That night, Phong slept in Camp Orthrus.
Or tried to.
The elf children curled together in a heap that somehow took up more room than seemed possible. Nyx slept in a coil near the foot of the bedding, one eye half open even at rest. Bruno lay near the doorway like he could personally bite danger before it crossed the threshold, while little Fireball had buried herself in Phong's hood again, warm and smug in sleep. Rico, after much complaint about missing proper coffee, had finally settled down too.
Phong woke at midnight—not from sound, but from instinct. The kind that crawled up the back of the neck before the mind had words for it.
He opened his eyes and sat up slowly. Something was outside.
When he stepped out far enough to look toward the perimeter, he saw one of the scariest things he had ever seen in his life.
A flayed diver's skin stood near the entrance of camp. Just the skin—no flesh inside it, no bones, no real body. It stood upright anyway, hanging in the shape of a person and waving at him with a slow, loose motion that made his stomach knot. Where the face should have been, the stretched skin held a smile. Not a real one. A sinister one—a grin pulled onto dead leather.
The Timatoes were already there, dozens of them floating low with fangs bared and boiling juice ready. Little tiger faces fixed on the thing with the kind of violent focus they only wore when they wanted permission to become murder.
But they did not attack first, and that was what worried Phong most.
The Timatoes were many things—proud, bloodthirsty, completely insane in ways only fruit should never be—but they were not cautious without reason.
The flayed skin did not advance either. It stood there at the edge of camp like a scout, measuring distance, counting defenses, checking lines of sight. It looked at the Timatoes, at the walls, at the sleeping lodgings. At him.
Phong felt cold all over.
Then the skin fluttered—not ran, not jumped, but fluttered away into the dark like a sheet caught by bad wind.
That was the exact moment Rico woke up. The raccoon stumbled out half asleep, saw the thing just before it vanished, and immediately pissed himself.
Phong stared at him. Rico stared at the dark with every hair on his body puffed up.
For a few seconds, neither of them spoke.
Then Phong said flatly, "You did it again. First the trolls. Now this."
Rico whipped around, scandalized and terrified at once. "I am Kamen Rider," he hissed. "Not freaking exorcist."
Phong would have answered, but movement hit the edge of camp again. Something small came running out of the dark and collapsed right before the entrance.
A mouse—one of the Great Burrow scouts.
She hit the ground hard, dragged herself forward another handspan, and looked into camp with panic so raw it burned through her little features.
"Help," she rasped.
Behind her, more flayed skins fluttered closer through the dark.
The Timatoes moved before Phong could think, swarming the mouse fast enough that Phong only had time to shout half a word before red little monsters were all over her, tearing into her skin with fangs and boiling juice.
Then something burst out from inside her—something far larger than the mouse skin had any right to contain. It exploded upward in wet ruin, shredding the false hide as it came free. What rose from inside was a hunched humanoid mass of raw red flesh and bulging eyes. It had no skin at all. Its mouth gaped too wide, too deep, like a maw split into meat, and where arms and legs should have been, it had thousands of fleshy tendrils knotting and writhing over each other in a constant crawling motion.
Phong nearly threw up on the spot. To him it looked like John Carpenter's The Thing and Imhotep from The Mummy had somehow made a child together and then aborted it three weeks in, but the thing had lived anyway out of spite.
The Timatoes tore into it screaming with delight. Boiling tomato juice hissed across exposed flesh while little fangs ripped at tendrils. The creature shrieked with a sound that had too much wetness in it and not enough soul.
Phong pressed one hand hard over his mouth and forced himself not to gag.
So this, he thought, dizzy with horror, is a Painted Skin from the Dry Sea.
The painted skin at the gate was still screaming under the Timatoes when Phong got hit from behind by six crying elf children at once. They slammed into his back hard enough to nearly knock him forward.
"Daddy!"
The children clung to him in a tangle of shaking limbs, tears, and terror. The sight of the thing the Timatoes were tearing apart had broken whatever strange bravery their stats gave them. One child buried their face in his side, another clutched at his shirt so hard the fabric threatened to rip, and a third was crying loud enough to wake the dead, which, given the state of the dungeon, did not feel like a phrase Phong should use lightly anymore.
And worse, some of them had peed themselves from fear.
Phong closed his eyes for one second and accepted that the night was ruined.
Behind him, Rico took one look at the wet trousers and announced with immediate relief, "See. Raccoon not only one who humiliate self."
Phong turned his head just enough to give him a look. "Not helping."
"Morale statement," Rico said.
"It's not."
The raccoon had enough self-preservation left not to push further.
Nyx and Bruno came next, both of them already fully alert. Nyx's fur was raised, and Bruno had that low rumble in his chest that meant he wanted to bite something and would settle for nothing less.
Phong pointed toward the perimeter. "First watch. Both of you."
Nyx nodded once, sharp and serious. Bruno puffed himself up. "We'll guard."
And for once, neither of them treated it like a game.
So while the animals took first watch and the Timatoes patrolled with fresh blood still staining their little faces, Phong gathered the elf children up and brought them back inside.
It took longer than he wanted—he had to change their clothes, clean them, wash shaky hands and tear-streaked faces. Reassure each one that the bad thing had not gotten in, that daddy was here, that Nyx and Bruno were on watch, that the angry tomatoes outside were even meaner than the skin monster.
It worked. Slowly, one by one, the children drifted back down from full panic into exhausted hiccuping sobs, then finally into sleep.
By the time the last one loosened their grip on his sleeve and went still, Phong felt wrung dry.
Morning came with bad news—bad enough that the whole alliance around Lake Baratok started sounding different. Sharper. Less patient. More frightened in the ways people only got when the danger was not just strong, but wrong.
There had already been victims of the Painted Skins across every faction. Lizardmen, Kamohai, a mouse from the Great Burrow—even one of the Inkborn had gone missing and been found wrong.
Phong spent the morning gathering stories and comparing details. The more he listened, the clearer the pattern became.
There were two kinds of attack.
The first type was the flutter skins—just skins, empty ones that drifted through the dark like sheets of flesh on bad wind. If they caught a victim, they wrapped around them and squeezed or stretched until the body inside was forced to match the stolen shape. It killed the victim in the process, though from the stories Phong could not tell whether death came from broken bones, suffocation, or something worse.
The second type was more direct: a demon, the same kind he had seen burst out of the mouse the night before. Those things hunted, flayed the victim themselves, and then wore the skin as clothing.
That explained the scout. That explained the plea for help. That explained why the Timatoes had acted before Phong could—somewhere in their little tiger-fruit heads, they had recognized the wrongness before any human logic could catch up.
Once he had enough stories, Phong started laying down rules.
No one moved alone at dusk or night. No one answered a familiar voice in the dark unless they had full visual confirmation. Any ally returning from patrol had to answer challenge questions before being allowed close to camp. If a body moved wrong, it got treated as a threat first. If something seemed too familiar, too sudden, too eager to be trusted, it got checked from range.
And nobody, absolutely nobody, approached a lone survivor outside the perimeter without backup and something sharp enough to cut skin.
The rules spread fast. Fear helped with that, as did the memory of the thing inside the mouse.
The Kamohai and the lizardmen took the offensive side of it almost immediately, forming hunting parties for daylight hours and pushing around the lake banks and through the nearby woods to track the abominations while the sun-equivalent light still held. The Kamohai wanted blood and motion. The lizardmen wanted order and containment. Between the two, the hunting packs had a real chance of catching at least some of the Painted Skins before night came again.
Phong watched them organize and felt the situation shift into something uglier but clearer. This was no longer just famine relief or biome recovery—now Lake Baratok had a horror problem. And he had a very bad feeling that the H'Re's warning had arrived early only because something had already started moving behind the scenes before anyone was ready.
Phong started preparing for the future the moment the Painted Skin problem showed its teeth. He no longer had the luxury of treating each crisis like a separate fire to put out—famine, spies, shifting, floor bosses, cursed races from lower floors, and now skin-wearing horrors. All of it was starting to overlap.
So he moved.
First, he brought several mice from the Great Burrow down to Floor 1. They were nervous the whole trip through the lime-oak network, whiskers twitching, little paws clutching their packs like the roots might suddenly change their minds and spit them into a monster nest. Phong ignored the fear and brought them straight to Camp Harpy.
The Greencap Bunnies received them with the same stiff military seriousness they gave everything.
Phong explained the arrangement again in full: the mice would learn to farm with surface soil, and in return, they would serve as his ears among the divers—not just on Floor 2, but wherever the Great Burrow still had tunnels, vassals, scouts, and reason to listen.
He then left the elf children there too, for their daily training with the Greencap knight. The children complained at first, mostly because Phong was not staying and because Uncle Rico was not there to suffer as a horse after drills. But the moment the bunny knight captain walked over and gave them that flat look of his, they straightened up fast enough to make Phong almost proud.
Almost.
Then he told the Greencap captain about the arrangement with the mice. The captain listened in silence, war banners still crossed over his back, eyes sharp and unreadable as always. When Phong finished, the Greencap gave a slow nod.
"Acceptable," he said. "As long as you pay in surface soil."
Phong had expected that. "Done."
That settled it.
The mice of the Great Burrow would learn how to farm from the Greencaps, under Phong's arrangement and with Phong's resources. In time, they would no longer need to beg for food every time a famine hit. And in the meantime, they would become something else for him: an intel network.
That thought sat cold and useful in his mind.
After that, Phong expanded his own systems. More moletatoes went into the ground, more Eardropping Wood Ears were planted where roots could relay their audio through the network. The ears alone had limits—sound only, distorted meaning sometimes, fragments instead of clear truth. But with mice listening, watching, and moving through places larger people overlooked, the system became much more dangerous.
The Wood Ears would carry sound, the mice would carry context, and together, they would let Phong hear things he had no business hearing.
He felt no guilt about it. Not anymore. Not after Daniel Harlan, not after Josh, not after every smiling rich bastard who thought Phong's life was a game board for their convenience.
When that work was set, he went to visit the H'Re.
They had settled near the entrance to the obsidian canyon, far enough from Camp Orthrus to avoid causing panic, close enough to stay within a zone people already feared. It suited them in a bleak sort of way. They looked less like a marching horror now and more like a refugee camp built by people who had forgotten what comfort meant—lean shelters, bound cloth, worm-sick bodies curled in shadows. A few of them still muttered to themselves about eyes.
Their leader came out to meet Phong. That single vertical eye in his forehead blinked slowly as always.
"We are grateful," he said.
The words were sincere enough to unsettle Phong more than lies would have.
He looked over the H'Re camp and nodded once. "Stay out of trouble."
The leader made a dry sound that might have been laughter. "Trouble finds all men."
That was not wrong.
Phong left them there and headed back toward camp. On the way, he saw Carrockets flying in the distance—not one, but several. They streaked over the horizon in burning arcs before exploding somewhere far off with enough force to shake birds from the trees.
Phong stopped, stared, then slowly rubbed one hand down his face.
He did not need a system prompt to know what that meant: Rico.
Only Rico would look at his friend's living artillery plants and decide they were perfect for cardio training.
By the time Phong followed the direction of the blasts enough to understand the shape of what happened, the answer was somehow worse than expected.
Rico had been using divers as target practice—not to kill them or maim them permanently, just to terrorize them while the baby treant on his back built more stamina through repeated Kamen Rider transformations.
Phong stood there in silence for a long moment, then decided he would deal with Rico's nonsense later. Mostly because if he dealt with it immediately, he might actually strangle the raccoon.
Instead, he pulled out his phone and checked the news, which turned out to be a mistake. Rico had already become media—articles, clips, interviews with rattled divers, photos from shaky phones, threads from the Diver Association forum. Phong scrolled through it and felt his soul slowly trying to leave his body.
The headlines were all versions of the same thing: the weird treant from Josh's failed push against Death Peak had appeared on Floor 2. It would ambush teams of divers, blast them with what one terrified commentator had called "a few full minutes of hell," then leave. No confirmed kills, no lasting crippling injuries—just chaos, fear, humiliation, and enough explosives to make the experience unforgettable.
Then came the worse part.
Divers had learned the treant could be bribed with energy drinks. If they left offerings of Monsters, Red Bull, or similar cans, the strange treant would sometimes spare them or back off sooner.
Phong stopped walking. He stared at the screen, then scrolled further down with the dead hand of a man no longer surprised by anything and yet still somehow offended.
The brands had reacted already—of course they had. Limited flavors, promotional campaigns, ads themed after the mysterious rogue treant of Floor 2. Some idiot in media had already given Rico a name: "Dungeon Robin Hood." "Caffeinated vigilante."
Phong facepalmed so hard it made an actual sound.
So that was what the raccoon had been doing behind his back all this time—not just training, but building a brand.