The rematch against the Otters went exactly as Phong expected, and that in itself told Team Nemean how far they had come.
This time he sent Janet first.
That surprised the commentators far more than the result did. War Valkyrie was not a class built to dazzle in one-versus-one fashion. Janet's strength lay in morale, support, command rhythm, and aerial harassment just annoying enough to pull a fight off-balance. In a full team format, or in a drawn-out campaign, she would be priceless. Against the DC Otters, she gave them something else: a real fight.
The Otters were still what the media had said they were. Pretty, polished. Too aware of cameras, too eager to angle themselves toward the nearest lens whenever they thought no one important was watching. But with Janet in the ring instead of Alex, the gap between Team Nemean and them became less apocalyptic and more educational.
Janet won the opener with only minor difficulty. She kept herself composed, used the air better than the Otters expected, and turned every attempt at flashy offense into wasted motion. She wasn't trying to humiliate them. She was simply better, steadier, and less in love with being seen.
Then Phong did something the crowd hated and Team Nemean understood immediately.
He told Janet to forfeit the next round.
The commentators nearly bit through their own microphones.
Team Nemean gave up the perfect win on purpose, gifting the Otters a round in the bo3. To the public, it looked baffling. To Phong, it was simple. The shinier part of Team Nemean had enough spotlight already. If the Otters were weak enough that Janet could handle them, then Alexei deserved a debut too.
And so the paladin stepped in.
He won with ease.
There was no need to dress it up more than that. The Otters were built for cameras. Alexei was built for conviction. They did not belong in the same category of conflict. Once he committed, the difference between aesthetic aggression and real combat intent was too obvious to hide.
By nightfall, Team Nemean had another win, Janet had her debut, Alexei had his, and the Otters had at least been allowed to keep one round for dignity.
That should have been enough excitement for one day.
Emma disagreed.
That night, she had to beg them. Not all of them equally, mostly Phong.
The Tannenbaums had arranged a fundraising gala in DC. Team Nemean's presence was expected. The phrasing Emma used made it sound almost voluntary, but everyone in the room understood the truth. Rich people had planned a ballroom, invited other rich people, and built a whole evening around being near divers who were becoming more valuable than startup founders and old senators combined.
Phong looked like she had informed him of a mandatory dinner inside a nest of snakes.
"No."
Emma put both hands together.
"Please."
"No."
"This is important."
"It's a ballroom full of elites."
Emma nodded once. "Exactly."
Phong's soul visibly tried to leave his body.
By the end of the negotiation, though, he agreed.
Not because he wanted to. Because the team would be gifted with custom made mana-tech equipments tailored after their class. If the team was going to compete in a joined dungeon diving for Celestial Skeletal, then they needed the gears. And more than that, he knew his own discomfort was cheaper than the safety of his friend.
So on the third morning in DC, Team Nemean got dressed.
Really dressed.
Not league-polished, not camera-neat. Both were not even enough. They took it up a notch to full rich-people event dressed.
They were taken first to a tailor and designer suite so expensive that Phong nearly had a health event just seeing the price tags. Suits in dark lines and quiet fabric, dresses cut to flatter wealth rather than youth, shoes that looked too elegant to touch weather, cufflinks and ties and silks and jewelry arranged with the kind of confidence that only came from businesses built on making people beautiful enough to be feared socially.
Phong stood in front of one mirror in a dark suit and looked like he had been accidentally cast as the next lead for Crazy Rich Asian.
Then he heard the cost and nearly fainted.
"No number that big should have the audacity to stand before the dollar symbol."
Emma did not even look up from where she was reviewing a second set of options. "It is reasonable."
"For fabric?"
"Yes. For high-end material, labor cost for the very best of tailors, and you paid for it to be hand made."
"More like daylight robbery."
Alex, already done with choosing because her taste in formal wear was exactly what one would expect from her—sharp, understated, and efficient—took one look at him in the suit and immediately decided they should take more.
"You look good."
"That is not a reason."
"It is to me."
Phong gave her a suspicious look, but she was already circling him with all the cool decisiveness of a woman shopping for a future husband she had every intention of dressing properly.
Emma, overhearing enough, finally looked up.
"Since he saved my life," she said, with all the relaxed violence of hereditary wealth, "he can take the whole row if he wants."
Phong stared at her in horror.
Alex, however, used that opening exactly the way a fiancée with poor moral restraint would. She coerced him into taking two.
Only two, which Phong later felt should count as proof of her mercy.
Then came the makeup artists.
The men had their hair trimmed, edges cleaned, necklines fixed, and, for those unfortunate enough to qualify, facial hair shaved into something less dungeon-adjacent. Dominic took it with the stoicism of a boxer at weigh-in. Jake flirted with the stylist until Jack threatened to stab him with a powder brush. Alexei, upon seeing himself with properly done hair, looked like he was being introduced to an alternate timeline in which he had become a magazine-cover villain instead of poultry enthusiast.
The women had it worse.
Or better, depending on one's views of glamour.
Makeup was applied with terrifying competence. Hair was styled into forms none of them would have chosen for themselves but all of them had to admit looked unfairly good. Emma transformed into what she clearly had always been waiting to become in public: a perfect heiress, elegant enough to cut glass. Joanne became sharper, more theatrical, and somehow even more Joanne. Janet softened in the right places and gained a quiet grace that made Dominic stare too long when she emerged. Séline and Camille looked like they had stepped out of old-money Europe and brought knives under the silk. Alex, when they finished with her, looked like a dangerous law of nature given collar bones and eveningwear.
Phong did not like how much he noticed that last part. He liked even less how much Alex noticed him noticing.
The fit fit them perfectly. Somehow Emma had gotten a hold of everyone measurements. Phong tried not to look too alarmed by someone he had considered a friend and failed miserably.
Well-dressed and thoroughly outpriced, Team Nemean was taken to one of the most luxurious hotels in DC.
It did not look like a hotel so much as an argument between gold and marble about which deserved to be seen first. The chandeliers were excessive in a way only old institutions and new corruption could afford. Soft music drifted across rooms full of heirs, heiresses, CEOs, senators, lobbyists, military men, research heads. All were different branding of polished predators who smiled too much because their teeth had long ago stopped being visible.
Phong felt underdressed in spirit even while wearing enough money to buy a used car on his back.
The first thing he understood was that everyone in that room knew how to look at power. The second was that a great many of them were still trying to decide what kind of power Team Nemean actually was.
That was when Emma's father arrived.
Hans Tannenbaum did not enter like a politician.
He entered like a man who had once solved problems with his body before deciding money was a cleaner extension of the same instinct. Tall, muscular even under a formal suit, beard trimmed short and neat, he carried himself like an athlete who had gone corporate without fully surrendering the shape of his shoulders. His face was handsome in a hard way, made softer only by the small signs of genuine fondness when his gaze touched Emma and did not immediately turn to business.
He greeted Team Nemean without wasting anyone's time. Direct courtesy freely given out one would think he was a German on principle alone.
Then, on camera, he presented the gifts.
Mana-tech equipments, custom designed around the classes and needs of Team Nemean.
Jake got a pair of daggers first. They looked sleek at a glance, but along the blades ran fine grooves filled with something metallic and dark. Hans explained that when fed mana, the daggers would vibrate at extreme speed, allowing them to cut materials and defenses Jake should not normally be able to breach at his level. The blades also had dungeon ore folded into them during the forging, giving them both this wavy pattern seen only in hand forged high-end Japanese blade, and the ability to hold and transfer mana better than every material mankind had been able to produced without the dungeon.
Jake took one in hand and immediately looked like a man who had been handed a morally questionable miracle.
Jack received a visor and belt system built on the same principle as Alex's MIT armor but stripped down into something practical for him. Small cameras, field mapping, terrain awareness, positional overlay. Enough to sharpen his control over the battlefield without turning him into a walking server rack.
Jack, who always preferred function over flash, looked quietly delighted.
Dominic's gift was a suit of armor with internal padding made from concentrated slime tissue.
The explanation made half the room blink.
The result made more sense. The padding would absorb extreme impact—Hans specifically mentioned sniper fire—without transferring meaningful damage to the wearer. Dominic, who already lived in a body built to ignore suffering on principle, was now being gifted armor that made the concept of stopping him even less appealing.
Séline received gloves.
Beautiful in that severe high-tech way. Clean black with hidden reinforcement and channels through the wrists and knuckles. Their special function was even better: they could manifest mana shields. For a Soul Fist user restricted by class from wearing true armor or carrying physical shields, it was a perfect workaround.
Séline, who almost never showed public excitement, had to hide the curve in her mouth by pretending to inspect the stitching too carefully.
Alexei was given a shield. Not for impact alone, but as a second mana pool. The thing could store and release mana back to him in battle, effectively extending his operating time and making his class far more sustainable under pressure.
Emma got a light armor built on the same principle, elegant enough not to offend her aesthetic and useful enough to please her survival instincts.
Joanne's gift drew one of the louder reactions.
A revolver.
Beautiful, compact, and built for a Spell Sniper's strange overlap of class and improvisation. It could store up to twenty rounds of her elemental bullets, either for repeated fire or as emergency backup once her mana ran too low to keep manifesting spell rounds from her fingers directly.
Joanne looked at it with instant devotion.
"I love her."
Hans, without missing a beat, said, "Try not to name it on camera."
Alex, Janet, and Camille got nothing yet.
Not because they had been overlooked. Because, as Hans and the researchers carefully explained, their class lines were still under study. Alex's latest changes after Boston had disrupted the assumptions behind her MIT prototype. Janet's War Valkyrie line required better modeling. Camille's style, especially with poison layering and the way she moved through pressure, still needed analysis before anyone built her gear that wouldn't just get in her way.
They all accepted that with more grace than Phong would have managed.
For a little while, he thought he had escaped.
The introductions were done, the gifts had been presented. Phong had survived mingling with the rich without vomiting on anyone's shoes or setting something on fire with pure social discomfort. He had even found a quiet corner near one of the side walls and was considering whether he could remain there for the next hour and still count as "having attended."
Then the room shifted in a way that was somehow so quiet it became easy to notice.
A new current through the crowd. Staff straightening, security shifting. The kind of tiny changes that only very powerful arrivals caused.
Emma looked up first.
Then Hans.
Then almost everyone else.
Ashley Merriweather had arrived. Current President of the United States, and the first woman ever to hold the office. She had not been on the invitation list that Emma knew.
Which meant one thing: she was here because she wanted something.