While Team Nemean rested in the Tortura camp, Phong had his own battle waiting for him on Floor 2.
Not against a boss or a cursed forest, no. Nothing quite that dramatic. His battle was purely against consequences.
Lake Baratok had not recovered from what the White Tigress did to it.
Phong stood near the shoreline with his boots half sunk into damp soil and looked out over the water in silence. The lake still held beauty, but it was the wounded kind now. The kind that looked fine from a distance until you noticed what was missing.
The prolonged freezing had done terrible damage.
Half of the lizardmen hatchlings had died. It wasn't collateral damage of the battle, or a result of hunger alone. Simply because the lake had been forced into a state it was never meant to endure for that long. The fish stocks had crashed. Smaller aquatic life had been hit even worse. The reeds near the shallows were thinner. The water insects were fewer. The whole chain beneath the surface had been cut in places Phong could not even fully see.
And now famine was brewing. It wasn't the dramatic kind with open starvation yet. Just the kind of pressure that turned societies mean.
So Phong worked.
Moletatoes spread beneath the banks, pushing through the earth in wide, patient lines. They loosened packed ground, shifted mud where the freeze had hardened it wrong, and helped restore gentle slopes and safe nesting zones. The terrain around the lake had to be coaxed back into something living before life would trust it again.
The Timatoes helped too.
In their own awful way.
They still looked down on the moletatoes, of course. Phong had never solved that problem. The tiger-faced tomatoes clearly thought root-network labor was beneath creatures as glorious as themselves.
But they protected the work. That, at least, they did with violent pride.
Any creature that got too curious about the moletato patches paid for it. The Timatoes rolled patrol around the active terraforming zones, baring their little fangs and hissing at anything that came too near. If a hungry scavenger tried to dig up the potatoes or chew through a working line, the Timatoes swarmed it and made an example out of it so bloody and loud that the rest of the local fauna learned fast: Leave the moletatoes alone!
After the third or fourth such lesson, hardly anything tested the rule anymore.
Phong watched one Timato roll past, pause beside a burrowing root-line, and glare up at a curious long-legged lake beast until it slowly backed away. He rubbed one hand over his face.
Useful. Still insufferable, though.
Then he opened the food stand.
Calling it a humanitarian aid station felt wrong. Not because the act was wrong, though. Because the word human no longer fit the reality in front of him: he was feeding a lake region full of dungeon races, each with their own way of sorting need from worth.
The lizardmen came first, organized as always despite the strain. Their society was matriarchal, so their priorities showed it. Food went first to hatchlings still alive, then to the elders, then to the weaker males who would not survive a lean season without support. Their queen's people distributed with discipline. No shouting. No open greed. Just quiet sharpness and careful counting.
The Kamohai were different. Brutally so. They sorted based on strength and threshold. The strongest adults, especially the new ones who had only recently entered full adulthood, were fed first. To them, survival of the fittest was not a slogan. It was structure. If the strongest stayed strong, the whole people had a better chance of surviving the next blow.
Phong did not agree with it. Yet he understood it was not his place to walk into another people's hunger and demand they reshape their instincts for his comfort.
Then there were the lizardmen's vassals: Buforians came in damp groups, frog-folk with wide eyes and cautious hands; the andromorphic mice of the Great Burrow arrived in family clusters, quick and alert, trying to look smaller than they were; the United Tribes of Giant Crickets came with all the twitchy impatience of a people built from jump and hunger; and the Inkborn, octopus folk who looked deeply wrong on land no matter how gracefully they moved, came with baskets and sealed jars for whatever broth or softened food could be carried back to their own.
It would have been easier if hunger made everyone noble.
It did not.
There were, as always, bad nuts. Spoiled ones too.
Some tried to take extra portions. Some lied. Some tried to send the same person through twice under a different group's line. A few pushed harder when they realized the stand was being run by a level 1 farmer and not one of his stronger allies.
When called out, those few made the mistake of thinking Phong's quiet meant weakness.
So they tried force.
The Timatoes made sure that mistake only happened once per idiot.
Phong did not even need to raise his voice most times. One sharp look at the little red monsters lining the stand was enough. And when that failed, the Timatoes rolled forward with all the joy of tiny executioners who had finally been given a reason.
After the first one died choking on boiling tomato juice and torn-open throat, every race around the food stand understood the rule: You did not challenge Phong's authority there.
Not if you wanted to keep breathing.
It was ugly. Necessary. And it worked.
So the lines settled. Distribution kept moving. The food went out bowl by bowl, bundle by bundle, crate by crate.
Phong gave away all of it: prepared fish stews made thin to stretch further, broth thickened with root vegetables and mushrooms, rice and grain he had brought in when he could, cooked meats traded from allies who could still hunt — soft portions for hatchlings, simple dense ones for the old.
Enough variety that different races could at least take something home.
By the time the last container was scraped clean and the final waiting hands had been turned away with nothing left to offer, the sky-light above the cavern had shifted toward evening. Phong sat down on an overturned crate beside the empty stand. His shoulders ached. His hands smelled of broth, smoke, and lake mud.
Around him, the desperate noise had softened. People were leaving. Carrying what they had gotten. Guarding it. Sharing it. Arguing over it, probably, once out of sight.
The Timatoes rolled lazy patrol nearby, red with more than their natural color.
Phong looked out over the recovering lake and thought of something that left a bad taste in his mouth.
The ten-day harvest cycle. Mutated crops came back fast.
Too fast.
Fast enough to feed a war machine if someone rich, cruel, and organized got hold of the right land, the right labor, and the right secrecy.
That was the part the elites would see — not the starving hatchlings; not the broken fish chain; not the patient work of stitching a damaged biome back together. They would see logistics: renewable buffs, rotating supply, and a system that could keep soldiers fed, healed, boosted, and replaced on a rhythm tighter than most modern armies could dream of.
Phong leaned forward, elbows on knees, and stared at the dirt between his boots. He had always known his plants could change battles. But sitting there, after emptying every last pot just to stop a local famine from turning into a bloodbath, he understood with fresh clarity how easily the same cycle could be used to fuel something far worse.