The strategy worked.
When the next wave of Soerai came out of the crescent forest, they did not charge right away. They slowed near the outer perimeter.
Their long, twisted bodies crouched low, their backward legs tensed, red eyes narrowed. Then several of them lowered their heads and sniffed the ground where Phong had planted the last seeds from Lyon.
The reaction was instant.
They recoiled.
One of them let out a low, ugly grunt. Another snapped its head sideways as if checking whether the scent could possibly be real. A third took one step closer, sniffed again, then hissed and backed off so fast its claws tore up the dirt.
Behind the first line, more Soerai stirred uneasily, but none of them had crossed where Phong had planted the elf seeds.
For a long minute, Camp Orthrus stayed frozen with them.
Nobody moved, nobody breathed too loudly.
Then, one by one, the Soerai turned and left, slipping back into the forest with the same hateful, wrong movement they had come with.
Phong let out a long, shaking breath.
His theory had been right.
Or, at least, close enough.
Dominic and Alex had already told him how the white tigress came to meet them on Floor 2 because of the bull's complaints. That had been the missing piece. If the tigress cared enough to come because "Little Yama" had complained, then their relationship mattered. The Soerai, as her faithfuls, would not want to trample over the scent of the bull's children and risk drawing the wrath of their goddess.
It was not noble. It was morally questionable.
But it worked.
And right now, that had to be enough.
For a while after the Soerai vanished, Phong did not move.
He sat near the frozen lime-oak, looking out over the clearing and the dark beyond it, and let the silence press into him. The camp had lived, the line had held, the next attack had broken before it even started.
That should have felt like relief.
Instead, the strain hit him all at once.
Exhaustion.
Too many plans stacked on too little sleep, too many fears, too many lives hanging from choices he kept making half out of instinct and half out of terror. Stress came at him in waves, rolling through his body hard enough to make his head throb. He bent forward and buried his face against his knees.
He was too worried to sleep, yet too tired to stay awake. The worst place to be. It reminded him of being sick the day before an important exam.
After a moment he lifted his head just enough to lean it against the frozen bark of the lime-oak, testing whether the cold helped at all. It did, but not by much.
Dominic watched him for a second, then stood.
"I'll take first watch," he said.
No one objected.
Séline and Camille looked toward Phong too.
They were worried. That much was easy to see. But both of them also knew him well enough now to understand that if they tried to tell him to rest, he would refuse. Not because he wanted to suffer, but because his mind would not let him put the weight down while he still believed something might go wrong. And neither of them knew what to say to the one person who could reach him right now.
Alex.
Across the camp, Alex had gone very still again.
But Janet saw through her facade with the sharpness of a woman who survive Manhattan real estate market and the experience of a married woman.
Alex was still angry, still wounded from the argument, and still too proud to let that just vanish because the strategy happened to work. But under all of that, she was worried sick. Every time Phong pressed a hand harder to his temple or bent a little further into himself, Alex's eyes shifted there before she forced them away.
Janet stepped close and leaned in.
"You know," she said quietly, "he's usually the gentler side of your relationship."
Alex did not answer right away.
Janet kept her voice low. "Maybe right now, you should be that for him."
Alex would have come to that conclusion on her own eventually, but a push from Janet helped break that last bit of stubbornness she had.
She looked at Phong once more, really looked this time, and then started walking.
The camp noticed, but nobody said anything. Dominic looked away on purpose. Séline and Camille quietly did the same. Even the lizardmen nearest the line gave the moment the respect of pretending not to see.
Alex stopped beside him.
Phong lifted his head at the sound of her steps and blinked in surprise.
For a second, he looked like he was not sure she was really there.
That hurt her more than she expected, as she knew exactly what he was thinking: that after their fight, after what he had done, he deserved to be left alone with this pain. So she did not let him say any of that.
She crouched, reached for him, and pulled him down before he could protest. The motion was firm, almost automatic. She sat with her back against the frozen lime-oak and guided him until his head rested in her lap.
Phong went still.
"You don't have to," he said softly.
Alex looked down at him with the kind of flat, unimpressed expression that made it clear she had no patience for his self-punishment right now.
"Be quiet."
Then her fingers moved to his temples. She started massaging them slowly, carefully, in steady little circles that took none of the ache away at once but made it easier to breathe through.
Phong closed his eyes.
The pain had not vanished.
But for the first time since she walked over, he could stop holding all of it quite so tightly.
Alex's anger was not gone.
Neither was the argument.
But this was not about winning. This was about him hurting right in front of her and her refusing to let him sit alone in it just because he thought he deserved that.
After a while, Phong said, still with his eyes closed, "I thought you'd leave me alone."
Alex's hand did not stop.
"I considered it."
That got the smallest, tired huff out of him.
Then she added, quieter now, "But I know how your head works."
Phong opened his eyes just enough to look up at her.
Alex kept her gaze on the dark forest instead of meeting his. Her fingers stayed moving against his temples, gentle and sure.
"You did something I hated," she said. "That doesn't mean I stop caring when you're like this."
The words went through him harder than he could answer properly. So he did not try. He just let his eyes fall shut again and rested there in her lap while she kept working the ache out of his temples bit by bit.
Around them, Camp Orthrus settled into uneasy quiet.
And under the frozen lime-oak, with the scent of elf seeds still in the soil and the argument between them still unresolved, Alex chose tenderness anyway.
Phong was asleep within minutes.
Janet looked over from her watch post, then back at Alex, and a small smile tugged at her mouth.
"That means he relaxes in your presence," she said quietly.
Alex did not answer right away. Her fingers were still moving lightly through Phong's hair now, slower than before, one hand still resting near his temple. The weight of his head in her lap felt heavier than usual only because he was letting it be. No guard, no pretending, and no half-awareness held back for duty.
He trusted her enough to drop all of it, and that did something strange to her chest.
Still, even in sleep, Phong did not fully rest easy.
Every now and then, something in the dark behind his closed eyes caught him. His shoulders would tense, his hand would twitch. Once, his whole body gave a little start, like some dream-version of him thought he had lost someone and needed to wake before it became real.
Each time, Alex eased him back down.
A hand on his shoulder, her fingers in his hair, and a quiet whisper, "Everything's fine."
It was no magic, certainly not a skill, but it was enough to pull him away from the edge and back into sleep before he jerked fully awake.
After the third time, Alex had had enough of sitting still and watching fear eat him from the inside even while he slept. So she took the problem into her own hands. With one hand still on Phong, she pulled out her phone with the other and opened the group chat.
Her message came blunt and immediate.
[If we need a distraction without giving Josh a reason to paint us as enemies of humanity, then we use the Black Ant Queen.]
The replies came fast.
Dominic reacted first.
[Go on.]
Alex typed with her usual directness.
[We spoil the information. Level 61 boss. Real threat. Bigger than Death Peak optics. Let public attention swing toward the ant colony instead.]
There was a pause.
Then Emma.
[Wait. The Black Ants have a queen? Level 61?]
Alex was promptly reminded that Emma had not been an ally back when they saw the level 61 Black Ant Queen hovered above camp, before leading her colony away from the Death Peak.
Emma next messages arrived moments afterward.
[That gives me leverage.]
[If the elites learn there is a confirmed level 61 boss tied to an expanding ant colony, they will have a reason to pull back from indulging Josh.]
[The league is too close. Optics need to stay clean. Further diver losses before March would be bad for all of them.]
Alex read that and kept going.
[Exactly.]
Emma answered almost at once.
[And if they think the ants behave anything like ants on Earth, the narrative becomes much easier to control.]
[Expansion of a monster colony. The risk of getting swarmed for taking a wrong step. Competition for resources would also escalate.]
[Much better public threat than "rich idiot pushes toward troll mountain and maybe exposes our raccoon kamen rider."]
Selena chimed in after that.
[Damn it.]
A beat later:
[I forgot about the Ant Queen.]
That got Jake immediately.
[How do you forget a level 61 ant boss.]
Selena's answer came back dry and exhausted.
[Because our lives got crowded with floor bosses, pillars, phoenixes, and dungeon-grown elves.]
[In comparison the ant queen became background noise.]
Joanne jumped in at once.
[That is an insane sentence.]
Janet added:
[It made sense tho.]
Alex could almost hear Emma's sigh just from the text alone:
[You people are broken.]
No one argued.
Selena recovered and returned to the real point.
[Mapping the ant colony would be a huge project.]
[Also, it'd be completely reasonable for a research institution to attempt mapping the ant colony first.]
[If I push that angle, it gives me a better defense against any continued pressure to map Baratok and Death Peak.]
Alex could almost hear the click in Selena's head from across floors and signal lines.
Good.
That meant they had something workable. A better fire to point the world toward.
Then Joanne added:
[If we're doing this, Alex should be the one to post.]
Emma agreed immediately.
[Yes.]
[Arbiter Mindblade. Clean reputation. No-nonsense public image.]
[If Alexandra Vogel says newly confirmed intel points to a level 61 Black Ant Queen, people will take it seriously.]
Alex looked down at Phong in her lap before replying.
He startled once more in his sleep, some little flinch in his brow like even unconsciousness had not managed to pry his hands off everyone else yet.
She smoothed a hand lightly through his hair until he settled again. Then she typed:
[Fine. I'll post.]
The plan moved fast after that.
Alex drafted the "newly found information" with enough detail to sound useful in that plain, overly serious tone she had learnt in med school. The Black Ant Queen, level 61, implication of a boss that had evolve twice and what that could mean to an expanding ants colony. She emphasized the need for caution and renewed mapping effort around the colony. It was the kind of report that demanded responsible attention rather than stoking panic.
Emma, meanwhile, started working her own side of things.
She reached out through media channels and private influence in the same smooth, deadly way rich girls with training in public war would do. By the time Alex's post went live on the Diver Association forum, Emma was already laying the next layer over it.
The Black Ants were a much bigger threat than people realized.
If their behavior mirrored real ants at all, then food intake, territory pressure, and expansion risk had to be treated seriously.
And if Josh's reckless push into troll conflict had stirred more corpses, more biomass, more battlefield waste into the area, then he might actually have made the ant problem worse by accident.
It sounded reasonable. It sounded terrifying. Thus, that angle caught immediately.
Soon enough, topic of discussions on the internet began to shift. Questions about the ant colony, speculation about the Queen floating around by the eternally online groups. Arguments over whether the government had underestimated the threat tangled with concerns about another swarm event. There were calls for proper reconnaissance. The demands that ambitious expansions be paused until the Black Ant risk was understood better skyrocketed.
It was exactly what camp Stymphalian had needed.
Under the frozen lime-oak, Alex read the first wave of reactions in silence.
Then Janet, still nearby, glanced down at Phong and said quietly, "He'd hate that you solved a problem while he was sleeping."
Alex's mouth twitched faintly.
"He can complain when he wakes up."
Janet smiled. "Fine, your household problem I suppose."
The camp around them stayed tense but quieter now. The Soerai had not returned yet. Little Fireball chirped once as if to complain that her favorite spot inside Phong's hoodie was unavailable.
In Alex's lap, Phong slept through the first real shift in the board, unaware that while he was finally resting, his people had started moving the world's gaze somewhere else.