Team Nemean arrived in DC with just enough time for the city to start regretting that all of them were in one place at once.
Washington, as always, was pretending to be more serious than every other city in America. Broad avenues. White stone. Too many flags. Too many buildings built to imply permanence by men whose decisions rarely lasted more than a generation. Yet now, in the age of the dungeon, even the capital had started growing stranger around the edges. There were more divers in the hotels, more mana-tech ads near the metro stations, more armored SUVs with government plates, and more people on the street glancing up at the sky as if half expecting the Sky Emperor to return just to ruin traffic.
The DC Otters were waiting for them near the press entry zone.
They had absolutely no shame.
That was the first thing Team Nemean understood. The three women of the DC Otters had clearly decided that if they could not win the league cleanly, they could at least ride the wave of Team Nemean's attention like surfers trying to catch a hurricane.
They tried Emma first.
One of them, all glossy hair, expensive makeup, and the kind of smile that had probably worked on influencer parties and mid-tier sponsors, drifted over to Emma with practiced casualness.
"I just wanted to say," she said, voice pitched for camera bleed, "you've really changed the game for women in the league."
Emma looked at her once. That was all.
Neither cold enough to be rude on camera nor warm enough to encourage survival.
"Thank you," Emma said in the tone of a heiress acknowledging a hotel staff member who had not spilled wine on her shoes. Then she turned away and began speaking to Janet about logistics as if the Otter had never existed.
Alex was next. Another of the team, this one trying for fierce-sisterhood energy, came in with admiration already prepackaged.
"Your growth after Boston has been incredible," she said. "Honestly, the resilience?"
Alex stared at her for two silent seconds.
Then said, "Move."
The woman moved.
Dominic got the compliment route.
One of the Otters, perhaps deciding that wholesome masculinity was easier to approach than the women, praised his shield work, his sportsmanship, and the "raw authenticity" of his energy in a way that made Joanne immediately choke on her own laugh.
Dominic, to his credit, nodded politely and then walked off to get coffee before the woman had even finished the third sentence.
Séline and Camille were approached in broken French.
That was a mistake. A spectacular one.
The Otters trying it clearly imagined that all French women would be charmed by hearing their language butchered in a flattering accent. Instead, she got the kind of synchronized stare from the duo that had probably started border incidents somewhere in Europe before.
Camille answered her in perfect French. Very quickly. Very politely. And with enough elegance that the poor woman clearly did not understand the exact words, but understood in her soul that she had been dismantled.
Joanne, meanwhile, was complimented on her look.
That nearly worked.
Not because she was easy to flatter, but because Joanne genuinely respected a good effort in style when she saw it. The problem was that the compliment came with too much visible hunger behind it. Too much need. Too much hope that the camera two rows over would catch their laughter and turn it into a "rising friendships in the league" montage later.
Joanne saw it. Then saw through it.
"That's sweet," she said. "But I'm emotionally unavailable to people with branding intentions."
The poor girl blinked twice and retreated.
Then the Otters made the fatal mistake of spreading wider.
They tried Phong.
They tried Jake and Jack.
Jake found it funny enough to entertain for a few seconds and then grew bored the moment he realized the flirting was generic. Jack rolled his eyes at Jake's reactions, then ignored it the way mountains ignored weather reports. Phong reacted the cleanest.
One of the Otters floated too close to him with a soft smile and some line about how "mysterious coaches are always the most interesting men in a team."
Phong immediately stepped back.
"I'm sorry," he said, polite to the point of pain, "but please respect my personal space."
That was it.
Phong left no room for his reaction to be interpreted as flirtation or embarrassment. A level-one farmer rejecting media bait with the earnest firmness of a man who would rather fight spiders than be impolite to a woman in public.
Team Nemean, watching from a few feet away, burst into laughter the moment the Otter retreated.
Joanne was the first to speak, as always.
"What were they thinking?" she said. "This is the same farmer who refused to touch Emma Tannenbaum just so he didn't cheat on Alex on principle."
Emma turned and glared at her.
"Yes, thank you for reminding me, Joanne," she said dryly. "My self-esteem needed that. Truly."
Jake nearly folded.
Even Alex laughed under her breath.
Phong rubbed one hand over his face. "Can we not make this a story?"
"No," said almost everyone.
As if that were not enough, the day found one more way to annoy him.
A few old friends from college, people who had cut contact after his aunt and uncle died, suddenly appeared near the press line with smiles too bright and voices too eager. They spoke his name too warmly. Asked how he had been. Brought up half-remembered shared classes and campus jokes as if silence, avoidance, and the long dead zone after tragedy could be erased by proximity to cameras.
Phong recognized them instantly. And hated the speed at which his body remembered the old hurt.
He had once wanted their kindness. Or at least their honesty. Instead they had vanished when his life became ugly and expensive in emotional terms. Now that he stood beside Team Nemean, now that cameras pointed his way and his influence had become visible enough to matter, they remembered friendship again.
Emma stepped in before he had to say anything.
Watching her deal with them was like watching a surgeon remove a tumor with silverware and no anesthesia.
She smiled. She listened. She acknowledged every attempt at familiarity.
Then, with words so polite they could not be quoted as cruelty, she turned them away in shame. She did not accuse them outright. That would have been messy. Instead she spoke of timing. Of how meaningful it was to see old connections remembered now. Of how she hoped they would understand that Phong's schedule was very full and that truly important relationships did not need to be proven on camera anyway.
By the time she finished, all them looked like they had just realized they were naked in church.
They left.
Phong stared at Emma.
"Awe is acceptable," she said.
"I hate that you're good at that."
Emma lifted one shoulder. "Wealth teaches many unpleasant skills."
With the formal obligations finally exhausted and the match not until tomorrow, Team Nemean did the only sane thing.
They went out together.
Because they had a day, a city, and enough exhaustion between them to deserve something as ordinary as tourism.
Washington DC, for all its stiffness, was not hard to enjoy if one stopped expecting authenticity and settled for scale.
They walked the Mall first, because that was what visitors did and because Jake wanted to see whether the monuments looked smaller in person or just equally self-important. The sky was broad over the long green spaces, the kind of open urban sky only capitals and old empires seemed to manage. They passed tourists, school groups, veterans in caps, joggers who pretended they were not staring at Team Nemean, and enough police and quiet security to remind everyone where they were.
Rico rode on Phong's shoulder for part of it, providing running commentary on national monuments as if they had personally offended him.
"Too many stairs."
"Big obelisk. Useless stone. Should be made into giant coffee fountain or soda machine."
"The man in chair looks sad."
At the Lincoln Memorial, Bruno sat down solemnly at the top steps and refused to move until at least three strangers had taken his picture with the Reflecting Pool in the background. Nyx tolerated the whole day with elegant suffering and somehow still ended up admired by half the people they passed. Little Fireball got carried inside Alex's coat and chirped disapproval whenever the wind picked up too hard.
They visited museums too, but badly.
Not with the focused reverence museums wanted from visitors. With the distracted fascination of divers trying very hard not to compare all human history to the nonsense currently happening in the dungeon.
Joanne bought postcards she would never mail.
Alexei became emotionally invested in a medieval armor section.
Then they ate. That was where the trip became truly good.
DC's local restaurants were a mix of politics, immigration, old southern influence, and the weirdness every capital gathered just by being forced to host too many people from too many places. Team Nemean took full advantage.
They had Ethiopian one stop, because Janet insisted and Emma supported her with money. They shared injera and stews and sauces rich enough to make Jake fall briefly silent in real respect. Rico tried everything with the fearless greed of a raccoon who believed every plate owed him tribute.
Later they found a place doing half-smokes and chili in a way so aggressively local that Dominic declared it "honest food," which in Dominic language was very high praise.
Séline and Camille, after one bite of something fried, buttered, and deeply American, exchanged the exact same look of horrified enjoyment.
Alex, still in a better mood than the media deserved, kept stealing bites off Phong's plate until he finally just pushed it halfway toward her.
By evening they drifted toward pubs.
Not the full drunken chaos kind. The comfortable kind. Wood interiors, old brass, local beer on taps, too much noise in the good way, and warm corners where a team could collapse into laughter and tell the same story four different ways. Rico again tried alcohol and again declared most beer "too bitter" and some wine "still too spicy," which had now become a fixed point in the universe. The racoon tolerant for alcohol was also fascinating too. Rico didn't become drunk no matter how much Jack Daniel Cola he drank. Or that the raccoon simply did what he would normally do when sober anyway, like trying to steal more soda.
Then came the amusement park.
It was not huge, just one of those brightly lit urban fun grounds that leaned harder on atmosphere than scale. Enough rides to waste an evening. Enough noise to let a team be ridiculous without attracting too much extra attention.
They played games.
Badly.
Jake cheated at one ring toss and still lost. Joanne bullied a shooting booth attendant with pure psychological warfare until she won a stuffed toy on her third try and then pretended she had been naturally gifted. Dominic somehow demolished a hammer strength game so completely that the machine operator came over to check whether the reading had glitched.
Emma won at a bottle knockdown on her first attempt and looked exactly smug enough to make everyone else furious.
Alexei got talked into a haunted house and came out looking insulted that no actual demons had been involved.
The only true tragedy of the day was the rollercoaster.
Rico wanted in the moment he saw it because he liked speed, yelling, and machinery in equal amounts.
The operator took one look at him, then at the safety board, and said no. Too short.
Rico argued like a revolutionary denied basic civil rights.
It did not matter. The answer stayed no.
He sulked for the rest of the day with such commitment that even Little Fireball eventually pecked his head in what might have been sympathy. Or criticism. It was hard to tell with her.
By the time Team Nemean returned to the hotel, night had settled over DC in a softer way than New York ever allowed. The city still glowed, still buzzed, still carried the low background weight of government and consequence, but for one long day none of that had mattered much. They had been tourists. Friends. Fighters resting between storms.
And even Rico, denied his rightful rollercoaster destiny, had to admit it had been a good day.