Phong took the afternoon off to be a young man his age, which felt more illegal than negotiating with minotaurs, feeding a pixie war machine, or telling a Mushroomkhan hivemind that its newly protected Black Ants would be treated as allies until they decided otherwise.
He left the Tannenbaum clubhouse through a side entrance with Rico perched on his shoulder, Dominic walking a few steps behind with the loose posture of a friend rather than a guard, and several Tannenbaum security personnel positioned far enough away that they looked like joggers, tourists, tired office workers, and one very bored man pretending to take photographs of trees. Hans Tannenbaum was absent, of course, but the arrangement had his fingerprints everywhere. Phong could almost hear the old man's dry voice explaining that presidents had expressed interest in bringing Team Nemean under government order, opportunists were sniffing around every person attached to the team, and therefore a walk in Central Park required an invisible perimeter because civilization had become absurd.
And Phong could not say no without being dramatic for the sake of ego, especially after President Meriweather had made it clear that she considered Team Nemean a national asset waiting to be properly claimed, and after the Gia Định match had pushed Phong's name back into public argument in ways he had never wanted. Alex had stayed behind because, according to Joanne, the girls needed "girl time, knife edition," which apparently meant Emma's fame strategy, Selena's lore panic, Camille's opinions, Janet's emotional check-ins, and Alex being forced to sit in a room where nobody let her solve feelings by training until something cracked. Phong had accepted that with dignity, then fled outside with Rico before anyone could decide he also needed emotionally supervised improvement.
Central Park in the afternoon was loud in a human way that felt strangely soothing after dungeon noise. Children screamed near playgrounds, tourists photographed squirrels as if squirrels lacked the criminal ambition Rico proved every day. Joggers moved past with earbuds in, dogs strained against leashes, vendors called out prices, and sunlight broke through the leaves in sheets that made Phong remember treant forests, without the part where every ancient tree might be judging his agricultural policy of course.
Dominic bought two beverages from a cart, handed one to Phong, kept his Pepsi, and said nothing about the bodyguards. That was one of Dominic's gifts. He could stand close enough to protect a person without turning protection into a lecture.
Rico saw the ducks five minutes after they entered the park, and all claims of tactical dignity abandoned him at once. He froze on Phong's shoulder, ears lifting, tail stiffening, eyes widening with the kind of unexplained vendetta against the quacks. "Duck," he whispered, as though naming an enemy commander. Phong looked toward the pond and sighed because the flock had done nothing wrong except exist within Rico's line of sight.
"Do not traumatize the ducks," he said, but Rico had already launched himself from his shoulder in a heroic arc of fur, armor, and bad intention. A cluster of nearby fans gasped before several began recording. Rico landed on all fours, charged toward the pond, and scattered ducks in a burst of indignant wings and quacks while shouting, "Face me, bread aristocracy!"
Dominic watched the chaos with deep, resigned fondness. "He has missed that." Phong remembered Lyon then, their trip before so much of the world had become heavier, when Rico had chased ducks with the same mad joy after getting his system pumped full of caffeine. The memory made his chest loosen. "He has," Phong said, and for several minutes he let himself watch without turning the moment into a responsibility. Rico chased, the ducks escaped, children laughed, adults filmed, and one Tannenbaum bodyguard disguised as a jogger changed direction, realizing maybe a bit too late that his protection assignment now involved tracking a celebrity raccoon through waterfowl diplomacy.
By the time Rico returned, he had somehow acquired a cone of vanilla ice cream, a grande Starbucks cup. He climbed onto the bench beside Phong, licked the ice cream with alarming seriousness, then took a drink from the Starbucks cup and frowned. "This is sweet coffee flavor water," he announced. Dominic sat on the other side of the bench and glanced at the cup. "That is probably a caramel macchiato." Rico looked offended. "Then caramel macchiato is sweet coffee flavor water with branding." He rummaged under one armored strap and produced three crumpled bills, a sticker, and what looked like a bracelet someone had given him. "I exchanged approximately twelve paw prints for supplies. The public understands my value."
Phong leaned back against the bench and laughed before he could stop himself. It was not the sharp laugh of disbelief he used when the dungeon created another crisis, nor the polite one he used around politicians, nor the exhausted one Alex could hear through walls. It was ordinary, and because it was ordinary, it almost hurt. He watched Rico balance ice cream, sweet coffee flavor water, and fame with equal greed, while Dominic pretended not to smile at a raccoon in enchanted armor making economic commentary about Starbucks, and for a short stretch of afternoon, Phong felt close to his own age. He was not a king, mediator, farmer-general, political headache, or the recipient of quests about weapons that could kill Imperial Saints. He was a young man sitting in a park with his friends, listening to ducks complain.
The peace lasted long enough to become dangerous.
Phong knew that even without him, Yuè would continue moving. The constructions would not stop because he spent an afternoon in Central Park. Trolls would still prepare the terraced farms on their mountain, hauling and shaping soil. Kamohai and Giant Crickets would still help move dungeon dirt to Fort Erymanthian, while lizardmen and Inkborn worked through irrigation designs that could coax reliable farming from the Obsidian Canyon's black stone. Pixie drones would wait in hidden routes for any Windrider supply convoy foolish enough to test Yuè's patience. The Greencap Hare captain of Pioneer Squad Twelve would gather friendly banners, Squad Seven would build its opposing force with supplies from a source Phong still could not name, the convoy claiming the king's entrusted future would turn uncertainty into legitimacy, and Great Burrow mice would keep putting whiskers where armies wanted darkness.
That knowledge should have comforted him. Yuè had grown past the point where every basket, brick, patrol, and argument required him personally. Allies and factions now had interwoven interests, which meant the kingdom could function briefly without its creator standing in the center pulling every thread by hand. The glue was still Phong, of course, and everyone knew it. His ability to harvest food three times a month remained the miracle around which their economy bent. His relationships held together monsters, divers, refugees, children, mushrooms, mice, trolls, lizardmen, pixies, H'Re, Greencaps, and creatures whose definitions of friendship sometimes required written boundaries around eating people. But a kingdom that collapsed because its farmer took a walk was not a kingdom. It was a panic attack with flags.
Still, his mind kept returning to the reports. Josh crying in a ruin near Croak Wood, whispering to his dead father that his mother had changed, that he had seen her talking to a third eye on her palm, that he feared she had become a monster from the dungeon. Painted Skins forming symbiosis with malformed goblins instead of simply choking hosts to death. Squad Seven's unexplained supplies. The Night Kings. The Grey One. A lost cultivation system hidden beneath the dungeon's level system. Vũ Vân Lôi's warning about the Four Banes, weapons capable of killing Pillars and Imperial Saints, which other civilizations might wake from hibernation to claim first.
Phong had eased the famine around Lake Baratok after Bai Hu's isolation. He had done that with crops, alliances, canals, and stubbornness. He did not know whether crops, alliances, canals, and stubbornness could answer ancient emperors, sleeping civilizations, invaders of pure energy, and whatever watched the world through eyes grown in palms.
An old man sat down at the other end of the bench.
Phong noticed him in the same second Dominic did.
The man looked harmless in the way very careful people chose it as a disguise. White hair, thin frame, brown coat, cane, paper bag of birdseed, the soft shuffle of age performed well enough that most people would stop looking after the first glance. One of Hans's hidden bodyguards turned his head slightly near the path. Dominic shifted his water bottle from one hand to the other, casual enough that only Phong recognized the movement as readiness.
Before Phong could turn fully, the old man whispered, "Do not look at me, Mr. Tran. Act as though you did not hear what I am about to say."
Phong's pulse changed.
Rico, licking ice cream between them, went still enough that even the cone stopped dripping.
Dominic's gaze remained on the pond. His expression did not move, but his attention sharpened.
The old man tossed a handful of birdseed toward the grass. Pigeons gathered, bobbing and pecking, hiding the slight movement of his mouth. "I should introduce myself again, since you have probably forgotten my face. My name is Langford Mercer. I am a professor at MIT and one of the lead researchers in Manatech."
Phong remembered the name only faintly, and only vague images of his trip to MIT showed up in his mind. He kept his eyes on Rico, who had resumed licking the ice cream with exaggerated normalcy, though his ears angled toward Mercer. "You picked a dramatic place to talk, Professor."
"I picked a public place with enough noise, enough cameras, and enough private security that killing either of us would create inconvenience," Mercer murmured. "That is the closest thing I currently have to safety."
Dominic took a drink of water, looking like a man enjoying a park.
Mercer's voice lowered further. "The pharmaceutical company Stephan and Kröpcke has been conducting gene-splicing experiments on goblins. They achieved partial success combining goblin baselines with traits taken from trolls, slimes, and even ogres, although success is a generous term when discussing gene splicing on dungeon monsters. The facility was destroyed recently. Hundreds of unstable experiments escaped back into the dungeon."
Phong's thoughts snapped immediately to Lôi's report. Malformed goblins, irredeemably insane according to the mice reports, wearing Painted Skins like living clothing. Goblin and skin moving together after brief disagreement, as if two forms of wrongness had discovered they could survive better as one. His stomach tightened as the pieces met and produced a shape uglier than either alone.
He kept his gaze lowered toward Rico's Starbucks cup. "Why are you telling me this?"
Mercer scattered more seed. The pigeons fluttered, wings beating softly over the sound of children shouting near the pond. "Because the person who destroyed the facility told me to find you and tell you the truth."
Phong's mouth went dry.
Mercer continued, and his next words made the park feel suddenly farther away. "That person was Professor Ulrich."
Rico's claws tightened around the ice cream cone until the wafer cracked.
Phong remembered Professor Ulrich.
Everyone who had been at the group stage draw remembered him, though most of the audience likely remembered the spectacle more than the warning. During the matchup draws, a video had surfaced of Ulrich speaking about invaders of pure energy, his voice strained by terror and conviction, his face gaunt in the way men became gaunt when knowledge ate sleep first and sanity second. Then the video had cut to the report of his death: Professor Ulrich jumping from an asylum in Köln, a suicide framed by officials as the final collapse of a mind already deemed unfit. The message had been pre-recorded months before the event, and no one on the research team understood why the later part of the broadcast had been modified to show Ulrich's speech before his recent demise like that, especially since he had already been suspended from the project for being in the wrong state of mind.
At the time, Phong had filed it under terrifying mysteries that Selena would eventually dissect while swearing at three whiteboards. Now Langford Mercer sat beside him in Central Park, claiming that the dead professor had destroyed a gene-splicing facility and sent a Manatech researcher to warn him.
Phong whispered, "Ulrich is dead."
Mercer's smile was a small, exhausted thing Phong saw only from the corner of his eye. "That is what I believe as well."
"Was it a recording?"
"It was more than a recording and less than a living man. I cannot explain it cleanly, Mr. Tran, and I have spent my life trying to explain things cleanly. He appeared inside the facility systems after the containment breach began, spoke through emergency channels, overrode doors nobody should have been able to override, and directed the surviving staff away from the escaped subjects. Then he told me that the experiments were only the surface symptom, that human who came before began to return from their slumber to demand the ownership of earth, and that if I wanted even a chance of the truth surviving, I had to tell you."
Phong's fingers curled against his knee.
Rico very slowly lowered his broken cone.
Dominic's voice entered softly, still aimed toward the pond. "Why Phong?"
"I asked the same question," Mercer said. "Professor Ulrich said, 'Because the farmer is the bridge between human and the dungeon natives.' I do not know what that means. I suspect you do."
Phong did, and that made it worse.
Yuè.
The camp that was becoming mediation.
The farms that fed dungeon natives and humans.
The kingdom that was not supposed to be a kingdom, but had grown into one naturally since various dungeon species demanded a fitting name to call his camps network.
Mercer reached into his coat slowly enough that Dominic did not move, then withdrew a folded paper and dropped it near the bench leg as though it had slipped from his pocket. "I did not manage to get much that was useful on Stephan and Kröpcke. But this might help."
Phong looked at the folded paper.
A breeze tugged at its corner.
One of Hans's disguised bodyguards began drifting closer from the path, likely noticing the drop.
Mercer stood with the stiffness of age, leaning on his cane. "I remain a professor at MIT and one of Manatech's lead researchers, Mr. Tran. That position gave me access, and safety as long as I remain useful. I suspect the government knew about this plan and supported it. The United States wanting to use modified goblins armed with Manatech technology to force advancement through Floor Three, the New Frontier, hardly surprise anyone. Especially since no country has successfully establish the first stable foothold on Floor Four, the Unknown, as of now. At least, that was the plan before the research facility was blown to bits."
Phong kept his eyes on the pond.
"Professor."
Mercer paused.
"Why help now?"
For several seconds, Mercer did not answer. Then he said, "Because I knew Ulrich. And he said you who are called The Green by the natives of the dungeon... would know what to do." He scattered the last of the birdseed, and the pigeons surged between them in a gray flutter.
He walked away.
Dominic waited until Mercer had blended into the park traffic before glancing toward one of the Tannenbaum guards. The guard moved in a lazy arc, dropped to tie a shoe beside the bench, and palmed the folded paper without making it look like anything other than clumsiness. Rico climbed into Phong's lap, ice cream forgotten, Starbucks cup held against his armor like a talisman.
Phong watched the ducks settle back onto the pond.
A few minutes earlier, the sight had made him feel young.
Now he remembered Ulrich's gaunt face on the group-stage broadcast, the warning about invaders of pure energy, the impossible modification of a pre-recorded video after a dead man's fall from an asylum in Köln, and the way Selena had frozen when lore became too heavy for one mind to hold upright.
Dominic's hand settled gently on his shoulder.
Phong did not look away from the water.
Somewhere beneath the ordinary sunlight of Central Park, another hidden facility had already been blown to bits, hundreds of malformed experiments had returned to the dungeon, and a dead professor had somehow reached across systems to send him the truth.
For the second time that day, Phong thought about going back to work.
This time, being young felt farther away.