Brennan Jameson stepped in after Séline's win.
Not because it was wise. Because it was honest.
Emma understood the choice the moment the broadest of the brothers rose from the Maine bench and rolled his shoulders like a man preparing to get hit very hard for reasons that had nothing to do with points.
Most people in the stadium did not.
The commentators were already talking over one another, asking why Maine would risk more of their roster now that the group picture had largely settled. After the first leg, it was painfully obvious who the two best teams in the group were. Team Nemean and the New Jersey Rangers had separated themselves from the rest. The standings would shuffle. Pride would sting. But the shape of the future was already showing.
Only two teams would advance.
Maine knew they were not likely to be one of them.
So Brennan chose growth.
If the road to the next stage was blocked, then he would use the ring as a forge instead.
Emma watched him walk to center and said quietly, mostly to Janet beside her, "He's here to sharpen himself."
Janet nodded once.
On the far side of the ring, Séline had already understood the same thing. That made her smile. Not widely. Just enough that Camille, watching from the bench, knew her friend was pleased.
Brennan activated Bison Soul the moment the horn sounded.
The spectral mass of it rose over him like old weather given shape—shoulders broadening beneath the spiritual pressure, stance lowering. He did not fight like Rory's Bear and he did not move like Eamon's Eagle. Bison was not a wall and it was not a sky-hunter.
Bison was momentum.
The right to keep coming once the world had already decided a normal man should have stopped.
Séline met that momentum with calm.
No air step theatrics this time, or flashy reveal. She stayed outside his first line of entry, fists lit with elemental mana, feet planted in that infuriatingly simple posture that made the untrained audience think she was underdoing it.
Then Brennan hit her.
Or tried to.
He drove in with a shoulder feint into a full torso rush, bison pressure packed behind the movement enough to rattle the ring floor itself.
Séline's answer was almost insulting in its economy.
One sidestep.
One forearm redirect.
One perfectly timed punch into the side of Brennan's guard right where his forward angle narrowed.
The impact didn't stop him.
It managed to change his course, and that was enough to matter.
His line wobbled just enough that he had to rebuild it mid-motion, and by then Séline had already flowed away from the center of impact and struck him again, this time with fire mana on her right hand and ice on her left.
Brennan grunted.
The crowd roared.
From there the fight became one of the best of the day. Neither spectacular in the way Alex's storm had been spectacular, nor mythic in the way Dominic turning a stadium ring into rubble had become instant history. This was different.
A good fight.
The kind old fighters respected more than highlights.
Brennan learned fast. That was the first thing everyone watching had to admit. He stopped giving Séline perfect timing windows. He started varying his commitment, sometimes letting Bison pressure build but cutting it short halfway to bait her counter, other times going fully through with enough stubborn mass to make her take several steps back just to meddle out his force.
Séline adapted too.
She changed element emphasis depending on what he gave her. Flame when she wanted to force him to feel attrition in the muscles. Lightning when she wanted interruption. Her punches came slower than the audience expected but harder than they should have, every strike built on the lesson she had carved into herself after glimpsing dǒu and refining prana coat into something alive under her skin.
And Brennan, to his own credit, had prana coat too.
The moment the first truly heavy exchange landed cleanly, it appeared over him in that close dense shimmer the cameras were only just learning how to catch.
The commentators, now educated enough by repeated exposure to stop sounding completely lost, immediately called it out.
"Prana coat seemed to be how it's called in Asia, folks. Seems like our combatants are using it again!"
"Maine hid this during the first leg! Their secret weapon perhaps."
"No use to team Nemean though. They knew it too. The vikings plan just back fired!"
Rico, back at the booth for the younger demographic and sitting with one leg thrown over the chair like a tiny delinquent philosopher, snorted.
"Yes yes, very cool. But where are the Kamen Rider armors? These one too simple. No flair."
No one tried to correct him anymore.
Brennan and Séline crashed into one another's timing for nearly five full minutes. He pushed. She redirected. He learned to take the elemental hits in the right places. She learned to read the split second before Bison Soul tipped from a feint into true commitment.
Twice Brennan nearly got her with a body-drive sequence that would have folded less disciplined fighters. Twice Séline answered by letting his own pressure carry him just far enough for her to land a perfectly timed short strike under the ribs.
The crowd got louder with every adjustment.
By the fourth minute, nobody in the stadium was looking down on Maine anymore. Not after Rory and Jake. Not after Eamon and Séline. Not after Brennan refused to become less dangerous just because the bracket likely no longer loved him.
But in the end, Séline's control was cleaner.
That was the difference.
Not power. Not heart. Mana.
She spent less to do more. Prana coat held smoother over longer exchanges. Her elemental choices wasted less. Her breathing stayed in step with her strikes while Brennan, under the grind of attrition and repeated body hits, began to lose efficiency in pieces.
A little too much in the shoulders.
A little too much in the stance resets.
Séline saw it.
Then ended it.
She let Brennan commit to one last full rush and met him halfway—not with a dramatic stopping blow, but with a compact double exchange. First strike to turn the line. Second strike, lightning-fed and mana-perfect, straight into the opening his body had been too tired to close in time.
Brennan went down to one knee.
Tried to rise. Couldn't.
The horn sounded.
Winner: Séline.
Maine's side clapped anyway.
And back at Team Nemean's bench, Rico returned from commentary duty in full glory, scaling two seats and one railing to celebrate like the result had been his all along.
"That's how French girl do it! Could be better with more caffeine though."
Joanne grabbed him under one arm and spun him once for no reason other than joy.
The fight behind them, the points, the standings, the cameras—all of it kept moving. But beneath the surface of the league, deeper and stranger things were already in motion.
While Team Nemean finished the surface match without their three brightest names, Phong moved through the dungeon with Alex and Dominic at his side.
It was not easy to leave.
They were too recognizable now.
Too many eyes had attached themselves to Team Nemean. Too many fans, press leeches, sponsor runners, and half-brave idiots thought following them might lead to content or leverage or proximity to whatever made one famous in the new age.
Phong had no patience for any of that. Alex had even less.
The first two people who tried to tail them got one look from her and retreated with the sort of speed usually reserved for prey animals realizing the grass was actually made of teeth. After that, no one else was stupid enough to keep trying.
They entered through the old gate routes and moved fast.
Camp Stymphalian greeted them with that familiar strange comfort only places built under pressure ever seemed to have. The original Lime-Oak spread its branches over the camp like a promise made green. The hidden paths, the plant lines, the smell of dirt, leaves, food, and danger all settled over Phong's nerves in the way no surface hotel ever could.
He checked the Mushroomkhan first.
Not because it was the most urgent, but because it was the most unknown.
The fungal megastructure loomed in the distance from the ridge line where the old colony had once been, vast and pale and wrong in the sunset glow of Floor 1. Up close, it looked even less like architecture and more like the world had decided to grow a thought too large to fit inside a normal organism. The holes across its surface opened and closed in slow wet pulses. The whole thing seemed to breathe through spores and silence.
Alex's hand hovered near her side instinctively.
Dominic shifted his grip on Eyeless Heaven.
Phong stepped forward anyway.
Then the psionic message touched him.
Not words, as fungal lifeforms in the dungeon didn't seem to have the concept of them, but it carried a meaning nonetheless.
Friend.
The pressure of it washed through his mind with enough gentleness that he relaxed before he fully realized he was doing it.
So that was good.
Very good.
He took from his bag the emblem he had designed, a rough but deliberate symbol: the Lime-Oak tree entangling a crescent moon in its roots. He held it up toward the vast fungal dome and said, "Anyone carrying this is my friend. Don't attack them unless they attack first."
There was still no spoken answer, only another pulse of knowing.
He could live with that.
Phong let out a breath.
Then they returned to Camp Stymphalian properly, where he gathered what he needed.
A newly sprouted Lime-Oak clone, stored in the storage and kept safe by his plants.
Several bags of seeds, farming tools, and enough food to bribe the representatives.
A future in plant form.
Then the Lime-Oak network opened for them, and the three of them stepped through its living path to Camp Orthrus.
Well, only team Nemean called it by that name now.
To the local races around the lake, it had become Baratok Town.
Species moved around it with patterns that suggested permanence. Lizardmen patrols on newly built road, careful not to stepped on the Great Burrow's messengers. Crickets hauling material. Kamohai negotiating over labor. Tortura elders in shaded perches.
Greencap emissaries and Wolven watching from opposite corners with old rivalry hidden under present necessity.
The elf children came running first.
Level seventeen and growing into themselves in ways both adorable and alarming, they surrounded Phong with reports, questions, demands for praise, and the urgent need to show him everything immediately.
Representatives of all the allied species gathered too. Because now the farmer had returned, and the farmer had plans.
Phong led Alex and Dominic out to the newly claimed ground in the Obsidian Canyon.
Even knowing his own design, even having ordered this step, the sight waiting for them still carried a kind of impossible satisfaction.
A portion of the canyon had been secured.
Not tamed. Never that. The Obsidian Canyon remained itself—black glass cliffs, harsh angles, deep cracks, old danger sleeping in the stone. But within one stretch of it, walls rose. Watchtowers stood. Barrier lines had been marked. The smell of Timatoes lingered so strongly that the deeper dark seemed to keep its distance on instinct.
Phong planted the Lime-Oak first.
It rooted and grew with the eager hunger his trees always carried in dungeon soil, trunk thickening, branches unfurling, roots gripping black ground that had once only known cockroach swarms and spider ambushes.
Then he planted the rest.
Tomatoes in bulk, since Timatoes had grown to become the ace in his defense, and his only offensive option.
Chilies.
Moletatoes, more than the other two camps needed. They were conquering an obsidian canyon, not soft lands near a lake or a ruin.
Carrockets remained the plant with the most explosive power, and so they were brought here.
Enoki machine guns to deal with the spiders.
Necroginger to turn roaches into zombies if they ever tried to challenge the camp.
Bonktatoes came too, since Phong had seen how bludgeoning was better on chitins since the siege of the Black Ants.
The Joker venom peas.
Anti-air dill in organized lines just in case anything flying in this place got ideas.
As he worked, the defensive perimeter came alive around him in that familiar cascading way only those who had seen Phong build from nothing could understand. Soil and rock shifted, unlike when Jack had tried and had been refused.
When he was done, he stood and named it.
"Fort Erymanthian."
Then, with help from the others, he mounted the great boar skull above the gate line—the skull of the monstrous beast the Greencap Bunnies and the Wolven had hunted together after Josh's failed push toward Death Peak. It hung now as a symbol and a warning both.
Alex and Dominic looked around in open disbelief.
Not because they doubted Phong anymore. Because they remembered this place too well.
They remembered being in the pincer of the spiders and those mouth cockroaches from hell. Alex nearly exploded from stats received from Berserking Strawberry and Emma's buff just so they could escape back to floor 2.
And now, in less time than a normal kingdom needed to organize a border village, Phong had turned a portion of that hell into a functioning fort.
But he was not done.
Not even close.
He gathered everyone: The elf children, the representatives, the elders, the mercenaries, and rhe emissaries.
Then, standing at the heart of Fort Erymanthian with the boar skull overhead and the new Lime-Oak taking root behind him, Phong announced the next truth. Something the overly excited elf children had decided to inform everyone badly before he could do it officially himself.
From now on, Phong's three territories would stand as the base of a small kingdom.
Not empire.
Not nation-state in the human sense.
A kingdom enough.
He named it Yuè.
Alex, standing beside him with dust on her boots and disbelief still in her eyes, asked what it meant.
Phong glanced at her and answered in the same quiet tone he used for things older than strategy.
"It's the pinyin for moon. And Việt."
He shrugged once.
"Using Vietnamese directly would be too obvious. So I borrowed Chinese."
"And the moon?" she asked.
Phong smiled faintly at that.
"I've always liked it more than the sun."
Then he told her the story.
About the diplomat sent to China after the Mongols retreated from Đại Việt in 1288. About the emperor of Yuan trying to challenge him with a parallel sentence. About how likely it was legendarized boast and not official records, yet were kept alive by folk's memory anyway.
The emperor of Yuan said:
Nhật Hỏa Vân Yên, Bạch Đán Thiêu Tàn Ngọc Thố.
(Sun is fire, cloud is smoke; the daybreak burneth the jade rabbit to ash.
In China mythology, the jade rabbit is a representation of the moon)
Phong let the words settle in the canyon air before giving the reply.
Nguyệt Cung Tinh Đạn, Hoàng Hôn Xạ Lạc Kim Ô.
(Moon is sling, stars are bullets; dusk striketh down the golden crow.
In China mythology, the golden crow with three legs is a representation of the sun)
He spoke it softly, but in that soft voice there was a thread of something old and stubborn enough to outlive empires.
"I always thought Việt was the moon," he said. "Next to a bigger, louder, more influential neighbor."
Dominic snorted once.
"That fits you down here too."
Phong looked at him.
Dominic spread one hand toward the new fort, toward the lines of allied species, toward the camps that had spread not by conquest but by shelter and food and impossible cultivation.
"You don't conquer," he said. "You don't dominate. You don't use scare tactics." He shook his head with a half-smile. "Your influence just reaches everywhere anyway. Quiet. Steady. Like moonlight."
For once, Phong had no joke ready.
Because standing there, with Fort Erymanthian newly born and Yuè spoken into being at last, he could almost believe Dominic had seen the shape of him more clearly than he had seen it himself.