The victory lasted maybe less than five minutes.
Đăm Bhi's body twitched on the ground.
Alex's eyes narrowed.
At first it looked like the last cruel movement of a dying thing, then from the edges of its gaping wounds, white mold as fine as silks crawled out. They wiggled like bloodworms, and immediately stitched the body of the Shoemri back together. Its flesh moved wrong, muscles vibrated as bones underneath them snapped back in place, the damages on the innards were filled up by the same mold strands. Blood flowed back inward, as if the land itself had suddenly decided it no longer accepted that red liquid.
And while the wound healed, the body changed too.
The tiger features began to recede.
The jaw lines constricted into a size that resemble human more, patches of fur rearranged themselves to the size of its face. The left corner of its lips finally covered it mouth fully after its fangs shrunk down in size. Its ears remained that of a tigers, its eyes still mismatch in sizes, the uncanny valley feeling was still present, which somehow made it worse.
Its status flickered again. Đăm Bhi level became 60.
Phong felt the cold go through him harder than any wind.
Only then did he understand how badly they had misjudged what stood in front of them.
The elves had been born with absurd levels because they were children of Horns of the Earth. The Shoemri had started out with a lower level, still higher than their best fighter, but manageable.
They had thought wrong.
If the elves started out insanely high level because Horns of the Earth was the Pillar of Life, then the Shoemri - children of the Pillar of War - would rose in battle. Phong made a hypothesis that the Shoemri inherited the White Tigress immortality, so whenever one was slain, it would simply raise again. And worse, maybe they could even evolve every time that resurrection triggered.
They were the children of a Pillar - entities of absurdity - they shouldn't think that the Đăm Bhi was easier to deal with than a ful growth elf.
Đăm Bhi stood back up, and its neck made a cracking sounds as it moved its head from side to side.
Alex did not waste the second of shock she was allowed. Her constructs flashed back into being around her, spear, rapier, vajra, shields, and bows re-forming from pure will. But, she knew for certain, a second duel against the level 60 monster would certainly kill her. Still, she set her feet and prepared for it anyway, because Alexandra Vogel would stand between danger and the people she wanted to protect, no matter the odds.
Đăm Bhi looked at her.
Then smiled.
It showed no sign of interest for a rematch with Alex, at least not instantly. Its eyes reflected a flash of cruelty so intense it could have poisoned all of lake Baratok.
It blurred past Alex, aiming straight for Phong.
Alex shouted his name, but the Shoemri was simply too fast after breaking through the second threshold. It was already there even before Alex could finish calling out his name, claws forward, one hand aimed for his throat with such speed that the air itself seemed too slow to follow it.
Phong saw it coming.
He fell backward on instinct more than skill, hitting the ground hard enough to lose breath, but there was no real escape in it. A level one farmer versus a level 60 child of a Pillar wasn't a fight, wasn't even a protest. It would be a slaughter, an execution with gun.
Then red liquid sprayed everywhere.
For one horrible moment, Alex's heart stopped.
Đăm Bhi's body blocked most of Phong from view, and all she saw was the burst of red, too much of it, wet and sudden and impossible to read from where she stood. Her mind supplied the answer before thought could stop it: Phong got his throat pierced, and kneeled lifeless on the ground.
But, the Shoemri shrieked instead.
It wasn't triumphant, it wasn't amusement. The scream of Đăm Bhi was filled with pain and misery. The Shoemri fell backward, its back hit the ground with a loud thud.
The sound froze the whole camp.
Every one went still with the same stunned disbelief.
Because floating around Phong, between him and death, were tomatoes. Well, they looked close enough for people to still recognized them as tomatoes adjacent at least.
Small, round, plump, red enough to look almost cheerful at first glance.
And they had faces.
Faces that looked like something caught between a tiger cub and a porcupine. If someone had asked a fever dream to breed fruit and teeth together. then this was the result. Tiny fanged mouths, little ridged snouts, needle-like spines running back from their floating bodies. Bright, furious little eyes with almost a smug look in them.
They hovered in the air around him like a swarm of savage little guardians.
One had bitten into Đăm Bhi's arm and hung there with complete conviction, tiny teeth somehow buried deep enough to make a Titan-child scream. Another spat a stream of boiling tomato juice into the Shoemri's face.
The juice that filled their little bodies like blood was viscous, thick, and clung to skin like glue. It hit with a hiss so violent that steam burst up at once, and Đăm Bhi reeled back clawing at her own face.
More of the floating tomato-things swarmed after her.
One slammed into her cheek hard enough to burst against the skin, turning int a splash of boiling red that ate across fur and flesh. Another circled near Phong's chest protectively, vibrating with little growls like a tiny murderous lantern.
Phong, flat on his back in the dirt, stared up at them in complete shock.
The tomatoes had mutated a defensive variant just like he had anticipated. But, they weren't simple projectiles launchers like chilies, enoki, or carrots. They weren't traps like garlic, or onion either.
They had mutated into something bizarre enough that even after everything he had seen in the dungeon, his mind needed a second to catch up.
Around him drifted a whole litter of furious, floating tiger-porcupine tomatoes.
And they were protecting him.
Đăm Bhi staggered backward, shrieking as one of the little monsters clamped onto her shoulder while another vomited another blast of molten tomato slurry across her neck. The rest of the tomatoes made tiny little angry growls while circling Phong. A few of them kept looking back at him, their face side slightly lifted upward like a bunch of tiny dogs showing off.
Alex almost dropped all her psychic constructs like how she had dropped her jaws. Not only her, but everyone else, had just slammed into a fresh wall of impossible and was too stunned to talk for a good why.
Dominic spoke first, and even then it came out weak.
"…what? The? Fuck???"
Phong sat halfway up, still staring.
One of the tomato-creatures turned in the air and looked at him with fierce little devotion, then bared its tiny teeth toward the Shoemri again as if to ask what kind of violence should they used against that tiger shaped threat.
The new plants had not merely mutated.
They had gained sentience, even more so than the moletatoes. And they were angry.
Phong did not waste time admiring the miracle.
The little monsters were adorable in the most wrong way possible, but they had just proven they could hurt a Titan's child, and that made them a resource before it made them cute.
He pushed himself fully upright, pointed at the retreating Đăm Bhi, and gave the order fast.
"Chase it out of camp. Do not kill it."
A few of the floating tomato-things snapped their tiny faces toward him at once. For a split second, they looked almost like they were pouting out of dissapointment.
Phong added, just in case instinct beat obedience, "Seriously. No killing."
It wasn't him being mercy. Not even close.
Phong had no interest in sparing Đăm Bhi out of kindness after the Shoemri had just tried to put claws through his throat. But if killing it only made it come back stronger again, then that was a theory he had no desire to test with a level sixty child of a Pillar. Could he be overreacting? Maybe. Could they killed the Shoemri for good if they burnt all the mold strands before they mended the wounds? Probably.
But if he was wrong, then what comeback might be a level 90 Đăm Bhi, and that would be too much for the Timatoes. Even just now, the only reason they could overwhelmed the Shoemri was due to the element of surprise.
The Timatoes respected their farmer enough to listen.
At least, Phong decided to call them Timatoes on the spot, and since they immediately responded to the name with little growls and eager spins, the matter settled itself.
"Go," he said.
The Timatoes launched after Đăm Bhi like a flock of tiny red murder comets.
The Shoemri, still shrieking and half-blinded by boiling tomato juice, did the one thing nobody there had expected to see from a Titan-child that morning.
It ran.
Phong immediately made a mental note. An immortal being that came back stronger every time shouldn't have an escape instinct. It best interest would be to hold the ground and fight to the death. Since it was not the case with Đăm Bhi, Phong made another hypothesis.
Either the immortality of the Shoemri was conditional and it just happened to meet those during the fight against Alex, or Đăm Bhi itself didn't know it was immortal.
Understanding the camp's current biggest enemy was Phong top priority, so he observed Đăm Bhi carefully and made notes whenever he found something.
The Soerai still lingering near the forest edge tried to regroup when they saw their goddess offspring fall back, but with the Timatoes in the mix, the whole dynamic of the battlefield had changed.
The boiling tomato juice burned through the mucus coating that had made the Soerai such a nightmare. Once that slick layer failed, their skin lost its protection. Then the Timatoes' little fangs did the rest, biting and tearing in a way far more effective than any of the camp's earlier blunt-force defenses had managed. The Timatoes swarmed the monsters aggressively, acting like a flocks of murderous angry piranha with lava for saliva.
The Soerai's formation broke entirely.
Their next push against camp Othrus never came, as the survivors fled into the trees with their tiger-child leader and did not look back.
Only when the last of them vanished did Camp Orthrus truly understand what had just happened.
They were safe.
Actually safe.
For the first time since Bai Hu had decided to trap them, the camp had something the Soerai did not know how to answer. And at the end of the day, that one single day that Phong had bought was what saved them from Đăm Bhi, much to Alex's annoyance.
Dominic stared as three Timatoes rolled past his boots in a neat little line.
Even though he had seen them hovering in the air, they apparently preferred bouncing and rolling along the ground like tiny possessed balls.
He rubbed a hand down his face. "I don't know how to process this sentence."
Janet looked over. "Which one."
"That small tomatoes with faces are now patrolling our camp." He pointed weakly as another one bounced off a post, corrected itself, and kept going with offended dignity. "Or that they could fly, but they still chose to roll."
That, somehow, was the part that broke him most.
A few of the Timatoes went farther, circling the perimeter with serious little snarls. The more shriveled up ones returned to the growing beds of tomato plants and did something even stranger.
They plugged themselves back into the vines.
Their little bodies nestled into the stems like fruit reattaching to a branch. Once there, the red glow under their skin pulsed more steadily, and steam started leaking from their tiny mouth.
"Are they... recharging?" Phong muttered.
Alex, standing beside him now, glanced at the vines and the fruit-creatures with narrowed eyes. "That is horrifying."
"No comments," Phong said.
"You made those."
"I made those. Still had no control over their mutation though."
The camp celebrated that night anyway.
Because whatever else the Timatoes were, they had bought the first true safety Camp Orthrus had felt since the White Tigress froze the lime-oak and caged them into a siege.
So fires were lit, food was brought out. The lizardmen relaxed enough to stop standing like statues every few seconds. Even the Tortura came down from the trees in turns to eat something warm and admit, very quietly, that maybe the floating tomato abominations were acceptable neighbors.
Séline and Camille took charge of one part of the meal and turned the moletatoes into a French potato dish that somehow made everyone shut up for the first few bites.
Rico, if he had been there, would have cried tears of joy.
The Timatoes had discovered mirrors and took turn growling at their own reflection. Janet looked in awe at the tiny little monsters apparently trying to show themselves who was the bigger threat. The fact that they seemed to recognize it was their own reflection in the mirror but chose violent anyway fascinate her, as their thought process was unlike anything she had seen before.
Dominic groaned:
"Selena would go crazy over the little menaces."
Phong and Alex spent part of the night checking each other over for wounds.
That should have been practical.
For the record, it was.
It was also sweet enough that everyone else present wanted to throw something at them.
Alex inspected the scratch on her neck while Phong checked bruising on her arms and shoulders from the duel and the aftermath. He made her hold still twice. She told him to stop fussing three times, and he ignored all of them. Then she caught a cut near his wrist and cleaned it with the same focused gentleness that made Dominic mutter, "I'm going to get diabetes at this rate."
Janet nodded in full agreement.
Séline and Camille booed from over the camp fire:
"How do you say that in English? Get a room."
Dominic sat nearby with food in hand and let out a heavy sigh.
"We really didn't do much in that last conflict."
It was clear that he was frustrated.
A team like theirs was built to matter, and there was nothing more annoying than helplessly watching impossible things happened around you, unable to change the outcome even for a bit.
Séline glanced at him.
Camille did too.
Then, together, with just enough smug grace to make it stung a little bit less, they said what needed saying.
"You helped in another conflict," Séline said.
"One with a different battlefield," Camille added.
Dominic frowned. "What conflict."
The two women exchanged a look.
Then Séline answered, "The one involving less immortal tiger humanoids."
"And more," Camille said, perfectly straight-faced, "two very stubborn young people."
Janet's mouth twitched first.
Then Dominic groaned so loudly that even one of the Timatoes rolling patrol paused to look at him in judgment.
"Oh no," he said. "Being couple therapy was not on my bucket list."
"That is because you lacked imagination," Séline replied.
Camille nodded. "And foresight."
Phong, overhearing just enough, covered part of his face while Alex tried and failed not to smile.
The camp laughed after that.
Things were still a mess, the lime-oak and the lake surface were still frozen, and cowering inside the patrol perimeter of the Timatoes was still necessary for surviving the Soerai. But at least they were alive.
And for that one night, under the half-frozen lime-oak, with Timatoes rolling guard like absurd little sentries and the first taste of actual security settling over Camp Orthrus, being alive was enough.