Phong only learned the elves had leveled up because he finally sat them down and asked them to let him check their status menus.
That part still baffled him.
Children who could barely form full sentences without turning half of them into demands for food somehow understood the concept of a status menu on instinct. He had to explain what a spoon was twice to one of them last week. But "open your status menu" got immediate results.
Monster instinct, Phong decided.
At this point, that was the answer he filed all his unsolved headaches under.
He checked the first child.
Level 13.
Phong frowned.
Then checked the next.
Also 13.
Then 13 again.
Worse, their stats were already climbing toward fifty. Not just one, but all of them.
The numbers made his stomach tighten in a way that was not fear exactly. More the heavy awareness that the children had just grown stronger right under his nose and he had no clear idea how.
He crouched there in the middle of camp, phone in one hand, status windows fading one after another, and tried to think.
They had not gone into battle.
He had not taken them into the dungeon front lines. No one at camp was stupid enough to do that without him knowing. So how had they leveled?
Then a theory started to form.
When he had been away, the camp had been running on frozen meals, burned attempts at cooking, and whatever scraps of order Emma and the others could force into the kitchen. No one there really knew how to feed elf children properly. Not yet...
These little monsters were always hungry, always foraging. Always chewing on something unless stopped.
Phong slowly looked down at them.
The children noticed his expression at once and immediately acted guilty.
That was answer enough before anyone spoke.
One looked down at their feet. Another hugged the pouch of cookies from Mrs. Lambert like a shield. A third looked like they were about to cry on principle, not even from being accused, just from the atmosphere of being found out.
Phong did not raise his voice.
He just asked, "What did you eat?"
That made the guilt spread through the whole group like a ripple.
At last, one of the children mumbled, "Mean plants."
Phong blinked once. "What?"
Another child, trying to be helpful, said, "Pulled mean plants. Ate them."
The third added in a rush, "They were spicy and angry."
And then it all clicked.
Phong sat back a little.
He had not understood before what Horns of the Earth meant when the bull said the elves would grow with him. Because Phong himself could not level. Not unless he was to give up the right to plant inside the dungeon and have his plants mutated.
He had no instinctive sense for what growth through EXP and stats really felt like from the inside.
Now he understood.
The children were not growing merely because time passed or because they existed near him. They were growing because they were eating his defensive variants.
The dungeon plants. The defensive ones to be more precise. They were the "mean plants", the nutrient chain, the trigger they needed.
He let out a long breath and rubbed one hand over his face.
So that was how it worked.
Feed them the wrong crops, and nothing much happened.
Feed them the dangerous ones, the plants shaped by threat and survival, and the children leveled.
The elf children watched him carefully, still waiting for punishment.
Phong lowered his hand and looked at them again.
"You can't just pull random dangerous plants and eat them."
One of them tried, very bravely, "Sorry."
Another said, "We were hungry."
That took the edge out of him right away.
He sighed. "Next time, ask me first."
They all nodded so fast it looked like a flock of guilty birds.
That problem, at least, was now understood.
Another one rose immediately in its place.
Education.
Because level thirteen elf children with stats pushing fifty were no longer just weird babies who followed him around and screamed for food. They were becoming something else. Something stronger. Something that would need discipline before raw power and child logic made a very ugly combination.
Phong looked across camp toward the Greencap patrol paths and felt the next step settle into place.
With their stats, the elves could probably start learning from the Greencap knights. Not serious combat, not yet. But posture, discipline, basic movement. Formation sense maybe. And obedience to command that did not depend only on "dad said so."
The bunny captain was too busy for full-time childcare. But one of his knights? That might work.
Phong began turning the thought over immediately, already measuring what kind of food trade or favor would be needed to convince a Greencap knight to become a tutor for elf children.
Nearby, a fresh disturbance drew his eye.
Little Fireball had taken charge of the fire chickens.
The chick marched in front of them with tiny, sharp steps while the larger birds shuffled after her in uneven lines. Then she hopped onto a crate, pecked at a tablet screen until her K-drama resumed, and turned it toward the chickens with an expression that somehow looked smug.
Phong stared. The fire chickens stared too.
Onscreen, beautiful people suffered through romance, misunderstanding, and whatever terminal illness or tragic death the story was currently using to ruin lives for entertainment.
Little Fireball chirped and pecked once at the screen as if emphasizing an important emotional beat.
The chickens looked blank. One tried to peck at a bug instead.
Little Fireball's whole tiny body sagged in visible disappointment. She turned and stared at them like a teacher realizing her students had understood none of the assigned reading.
Phong walked over, scooped the chick up before she could escalate into cultural violence, and set her into his hoodie hood. She burrowed down at once with a small offended noise, clearly still upset that the chickens lacked any appreciation for deep dramatic story arcs involving love, misunderstanding, and death.
Phong adjusted the hood around her and looked back at the elf children. They were already stronger than he expected. Already leveling in ways he had only just begun to understand. Which meant he could not keep treating them like strange little mascots who happened to call him dad.
The next step had to begin now.
He would speak with the Greencap knights. Hire one under the captain. Set terms. Get the children training before their stats climbed any higher than their discipline.
And as Camp Stymphalian settled around him, with guilty elves, disappointed phoenix chick, and fire chickens too simple for television drama, Phong started planning the next part of fatherhood.
Alex did not want to waste time searching blindly for another gate. Not now when the title Bai Hu had forced onto her, Squire of the White Tigress, had doubled the amount of EXP she needed to level. Every fight now had to count more. Every hour spent wandering had to justify itself. She was in no mood to burn days on random scouting if a better answer already existed.
So she said it plainly. "We ask the Tortura."
Dominic looked over at her. "Because?"
"Because they're natives of Floor 3," Alex replied. "Or they were."
That was enough to make the others go quiet and think it through.
The Tortura living near Camp Orthrus were exiles. Old archers who had fallen from grace once their levels dropped below fifty. If they had survived long enough to end up on Floor 2 and settle here, then they had almost certainly used a safer route than the obsidian canyon. Alex doubted a group of sub-fifty tortoise archers could make regular use of a path filled with monstrous cockroaches and spider body thieves.
Emma nodded first. "That's solid."
Joanne snapped her fingers once. "See, that's why she's the scary one!"
Jake squinted at her. "You say that like we didn't know already."
So they went to the Tortura and asked. The old archer who answered them listened without wasting motion, then pointed west of Camp Orthrus.
"There is a ruin," he said. "In Floor 2. West. A gate lies there."
Dominic's shoulders eased by half an inch. "Safer than the canyon?"
The Tortura gave him a long look.
"Safer," he said. "Not safe."
"Fair."
Then the Tortura added the part that mattered. "Pixies nest there."
Dominic groaned immediately. "I already don't like that."
Joanne looked over. "You don't even know what they are."
Dominic rubbed a hand over his face. "Exactly. And I know I'm not going to like how the dungeon twisted Tinker Bell."
That got a few tired laughs, but not many. Because if the dungeon had taught them anything, it was this: never trust a familiar name down here.
They also remembered Mr. Zero and what he had said during the dinner at New Year's Eve. He mentioned a ruin with pixies, and now, they were pointed there by the Tortura. Too convenient for anyone liking, especially when it involved a floor boss that lived mostly on the surface under the alias of a tech savvy genius.
Yet, Team Nemean set out.
The route west of Camp Orthrus took them about three miles on foot. The ground changed as they went, less lake-fed and green than the camp perimeter, more broken and dry in patches. Old stone jutted from the earth at odd angles. Half-buried walls appeared now and then under vines and moss. The whole area felt like something had once stood here in full and had only later been chewed down by time and dungeon pressure.
By the time they reached the ruin, the light of Floor 2 had shifted into that dim, cold tone that made it feel older than it should.
And the sight that met them stopped them all.
It was a city. Or... what remained of one.
Not dungeon caves shaped into mimicry. Not crude monster structures, either. A real city, now broken and sunk and half reclaimed, but still carrying the shape of deliberate humanlike settlement. The houses and walls were made from something that looked close to modern concrete. Smooth in places. Cracked in others. Strong enough that even now, after ruin and collapse, much of it still stood in stunted blocks and leaning shells. Windows gaped darkly in many walls, some still held frames and warped panels that could creak open at the top or swing fully out from the side, the sort of design more familiar to Europe than to anything Phong grew up with. A few half-broken shutters knocked lightly in the stale air, though no wind strong enough to move them could be felt at ground level.
And above the houses, on nearly every roof that remained intact, sat stranger things still. Strange devices consisted of clusters of polished metal orbs, connected together by rods or braces. Each construction balanced in ways that felt too precise to be decorative. Some had rings circling them, like halos or alignment frames. Others tilted at odd but deliberate angles, catching the cavern light and throwing it back in pale reflections.
No one at the edge of the ruin knew what any of them were. They looked nothing like relics from Earth history. Nothing like Roman ruin, medieval keep, industrial wreckage, or modern urban remains.
Just like most things buried in the dungeon, they came from some other culture entirely. A civilization that had once built with logic and beauty and tools that did not belong to anything the surface remembered.
Jake stared up at one of the rooftop devices and muttered, "I hate that this place looks smart."
Emma nodded. "That usually means it's dangerous."
Alex's eyes moved across the city remains, tracing sight lines and broken walls and the dark paths between buildings.
"Stay sharp," she said quietly.
Because somewhere inside the ruin, beyond the concrete bones of a dead city and under those strange metal orbs, waited another gate.
And pixies.