The floor bosses left after dinner.
Neither with thunder, nor with threats. With the casual ease of things too powerful to care how they exited a mortal camp once they had gotten what they wanted. The moment they were gone, the air in Camp Orthrus felt lighter by sheer absence alone.
Phong exhaled through his nose and looked toward the lime-oak. "It's time to go back."
Dominic raised a brow. "To Stymphalian."
Phong nodded. "I want to see what kind of monstrosities Alexei and Rico made while I was away."
That got no argument.
Then he added, "And I want to move some peas to Floor 2. See if I can trigger a defensive variant here."
That got a little more attention.
Séline folded her arms. "More experiments."
"More useful plants," Phong corrected.
Alex stood beside him, tired enough not to bother correcting either label. Dominic, Janet, Séline, and Camille came with them. None of them needed convincing. After days of constant siege pressure at Camp Orthrus, even a trip back to Camp Stymphalian sounded close enough to rest.
A few of the Timatoes noticed the departure and immediately started rolling after Phong like outraged guard dogs the size of fruit.
Phong turned, crouched, and nudged them back toward the tomato vines. "Stay."
The Timatoes made several offended little noises that sounded way too close to argument for produce.
Phong pointed again. "Now, please, back to the trees."
Reluctantly, and with the dignity of tiny warlords being denied campaign rights, they rolled back toward the stems. A few plugged themselves into the vines again with tiny sulks.
Then the group went through the lime-oak network and returned to Camp Stymphalian.
Chaos greeted them.
The moment Phong stepped through, a chicken shot across the camp square trailing fire.
Its wings beat once, twice, and each burst of takeoff left a burning streak in the air and a line of scorched dirt where it had pushed off from the ground. Phong stopped dead.
Another hen sprinted past a food crate, pecked once at the ground, and left blackened claw marks in the soil from the heat radiating off its talons.
Then a third chicken spotted Alexei. The bird froze, its eyes narrowed. And without hesitation, it breathed fire at him. A clean, furious burst. Alexei yelped and barely threw himself aside in time.
"I object!" he shouted. "I object strongly!"
Then Phong stepped fully into view. And every single chicken stopped on the spot. The flaming wings folded. The hostile pecking ceased. The fire-breathing hen drew back at once. One by one, the whole new flock retreated in guilty silence toward the coop like schoolchildren who had just noticed the headmaster was home.
No one understood it. No one noticed the tiny shift in Little Fireball where she perched in Phong's hood. They only saw murderous poultry suddenly lose all confidence.
Phong looked from the coop to Alexei, then to Rico, then back to the coop. The silence around him became very dangerous.
Finally, Phong reached up, took Little Fireball gently out of his hood, held her in both hands at eye level, and asked in the flattest voice possible, "What are you. Monstrous Phoenix?"
The chick chirped. Softly, innocently, and tilted her head.
And because no one in their right mind would actually believe that a floor boss, a Pillar, an embodiment of death and burning ruin like the Phoenix, would live in a human camp as a mascot without a shred of pride or dignity, the matter died there.
Jake was not present to make it worse. That was lucky.
Phong lowered the chick, sighed once, and very deliberately chose not to think about what his life had become.
Alex did not have that problem. She solved hers immediately.
She walked over, grabbed Rico by the collar, lifted him clean off the ground, and whispered in a tone so cold it made the raccoon stiffen, "You're sleeping in the chicken coop for the foreseeable future."
Rico gasped. "Tyranny."
Alex's grip did not change.
The raccoon pointed an accusing paw at her. "You are using this chance to pay raccoon back for that one time."
Alex raised a brow. "What time?"
Rico, either too brave or too stupid to stop, blurted, "When I sneaked into farmer cabin and asked if elf children count as cheating right in middle of your mating."
The camp went silent in the deeply enjoyable way only public humiliation could create. Phong covered his face. Dominic coughed into one hand. Janet looked away with the expression of a woman thanking fate that this was happening to someone else. Alex stared at Rico for one terrible second. Then, she smiled the coldest smile in her life. And, in a perfect imitation of the White Tigress's shameless tone, she said, "I do. What are you going to do about it?"
That silenced the raccoon instantly. Completely. He had no answer, because there was no answer. Alex gave him one small shake by the collar for emphasis, then carried him off toward the coop while Rico accepted his fate with the look of a criminal finally meeting a higher court.
Behind them, Camp Stymphalian settled back into its normal level of impossible. And Phong, standing in the middle of it with Little Fireball in his hands and fire chickens hiding guiltily in their coop, realized he had missed home.
When Team Nemean gathered beneath the original lime-oak tree that day, the mood had shifted.
The rest at Camp Stymphalian had helped. Food, walls, familiar routines, even the fresh absurdity of fire-breathing chickens had taken some of the edge off. But under that, everyone knew the same truth: Rest was temporary.
Dominic stood with his arms folded and looked around the circle until he had everyone's attention. "Three days."
"Three days."
Jake stopped mid-drink. "That's all."
"That's enough," Dominic said.
He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. "Three days to recover, train, and stop being disasters. Then we push again into Floor 3."
That made the whole group still in the way only a serious plan could. Dominic went on. "Not straight back to the obsidian canyon. We don't need to be suicidal twice in the same week. But we search for another gate somewhere near Wraith Fort."
Jack nodded first.
That made sense. They had a Floor 2 HQ now. A foothold: the Wraith Fort. If another access point to Floor 3 existed near that zone, then going back through the same cursed canyon would not be their only option.
Emma folded her arms. "Safer entry. Better odds."
"Less likely to get trapped between spider body snatchers and mouth-roaches," Joanne added.
"That too," Dominic said.
No one argued, because everyone there understood why the call mattered. They needed more. More leveling, more experience, more pain, probably. And if they wanted the best possible shot at the tournament in March, then they had to keep moving. They could not let Josh be the only one climbing.
Around the tree, heads nodded one by one.
Even Alex, quiet beside Phong, gave the smallest nod.
The decision settled. Three days, then deeper.
Alex glanced sideways at Dominic after that, and when she spoke, it was in a lowered voice, pitched like she thought Phong would not notice. He noticed anyway.
"You're getting sentimental."
Dominic gave her a look.
Alex's mouth twitched faintly. "He shifted to the tournament that fast."
That made Dominic's expression change just a little.
Alex continued, voice still low.
"He bargained with a floor boss wearing his aunt's face," she said. "Hated every second of it. And still did it anyway because he wanted an edge over Josh for us."
Dominic did not answer directly. He did not need to. The look in his eyes was enough. He had noticed too.
Not just the practical side of it. The emotional cost. The way Phong kept dragging himself through uglier and uglier things as long as it bought them a better chance later. Alex saw the answer in Dominic's face and said nothing more. Neither of them realized Phong had heard enough. Or if Alex did realize, she let him have the moment without calling it out.
Phong looked away before either of them could catch him noticing. His eyes landed on the signal amplifier and the generators set near the edge of camp, humming quietly as mana-fed transmission ran through them. The devices bore the clean logo of Zero Industry.
He stared at it for a moment. A signal booster. A machine that carried internet through mana and dungeon depth. A generators who was so efficient that they could create stable footing for the divers.
Of course that had been made by a floor boss. Of course the mad genius behind the Diver Association and the app and the quiet infrastructure of modern diver life had also built the thing letting them talk through floors. Of course only a floor boss would have access to the back of the system to immediately notify the world of team Nemean breaking level 30 during the ants attack.
At this point, the world felt less like a system and more like a joke written by something with too much power and too much time.
Still, a thought had already formed. And once it did, Phong acted on it. He stepped a little away from the others, enough for privacy without making it look like he was sneaking off, and opened a private message.
Long.
The coffee shop owner answered faster than he usually did. Phong typed first.
[I need your help with some high-tech / cyber security stuff.]
There was a short pause. Then Long replied.
[What do you need?]
Phong stared at the screen for one second, thoughts moving into place. Then he started typing.
He wrote. Stopped. Rewrote. Then sent the request.