Hans had been right.
When Team Nemean arrived in New Jersey, no government cars were waiting for them. No federal handlers, no smiling military liaison trying to turn "voluntary service" into a contract with a flag on top. The silence itself told Phong everything he needed to know. Ashley Merriweather had gone back, looked at the board again, and realized that Hans was right. Trying to moral-blackmail Team Nemean with patriotism was absurd when half the team did not even belong to the country she wanted them to die for.
Phong still did not assume they were free.
He knew better now. The state would still come asking for favors later. Quiet ones. The kind no one announced, the kind that would be framed as reasonable, temporary, necessary. But that was acceptable to him, so long as Team Nemean did not become owned. So long as no one in a suit got to tell Alex where to bleed or Dominic where to plant his shield.
When he said as much, Emma only smirked.
"So," she asked, "have we all finally realized the value of fame and influence when used as leverage?"
Joanne snorted. Jake groaned. Dominic rolled one shoulder. Phong, for once, gave Emma a look of open reluctant respect.
"That was the Tannenbaums," he said.
Emma tilted her head. "And now you know why my family is rich."
The New Jersey Rangers welcomed them with open arms.
That was one of the reasons Phong kept thinking about them as more than just an opposing team. There was very little poison in the way they met Nemean now. Competition, yes. Pride, absolutely. But not that slime-slick envy or old-money sadism he had come to associate with Josh and Olen. Kenai greeted Dominic like an equal. Tara nodded to Jake and Jack. Denahi gave Alex a look that said he remembered every movement she had made in their earlier match and was not foolish enough to forget any of it.
They did the pre-game interview together, which the media loved.
Kenai was asked, almost immediately, what he thought of Alex's new fighting style after Boston.
He answered honestly.
"We haven't found a solution for her yet," he said, looking not at the reporter but straight ahead, where the stadium lights made the tunnel mouth shine like a challenge. "But I'll do my best anyway."
That won him applause.
Then the microphones turned to Phong.
He stood there in the coach's place, one hand in his pocket, the other resting at his side, and confirmed the one thing everyone had come to hear.
"Alex will open for us today."
The reporters leaned in.
Phong's mouth curved just enough to suggest he already knew the answer to the next question.
"And yes," he said, "I know Kenai will accept the duel."
Across from him, Kenai gave the smallest smile.
Of course he would.
Rico, meanwhile, was carried off toward the commentators' booth by a pair of security staff like a royal mascot who had become too important for his own feet. That had somehow become normal in the East Coast now. Arena security escorted him like he was an honored guest and a public hazard at the same time.
Apparently, executives had even begun offering him contracts to appear at matches Team Nemean was not participating in. He had denied them with perfect raccoon logic.
"Sir," he had told one such executive in front of three witnesses and one crying intern, "I'm a raccoon."
That answer had somehow ended the negotiation completely.
Then the match began.
The stadium was packed in that electric, tight-throated way that meant everyone present knew they were about to watch something with real narrative weight. Team Nemean versus New Jersey Rangers had already become one of the East Coast's cleanest rivalries—hard-fought, low on cheap bitterness, high on actual quality. Now, with Alex opening and Kenai answering, the whole place felt less like a sporting venue and more like an altar waiting for an argument in violence.
Kenai entered first.
The wooden pistol at his side looked almost ceremonial until one remembered what it could do. Totem-carved barrel, animal spirits nested in old wood and will. A weapon that looked handcrafted by a culture that knew stories and death should never be too far apart.
Then Alex entered.
And whatever noise the crowd had made for Kenai fractured under the response she pulled from them.
She walked to center ring with that impossible stillness of hers, carrying no visible weapon because for her the arsenal had long since become psychic. Her class no longer needed to show before it struck. Bai Hu's storm had already changed how people saw her. Boston had learned that lesson first. The rest of the league had spent the last days trying to catch up.
At ringside, Phong sat with the rest of Team Nemean and watched more than the ring.
He watched Kenai's shoulders, Denahi's face. The way Tara leaned forward, the way Koda folded his arms tighter when Alex settled into stance.
And while he watched, he spoke quietly to the team.
"We should consider the Rangers."
Jake looked over. "For what?"
Phong did not take his eyes off the ring.
"For the circle."
Now everyone listening knew what he meant.
Not public alliances, not for the league. The camps, the kingdoms, the plants, the hidden routes. Baratok Town, fort Erymanthian, Yuè. The Greencap ties, the Tortura, the lizardmen, the mice of the Great Burrow, all the roots Phong had been sinking beneath the public world while the league played sports on the surface.
"They could fit," Emma murmured.
Dominic's gaze stayed on Kenai. "I'll ask them to form a coalition in the next stage."
Phong turned his head slightly toward him.
Dominic continued, "If the format changes to a joined dungeon dive—and it will—we pull them close enough for you to observe under stress. Real stress. Dead-or-alive stress."
Phong nodded.
That was exactly the right test.
"You trust people better when they're hungry or scared," Joanne muttered.
"And when they think nobody important is watching," Emma added.
Phong looked back to the ring.
"Yes."
In his mind he was already expanding the map again. If the next stage became a Celestial Skeletal dive, then every alliance mattered more. Every supply line. Every intel route. Every boss sighting. He had already told the mice to search for ruins and strong entities across the three floors under his influence. He meant to arm Team Nemean as hard as the dungeon would allow.
He thought, very briefly, of the production-class circles too. Then discarded the thought.
Timing didn't work in his favor. Back when production classes were still trying to find their place in the age of divers and Olen had not yet risen too far above the rest of them in public influence, he might have a chance of convincing them. Yet, back then, what Phong had was too fragile to risk letting people in. Selena was already too big of a gamble that sometimes Phong questioned why did he trust her so quickly, so easily. Nevertheless, it was too risky for him to test his luck again with another person.
Now, when he had already stabilized himself enough in the dungeon to be confident enough? Necromancer had sadly changed the chess board again. Olen had become a magnetic figure to everyone weak, frightened, or ambitious enough to think production-class survival meant kneeling to his example. Phong had no intention of fighting that war right now.
Not when he had kingdoms to build instead.
The horn sounded.
Alex moved first.
Bai Hu's storm came alive around her in a tightening cyclone, wind gathering hard enough that the edges of the ring suddenly looked unstable by comparison. The audience roared, already knowing what this meant in broad strokes.
Then Alex changed it.
Again.
This time, instead of condensing her constructs into psychic marbles and turning herself into a spinning execution device, she split them the other way. A dozen bows. A dozen slings, all hovering above her storm like an army of invisible archers. Shapes of pale force forming and reforming in the storm around her, all different angles of artillery nested inside a single rotating system.
Kenai's eyes sharpened at once.
The first exchange made the shape of the fight instantly clear.
Kenai fired low and fast, a spirit-shot curving toward Alex's flank with enough intelligence in its path that an ordinary sidestep would have meant nothing. The storm took it. The bullet struck one rotating band of air and changed angle. Alex subtly tilted the whole pressure of Bai Hu's storm and let the round whirl off line.
Then she answered with arrows and pebbles compacted dense enough that the air cracked around them as they moved. The bows loosed in staggered patterns. The slings spat with ugly, whipping force. Instead of one clean line of return fire, Kenai found himself under a rotating battery.
He moved beautifully.
That deserved saying.
Spirit Gunslinger was no gimmick class. Kenai's bullets lived in ways Alex's simple projectiles did not. They bent. Curved. Tracked. One wolf-shaped shot ran the ring boundary and tried to come up at her from behind. A raven-bullet split once and rejoined on a delayed path. A heavier bear-bullet tore straight through a line of arrows before the storm's pull finally chewed it apart.
But the problem was volume.
Alex's rate of fire was absurd.
This was the style born before she perfected it into the meat grinder. The first spark was already in place back in the pixies ruin, when Dominic got his Eyeless Heaven, Alex had already found that her constructs could be bent, carried and influence by Bai Hu's storm itself. Yet, to the wider public, it was like Alex invented a whole new different fighting style and combine it with her old one in just 2 weeks.
The constructs provided fire power and range, the storm acted as protection and pressure. Telekinesis took care of mobility. Of course, it was not perfect. The absurd mana cost and even more ridiculous brain processing power meant Alex could not sustain this fighting style for long.
Kenai managed to keep up for the first thirty seconds, then the pressure started to tell.
He fired a Thunderbird bullet early, trying to seize the air before Alex's rotating barrage could make the ground unlivable. The spiritual shot burst into his wings, pale electric feathers forming over his back. He launched upward, gaining altitude to rain spirit-bullets down from outside most ground fighter rhythms.
Alex did not let him have the sky unchallenged.
The moment Kenai lifted, every bow in the storm reoriented. The slings altered angle too. The whole spinning formation tilted upward like a living anti-air platform. Psychic arrows and pebbles shredded the air around him in a density of fire that bordered on unreasonable.
The Thunderbird wings took the brunt first.
And they suffered.
At first the spectators only saw flashes. White spirit-feathers torn by pale force. Then the cameras caught it properly. The wings were being ground down by repeated punctures. Holes, tears, gaps opened non-stop where Alex's artillery barrage chewed through them second by second.
Kenai tried to outmaneuver the pattern.
He folded left, dropped low, then curved upward with a hawk-like spirit-round leading his line, hoping to force Alex's barrage to choose between tracking him and preserving her own defense.
She chose both.
That was the nightmare.
The storm deflected the incoming spirit-shot enough for one sling pellet to smash it apart. At the same time Alex herself moved under her own weather with telekinetic bursts so fast the spirit bullets could not catch her. She adjusted angle, pivoted, and fed a fresh sequence of arrows into the path Kenai had wanted to claim.
The commentators were losing their minds.
"Alexandra Vogel just keep getting even more insane!"
"Kenai can't even win the air!"
"Which version was this? 3.0? Why did that woman insist on making herself an entire army?!"
And from the booth came Rico, shrieking over them with all the dignity of a caffeinated oracle.
"Dungeon Robinhood build detected! Copyright infringement!"
Phong let out a breath through his nose.
At least the raccoon still had enough self-control not to yell the real part out loud—that Rico himself was the Dungeon Robinhood, the weird treant on floor two who had been terrorizing divers for months with righteous artillery and caffeine-based extortion.
On the ring, Kenai grimly fought on.
To his credit, he adapted faster than Shirlene had, faster than many league fighters would have. He stopped trying to win the whole exchange at once and instead began aiming for erosion. Spirit bullets came not just at Alex, but at the rotating bows and slings themselves, looking for weak points in the patterns. He sent wolf shots into the rhythm of her slings to disrupt release timing. He used a serpent-round to ride low through the storm's undercurrent and nearly clipped her calf.
But Alex was simply either too fast, or her storm was too strong. Only 2 out of 10 bullets even manage to catch her at the speed she was moving, then got deflected by her storm. And it happened while Alex's constructs still showering Kenai with projectiles of her own. Arbiter Mindblade ability to force excruciating pain with every contacts became a problem too. A harmless clip of an arrow, a slight touch of a pebble normally harmless was turned into moments of stutter when Kenai had to stop and gasp for air.
Kenai lasted longer than most would have.
Long enough that even Phong, who had expected Alex to win, found himself respecting the stubborn beauty of the attempt.
But respect did not change outcomes.
The Thunderbird wings finally gave out under the grind.
The spiritual feathers shredded apart in pale tatters, riddled through by too many psychic arrows and too many dense sling-shots. Kenai dropped, landed hard, and tried to convert immediately into a ground-line exchange where his pistol and instincts might still let him steal rhythm back.
Alex met him with a fresh storm angle and another barrage. One pellet smashed the pistol hand off line. Two arrows hit the ground around his next step and forced him inward. Then she moved in person, closing distance behind her own artillery and striking with the speed of someone with Jake or Séline's class,
The final sequence was fast enough the crowd only understood it in pieces.
Kenai ducked one arrow and took a sling-shot across the shoulder.
He twisted under a second shot just for Alex to be there, storm screaming around her, and the telekinetic force behind her motion turned one compact strike into a verdict. Kenai went down after shit hit the fan and spiral out of his control.
The referee stepped in before pride could waste everyone's time.
Winner: Alexandra Vogel.
The stadium erupted.
Not just because Alex had won. Because she had beaten Kenai cleanly, visibly, and with yet another version of herself the league had not fully solved yet.
Back at the bench, Phong let out the sigh he had been holding for the whole final stretch.
Rico, still shouting from the booth about copyright theft and treant ethics, sounded absurdly offended on behalf of his own secret identity.
And while the stadium roared for Alex's victory, Phong sat there thinking not only of the points Team Nemean had just earned, but of circles expanding quietly under the noise.
The Rangers. Bosses. Ruins. Kingdoms.
And how much stronger Team Nemean would need to become before the next stage swallowed all of them whole.