Vân stayed with Team Nemean after that.
"Josh is in Japan," he said that evening while they made camp. "If the bastard is not completely brain-dead, he'll come back with prana coat or something close to it. So you all should learn it now."
No one argued after seeing what his body did to Alex's offense.
Especially not after hearing how Eastern divers had already been rebuilding martial thought around mana while the west still leaned too heavily on old physical logic. The class system, evolutions at level 30, and the thickening of mana all fit the broader rule structure they already knew, where higher-level growth keeps changing what combat even means.
So Vân traveled with them for the time being.
That night, over dinner, they learned more. A lot more.
For one, Vân's class was not what anyone expected.
"Thunderclap Monk," he said, tapping his chopsticks against his bowl.
Jake blinked. "That sounds broken."
Vân shrugged. "It has nothing but passives."
That shut Jake up. Because that made it weirder, not weaker. All the flashy palm strikes, the golden bell, the lotus lamp, the almost-teleportation burst, those were not system-given actives. They were his own creations.
He explained the theory more carefully this time. Mana had travel paths through the body. The closest idea Team Nemean could compare them to was Eastern meridians, but Vân quickly corrected them.
"Only the idea is similar," he said. "Not the exact pathways."
The exact routes were different from person to person. Still, there were patterns. Usually, there would be intake paths on one hand and one leg, and output paths on the opposite side. Once someone learned to consciously control how mana moved through and between those paths, they could start changing the nature of the mana itself. And if the technique stabilized enough, the system would recognize it and register it as a custom skill.
That made Emma sit straighter.
"The system registers self-made skills."
Vân nodded. "If it's complete enough."
He then listed his three.
"Phật Đả Kim Chung."
"Kim Đỉnh Phật Đăng."
"Đại Phật Tây Lai."
Joanne muttered, "He really does name them like a theater kid with a god complex."
Vân grinned. "You say that like it is a flaw."
He kept teaching after that. Slow punch drills, breathing. Entry and exit control, layering mana just under skin without letting it disperse. Alex hated the first attempts because they felt clumsy. Séline hated them because she could feel how close she had come to the answer without fully seeing it. Dominic took to the discipline of it better than most. Jake hated standing still. Unlike him, Jack absorbed it quietly. Emma listened with the intensity of someone already mapping how to weaponize the concept later.
Then, at around eight that night, Vân's phone rang. The caller ID was simple.
Grandpa
Vân jolted.
Actually jolted from one side of the fire to the other like the ringtone itself had tried to stab him.
That got everyone's attention immediately.
Alex raised a brow. "You fought Yue Ting and Jeanne de Valois without blinking."
Dominic pointed at the phone. "And that scares you?"
Vân looked at all of them with dead seriousness. "You don't know our grandpa."
Then, before answering, he took one look at Alex.
That look was suspicious enough that Emma immediately smirked.
Vân accepted the call.
The old man appeared on screen almost at once.
He was eighty-four, with a goatee, missing his right arm and left leg, and somehow still radiated enough force through a phone screen to make everyone at the fire sit a little straighter.
The first thing he said to Vân was an explosion of insult.
"You idiot."
The old man's voice carried the full authority of someone who had spent a lifetime being obeyed and never once found it excessive.
"I heard what you did. Boasting about punching Joshua Harlan? Have you got donkey poo for brain?" He leaned closer to the screen like rage itself could cross bandwidth. "For what he did to Phong, you should have killed him silently. But you just have to alarm him like an imbecile like that, eh?"
The whole camp went still.
Vân, for once, did not grin.
"Phong wants to do it himself," he said. "And he didn't want to drag a retired grandpa into this."
That did not help much. The old man opened his mouth to continue, looking deeply offended that his face turned red like a tomato. Then Vân made the most shameless tactical decision Team Nemean had seen all week.
He turned the phone toward Alex.
"Look, grandpa. Your granddaughter-in-law."
Alex froze.
Jeanne de Valois and Yue Ting had not managed that earlier.
That old man did.
His entire demeanor flipped completely, like someone had turned a switch in the center of his soul.
"Oh."
The fury vanished. The old man straightened as much as the screen allowed and gave Alex the kind of respectful nod usually reserved for royalty, honored guests, or people one genuinely owed.
"Thank you," he said, voice suddenly warm and grave. "For taking care of my grandson when I could not."
That stunned Alex more than the title had.
Vân, meanwhile, looked like a condemned man who had just been granted a miracle pardon.
Dominic almost laughed.
Janet definitely noticed.
The old man then thanked the team too, one by one in his own stern way, and by the time he was done, Vân had escaped judgment for the moment.
Keyword: for the moment.
Then the old man said Vân could accompany Team Nemean. But the permission came with a warning.
"If anything happens to my future granddaughter-in-law," he said, staring straight through the phone and somehow directly at Vân's soul, "I will personally come down there and beat the crap out of you with a toothpick."
Jake wheezed.
Joanne covered her mouth.
Even Alex's mouth twitched.
The call ended not long after that. Silence held for exactly two breaths.
Then Dominic said, "He doesn't seem that scary. Maybe just stubborn. Like old geezers are."
Vân shivered.
"He's only like that after fifty years of peace."
That wiped the smiles off a few faces.
Vân poked the fire once with a stick and sighed.
"Our grandpa was a special forces instructor back in the Vietnam War. Got promoted to general right before the bombing of Hà Nội took his arm and leg... and my grandmother." He looked at the flames instead of them. "He was strict on us. Really strict."
That explained more than anyone liked.
It explained why Phong had hidden what happened to his aunt and uncle at first. Why he had kept that distance. Why revenge had not immediately turned into family mobilization.
Anything the old man did, and by extension anything Vân did under that banner, could be read as stirring up international conflict on purpose. In a world already full of dungeon tensions, shifting borders, and nations trying very hard not to ignite each other before they understood the rules, that mattered. A lot. There were already plenty of people who wanted conflict. Phong had not wanted to hand them an excuse. Especially if that meant potentially turned his crippled grandpa into an international criminal.
The broader world timeline already showed how unstable post-dungeon society became and how national systems kept reorganizing around dungeon pressure.
Vân's voice softened after that.
"I'm really thankful to all of you."
That surprised them more than the grandpa call had. Because for once, Vân sounded nothing like Rico. Nothing like a clown. Nothing like a show-off. Just tired and honest, like a mask had dropped.
"Phong chose to shoulder all of that revenge pressure alone. For my sake. For my parents' sake. For grandpa's sake." He gave a weak huff. "That's how my little brother's mind works."
Alex's eyes lowered slightly. Because she knew it too. Phong had, more than once, tried to shoulder everything alone on an instinct.
Dominic said nothing.
Vân looked around the fire at all of them.
"I was glad when he started contacting us again after nearly a year and a half of radio silence," he said. "Back home, grandpa only knew that there was an accident. He tried to message Phong multiple time to go home, but got no reply. He would have gone to the US himself had it not been for what happened to grandma. I went to New York after the news to see he sold the house, and didn't know where I to find Phong. Couldn't leave the country for longer than a week. Small countries needed to keep their assets they had said."
He sighed, "Well, back on track. What I meant to say is: thank you. If not for you all, Phong'd be much more of a lone wolf by now."
That landed harder than anyone expected.
Because they could all see it.
The version of Phong that never let Dominic in, never trusted Alex, never built Camp Stymphalian into a place people could belong to. The version that kept away even his own family halfway across the globe. The version who held every grudge under the skin until it turned him into something harder and lonelier.
So that was why Vân was so eager to tell them everything he knew.
Alex kept that thought to herself, as no matter how emotional Vân had shown he could be, at the end of the day... he was still loud, weird, and love showing off.
The fire crackled softly between them.
And for that brief stretch of night in Floor 3, with Croak Wood whispering at the edge of camp and prana coat drills waiting for tomorrow, Team Nemean understood a little more clearly just how much of Phong they had saved without ever setting out to.
Hà Nội Corner was quiet in the late hours.
The kind of quiet that only came after the last customers had left, the chairs were turned, and the smell of coffee had settled into the wood like a second skin. Long stood behind the counter, polishing a cup that did not need polishing, more out of habit than need.
The bell above the door rang.
Long looked up.
A businessman stepped in.
Blonde sideburns. Sunglasses. Easy smile. Tailored suit that cost more than most people made in a month. It was Mr. Zero - entrepreneur, genius, and one of the 13 Pillars of the Dungeon.
Long did not greet him right away.
Mr. Zero took one slow look around the coffee shop, then at Long, and smiled as if he had just confirmed a private joke.
"So," he said, voice light, "it really is Fahr's syndrome. My... couldn't tell just from looking. You work just like a healthy person. Stats from your class help tremendously with the early symptoms, am I right?"
Long's hand paused on the cup.
Mr. Zero strolled to the counter like a regular customer and rested both palms on the wood.
"The calcified parts in your brain shielded you," he said. "From the little suggestion I gave every System Blessed human."
Long said nothing.
Mr. Zero continued anyway.
"That my technology was normal. That a generator running that well was normal. That an app that track people level in real time but didn't track their location was normal. That a signal amplifier carrying internet through mana while every other radio-controlled device on the market failed after three hundred meters was normal." He smiled wider. "Drones. RC cars. robots. All crippled. But mine somehow work, and you noticed."
Long set the cup down.
His expression stayed mild, but the air around him had changed.
"You knew?"
"Of course I knew."
Mr. Zero leaned one elbow on the counter.
"You were aware of all of it, and you chose to keep quiet. Why? It wouldn't really matter if you had said something... but why?"
Long let out a slow breath.
Then, for the first time that night, he dropped the mask. No more broken English. No more careful pacing of words. When he spoke, the difference was immediate.
"I just wanted to keep Phong safe."
That earned him something rare.
A real nod of respect from Mr. Zero.
The floor boss disguised as a businessman looked at him with a little less playfulness than before.
"The group chat," Mr. Zero said, "was at least partly because of me?"
Long gave the smallest shrug.
"Don't be so humble. I made it mostly because of you."
Mr. Zero chuckled softly.
For a few seconds, neither spoke.
Long reached for the kettle and began making coffee without asking what the guest wanted. The motions were smooth, precise, practiced from years behind this counter. Water, heat, the blooming of coffee ground. The pour, the drip. The patience. All seemed to swirl together with the fragrance of the brew.
Then he asked the question that had clearly been waiting in him for a long time.
"I've seen you visit Red Lantern for at least ten years."
Mr. Zero did not interrupt.
Long kept his eyes on the pour.
"So, I want an answer from you too."
That made Mr. Zero's smile thin a little.
Long looked up.
"Were you really a person before this, and had your identity stolen by a dungeon floor boss?"
He set the kettle down.
"Or had the dungeon already existed on Earth, quietly, for at least a decade before the world noticed."
The coffee dripped.
Dark and steady.
Long's face stayed calm.
But his next question came out heavier.
"And did the disappearance of Phong's parents have anything to do with the dungeon."
For once, Mr. Zero did not answer right away.
He looked at Long. Really looked at him.
Then his gaze shifted, just for a second, toward the back of the shop, as if he could somehow see through old walls and time itself.
"Phong's uncle and aunt trusted you a great deal," he said.
Long's eyes sharpened.
Mr. Zero rested both hands around the cup Long had set in front of him.
"That they told you about what happened to their brother and his wife says enough."
Long's jaw tightened.
"That wasn't an answer."
"No," Mr. Zero said. "It wasn't."
He lifted the cup, took one sip, and closed his eyes for the briefest moment like a man appreciating something honest in a world full of lies. Then he opened them again.
"You can believe this or not," he said, voice quieter now. "But the dungeon is not mankind's enemy."
That was all.
Long held his gaze for a moment longer, then looked away first. Because he knew that was all he was getting tonight.
Mr. Zero finished the coffee without hurry. When he stood, he placed the cup back down with care.
"Thank you," he said.
Then he left.
The bell rang once more.
And the shop was quiet again.
Long stood there for a while, one hand resting on the counter, eyes fixed on the door after it had already shut. Then he sighed, just enough to let some of the tension out.
After that, he picked up his laptop, opened the files he had been building in secret, and went back to work.
Tracking Daniel Harlan.
Where he was going.
What he was planning.
And how much time Phong had left before that man made his move.