Elsewhere, while Camp Orthrus finally had one quiet night to breathe, the fight on Floor 1 and on the surface never truly stopped.
Selena kept working herself ragged.
Once Alexandra Vogel's report about the level 61 Black Ant Queen hit the Diver Association forum, Selena moved fast and pushed a focused mapping proposal around the Black Ant Colony. She framed it as the obvious next step: A high level boss inside a rapidly expanding monster nest was the sort of thing no sane planner could ignore. Compared to that, any push toward the meadow between Lake Baratok and Death Peak suddenly looked reckless, selfish, and badly timed.
Emma moved on another front.
The Tannenbaum network spread wide and moved with all the polished force that old money had when it wanted something done quietly but effectively. Calls were made., favors were used, and friendly dinners turned into talks about risk management and control over narratives. By the end of it, roughly half of the elites who had been willing to tolerate Josh's expedition stepped back from funding it.
Not because they suddenly grew morals, but because risk had become more expensive than Josh's pride.
Emma made sure the public side hurt too.
On camera, in interviews, and through carefully placed comments, she attacked Josh's brand of "personal heroism" with the clean cruelty only a fellow public figure could manage. She said Joshua Harlan was trying to chase personal glory while ignoring the safety of everyone around him.
Then she showed proof.
Logs of him pushing Selena to force map teams toward the ruin town between Lake Baratok and Death Peak. Requests that kept leaning toward the same zone even when more sensible alternatives existed. Emma pointed out that Josh could have waited for proper scouting results. He could have directed early efforts toward the meadow between the Greencap cavalry territory and the Black Ants, but he instead requested for the ruin between mountain and lake. He could have chosen patience, but he did not.
Quietly, through her influence, Emma sowed another seed in the divers forum: that it was no longer worth it to join Josh's expedition, that it was no longer safe to push against level 35 trolls after Josh lost his funding. She knew, for certain, that speeches about grand yet abstract things like morals couldn't persuade the average Joes. She knew what they were thinking when they joined the war. They thought they could be media heroes, that they could gain enough fame and monetary benefits if even one moment of their fight went viral. They thought about brand deals, about being famous, about life changing opportunity, about an entrance to the world of the elites.
So she gave them a knock on the head and busted their bubbles.
When the expedition toward Death Peak no longer felt like easy money, people withdrew by the dozens every minute.
Emma also made another move, one so sharp it made even people on her side blink.
She praised Olen. She didn't give him a general, business-graded glaze people of the 1% usually did when networking, but a detail one. She praised Olen craftiness for taming the trolls, and him being the sensible guys by arriving just in time to reinforce the battle field. Without saying it outright, Emma had implied that Olen had saved a lot of divers from losing their lives over Josh's recklessness, and was the better between the two.
It was calculated.
If Josh's public story was "heroic young leader outside, reckless egoistical brat inside," then Olen's emerging story became "clever specialist with actual results." Emma knew exactly what kind of crack to put between the two heirs with ego too big for their heads.
But Josh being Josh meaning he would not stay on the defensive forever.
Since the media and the elites had grown tired of him rambling about Camp Stymphalian and its secret plants, he shifted the angle again. He told reporters and sponsors that priority should be given to hunting down the weird treant-like thing caught on camera during the battle near Death Peak.
He didn't push for camp Stymphalian or Phong openly, but he knew that the projectiles Rico had used that night belonged to Phong's mutated plants.
His new angle was close enough to the truth to be useful, but far and noble enough from his earlier claims to avoid sounding like a broken recorder.
The footage of Fortress Form helped him there. Rico's artillery silhouette had been bizarre enough to stick in people's heads. Josh leaned on that hard, talking about dangerous unknown monster variants and the need to stop strange new entities before they spread.
It was still him trying to pull the trail back toward Phong's world without saying Phong's name.
The media war raged on across the internet for days.
Then, on the twentieth of December, the Minister of Defense made a formal statement. The speech was polished, calm, and patriotic in that expensive, careful way politicians liked when they wanted to sound like they had given the matter serious thought while having no answer to the problem.
He praised both Josh and Emma as "the future of America."
That sentence alone made everyone in both camps choke on their coffee.
Then, he announced the practical line.
To avoid turning Floor 1 into a quagmire, further espionage and intelligence gathering should be directed toward the Killer Rabbits and the Black Ants. The rising powers that were rabbit cavalries and level 40+ giant ants was where official attention would go next.
And just like that, the world's gaze temporarily slid a little farther away from Camp Stymphalian. It wouldn't be forever, but long enough to buy them at least a year or two, since the public's attention would be shifted full force toward the divers' league sometimes after New Year Eve.
For now, that had to be enough.
After Đăm Bhi's defeat, the Soerai did not advance on Camp Orthrus again.
That should have felt reassuring.
It did not.
Because Bai Hu clearly had more than one kind of faithful.
The next attacks came from the forest in different shapes: Leopards whose bodies blurred into layered illusions until one beast looked like five, jaguars streaked with pale gold magic that flared from their jaws and claws like weaponized sunlight. Mountain lions whose hides shimmered and shifted against the background until they vanished almost completely, blending into stone and brush like living chameleons. They surrounded the camp on all fronts, trying to reach the heart of camp Othrus.
It would have been a nightmare for team Nemean to deal with a diverse roster of feline monsters like that.
If not for the Timatoes.
The little monsters threw themselves at every new feline threat with joyful violence. Illusions confused humans, true. Somehow they did not confuse floating tomato abominations with tiger faces and boiling juice. The jaguars' light magic lit up the clearing, only to get answered by a swarm of red bodies biting through legs and eyes. The invisible mountain lions lasted longer, but not by much. Once one moved close enough, the Timatoes somehow noticed. Smelled it, maybe. Felt it, more than likely. Phong didn't know if their senses even worked like normal life forms, but their tiny bodies would vibrate with intense joy whenever a monster came close. Then the whole swarm would pivot in the exact same direction and descend like tiny meteors filled with boiling tomato juice and even more condensed anger.
Phong watched them work and slowly realized they had a problem.
The Timatoes were too strong-willed. They had much personality, too much ego packed into their tiny red bodies.
They obeyed him because he was the farmer who planted them. That much was clear. When he pointed, they moved. When he warned, they listened. When he told them not to kill, they sulked but obeyed. When he told them to stop chasing the monsters deeper into the wood, they protested angrily with their growls but still rolled back to camp.
The moletatoes, though, had no such authority over them.
And that was a matter that needed to be addressed.
Because the moletato network was the backbone of every clean defense Phong had ever built. It was the intel networks, it separated allies from foes, it kept his plants from tearing each other apart and trap lines from turning into a disaster. But the Timatoes treated the moletatoes less like siblings in a system and more like annoying cousins.
They would not cooperate cleanly not because they couldn't, but simply because they didn't want to.
More than once, Phong caught a moletato trying to guide a Timato toward a useful lane, only for the little creature to puff up its spines, make an offended chitter, and go racing off in a more dramatic direction instead. At least, the Timatoes had enough self-control to not biting other kins on sight, but that didn't mean they were easy to co-exist with. They would bump themselves on the moletatoes from time to time just because they could.
The Timatoes rampaged across Bai Hu's feline attacks like a twisted, dungeon version of the Pied Piper rats. They were useful, they were tiny angry little menace, they were glorious, and at the same time completely insufferable.
By the twenty-fourth, the two camps still had not been reunited.
So they held Christmas over video call.
Camp Orthrus gathered around one side of the screen, camp Stymphalian crowded the other, Selena and Vanessa joined from their apartment. The signal crackled once or twice through the line, but the image held well enough to make the distance feel worse and better at the same time.
Phong had cooked everyone at camp Othrus a meal like it was the most obvious and natural things.
Even trapped on Floor 2, with resources thin and pressure constant, he still found the fish he had traded from the lizardmen and turned it into cá kho tộ, Vietnamese braised fish in a clay pot. The rich dark sauce clung to the flesh, glossy and fragrant, the smell carrying warm and sweet and savory through Camp Orthrus until even the lizardmen nearby looked approving.
On the other screen, chaos had apparently won.
Jake and Jack were each drinking Pepsi with deep, deliberate satisfaction, and both of them were doing it in a way that made it obvious they were trying to annoy Dominic from several miles and one dungeon floor away.
Dominic saw it immediately and pointed at the screen. "You two are children."
Jake raised his can in salute. Jack took another can from Dominic's reserves at camp just to make it worse.
Emma, seated in Camp Stymphalian with the calm expression of someone about to commit public violence, decided to reveal the truth.
"Since none of you are here," she said, "I should report that almost no one in this camp knows how to cook a proper meal."
That caused instant outrage from several directions.
Emma continued over it effortlessly.
"We've basically been surviving by digging through Phong's frozen meal stockpile like scavengers."
Phong closed his eyes for a second. "I knew it."
On screen, Joanne was indeed attempting something so cursed that even through the video quality it looked wrong.
She had rice, she had hot water. And somehow, in a crime against several civilizations, she was trying to brew the rice like coffee.
Long would have had a stroke.
"What are you doing," Phong asked, voice full of personal pain.
Joanne looked up, offended by the lack of support. "Improvising."
"That's not improvising. That's blasphemy."
"I tried using the pot. It come out inedible."
Emma shrugged, giving Phong a jab to the stomach as deliberately as she had given her fellow campers just now:
"The raccoon know how to use a burner and fry his own fries is an interesting sight as well. I suppose it's another one of your irresponsible child raising strategy perhaps?"
Phong groaned and staggered a few steps back from that. He could already heard a certain raccoon loudly protest from the background about him not being a child.
Speaking of Rico, the raccoon had started his own scene in the background. The raccoon stood on a chair and gestured like a wronged union leader. "Camp morale under assault!"
One look and Phong knew, Rico had gone through his stash of instant coffee. All of it.
"You mean your morale? You drank my coffee. Those are from Uncle Long's," He said.
"Emergency happened!"
"Right. The emergency is you?"
"I'm important."
Nyx appeared next, sitting in front of the screen with full feline dignity and an expression that somehow communicated disappointment across digital transmission.
"We require proper feeding," she said.
Bruno crowded in beside her at once. "Yes. Return immediately."
Phong stared at them. "You're both alive."
"That is not the standard," Nyx replied.
Alex let out a laugh beside him before she could stop it.
Then Little Fireball climbed up out of his hood.
She hopped onto the table, strutted across with the absolute confidence of a bird who knew she was important, pecked a piece loose from one of the braised fish fillets, and looked toward the screen with pure smugness.
It was unmistakable: she was showing off.
Rico gasped like he had been betrayed while Bruno barked in outrage. Nyx, whose favorite food was and always had been fish, narrowed her eyes in offended silence.
On both sides of the call, people started laughing. Real laughter too.
It was the kind of laughter that came when things were bad enough and absurd enough that the only honest response left was to laugh anyway. Because the truth was, their situation had not been fixed.
They were still separated by two floors. Camp Orthrus lacked resources, manpower, and easy reinforcement, while camp Stymphalian had safety, food stocks, and not nearly enough people who knew what to do with a kitchen.
Still, for one Christmas call, they were together enough.
Phong looked from the screen to the people around him, to Alex beside him, to the clay pot of fish, to the frozen distance and the camps held together by too much stubbornness and too many ridiculous people.
Then he smiled, tiredly, but genuinely.
And for a little while, the war waited outside the circle of light.