Phong finally told them what he had in mind.
They were still around the table when he set the bowl down and spoke in that calm, practical tone that always made Alex nervous, because it meant he had already thought too far ahead.
"I had the mice scout for Daniel Harlan's stable spot," he said. "The result looks promising."
That got everyone's attention at once.
Phong continued.
"At this pace, they should find it in a week. Maybe less." He tapped the notes laid out in front of him. "They already found a lot of sketchy-looking humans and shiny toys."
Jake frowned. "Shiny toys."
"The mice's words, not mine," Phong said. "But to me that sounds like Daniel's people and their devices."
That made sense. The Great Burrow knew what divers looked like by now. With more and more people reaching A-class and pushing into Floor 2, the mice had enough experience to tell normal diver activity from something more planned, more secretive.
Phong's voice stayed level, but everyone at the table could feel the weight under it.
"Once I know where the stable spot is, I'll know where Daniel Harlan is going to be during the tournament season." His eyes lowered to the map. "He'll want to inspect it first. Then he'll try to push his influence with the government, make sure all the land worth claiming ends up in elite hands before the public can react."
Silence settled over the table.
Because they all understood what that meant.
That was Daniel's opening.
And Phong's too.
Phong lifted his head again.
"That is my chance to strike."
No one interrupted him.
He did not need to explain what kind of strike.
Not after everything Josh and Daniel had done to him.
Not after how Phong had just phrased it.
To give Josh the same fate, the same loss. The same hole torn into his life.
Phong kept going before anyone could object.
"But for that to work, I need distance between me and it."
Emma leaned back slightly, already seeing the shape of the move. Dominic looked at him with quiet confusion.
"I need to be visible," Phong said. "Visible enough that people with money and influence won't connect Daniel's death to me. I need to be on camera."
Jake blinked. "That's your plan?"
Phong nodded.
"The best way is to join Team Nemean as water boy."
That was so much smaller than what Dominic expected that it broke his train of thought entirely.
He stared. Then stared harder. His expression looked like he was about to ask a million different questions at once, all of them starting with "that is?" But before any of those could leave his mouth, Dominic did what Dominic always did when Phong asked for something that mattered.
He accepted him.
He pulled up the team registration interface and added Phong as their coach on the spot.
A last-minute addition.
Official enough to matter.
Visible enough to place him there in public.
One by one, the others approved it.
The Js, Emma. Alex. The French girls and the Russian. All of them gave their consent with no hesitation. By now, Phong was part of the team in every way but paperwork. This only made the world catch up.
Rico, for once, tried to go the other direction. He puffed his chest and said he wanted to stay behind.
"I need to test third rider form," he said.
Phong looked at him once and knew exactly what that meant. The raccoon wanted to claim the kill of the "rich fish's" father. It was Rico's strange, loud, badly adjusted way of caring. The same way he had gone to war for the trolls. The same way he kept throwing his little body at other people's pain like he could insult the world into fairness.
Phong still said no.
Firmly.
"Absolutely not."
Rico looked offended. "Raccoon is powerful ally."
"You are also always seen with me, Alex, and the team," Phong said. "If I need an alibi, then the animals are part of it too."
That shut the raccoon up for a second. Then he tried again. "Third rider form very cool though."
"No."
"Very cool."
"No."
Rico slumped in defeat. So the animals were coming too.
Later that day, after the first wave of work settled and the others scattered around camp to handle their own things, Alex sat down beside Phong to help him sort through the intel from the mice of the Great Burrow.
They worked close together, shoulders brushing now and then as they organized notes, rough maps, witness sketches, and coded descriptions of possible human movement. The room was quieter than breakfast had been. Rico was gone somewhere sulking. Dominic's people were elsewhere in camp. Emma had gone to inspect the fort layout with the kind of rich girl seriousness that meant she was mentally pricing everything.
Alexei had gone back to Camp Stymphalian right after breakfast.
He said he needed to check on the chickens himself, because he still could not fully trust the lizardmen to handle them. Especially not the fire chickens he had created using Little Fireball's feathers.
Phong had not stopped him.
That was Alexei's mess to manage.
Here, in the quieter center of Camp Orthrus, Phong let himself lean a little into Alex's shoulder while sorting one more stack of mice reports.
"I missed this," he said.
Alex glanced sideways. "Being buried in paperwork?"
"Being close to you like this."
That made her expression soften.
She nudged him lightly with her shoulder. "You could have just said that."
Phong smiled faintly, then after a brief pause, asked, "What do you think of my family?"
Alex looked at him.
"Grandpa," Phong clarified. "And Vân."
That got a huff out of her.
"Vân is a bit much."
"That is the polite version."
"Yes." She kept sorting a few pages, then added, "I like your grandpa."
Phong looked amused. "I figured."
"He likes me too."
"He definitely does."
Alex's mouth twitched. "Was that obvious?"
Phong nodded once. "If what grandpa told me can be trusted, then you remind him a lot of my grandmother."
That made Alex pause.
He continued more quietly.
"I never got to meet her."
For a moment, only the sound of paper moving between them remained.
Then Alex asked, "What was your family like?"
Phong sat back a little and looked at the notes without really seeing them.
"My grandmother's side ended with her," he said. "But she left grandpa with three sons."
He lifted one finger.
"The eldest was Vân's father."
That came with a certain weight.
"He took care of grandpa after the bombing and after grandma died. He spent his youth looking after his father and his brothers." Phong's voice stayed calm, but Alex could hear the old respect in it. "He never got a proper education because of that. My father and my uncle both said they were indebted to him. I was always told not to bring trouble to his doorstep."
A second finger.
"The middle son was my father. He worked as a researcher at the Department of Meteorology and Hydrology." His eyes lowered. "That's where he met my mother."
He paused there, long enough that Alex stopped touching the papers.
"They disappeared thirteen years ago," he said at last. "Officially dead after that."
Alex stayed silent.
He did not need comfort in that moment. Just room. Then the third finger.
"My uncle was the youngest. He got a scholarship to the US. Studied here. Then married my aunt when they were both in culinary school."
That part carried more warmth.
"They didn't have children. So when my parents disappeared, they took me in." He gave a small shrug. "My eldest uncle couldn't support another person financially. My youngest uncle and aunt could."
Alex listened without interrupting. When he finished, she was quiet for a little while before speaking.
"You could move here."
Phong looked at her.
"To Orthrus," she said. "Use this new town as your base instead."
He already knew where she was going with it.
She continued anyway.
"If you need to surface, Rico, the elf children, and the animals are more than enough to protect you. If humanity breaches Death Peak, all they'd find at Camp Stymphalian is the lime-oak. Assuming you move the plants."
It was a good idea.
Practical too. The kind of idea Alex came up with when she was not just thinking like his lover, but like someone trying to keep him alive while the world kept getting worse. Phong still shook his head.
"The lime-oak is the problem."
Alex frowned slightly.
"It can't be left unsupervised," he said. "Not with the cloning ability. Not with the teleportation network. Not with the way the sapling can evolve monsters."
That made her stop. Because yes. She had forgotten that part.
The tree was not just a transport route.
It was infrastructure.
Risk, mutation source, bottleneck.
Maybe everything all at once.
Alex exhaled softly and admitted defeat with a little tilt of her head.
"I forgot."
Phong set the last paper aside. Then Alex leaned in and kissed him.
Not in a teasing way.
Not in a way meant to distract.
Just close, quiet, and full of the understanding that both of them were now trapped in lives too large and too dangerous for simple choices, and still choosing each other anyway.
When they pulled apart, the notes about Daniel Harlan, the mice reports, the new fort, and the coming tournament were all still there. But for a moment, they were only two people sitting close together in the middle of the storm.
Dinner that night felt fuller than usual.
Not because the food was better, though it was. Not because the camp was safer, though for once it truly felt that way. It felt full because everyone was there.
Phong sat at the center with his phone in hand, the light of the group chat reflecting faintly on his face. Around him were Alex, Dominic, Janet, Joanne, Jake, Jack, Séline, Camille, Alexei, Emma, Rico, Nyx, Bruno, Little Fireball, and the six elf children. Selena and Vanessa joined through the group call, their voices coming through the signal line with only a little delay. Even that felt strange in a good way. For one dinner, all the core people around him were present.
Phong looked over the table, then at the six children who had already started stealing food from each other despite having their own bowls.
"We have to name them," he said.
That caught their attention right away.
The elf children looked up, suspicious.
Phong sighed. "You keep rejecting all my suggestions."
One of the children pointed a spoon at him. "Bad names."
"That's rude."
"True though," Alex said.
Phong gave her a look. She looked back with zero guilt. Then Jack, of all people, leaned back and said, "Fine. Anime is on the menu." That immediately made Joanne laugh.
Jack pointed at one of the elf children and said, with full confidence, "Celine."
He clearly thought one of the girls would take it. Instead, one of the boys raised his hand at once.
"Celine."
The whole table went quiet.
Jack blinked. "You sure."
The child nodded with total certainty. "Celine."
Phong opened his mouth to explain. The child hit the table with his little palm and repeated, "Celine."
That settled it.
And so Celine he was called.
Joanne laughed so hard she nearly dropped her bowl. Jake had to look away to recover. Jack rubbed his forehead like he had just accidentally changed fate.
Once the first name stuck, the others came easier.
Phong, after a brief and very firm argument with one of the older girls, finally gave up and gave one of them the name Lôi.
"Thunder," he explained.
The eldest girl immediately snatched that name with the speed of a goblin stealing gold.
"Lôi."
She looked proud of it too.
Alex named one Joachim, and that child accepted it after a moment of grave thought, as if weighing the burden of the name before agreeing to carry it.
Emma suggested Tara, and to everyone's surprise, one of the quieter children liked it at once and hugged the name to herself like it had always been hers.
The rest followed with less drama, though every choice still felt like bargaining with tiny forest nobles who thought adults were mostly here to be managed.
By the time all six had names, the camp felt subtly different.
Phong looked over them all, then suddenly frowned.
Alex noticed first. "What?"
Phong tapped his chopsticks lightly against his bowl.
"I think they might not understand sexes and genders at all."
That got a pause from the table.
He looked from one child to the next.
"They grew asexually out of the biome on Horns of the Earth's back. That might explain it." He rubbed his chin. "They have daddy. But no mommy."
Emma gave a thoughtful hum.
Alex looked at the children, then at Phong, then back at the children.
One of them, hearing the word daddy, happily pointed at Phong.
"Daddy."
Another pointed at Alex.
"Alex."
That did not help the theory.
Janet covered her mouth, trying not to laugh.
Rico, still holding his bowl with wounded dignity from earlier, muttered, "Farmer out here discovering elf sociology over dinner."
After the names settled and the children got distracted again by food, Team Nemean finally told Selena their theory about Shifting.
The call went quiet on the other end for a few moments.
Then Selena spoke, voice already slipping into that focused rhythm she had when her brain was moving faster than her mouth.
"That goes against what I know so far," she said.
Everyone listened.
"Shifting reacts to mana density, population pressure, and other unknown variables. At least that's what the data suggests right now." She took a breath. "It acts like a balancing mechanic."
"So you think we're wrong?" Dominic said.
Selena hesitated.
"Not fully. I think your theory and mine might be touching the same elephant from different sides."
That got Jake to grin faintly. "Classic scientist answer."
Selena ignored him.
"What I mean is, I don't think Shifting itself behaves like fear. Not directly. But I also can't dismiss the possibility that the mechanic was born from fear or discomfort at some earlier point."
Vanessa spoke up then, calm as always.
"Maybe it began that way," she said. "Maybe the dungeon created it out of fear and discomfort. Then later the triggers got changed because it was useful."
That made the whole table go still for a moment. Because that sounded too possible. Too ugly in the right way.
Then Selena finally fully processed what Team Nemean had actually been through, and whatever half-steady footing she had found in theory collapsed all at once.
"You found what?"
Emma leaned back, already bracing for impact.
The answer came in fragments as people filled the story in again. The ruin of a dead civilization. The cryo-tomb. Another Dominic. The Tortura. The copy of dǒu.
Then what Séline saw when that power moved through her. A human figure with stats and level so high the system only showed question marks. A person turning into flame and burning a meaning into the dungeon itself.
By the time they finished, there was silence on the other side of the call.
Then Vanessa said dryly, "She almost fainted."
"I did not faint," Selena said weakly.
"You nearly did."
"That is not the point."
"It is a little the point," Joanne said.
Selena ignored that too.
Her voice came back louder now, full of the kind of horrified excitement that meant she had just been handed the biggest research lead of her life and hated what it would cost her sleep.
"You people went through all of that without me?"
"That sounded jealous," Emma observed.
"I am not jealous," Selena snapped. Then, after a beat, "I am a little jealous."
That got a laugh from around the table.
Only Rico stayed quiet.
That, more than anything, made Phong notice him. The raccoon had been strangely subdued all night. He ate. He listened. He made one or two comments. But the usual loud Rico chaos was missing. He was still sulking over Daniel. Over being told no. Over not being allowed to go after the man Phong planned to kill.
Phong looked at him for a moment and understood enough. It was care, in Rico's own strange way. Badly shaped. Poorly expressed. But real.
So Phong quietly decided he would make the raccoon a new moletato dish tomorrow.
Not as apology.
Not exactly.
More like peace offering.
Around them, dinner kept going. The children called each other by their new names, some already testing how those names felt in their mouths. Nyx corrected Bruno on pronunciation for no reason except that she could. Little Fireball chirped at the tablet screen and tried once more to interest at least one elf in K-drama tragedy. She failed again.
And for a little while, beneath the weight of all the things waiting outside the walls, Phong let himself enjoy the simple fact that the table was full.