Dominic tried to cheer Phong up on the walk back from the pond.
Phong could tell because Dominic drew in the particular breath he used before making a joke meant to land softly, the kind that usually made bad situations feel a little less like the world had mistaken Team Nemean for its personal complaint department. He expected something about raccoon diplomacy, or Central Park ducks filing a restraining order, or Hans Tannenbaum accidentally hiring bodyguards who now needed waterfowl training. Dominic looked down at Rico, who was riding in Phong's arms with the broken ice cream cone in one paw and the grande Starbucks cup tucked against his Greencap armor, then looked at Phong, opened his mouth, and stopped.
For several steps, only the park spoke.
Children shouted near the playground, tires hummed beyond the trees. Ducks complained from the pond in the distance, perhaps filing oral testimony against Rico's bread aristocracy revolution. The Tannenbaum bodyguards kept their invisible perimeter with such professionalism that Phong only noticed them because he now measured every ordinary thing by how well it hid danger. The folded paper Mercer had dropped was already with one of Hans's men, sealed in a small evidence sleeve and passed through enough hands that normal people watching would see nothing more suspicious than a jogger checking his shoelace and a tourist adjusting his camera bag.
Dominic finally sighed. "I was going to say something encouraging."
Phong glanced over. "What happened?"
"I started counting recent existential threats attached to your life and ran out of courage."
Rico lifted his coffee. "Cowardice. The math goblin claims another victim."
Dominic ignored him with practiced grace. "I miss when your biggest problem was doing laundry in the dungeon."
Phong let out a quiet laugh, more breath than sound. "I miss when laundry was the biggest problem too."
"It was still a strange problem," Dominic said. "Most people do not have to ask whether monster blood stains come out better with cold water, detergent, or emotional denial."
"Cold water first, then whatever the hell you want to use inside the laundry shop," Phong said automatically.
Dominic pointed at him. "See? Simpler era."
It should have helped more than it did. It helped a little, which was one of the reasons Phong loved Dominic like family. The man could stand beside a nightmare and make a joke without pretending the nightmare was somehow better than it actually was. Yet Mercer's words sat in Phong's mind like a stone under the tongue. Stephan and Kröpcke splicing goblins with troll, slime, and ogre traits. Hundreds of unstable experiments released back into the dungeon. Professor Ulrich, supposedly dead after jumping from an asylum in Köln, appearing through facility systems and blew up a research facilitz. The government possibly backing modified goblin forces armed with Manatech equipment to satisfy the US superiority complex.
Phong looked toward the skyline beyond the trees.
"I truly do need more surface allies," he said.
Dominic's expression turned serious immediately.
Phong hated that he could hear himself becoming practical again, as if his mind had learned to fold panic into planning before the fear even finished arriving. "Yuè can function inside the dungeon for a while. The allies there have their own interests now. But this Ulrich situation means the surface is stranger than I thought. Manatech, Stephan and Kröpcke, government support, maybe private facilities, maybe pure energy entities hiding inside institutions. Hans is useful, Selena is useful, the Lamberts and Delacroix are useful, but this is bigger than a clubhouse circle."
Dominic nodded. "You want people who can move outside diver politics."
"Yeah. Powerful allies, too. Someone like my cousin, but I doubt it would be that easy given politics, governments, and all that..."
"And trustworthy too? You're gonna need every god of luck that was ever worshiped on your side for that to happen."
"I know."
Rico took a solemn sip from his sweet coffee flavor water. "Add ducks. Ducks survive everything through spite."
Phong looked down at him. "You chased them."
"And they survived. My point strengthens."
By the time they returned to the Tannenbaum clubhouse, the attempt at ordinary afternoon had fully dissolved. The building's security posture had changed while they were gone, though an outsider might have seen only quiet staff, clean glass, and expensive calm. Phong saw the doubled personnel near the side entrance, the mana-tech scanner humming behind decorative paneling, the way one receptionist's eyes flicked to Dominic before returning to a screen.
Jake met them near the private elevator.
He looked wrong.
Jake usually wore worry like a joke he had not finished telling. Now his face had this serious look normally reserved to floor bosses, relic holding bosses, and everything related to the Nine Secrets. "You're back," he said. "Good. Emma wants you in the secured room."
Phong's stomach sank. "What happened?"
Jake glanced at Rico, then at Dominic, then back at Phong. "You need to see it."
That was not an answer.
That made it worse.
The secured meeting room was already full when Jake led them in. Emma stood at the front near the projection screen, arms folded, tablet in one hand and expression carved into tactical displeasure. Alex sat near the center table with her fingers laced together, eyes focused on the blank screen as if she was still seeing whatever had been on it moments earlier. Joanne leaned back in a chair with both hands over her face, groaning softly into her palms. Jack and Alexei stood beside each other near the wall, both wearing the same grim disbelief. Séline had made it halfway to the side door leading toward Selena's temporary research rooms, and Vanessa currently had one hand hooked firmly around the back of her collar.
Selena herself stood beside Vanessa, looking pale, furious, fascinated, and sleep-deprived enough to threaten academic violence if anyone asked whether she was all right.
Rico climbed from Phong's arms onto the table and looked around. "Wonderful. Everyone has the expression of someone who accidentally swallowed a fly."
Joanne lowered her hands. "I refuse to believe what I just saw."
Jack nodded once. "Same."
Alexei's mouth tightened. "Someone like Josh does not change that quickly."
Alex looked up at Phong when he entered.
Her expression was the one that worried him most.
It was thoughtful. Not angry, not disgusted. Thoughtful. Which meant she had already moved past whether the information was pleasant and started considering what it could become.
"What happened?" Phong asked.
Emma gestured to the chair beside Alex. "Sit first."
Phong did.
Alex's hand found his almost immediately beneath the table.
That did not reassure him.
Emma turned toward the screen. "I gave the Great Burrow mice cameras."
Phong stared at her.
Of all the opening lines he had expected, that was not one of them.
Rico slapped one paw on the table. "Tiny spy cinema!"
Emma ignored him. "After the report about Josh crying near Croak Wood, I realized we were relying too heavily on verbal relay from scouts whose senses are excellent but whose descriptions are shaped by unfamiliar priorities. They can tell us a man cries, a monster smells wrong, or a corridor tastes like old stone, but if we want to analyze equipment, formations, architecture, and unknown skills, footage is more useful. So I had miniature cameras adapted for Great Burrow handling and sent them through Yuè's scout network."
Phong absorbed that with a strange mix of admiration and embarrassment. "I should have thought of that."
"You were coordinating a kingdom, a tournament, a possible Windrider war, a Greencap civil conflict, Selena's lore collapse, and a park meeting with a terrified Manatech researcher," Emma said, already knew about his meeting with Mercer thanks to her father body guards. "Delegation exists because people have limits."
"That sounded almost kind.
"It was tactical kindness. Do not get used to it."
Rico raised his coffee cup. "I support spy mice."
"Of course you do," Joanne said. "You support anything that sounds illegal and adorable, double if they were the same thing."
Emma tapped her tablet, and the projection screen came alive.
The footage was low to the ground, angled upward, and shaky in the specific way of something filmed by a creature small enough to run beneath broken planks and through gaps in ruined stone. The view showed Floor Three terrain near Saitama, though the architecture dominating the frame did not look like the ruins Phong associated with Croak Wood or the older dungeon sites. A Japanese foothold rose ahead, built like a castle transplanted into hostile dungeon geography: layered wooden and stone walls, sloped roofs, defensive towers, mana-lanterns hanging under eaves, and barricades reinforced with modern materials. The place was battered but standing, smoke rising from one corner while defenders moved along the walls with bows, rifles, spears, and spell foci.
Then the camera shifted lower.
Black bunnies swarmed the outer defenses.
The difference between them and the Greencap Bunnies was immediate and unsettling. Greencap could be ridiculous, brave, formal, dramatic, foolish, and deeply political, but they were people. They had customs, officers, banners, grudges, jokes, and the painful dignity of a kingdom under pressure. These black bunnies had none of that visible intelligence. Their fur was matted. Their eyes shone with ravenous, almost rabid intensity. Their bodies moved in packs that slammed against barricades, clawed at wood, bit through ropes, and threw themselves into danger with instinctive hunger rather than formation discipline. Some were larger than they should have been. Some had wrong jaws. Some twitched as if their nervous systems were being plucked by invisible fingers.
The footage jolted as the mouse camera ducked behind a cracked stone.
Then Josh Harlan appeared on screen.
Phong's first reaction was physical. His hand tightened under Alex's.
Josh looked tired.
That alone was strange. Not tired in the polished way public figures allowed cameras to see after a staged hardship. Tired like someone who had been sleeping badly in armor, eating too quickly, and discovering that fear did not respect family money. His face still carried the scar on his left cheek, past the eye and toward the forehead, the mark from the Greencap captain who had given him something real to remember. His gear was better than most defenders' gear, of course. Josh Harlan would probably wear expensive equipment into the apocalypse. But the posture was different.
He was not posing.
"Left wall, rotate!" Josh shouted. "Do not chase the small ones. They are baiting you toward the breach. Mathias, cover the shrine gate. Shirlene, for the last time, eyes on the medics!"
A black bunny the size of a wolf vaulted over a shattered barricade and slammed into a Japanese defender. Josh blinked forward, caught the creature's charge with a mana-reinforced strike, and took the impact badly enough that his shoulder snapped back. He grimaced, decapitating another monster rabbit, then peeled it off the defender. With a decisive motion, Josh dragged the wounded man behind cover.
Phong heard Joanne groan again behind him.
"I hate this," she said. "I hate that he did that no matter how many times I watched it."
The footage continued.
Josh moved through the fight with a clarity Phong had never seen from him. He gave orders that made sense. He placed the Boston Jokers teammates where their skills mattered. He used his blink not only to attack, but to move messages, pull defenders away from collapsing points, and intercept attacks aimed at people slower than him. He shouted at one of his own divers for overextending, then apologized to a Japanese archer after knocking him aside to take a hit from a leaping black rabbit whose teeth would have taken the archer's throat. He looked afraid during parts of it. He kept fighting anyway.
Jack's voice was low. "That is not the Josh from before."
Alexei shook his head, troubled. "I do not think someone like him could change so fast."
Alex finally spoke, and her words made Phong colder than the footage did. "A Josh who remains spoiled, cruel, and cowardly is dangerous because he has money, connections, and no restraint. A Josh who matures into an actual leader is more dangerous."
Everyone looked at her.
She kept watching the screen. "He knows how elites think. He knows how to play cameras. He already has a name people recognize. If he becomes brave for real, if he learns responsibility under pressure, then people who wanted him redeemed will have something solid to build around. Manufactured heroism is easy to attack when it smells fake. Real growth is harder."
Phong said nothing.
He remembered Emma's livestream exposing Josh's lie about her death on Floor Three, remembered the media edits trying to save his image after the truth came out, remembered the way public relations had tried to dress cowardice as tragedy and selfishness as complexity. This footage did not feel like that. It did not look like a camera crew had arranged a flattering angle. It came from a mouse hiding in a crack, watching a besieged foothold while defenders fought rabid black monsters in smoke and splinters. Josh did not know he was being recorded. That made the heroism, if that word could be used without choking, much harder to dismiss.
The screen showed Josh falling to one knee after taking a hit meant for a medic.
One of his teammates reached for him.
Josh shoved the man toward the wall. "Move! They breach in groups of three. Count them!"
The footage cut there.
Emma let the screen go dark.
The room remained heavy.
Phong understood now why everyone looked sick. Hatred was easier when the hated person stayed simple. Josh Harlan had made himself very easy to hate. He had earned it. He had hurt people, lied, exploited power, stolen from Greencaps, and treated dungeon lives as tools. Yet the footage showed someone who might be changing under the weight of fear, grief, and whatever horror he had discovered about his mother. That did not erase what he had done. It complicated what came next, which was often worse for planning.
Phong leaned back slowly. "Replay it."
Emma did.
This time, Phong watched for details beyond Josh. The Japanese castle foothold had disciplined defenders, but their supply distribution looked uneven. The black bunnies attacked in waves without elegant command, though their pack instincts were strong enough to test weak points repeatedly. Josh's team had become integrated with the defense rather than standing apart like foreign specialists. Several Japanese divers obeyed Josh's commands without hesitation, suggesting he had earned at least temporary authority through battlefield performance. The former Boston Jokers looked less polished than before, more worn, and more connected to one another by survival than branding.
The second viewing made Phong's discomfort worse.
When the projection ended, he reached over and turned it off himself.
The room's lights seemed too warm after the footage.
Phong looked at Emma. "That is real."
"Yes," she said.
Joanne slumped deeper into her chair. "Unfortunately."
Dominic's expression held sadness rather than surprise now. "People can become better. It's rather unexpected that Josh still count as one, though."
Joanne looked at him. "Agree."
Dominic did not deny it.
Alex's hand tightened around Phong's. "The question is whether he becomes better before or after someone uses him."
That was the heart of it.
Josh's grief over Daniel Harlan, his fear about his mother and the third eye on her palm, his presence near the Saitama foothold, the unknown supplies reaching Greencap Squad Seven, the changed Mrs. Harlan, the possible dungeon entity inside surface power structures, and now Mercer's report about government-backed gene-splicing experiments; the pieces did not form a clean picture yet, but they were beginning to lean toward one another.
Phong exhaled.
"I met Professor Langford Mercer in Central Park."
Selena, who had been subtly inching toward the door again, stopped so abruptly that Vanessa bumped into her.
Vanessa tightened her grip on Selena's collar. "There. See? Staying paid off."
Selena's eyes sharpened. "Mercer from MIT? Manatech Mercer?"
"Yes."
That piqued her interest in a way the Josh footage, unsettling as it was, had failed to do fully. Her whole posture changed, exhaustion burning away under the sudden fire of research hunger. "What did he say?"
Phong told them.
He described the bench, the birdseed, the warning not to turn, and Mercer's introduction as a professor at MIT and one of Manatech's lead researchers. He repeated the report about Stephan and Kröpcke conducting gene-splicing experiments on goblins, adding troll, slime, and ogre traits with enough success to create unstable subjects and enough failure to make hundreds of them monstrous. He connected it to Lôi's report of malformed goblins wearing Painted Skins in a symbiotic relationship. He explained Mercer's claim that the facility had been blown apart, that hundreds of unstable experiments had escaped back into the dungeon, and that the person who destroyed the facility and sent Mercer to tell Phong the truth was Professor Ulrich.
Selena went very still.
This time, it was not a broken CPU freeze.
It was focus.
Phong continued. He reminded them of the group-stage draw, Ulrich's recorded warning about invaders of pure energy, the report of his suicide by jumping from an asylum in Köln, and the mystery of the video's later portion being modified to show his speech before his death despite him being suspended from the project for mental instability. Then he added Mercer's stranger claim: that Ulrich had appeared in facility systems during the containment breach, spoken through emergency channels, overridden doors, guided survivors, warned that the experiments were only a surface symptom, and said that pure energy entities were moving through institutional blind spots.
Selena's breathing quickened.
"Did Mercer give you anything?"
Phong nodded toward Emma. "Hans's guard retrieved a paper. It is being scanned and checked."
Emma tapped her tablet. "Preliminary scan shows no obvious curse, tracker, poison, or active mana signature. Physical and digital copies are being prepared for isolated review."
Selena pointed at her. "Send it to my room. Also give me the raw Great Burrow footage, the Josh clip, the Croak Wood coordinates, the Saitama foothold map, and every known public connection among Manatech, Stephan and Kröpcke, Harlan interests, and government dungeon advancement contracts."
Emma's eyes narrowed slightly. "That is several investigations."
"Yes," Selena said. "They are pretending to be separate, which is exactly why I dislike them."
Rico lifted his Starbucks cup. "Research Lady has awakened."
Vanessa released Selena's collar slowly, as if testing whether she would bolt toward the study. Selena did not bolt. She walked to the table, pulled a chair out, and sat down with intensity.
Phong looked at the dark projector screen.
Josh Harlan had changed, or something had changed him, or hardship had cracked enough of his old self that something better could be seen underneath. Professor Ulrich was dead, or not dead enough. Goblin experiments had escaped. Painted Skins had found new hosts. Surface institutions might have opened doors for pure energy invaders while pretending they were building weapons for Floor Four. Team Nemean had one week before their next match, and that week was already filling with threats that cared nothing for brackets.
Phong thought about dropping out of the diver league for one moment. Compare to the Night Kings, Grey Ones, whatever was happening with Ulrich and Kitahara was bigger than some foolish entertainment event. Then logic hit him, and Phong swept the thought under the rug.
The tournament remained their strongest tool for leverage and scout for potential allies. Dropping out now would be the same as shooting themselves on the foot..
Dominic reached over and placed a hand on Phong's shoulder again.
This time, he did not try to joke.
Phong appreciated that too.
"All right," Phong said quietly. "We treat Josh as dangerous in a new way, we treat Mercer's warning as credible until proven otherwise, and we find out whether the same hand is touching the Saitama foothold, Squad Seven's supplies, and those goblin experiments."
Emma nodded.
Selena was already typing.
Rico looked around the room, then raised one paw with solemn gravity.
"Also," he said, "we investigate whether ducks are involved."
Joanne threw a pen at him.
Rico dodged with the reflexes of a creature who had more intrusive thoughts than a football team combined and somehow survived anyway, and for half a second, the room remembered how to breathe. Then Emma turned the projector back on, and the changed face of Josh Harlan stared at them from the battlefield smoke.