The white tigress looked up at Phong from the frozen steps below the cliff and smiled with a kind of calm cruelty that felt worse than open malice.
Then she cracked a smile, one that was devoid of any kindness, humor, or warmth.
"I am impressed," she said, looking at Phong as if he was a puzzle she had not expected to enjoy. "I underestimated human cleverness. I did not think you would use one war to stop another."
Her tiger ears twitched once.
"That was very entertaining."
The cold around her thickened.
"And because I am now so impressed," she went on, voice smooth as fresh snow and twice as cruel, "I think it would be far more exciting if you stayed here on Floor 2 for a while longer. Imagine it! You trapped in Camp Orthrus, my faithfuls pressing you day after day, while the war between Joshua Harlan and the trolls unfolds without your interference."
Phong felt Alex tense beside him.
The white tigress lifted one hand and gave the smallest wave. And at the center of camp, the newly grown lime-oak clone froze solid. The trunk locked under glassy ice in a single instant, the leaves turned brittle silver, the roots under the ground screamed through the system link so sharply that Phong almost flinched.
Alex swore under her breath.
Behind them, Dominic had come up from the work line the moment the temperature dropped. Séline and Camille were with him, both already reading the danger in the floor boss's face and posture.
Dominic stepped forward before anyone else could.
"That's bullshit."
Séline's voice came right after his, colder. "You are doing this on purpose."
Camille did not raise her tone, but the quiet edge in it was sharper than shouting. "You are picking on us."
The tigress shrugged.
"Yes."
The answer was so shameless that for a second nobody knew what to do with it. Then she added, "And what will you do about it?"
That silenced them harder than a threat would have.
Because she was right. Nothing. They could do absolutely nothing about it when a god-like being decided to be petty. Nothing direct, anyway.
The White Tigress gaze drifted back to Phong.
"I know you can contact the eldest," she said.
The words landed like a stone dropped into still water.
Phong's jaw tightened, his hands stopped halfway through reaching for his menu system.
The white tigress tilted her head slightly. "And as you have noticed, I have never broken the boundary the... how do you called big brother again? Ah... Sky Emperor. I have never broken the boundary he imposed. Not directly." Her smile sharpened. "Even if I had, how could I possibly know better? I am merely war-crazed little tiger who understand very little about politics."
Alex made a low, furious sound.
Phong clenched his teeth so hard his jaw hurt.
Because now he understood exactly how she was playing this.
She knew enough to skirt the line, enough to provoke without stepping cleanly into defiance, enough to wrap herself in her own nature as an excuse while making sure every consequence still landed where she wanted it.
It was infuriating.
It was deliberate.
And right now, it was not the problem he could afford to indulge. So instead of wasting breath yelling at a floor boss who had decided she felt like being extra vicious today, Phong moved. He opened his phone, got into the group chat, and sent messages fast.
He shared Selena's condition, in case Alexei, Emma and the 3Js had missed the video call from Vanessa. Phong told them about rough shape of his distraction plan, the fact that the new camp on Floor 2 would not be able to assist for now, and the fact that his group were about to be pinned in place.
By the time Phong finished, the white tigress was already turning away.
She walked back toward the frozen lake, every step still answered by rising ice beneath her boots.
Without looking back, she said, "Try to make it even more entertaining for me, farmer."
Then she left.
The cold lingered after her like a sneer.
For the rest of the afternoon, Camp Orthrus braced.
The frozen lime-oak stayed locked in ice at the camp's center like a warning.
Phong checked it three times, found no answer, and forced himself to stop before frustration made him stupid. The camp shifted from construction into defense. Jack was not here, so they would have no way to patch the partial walls up with Stone Warden abilities. That hurt like hell. They had numbers, but not enough. There were good fighters presented, but lacking both Jack and Alexei compromised their frontline greatly, and the Tortura would appreciate Joanne being here.
Still, it would have to do.
By dusk, the first of the tigress's faithfuls appeared.
Twenty figures stepped out from the forest.
They were barely humanoid. Their skin was greenish-blue, the color of drowned flesh left too long in bad water. Their hair hung in wild, filthy lengths, and the ends curled upward against gravity like dead things refusing the proper direction. Tusks jutted from the corners of their mouths. Their eyes were blood red, bright enough to catch the fading light. Worst of all were the legs. Their knees bent backward, not like any mammal Phong knew, but like the hind joints of grasshoppers or other insects.
One of them turned its head fully around, 180 degree, and stared at camp over its own shoulder.
Janet swore softly.
Alex's voice came low and hard. "What are they?"
Séline checked the status read and cursed in French.
"Only a race name."
Camille answered for her.
"Soerai."
That was all the system would give them.
No useful detail, no warning, no levels, no stats. Only a race name was visible. They didn't have "???" for everything like a typical floor boss, nor did they lack a stats menu entirely like Rico. Another kind of anomalies in the system just decided to show up to attack camp Othrus at a Pillar's beck and call, apparently.
The Soerai attacked almost the moment they were seen. They came in long, springing bursts, backward-jointed legs eating ground at a speed that looked wrong to the human eye. Some ran low on all four. Some leaped from trees to trees. One snapped its head back around in the middle of a charge just because it could.
"Positions!" Dominic barked.
The camp answered.
Dominic took the front with Alex, both of them moving to the strongest lane of attack. Janet flew up high and moved to one flank. Séline and Camille flowed toward the outer edges where they could fend off anything trying to break past the main line. The lizardmen grabbed spears and locked into defensive shield formation with the clean discipline of experienced warriors. The Kamohai took the rougher angles near the lake side, less organized but dangerous enough to matter.
Phong did not pretend to be useful in direct combat. He moved exactly where he should: straight into the middle of camp, near the frozen lime-oak clone, out of the way and protected enough not to force someone else to babysit him mid-fight.
The Soerai hit harder than expected. They were strong, stronger than Phong liked, but luckily not on the scale of the elves would have with their level 120. That much became clear almost immediately. If these had been children of the White Tigress in the same way the elves were children of Horns of the Earth, then this camp would have died right here.
Dominic learned the first one's rhythm by taking a slash across his shield and then driving his shoulder into its chest hard enough to break its footing. He groaned at the stinky mucus that covered the Soerai from head to toes that lessened his blow significantly. Just in case, Janet tossed him a piece of Arrogant Ginger. Alex's psychic spear pinned another mid-leap and slammed it into the ground before it could reach the inner line. The psychic Dragon Slayer spun and cleave at a third Soerai. They shrieked in pain as their mucus could not protect their mind from the pure psychic pain caused by an Arbiter Mindblade. Séline and Camille went to work with their usual precision, striking limbs and joints and openings faster than the things could quite adjust.
The lizardmen fought in tighter formation, their spears holding the line in short, brutal thrusts.
The Kamohai were uglier in motion, but their pure physical strength and savagery were enough to push the Soerai back when the latter came too close.
Still, the pressure kept building.
The Soerai were too fast and erratic even for dungeon fauna's standards. They bounced off one approach, then came back from another with that horrible insect-leg movement making every distance harder to judge.
In the middle of it, Phong felt something ring through the soil.
The plants.
They were ringing through the ground like struck wires: mutation response.
His breath caught for half a second.
Under immediate threat from the Soerai, on Floor 2, they were beginning to change.
His hypothesis might have been right.
There might be a cap on how many plants could mutate on one floor. A limit of pressure, of attention, of twisted dungeon capacity. Floor 1 had already filled that threshold with everything Camp Stymphalian had become. But Floor 2 still had room. The basil leaves shivered, the dill bent erratically in the windless dusk, the tomatoes pulsed under their skin like hearts learning to hate.
Phong stared for one second too long, caught between fear and vindication.
Then another Soerai slammed into the outer defense, and Camp Orthrus shook around him as the first true night of siege began.
Phong watched the battlefield silently, with the part of his mind that was better at logistic than actual battle. Ever since the dungeon first showed up, he had realized he was better at working with spreadsheets, recognizing patterns than making snap, quick decisions anyway.
So back at the center of camp, observing the fight while not becoming anyone's liability was where he was useful.
Phong noticed how the weeping onions failed first.
Their gas rolled low and thick through the kill lanes, enough to choke most living things into panic, but the Soerai did not cough, did not gag, did not even slow the way enemies were supposed to when the air turned hostile. They did not even pretend that they need to breath.
Phong saw it, filed it away, and stopped expecting that line to help.
Bonktatoes disappointed him next.
They were not fully useless, but nowhere near good enough. The Soerai were coated in a slick layer of mucus that made blunt impact slide wrong. Bonktato vines still hit hard, still sent bodies tumbling if they landed cleanly, but hit that would have broken bones was reduced to mere nuisance. Too much of the force bled off across that foul coating.
Garlic mines were worse.
The Soerai moved too fast and too strangely. Their backward-jointed legs gave them disgusting, grasshopper-like bursts of motion, and more than once Phong watched one spring out of the danger zone a split second before the main explosion fully went off. The traps still punished groups and bad angles, but not with the clean reliability they had showed against the lizardmen, the ant, and Josh's assassins.
The chilies, though.
The old reliable, the first plant to mutate a defensive variant, still worked.
Angry Chili launchers spat shot after shot down the approach lines. Green chili pods burst and burned, capsaicin and heat clung to the Soerai's mucus, doing what blunt force and gas could not. They screamed with gods know what, but the pain were sharp enough to count. And so, the chilies became the backbone of the defense.
Up in the trees, the Tortura proved their worth all over again.
From the tree houses they had already started building, the exiled tortoise archers fired with old, patient cruelty. Every shot came from cover, every kill made the next line harder for the Soerai to maintain. Whenever one of the creatures bounced too high, too eager, or paused just a fraction too long after landing, an arrow found it. No arrows were wasted. Their firing rate was nothing to boast, their kill rate was nothing to scoff at.
The Kamohai fought well too.
They were loud, they were violent, and they constantly demanded a raise.
"This was not in the food contract!" one of them shouted after carving open a Soerai flank and nearly losing an arm to the answering claws. "These lunatics worship the Tiger Titan!"
"Fight first, bargain later!" a lizardman barked back.
"Food now, then fight better!"
Phong might have laughed if the situation were less miserable.
The lizardmen, at least, kept their discipline.
Their captain moved through the defense line with calm authority, spear flickering where it needed to, shield angles correcting weaker points before the Soerai could exploit them. His warnings came sharp and clear over the noise.
"Avoid the claws!"
That got repeated more than once.
Because they needed the constant reminder.
The Soerai's talons carried the same mucus that coated their bodies, and any wound from it began rotting in minutes. One Kamohai took a shallow slash to the side and nearly lost the whole patch of flesh before the lizardman mages and what little healing stock they had on hand could slow the spread. Dominic, Séline and Camille only survived direct confrontation that long thanks to Arrogant Ginger.
Every exchange came with more caution, more distance, more hatred.
The fighting lasted nearly an hour.
Nearly a full hour of ugly pressure.
By the end of it, the first wave of Soerai lay dead or broken across the approach to Camp Orthrus. The surviving defenders were breathing hard, slick with sweat, blood, and dungeon grime. The air smelled of capsaicin, rot, and burning fungal residue from the plants that had gone off under pressure.
And then the Tortura called down from the trees.
"More incoming!"
Those two words tasted like bile.
The old archer above them did not waste a word.
"Herd of Soerai moving this way."
The camp went still, knowing too well that the next answer was going to hurt.
Phong swore under his breath, then louder. One ugly curse in Vietnamese slipped out before he bothered to translate his frustration into anything more useful.
"A floor boss's whim," he muttered, looking out toward the forest, "and suddenly we go from pioneers to caged birds."
No one disagreed, because that was exactly what Bai Hu had done. Camp Orthrus had been a foothold. Then a home. Then, in one cold gesture, it had become a pen.
The Kamohai made their decision first.
Once it was clear this was not a single raid but the beginning of a longer defense against things that threw themselves at camp like rabid zombies, the sharkfolk started pulling back with the blunt honesty of mercenaries who knew the terms of their contract.
They had fought for food, and they had fought well. They had upheld their end of the deal with honor but long-term static defense against Tiger worshipers was a different price. One of them met Phong's eyes and jerked his head toward the stores.
"You will run out of crops paying this rate."
Phong knew it too, so he nodded.
The Kamohai left after that, peeling away from the line and back toward safer water routes where their hunger and skill would be worth something they could actually collect.
Phong did not hold it against them. They were mercenaries. They had never promised anything deeper than food for battle. True loyalty was not theirs to give lightly.
Janet, wiping blood from one forearm, put voice to the next problem.
"Our utility plants."
Everyone looked at her.
She said it plainly.
"We didn't prepare for a siege. We prepared for an outpost."
That landed harder than any criticism.
They had chilies, garlic mines, bonktatoes. They had solid defense plants. But the consumables, the delicate ones, the buffs and support plants, the ones that kept minds and bodies and damage under control in prolonged stress... those stocks were far too low for this kind of attrition.
"We won't have enough Empathy Enoki," Janet said. "Not enough Relaxing Shiitake."
Her eyes shifted to one of the lizardmen treating a claw wound with clear concern.
"And most importantly, not enough Arrogant Ginger for another siege."
That last one mattered too much. The gingers were the only reason Dominic, Séline and Camille could fight the Soerai heads on. But they had not stocked for this. Not in the quantities that would have mattered for a siege.
Not here.
Phong didn't plan for the lime-oak elevator to be locked down like that. He had thought they could just use the storage at camp Stymphalian via the lime-oak network, so he had kept the utility plants to minimum. Now he realized how wrong he had been.
Phong looked away from the line and out toward Lake Baratok. Only then did the full shape of the problem settle properly into place.
The lake surface was still frozen.
White Tigress had not merely froze the lake solid to farm aura.
She had severed their escape route to floor 1, both via the tree and the usage of lizardmen vessels.
But that meant more than trapping Camp Orthrus.
It meant the lizardmen and what remained of Kamohai support could not quickly reinforce Death Peak either. The floor boss had not only penned Team Nemean's half-built second camp.
She had cut the water road that tied two battlefields together.
Josh's war against the trolls.
The siege against Camp Orthrus.
Both constrained at once.
By one act of cold.
Phong exhaled slowly, staring at the frozen lake and feeling the bitterness settle properly this time. He had thought of that Pillar of War as cruel, petty even. A war lover with the instincts of a bully and the patience of a titan. All of that was true, but it was still not enough.
Because this was strategy and not just mere malice.
Elegant, layered, infuriating strategy.
Phong rubbed one hand over his face and let the truth sit.
They had been targeted by a master strategist of a floor boss who just happened to enjoy war too much.
And things were much worse than what he had initially thought.