowd loved it anyway, as was the last honest thing left in the arena after everything else had become branding, trajectory, and speculation. The commentators and the analysts were all surprised that a Dominic managed a draw with a hard-counter class and Eyeless Heaven's long-range attack no longer an unknown factor.
Once the officials finished, Team Nemean went up to the commentators' booth to collect Rico.
Alex got there first.
She took one look at the raccoon, who had somehow acquired three opened cans of something caffeinated around his seat and an expression of innocent overwork, and lifted him by the scruff with immediate justice.
"No more caffeine," she said.
Rico froze.
"Until we leave New Jersey."
Then he started squirming with the full theatrical agony of a small prince being exiled.
"No! Cruel! Unnatural! Against all jungle law!"
Phong just shrugged when Rico threw him a pleading look.
"I'm Vietnamese," Phong said. "My voice in the household doesn't count."
(Fyi: Mường's people who lived in the current day Red River Delta was matriarchal before the China's invasion. After Vietnam split off from China again and became its own country, it moved to patriarchal feudalism due to the Sinosphere's influence, but some of the matriarchal influence stayed, including a genre of comedy where the subject were men terrified of their wives)
The entire nearby production crew heard that and nearly died laughing.
Rico gasped.
"Betrayal!"
Alex kept walking, carrying him like a convicted criminal.
That was how they went to dinner.
The New Jersey Rangers took them a soul food truck.
That alone improved Phong's mood.
The truck was parked in a lot just off a busy road, lights strung overhead, folding tables set out nearby, the smell of smoke, spice, fried batter, and slow-cooked meat already heavy in the air. The sign painted on the side had personality rather than branding. Music came from a speaker clipped near the serving window. A line of regulars had already gathered despite the late hour, which was always the best possible endorsement.
Then Denahi introduced the owners: his wife, and his ex-wife.
The whole thing was bizarre enough that Dominic immediately forgot hunger in favor of confusion.
"Hold on," he said. "Explain."
Denahi's current wife, a warm-eyed woman with the patient expression of someone long used to absurdity, laughed first. The ex-wife, standing at the truck window with a ladle in one hand and a chef's apron tied over a shirt that had definitely once been white, only rolled her eyes.
"It's not complicated," Denahi said.
It was absolutely complicated.
So he explained anyway.
He and his ex-wife had split peacefully years ago due to life views pulling in different directions until love was no longer enough to make the road one lane. They had stayed on decent terms because hating each other would have required more energy than either wanted to waste.
Then, sometime later, the ex-wife had introduced her best friend to him.
The best friend had eventually become his current wife.
At this point Jake was staring into middle distance like he needed a diagram.
Denahi's ex-wife, meanwhile, had awakened the class of chef after the dungeon changed everything. Her food was good before, as she had once taken culinary courses. But now, infused with mana, it became legendary both in and out of divers space. Her meals helped with recovery on top of the taste, and thus divers loved to eat here. She opened the truck after her attempt at facebook marketplace succeeded locally.
The cooking was good enough that business exploded. Too good, in fact. She needed capital and help. Denahi's current wife invested and became co-owner.
"So," Joanne said slowly, "you all actually like each other?"
The two women looked at her like she was the strange one.
Denahi's wife shrugged. "We're adults."
That shut Joanne up for almost six full seconds.
Their situation was so awkward that it would 100% percent ended up in disaster if all parties involved did not have the emotional maturity for it. And quite frankly, most couples didn't. Yet, Denahi, his wife and ex-wife somehow made it work.
The food arrived after that, and with it came silence of the good kind.
Fried chicken so crisp it cracked like lacquer. Greens rich enough to feel medicinal. Mac and cheese with crispy top and gooey body it bordered on theology. Catfish, cornbread, yams, beans, and smoked meat that made Rico momentarily forget his caffeine oppression.
Once everyone had eaten enough to soften their edges, the conversation drifted back toward the future.
Phong set down his cup and looked at Kenai.
"You should recruit Maine."
That got the Rangers' full attention.
"Maine Vikings," he clarified. "Into your number. If you want to match Josh's team size later."
Kenai leaned back.
Denahi looked thoughtful instantly.
Phong continued, "They're disciplined. They learn fast. And they fight clean. You'd rather have them close than let Brooklyn grow by default."
It was a genuine advice. That was why it landed. Alex could see the Rangers view on Phong changed in real time hearing what he had just said.
Then he added the second part.
"And once we're in the dungeon, we should form a coalition."
That made the table go quiet in a different way.
Now it was no longer just league logistics. Now it was the edge of the deeper thing.
Kenai and Denahi exchanged one look.
"We'll think about it tonight," Kenai said.
Denahi nodded once. "But the suggestion about Maine? That was genuine. Thank you."
Phong lifted one shoulder. "No reason to let Josh be the only one thinking in numbers."
That got a low laugh from Dominic.
After food and too many drinks for some and not enough caffeine for one extremely oppressed raccoon, Team Nemean finally returned to their hotel.
Emma had, naturally, already prepared everything.
Rooms were ready. Late-night tea and snacks waited. Extra mint, fresh towels, and enough quiet order had been arranged that nobody even had the energy left to complain about how absurdly useful it was having a Tannenbaum in the group.
The night, after all the fighting and the politics and the food truck revelations, ended in something close to peace.