That night, the argument came fast.
Alex did not wait.
"I'll do it."
Phong looked up from the rough map of the camp and stared at her. "No."
She crossed her arms. "It's a duel."
"It's a trap."
"It can be both."
He stood immediately. "No."
The firmness in his voice made everyone nearby go quiet.
Alex did not back down.
"I'm the best choice."
"No, you're the most obvious choice."
"And the strongest."
Phong shook his head hard. "That thing is level forty-seven."
Alex's eyes narrowed. "So."
"So," he snapped, "that is the same level range as the Greencap captain."
That landed.
Alex eased a bit. Not because she was scared of an opponent with a higher level than she did, but because she respected the bunny that was being compared to Đăm Bhi.
Phong went on before anyone could cut in.
"Worse," he said, looking toward the dark forest, "If it could command the Soerai, then it means something terrifying."
Alex went still. The others did too.
Phong's voice dropped lower.
"The Soerai are followers. Fine. They are dangerous, their mucus is a pain to deal with, and they give no exp when killed. But they were merely followers. That thing is different." He looked back at her. "Đăm Bhi is a true child of the White Tigress. The elves, children of Horns of the Earth, start at level 120. Sure! Đăm Bhi's level is below them. But don't forget that it is still in the same category as the elves."
The air in the room shifted.
Because if Phong was right, then they were challenged by the blood of a Titan to a duel to the death. It was not just another elite monster, not just any strong champion, either. That would be easier to deal with. Tomorrow, they could be fighting something born directly under a Pillar's shadow.
Alex's jaw tightened, but she did not yield.
"I should still do it."
Phong laughed once in disbeliefs, which was so rare of him that it surprise everyone. He dragged his palm across his hair, voice lowered:
"This is not a spar with the Greencap captain."
"No," Alex said. "It isn't."
"Then stop talking like it is."
She stepped closer. "I'm talking like someone has to fight it."
"And I'm talking like losing our heaviest hitter, no matter the outcome, is stupid. Losing you in the defense against the Soerai because of strawberry debuff is bad enough. If..."
He finished that ugly what-ifs with a shiver instead.
That made Dominic finally speak.
"You think she'd need the Strawberry?"
Phong rounded on him. "Of course she would."
Alex answered before Dominic could.
"I would."
That hit him like a punch.
"Absolutely not."
Alex's expression hardened instantly.
"Phong."
"No."
He was louder now, and for once he did not care.
"You're betting on the honor of something we know nothing about. You're assuming it won't cheat, won't twist the terms, won't kill you anyway if it feels like it." He pointed toward the forest. "And even if you win, you'll be useless afterward."
Alex's mouth flattened. "I know the risk."
"No, you know the risk and you're doing it anyway."
"That's what you did."
Her words landed hard enough it staggered Phong, forcing him to take a step back just by hearing it.
Their first big fight had not gone away. It had only gone quiet. And now, Alex was holding up a mirror. Phong saw his reflection and hated that she was right enough for it to hurt. Still, he did not bend.
"The Berserking Strawberry gives you one minute of winning and a full day of being half-dead."
"More than enough for a duel."
"That's not certainty."
"It's enough."
Phong looked at her and groaned. "You sound exactly like me."
Alex eyed him once, unfazed. "Yes."
She was showing him himself. The same stubbornness he had shown when he planted the seeds. The same refusal to step back when fear for others got tangled with decision. Alex had just wrapped them up and shipped it to him in a present box.
Phong opened his mouth again.
Dominic cut across it.
"I respect her decision."
That made Phong turn sharply.
Dominic did not flinch.
"Same way I respected your decision to plant those seeds."
Janet stepped in too.
"And your option is a gamble," she said. "You hope the dills, the basils, and the tomatoes mutation would finish in a useful way. You don't know what they will become. You don't control their mutation. The only thing you know for sure is they would mutate a defensive variant under Đăm Bhi's pressure."
Phong looked between them.
Janet held his gaze.
"This is the same kind of ugly choice."
He wanted to argue, to say it was different, to say Alex was flesh and blood. He wanted to counter with Alex was not a plant, not a hypothesis, and not something he could afford to lose. But the words got caught on a different memory.
Rico.
The troll war.
The raccoon asked to go. Phong had given him permission in the end simply because loyalty mattered, because agency mattered. And because sometimes you did not get to keep people safe by locking them behind your own fear.
That memory took the fight out of his next breath.
He looked at Alex again.
His anger, his fear, they were all still there, mixing in his guts like an ugly concoction of human worse nature. But now, there was something else in there: insight. He saw exactly what he was doing because she had already lived it from the other side.
Slowly, painfully, Phong yielded ground.
His voice came out rough.
"…fine."
Alex did not smile, neither did she soften.
But some of the hard edge in her shoulders shifted just slightly.
Phong rubbed a hand over his face and looked away toward the growing beds outside.
One day.
One duel to the death.
The unknown potential of plants about to mutated.
A child of a Pillar.
All of that stacking on top of each other, and now the woman he was going to marry telling him, in the hardest way possible, that she would make her own desperate choices too.
Phong did not know what to say after that, so he stopped trying altogether. Instead, he pulled Alex closer.
It wasn't dramatic, wasn't making a vow of eternal devotion to the mountain and the sea. It was with both arms around her and his forehead resting briefly against hers, as if contact itself could argue where words kept failing him.
Alex felt it immediately.
The tremble in his fingers.
She softened a little, enough that only someone who knew her very well would have noticed.
"I'm not that fragile," she murmured.
Phong did not answer.
Alex kept going, her voice lower now.
"I'm not a damsel." She held his gaze. "I can protect myself."
Then, after the smallest pause:
"And you."
That did it.
Something in his face changed. It was not anger, it was not stubbornness. It was something old, something too painful to keep on his waking moments else he'd cease to function, something buried deep within half forgotten nightmares.
When he spoke, his voice came out quiet.
"That's exactly what my uncle was to me."
Alex felt like she was hit with a petrification skill of those body snatchers.
Phong looked down for a second, then back at her.
"Strong. Reliable. The protector." His jaw tightened once. "Until he was gone."
The words sat between them heavier than any argument.
Because that was the heart of it: Fear carved old and deep enough that even now, even after all this time, it could still reach into his decisions. A wound so deep that it could still dictate how he'd act.
Alex's expression changed again.
She understood him better with that one sentence than if he had spent an hour explaining himself.
Still, time did not care.
Morning came anyway.
The duel could not be postponed any longer.
The camp gathered in a hard, uneasy silence as Alex stepped out to meet Đăm Bhi. The air was cold. The frozen lime-oak still stood at the center like Bai Hu's insult made visible. Beyond the perimeter, between leaves and ridges of sunken rock, countless eyes were deliberately, silently watching the duel between one of the best diver in the East Coast and a Pillar's child.
Phong expected the Soerai, but the Kamohai surprised him. Yet, once he stopped to think about it, the reason was clear as day. The shark folks tolerated him, but mostly they'd missed his crops more.
The Shoemri was already waiting.
It stood with that same eerie confidence, tiger features wrong in the morning light, claws flexing once as Alex approached. It stretched, its elongated arms were half the length of its entire body.
Alex walked into the open and let her constructs bloom into being around her.
A spear.
A rapier.
A vajra.
Two shields.
Two bows.
She didn't risk using the psychic Dragon Slayer this time. It was not training for her to be cocky and arrogant. A duel between life and death meant no ground for testing unproven tactics. Alex asked for a moment to check her constructs one last time, and the Đăm Bhi agreed. Phong's stomach churned with concern. Alex never asked to check her armory like that. It must have meant that she was worried, and she lacked the confidence to face the monster.
Alex deliberately went over each weapons, making sure that they were stable and ready. These constructs had carried her through more fights than anyone else in camp could count. For once, Phong preyed to his uncle and aunt that luck would be by Alex's side. He was never that big of a spiritualist, but right now, that was all he could do.
The fight began shortly after Alex gave a nod.
Phong watched every movement like his own heartbeat depended on it. And for the first moments, it looked bad.
Đăm Bhi moved as if a storm was brewing inside of its.
Alex's first bowshot never really existed as a threat. One claw strike shattered the arrow before it fully reached the Shoemri. The spear came in next and got battered aside so hard the construct burst apart into light. One shield slammed low for control and was stepped on, crushed into millions of fleeting motes by the warring stomp of the Shoemri.
The rapier flashed for the throat.
Đăm Bhi tanked it with its neck, then crushed it in half with its chin.
The vajra dropped on its head.
The tiger-child head-butted the psychic weapon into oblivion.
Samir had been able to fend off Alex's attacks, so did a buffed Dominic, but Đăm Bhi dwarfed both in term of how overwhelming and one-sided facing it felt. From the beginning until now, the Shoemri looked basically unstoppable. It was like Alex was fighting an armored opponent in cloth, but her opponent was even faster than her so escape was a none option from the start.
Alex shifted into defense almost immediately, her remaining constructs rearranging faster than most eyes could track, but it still felt like she was losing ground too quickly. Đăm Bhi got inside the distance again and again, those claws slipping frighteningly close to her neck, her face, the stomach and all the vital places where one true mistake would end the duel before anyone in camp could even scream.
Three times the Shoemri's claws nearly kissed her throat. Đăm Bhi licked one drop of blood from its claws as its mouth cracked into that ugly smile that bared a full rows of fangs.
By then Phong's hands had already clenched hard enough to hurt. He realized that Đăm Bhi was toying with Alex. The Shoemri might not be so overpowered that it could kill Alex in one hit, but it was clearly punching below its weight class. And there was something even worse. Đăm Bhi wasn't some mindless beast. It knew exactly where its advantage lied: endurance far surpassed that of a human. It knew Alex's stamina couldn't keep up in a high speed fight, and the Shoemri was forcing her ever closer near the edge.
Then Alex reached for the Berserking Strawberry.
Phong saw it.
So did everyone else.
And Đăm Bhi was faster.
A clawed swipe snapped out and struck the fruit from her hand before she could bring it to her mouth. The strawberry spun away into the dirt.
Đăm Bhi laughed.
A low, ugly sound full of borrowed confidence.
"Mother warned me," it said, circling Alex like a cat playing with its food. "She watched your little struggle against the spiders and cockroaches." Its too-wide mouth curled. "She told me to be careful of the strawberries."
The camp froze in recognization.
Of course the White Tigress had accounted for that.
Of course she had watched.
Dominic dropped his voice as low as a whisper, telling Janet, Séline and Camille to prepare. On his cue, they would rush in to save Alex.
Đăm Bhi bared its fangs at Alex.
"You die now," it said. "The trick you rely on is gone."
Dominic ran forward and was slam face first into the dirt. As desperately as he tried, he could not even lift his chest up from the soil. Janet, Séline and Camille dropped to their knees behind him. Phong knew what was happening. The White Tigress, or at least a special skill she bestowed upon her child, had prevented Dominic gang from interfering with the duel through pressure alone.
Sweat ran down Alex's forehead, her pupils dilated. Phong screamed her name and tried to walk toward her, but the thought alone made him a target to the pressure. His bones creaked audibly as he too fell to the White Tigress power.
The Shoemri lunged in, full of certainty, already tasting victory.
And then the ground beneath it exploded upward.
A psychic drill burst from below.
From the earth itself, the drill rose and tore up beneath Đăm Bhi in a screaming spiral of force. The same attack that had taken the life of the Ice Wolf hit so cleanly and so violently that for one impossible second the Shoemri's confidence stayed visible on its face even as the rest of it understood too late.
The drill punched through it, breaking half of its back to shot toward the sky. Its body jerked, then collapsed into a puddle of blood spreading out from underneath it.
The duel ended in one brutal, perfect reversal.
Silence hit the camp so hard it felt unreal. Dominic scrambled to his feet, Séline and Camille dropped down panting. Janet's eyes widened in disbelief.
Alex stood in the middle of the clearing, breathing hard as well.
A line of red marked her neck where one of Đăm Bhi's near-misses had finally become a scratch. Nothing deeper than enough blood to show how close the fight had really been.
She reached up, wiped the single drop away with one thumb, and looked at the dying Shoemri without pity.
"I learned better than to over rely on Berserking Strawberry," she said.
Her voice was cold and steady and very clearly meant for more than just the creature bleeding out at her feet.
"The lesson came from a certain Greencap bunny captain."
That landed with everyone who understood.
The anti-bait.
The delayed answer.
The hidden heavy strike.
The refusal to become predictable around a single power-up just because it worked.
She had adapted. How and when did she learnt to hide the drill attack underground was beyond anyone guess. But one things was for certain, during this fight her constructs broke into light particles far more often than normal.
Phong stood up slowly, then shook his head once in helpless defeat.
This had been Alex's answer to him.
That she could protect herself, and him.
And for Alex, using Phong's Berserking Strawberry as the true winning move would have ruined the point completely. She had used it as bait instead, knowing full well that the White Tigress a master tactician and a petty floor boss, would already have taken those strawberries into account when shaping the duel. So Alex went into the fight expecting Đăm Bhi to know of the strawberry, and won by using the Shoemri's expectation.
She leaned into Đăm Bhi's arrogance and power fantasy, making sure the psychic weapons would exploded into motes of light when destroyed. Those particles would then gathered underground, waiting for her signal.
There was one thing Alex had hidden from Phong, and from everyone else.
She had used the Moletatoes network to guide those psychic motes to prepare sneak drill attack. So this was not something Alex could use outside of the camp, where the moletatoes had yet to spread their root system. But for Alex, it would be better for her overly earnest fiancé to not know of this just yet.
Phong looked at her standing in the cold morning light, neck scratched, breathing hard, constructs fading one by one, and felt a strange mix of relief, awe, and surrender settle through him.
Alexandra Vogel had just looked a Titan's child in the eye and told Phong, in the only language she trusted enough for something this important, that she was not the kind of woman who needed him to carry all the fear alone.