Next morning, Rico's "allies" arrived.
The moment Phong saw them, he understood why the raccoon had been so smug while also refusing to explain anything. No normal explanation would have done them justice.
They were human. Or at least, they had once been. Now, they looked like what happened when a person had been chewed on by the dungeon and somehow lived through it.
Their backs were swollen and hunched, bulging under loose wraps and worn cloth until each of them looked bent under a burden growing from inside their own flesh. They walked with staffs clutched in trembling hands. Their legs were even worse. The skin was riddled with holes, and from those holes, worms would sometimes peek out and writhe before slipping back beneath the flesh.
Phong had seen many ugly things by now, but these people still made his skin crawl.
One of them caught him looking and spoke in a dry, matter-of-fact voice.
"They keep us alive."
Phong frowned. How on earth did a blind person with a blindfold just tell when he looked at them was completely beyond him.
The man seemed to look down at his own leg where a pale worm had just pushed halfway out through a hole near the shin.
"They feed on us too," he added. "But they keep us alive."
That was not any more reassuring, not even one bit. If anything, the explanation made it worse.
Worse still were their faces.
Most of them had their eyes covered with bandages, wrapped again and again until only the lower half of their faces remained visible. But the bandages did not hide the claw marks on their cheeks. Deep, ugly scars, the kind that could only have come from desperate hands gouging inward. These people had clawed their own eyes out.
Phong realized that before anyone said it, and once he realized it, he started hearing the mutters.
"People shouldn't have eyes."
"Eyes lie."
"Eyes invite them in."
It was deeply concerning. Phong would have called that insane if he wasn't so desensitize by the dungeon's bullshits that everything in life now sounded plausible. Even Rico, who had proudly brought them here, had fallen a little quieter now that the group stood in full daylight before camp.
The strangers called themselves the H'Re.
When Phong asked what that meant, the one who seemed to be their leader answered.
"Gnawed," he said.
The leader stood a little straighter than the rest, though that did not make him less unsettling. Unlike the others, he still had one visible eye. Not where it should have been though. One single vertical eye stared from the middle of his forehead, blinking slowly as it studied Phong.
Phong had to fight the urge to look away. The old man seemed like a messed up version of Erlang Shen.
The H'Re leader planted his staff and spoke in a voice roughened by age, pain, and too much darkness.
"We are those who were gnawed by the Dry Sea and did not die."
That made the air around them feel colder.
"The darkness of the Ninth Floor ate at us," he continued. "And in being gnawed, we learned the truth of our people."
Phong did not know what that truth was, and judging from the way the man said it, he was not sure he wanted to know.
The leader went on anyway.
A recent Shifting had moved their hideout from Floor 9 to a nearby mountain ridge. They had been displaced, confused, and forced closer to regions they did not know. Then Rico had found them. Or, maybe more precisely, they had found Rico.
That part was less clear. Either way, the H'Re seemed to believe it had not been chance.
Their leader lifted his chin a little and spoke with the weight of prophecy.
"There is a saying among our people. An old promise." His vertical eye fixed on Rico for a moment. "An envoy of the Green will appear in the form of a talking raccoon and lead us to the Green."
Rico puffed his chest out immediately, looking entirely smug and too please with himself. That got him a boo from both Nyx and Bruno, yet the raccoon treated them like applauses anyway.
Phong closed his eyes for one second. Of course that raccoon did.
The H'Re leader continued, voice trembling with something between reverence and fanatic hope.
"The Green will be the only one who can kill those pesky eyes." His lip curled slightly at the word. "And free all the humans of the Ninth Floor."
Phong looked at them again.
First, at the worms. Then at the dirty bandages over empty eyes. Finally, the way some of them twitched whenever sunlight caught a reflective surface.
Mentally stable was not how he would describe them. Not even close.
Still, level-wise, they were no joke. When the system gave him enough to work with, what it showed was bad news.
Every single one of the H're were level 60 and above.
For a brief moment, Phong understood why Rico had come back pleased with himself. From the raccoon's point of view, he had found another powerful faction and dragged them back like a cat bringing home something alarming it had hunted.
Phong rubbed one hand over his face.
Then he turned to the lizardmen queen.
He did not ask for a full alliance, not even refuge inside the center of camp. Only whether the H'Re could be allowed to stay nearby.
The queen did not answer at once. Her slit-pupiled gaze moved over the H'Re, measuring the old scars, the unstable mutters, the worms, the prophecy talk, and the raw levels hidden in their ruined frames. When she finally spoke, her answer was simple.
"No."
Rico gasped like she had stabbed him.
"They should stay," the raccoon protested at once. "They know my importance. They powerful."
That was exactly the wrong thing to say.
The queen turned her eyes to him.
"Then they are your responsibility, then?"
Rico froze.
The queen continued in the same even tone.
"When their insanity rises. When they lash out. When they kill. When their prophecy becomes a problem. When they release whatever magic behind those eyes upo the Scaled Throne... Will you take responsibility?"
Rico's tail immediately tucked between his legs.
The raccoon backed down so fast it was almost impressive.
"…valid concern," he muttered.
Phong could not fault the queen.
In truth, he thought the same.
Camp Orthrus was already a fragile place. Half built, and still growing. The zone near it was full of tension, trade, hunger, and too many moving parts. Bringing in a group of unstable level sixty-plus people who clawed their own eyes out and muttered about the truth of humanity would be reckless.
The queen was right.
And yet, Phong looked at the H'Re again.
For all their wrongness, for all the danger they carried, he could not quite bring himself to reject them outright. Not when they had clearly come here because they believed this was their last hope. And he had seen enough to know that keeping them where he could see them was still safer than letting then wander off and somehow got recruited by the wrong people.
Phong thought of Olen and the trolls at that last part.
So he chose a middle path.
"I'm not the Green you're waiting for," Phong said plainly.
Some of the H'Re stirred in distress at that. Their leader, however, only watched him with that single eye.
Phong went on before they could spiral.
"But I do know a place."
He told them about the old Mushroomoid colony near a gate to Floor 3. The swampy region the Mushroomires had once called home, now left with enough space and isolation that a group like the H'Re could settle there without immediately clashing with Camp Orthrus or the lake peoples.
"You can stay there for now," Phong said. "Until something better is worked out."
The H'Re leader listened in silence.
Then he gave a slow nod.
"Then we will go."
He did not bargain.
There was no anger to be found in his voice.
Not even disappointment loud enough to crack into something ugly reflected in that single eye.
Just a strange, tired acceptance.
That somehow made them feel sadder.
Phong watched as the H'Re began moving again, staffs tapping against the ground, hunched shapes turning toward the direction of the old Mushroomoid swamp. They moved like the remains of a people who had already lost too much of themselves, but not yet enough to stop walking.
Rico watched them go with a look halfway between pride and worry.
The lizardmen queen said nothing else.
And Phong stood there for a while, eyes following the retreating H'Re, already knowing this would not be the last time that prophecy came knocking at his door.
The H'Re left behind one last warning before they disappeared into the direction of the old Mushroomoid swamp.
"Beware of the Painted Skin."
The words stayed with Phong longer than he wanted.
They stirred up an old memory from before all this. A Chinese ghost story: Liaozhai ZhiYi by Pu Songling - Painted skin. A thing that wore a human shape like clothing and only revealed what it really was when it was already too late.
That was enough for him.
Before the day ended, Phong passed the warning through the lakeside network as far as he could. To the lizardmen, the Kamohai, the Inkborn. To the mice of the Great Burrow, the Buforians and the cricket tribes too. He did not have details, only a name and a bad feeling. But in the dungeon, that was often enough to save lives.