They went back to the clubhouse first, but nobody really stayed there in spirit.
The whole place felt wrong after Professor Ulrich.
Too polished, too bright, too expensive. The soft couches and glass walls could not hide the fact that, only an hour ago, they had all watched a man speak like his mind had been torn open, then die on a recording that should not have known his death.
The first matches were delayed until the day after tomorrow. The elites, governments, universities, and corporations all needed time to deal with the fallout. No one knew whether the conference hall had been hacked, haunted, tampered with by a Pillar, or simply exposed to some new horror nobody had a name for yet.
So Team Nemean did the only thing that made sense. They went to Hà Nội Corner.
Rico did not need convincing twice. The moment someone said coffee, the raccoon was already halfway to the door. He had the speed of a man hearing his homeland called.
Phong texted Selena and Vanessa on the way there.
[Meet us at Hà Nội Corner. Important.]
Selena replied first.
[Coming.]
Vanessa answered seconds later.
[I'll drag her if she starts theorizing before we arrive.]
That made Phong smile faintly for the first time since the professor's video.
The city outside felt colder than usual. Not because of weather, because too many people were checking phones and speaking in hushed tones. News about Ulrich had spread fast. Faster than the league schedule, faster than sponsorship stories, faster than any team draw. The whole city had that strange charged mood that came when public fear was still trying to choose a shape.
Then they reached Hà Nội Corner.
Long greeted them as if nothing in the world had changed.
His shop had grown again. He had taken over the neighbor place and knocked through the wall. The result was still unmistakably Hà Nội Corner, but broader, warmer, fuller. More tables, more shelves, more glass jars of beans and tea. The old smell of roasted coffee and condensed milk still ruled the place, but now it had room to breathe.
Long looked over the whole team, then at Phong.
"You all look like hell."
"That's because we watched hell at a science conference," Joanne said.
Long nodded once, accepting that as a normal enough answer, then jerked his head toward the back stairs.
"You can use the apartment upstairs if you need to talk about things you don't want in public."
Phong let out a breath.
"Thanks."
Long waved that away.
Phong, before heading up, looked at the coffee guru a little longer than usual.
"Wear something warm," he said. "And take care of yourself."
Long gave him a look that held equal parts amusement and affection.
"I'm not the one living in a dungeon kingdom."
"Still."
Long shook his head once, but the corner of his mouth moved.
Upstairs, the apartment was exactly what Long would make for himself.
Small but efficient, clean but lived in. A low table, old books on top, several jars of various pickles underneath. A rice cooker in the corner, a stack of folded blankets. A window overlooking the street where the city lights came through in muted gold. It felt private in the right way, it felt safe, and that mattered.
Nobody even waited for drinks to settle before Dominic started.
He stood near the table, one hand resting against Eyeless Heaven where it leaned against the wall, and said what had clearly been sitting in him since the press conference ended.
"Human shouldn't have eyes."
The room went still.
Dominic looked at the shield.
"That's too close to Eyeless Heaven."
He did not say the rest right away, but everyone knew what he meant. The cryo-tomb, the other Dominic, the broken warning that never finished. The Soerai who had once been human.
Phong nodded from where he sat beside Alex on the floor cushions.
"And the H'Re said almost the same thing," he said. "A human professor on the surface, a shield from who know where, and a cursed race from the Ninth Floor repeating the same idea... that's too big to be a coincidence."
Alex folded one leg under herself and leaned her shoulder lightly against his. "Agreed."
Jake rubbed both hands over his face. "I really hate when our problems start lining up across floors."
Joanne, seated on the couch arm because normal sitting was apparently beneath her, muttered, "At this point if a chicken starts saying it too, I'm leaving."
Alexei looked thoughtful. "The fire chickens might."
Nobody answered that because everyone could imagine it.
Long came up with trays not long after. Coffee for most of them. Tea for the few who wanted less shaking in their veins. A small plate of coffee flavored sweet things for Rico, which the raccoon accepted as tribute properly owed.
Then, not long after that, Selena and Vanessa arrived.
Selena came in looking exactly like a woman who had been pulled out of a spiral of scientific doom halfway through feeding it. Vanessa came in looking like the person who had done the dragging. The contrast between them remained one of the funniest and most reassuring things in Phong's life.
Vanessa had changed too.
Phong noticed it once they were all seated. She had revealed her new level: 33, and her evolved class was now Blood Assassin.
That sounded unpleasant enough that Rico immediately approved.
"Cool."
Vanessa gave him the flat stare he deserved.
Phong got to the point once everyone had drinks. He told Selena everything again, but slower and cleaner than the group chat version. Eyeless Heaven, the cryo-tomb, the other Dominic, the half-finished warning, the H'Re, the phrase about eyes.
Then the press conference. Ulrich. The pre-recorded video that knew too much. The impossible timing of his death.
Selena listened in total silence at first, fingers wrapped around her cup.
By the time Phong finished, she sighed deeply enough that it sounded like a personal betrayal by reality itself.
"What happened to Ulrich," she said, "has caused an earthquake in the science community."
"Comforting," Jake said.
"It is not meant to be."
Selena sat forward slightly, tired eyes sharpening.
"The phrase 'invaders of pure energy' is the part I don't like."
Emma, who had been quiet until then, asked, "Because?"
"Because it sounds suspiciously like the system and the Pillars."
That made the room still again.
Selena continued before anyone could jump in.
"Think about what we already know. Or well, think we know." She lifted one hand, counting off with her fingers. "The system behaves like an external operating force layered over reality. Pillars can override names, stats, notifications, and even some rule expression." She glanced at Dominic's shield. "And the cryo-tomb plus the H'Re plus Ulrich all suggest there are older interactions between humanity and the dungeon than public knowledge can explain."
Dominic frowned. "You're saying the system and the Pillars might not just be part of the dungeon?"
"I'm saying they may be the invading part."
That sat in the room like a block of ice.
Bruno, who had curled up near Phong's knee, lifted his head as if even he could feel the tone shift.
Selena kept going.
"And then there's shifting."
Phong already knew he would regret this.
Selena's hands started moving more when she got into theory.
"The way shifting can connect the same general location to two different altitudes, assuming the dungeon floors are stacked something like a tower, without killing everything around the split zone... that should not be possible under ordinary three-dimensional geometry."
Joanne made a face. "You lost me already."
"I have props," Selena said.
Of course she did.
She pulled a notepad and a pen from her bag, then tore out a strip of paper. Working quickly, she made a loop and twisted it before taping the ends.
"A Möbius strip," she said.
Jake leaned forward. "I know that one."
Selena nodded and placed the strip on the table.
"Imagine an ant walking on a flat strip of paper." She traced a finger along one side. "Normally, it cannot reach the other side no matter what it did." Then she pointed to the twisted loop. "But if the strip is changed into this, the ant walks and eventually ends up on what used to be the other side without ever realizing it crossed anything impossible."
Vanessa, seated beside her, added quietly, "Because from the ant's point of view, the path was continuous."
Selena pointed at her in approval.
"Yes. That's what I think the dungeon may be doing. Not literally with Möbius strips. But with some higher-dimensional folding we don't understand."
Now even Joanne looked less annoyed and more unsettled.
Selena looked around the room.
"If shifting is using something like that, a higher dimension outside ordinary human comprehension, then the dungeon is not just moving land around. It is changing how space itself is being connected."
Phong groaned softly.
He already knew where this was going.
Selena was not done.
"And the Pillars can control shifting," she said. "Which means they can interact with that same framework directly." Her voice grew quieter. "So if Professor Ulrich called them 'invaders of pure energy'... then the worst-case scenario is that the system and the Pillars are high-dimensional beings."
Nobody spoke for a few seconds.
Then Selena landed the final blow.
"If that's true, then humanity's weapons, which operate in three-dimensional space, might not even be able to meaningfully interact with them." She looked at no one in particular. "Let alone hurt them."
The silence after that was deep enough to hear the pipes in Long's apartment.
Rico finally broke it.
"So. We punch anyway?"
No one laughed.
Phong put one hand over his face.
"We wanted answers," he said through his fingers. "And Selena just drove us off-road into cosmic horror and existential crisis."
Selena pointed at him with full offended dignity.
"In many cases, those are the same thing."
That got a real laugh. Small. Tired.
But real.
And it helped.
That was the strange part of them by now. Even in the face of something this large, this ugly, this possibly beyond all ordinary human reach, they still found ways to stay human with each other. Jake passed Joanne one of the pastries without being asked. Vanessa quietly refilled Selena's tea before she noticed it was low. Dominic shifted Eyeless Heaven farther from the table so no one would bang a knee on it. Emma, despite everything, moved Bruno's paw away from a coffee cup before he could step in it. Alex leaned more firmly into Phong's side when she felt him tensing again.
Small things. Normal things. Enough to keep the room from tilting too far.
Phong lowered his hand and looked at Selena.
"So what do we do with any of that."
Selena took a breath.
"The same thing we always do."
Jake raised a brow. "Which is?"
"We gather more information," she said. "Before we let ourselves drown in the implications."
"That," Emma said, "is the most scientist thing you've ever said."
"It is also the correct thing."
Dominic nodded.
"We focus on what's in front of us first." He looked around at all of them. "The league. Daniel. The camps. The Painted Skins. The Nine. The rest we keep in mind, but we don't let it paralyze us."
That was sensible. Grounding. Dominic always had a way of dragging the room back onto the floor without diminishing what scared them.
Alex spoke next.
"We also don't ignore the patterns."
Her voice was steady.
"The H'Re. Ulrich. Eyeless Heaven. The Soerai. They all point somewhere."
Phong looked at her and saw the shape of the same thing in her face that had been in his own for a while now. They were all getting used to living with answers that made the world bigger and uglier at the same time.
Long, who had mostly stayed quiet while serving refills and pretending not to listen too hard, finally said from the small kitchen area, "Coffee first. Cosmic horror second."
That got the biggest laugh of the night.
Even Selena smiled at that one.
And somehow, with warm mugs in their hands and the city below them still moving like the world had not just opened its mouth a little wider, Team Nemean sat together in Long's apartment and kept talking.
About theories, fear, how stupid Vân sounded when he flirted with death, whether prana coat would make Joanne even more unbearable.
About whether Rico could in fact be stopped if Emma ever built that lion bike, the elf children and their names, Vietnam, and Lyon, and Camp Stymphalian, and how strange it was that all of them now had places outside the surface that felt more like home than most cities did.
The cosmic scale of it all did not shrink.
The horror did not go away.
But for a while, held up by coffee, closeness, and the stubborn affection of people who had chosen one another in the middle of the dungeon, it became something they could face without being alone.