Phong had a strange dream that night.
At first, it was only a voice.
Not loud, not commanding. It boomed behind him, speaking Vietnamese in a tone so natural that his sleeping mind accepted it before it understood the problem. That alone felt wrong. These days, there were only three people he spoke that language with often enough for it to live in his dreams: Long, Vân, and his grandpa.
This voice was none of them.
It was younger than his grandpa, calmer than Vân, less grounded than Long. It carried a familiarity that did not belong to any memory he could place. The sort of familiarity that made the back of his neck tighten.
Phong turned in the dream.
Darkness was all there is.
A kind of primordial black that felt older than the dungeon and more patient than the sky above it. Something moved far off in that dark, so vast that at first his mind mistook it for the shifting of the world itself. Then it slithered.
Serpentine. A body, or the suggestion of one, cutting through chaos the way a river might cut through mist if rivers were old enough to remember the first night. It lacked the majesty and pride the Sky Emperor carried with him. It moved too far away to be touched by reason, and yet close enough that his soul recoiled on instinct.
Phong narrowed his eyes, and saw them.
Two eyes suspended in the black, each with a double iris.
He woke with a jerk.
The ceiling of the hotel room swam into view. Air conditioning hummed softly. Streetlight from outside painted a pale line across the curtains. Beside him, Alex shifted and immediately rolled half awake toward the disturbance the way she always did, body already ready before mind fully caught up.
"What was it this time?" she murmured.
Phong breathed once, hard, then let himself sink back down beside her.
"Double-pupil eyes," he said.
Alex, still mostly inside sleep, frowned faintly. "That sounds very specific."
"It is."
He lay there staring into the dark for a moment longer, then realized she might not know why the phrase had left such a strange taste in his mouth.
"In China," he said quietly, "there's an old belief that people born with double irises are great men. Saints of an era. Exceptional figures." He turned his head slightly toward her. "That idea made it into Vietnam too. Through the whole Sinosphere influence. Through the centuries under Han and Tang control. It stuck."
Alex let out a small sigh and shifted closer until his shoulder touched hers fully.
"As long as it isn't the Lyon nightmare," she said, "the one where everyone forgot who you were and charged into your garden, I don't think you should panic yet."
Phong huffed a laugh softer than the dream deserved.
"Maybe you're right."
"Of course I'm right."
That was enough.
Between Alex's warmth and the ordinary weight of a familiar bed, the dream retreated into the corner of his mind where he kept things he could not yet explain.
The next morning, the league announced the pause.
Two weeks.
Officially, the statement called it "preparation work behind the scenes." The broadcasters used polished language. Executives smiled too hard while describing the next phase of the season as exciting, ambitious, and unprecedented. Nobody with any sense missed what they actually meant.
They needed infrastructure.
If the league was really going to become a joined dungeon dive for Celestial Skeletal, then the old surface-born systems would not be enough. Internet signals died or twisted under mana pressure. Radio degraded. Cameras failed after too much distance or too much dungeon interference. If they wanted to turn the next stage into a survival spectacle and not lose the money shots inside Floor 2 and Floor 3, then they needed even more settlements, more foothold, more of Mr. Zero incredible signal amplifiers and generators.
Phong understood that immediately.
So did Emma.
When the press cornered Team Nemean before their departure and asked why they were disappearing into the dungeon so quickly, Emma answered with smooth confidence.
"We're taking advantage of the break to do a specialized training course," she said. "The next phase will demand very different preparation."
That was true enough to survive cameras.
What it really meant was much better. Phong got time to build, and team Nemean got time to use his kingdom.
They returned to New York only long enough to move properly, gather what they needed, and then slipped down through the dungeon routes with far less ceremony than the surface deserved.
When they reached Baratok Town again, even Dominic had to stop and take in the sight.
The Kamohai and the trolls had been placed at the front, exactly where one would put creatures who understood violence as both profession and appetite. They formed the vanguard—hard-eyed, broad-shouldered, and restless.
The lizardmen took the rear and flanks. Their discipline and hierarchy made them natural side-guards, and the queen's instincts for holding a formation together showed in every detail. Their warriors moved in scaled ranks, spears and shields organized, tails balanced, reserve fat no longer wasted, but spent with intention.
The Tortura had taken the archer role, sheltered in the middle where older hands and calm discipline mattered more than youth. Their bows pointed outward in patient readiness, and their age, once a mark of exile, now felt almost noble in formation. Among them stood the lizardmen mages, disciplined and focus, as if they were always ready to rain down magic on the opposing forces once command was issued.
Behind them stood the reserve force: Buforians, giant crickets, Inkborn. Strange to human eyes, perhaps, but not to anyone who had survived enough dungeon bullshit like team Nemean. The frogs was in charge of morale boosting works such as waving the flags, sounding the war horns, or playing the war drums. The crickets handled movement of tools and heavier support gear. The Inkborn were war doctors, concocting various medicines with their tentacles.
And everywhere, the mice of the Great Burrow moved through it all. Scouts. Runners. Quartermasters. Carriers of reports and food and tools and small impossible things. They did not make the line impressive, but they made it real.
The lizardmen queen herself walked Phong through the structure with quiet pride.
"If the Greencaps and the Wolven commit," she said, "we will have cavalry too."
Phong nodded, genuinely pleased.
This was good. No, even better. This was something durable.
Then, the lizardman queen led him to witness the consequence of one of his older decisions. And Phong immediately wished he hadn't.
Near the edge of Baratok Town, where he had once planted elven seeds to scare away the Soerai during Bai Hu's long freeze, one pod had grown. Only one. But it was enough.
Unlike the translucent green pods that had held the other elf children, this one was wrong at first glance. Its surface was deep red—so dark it almost looked black at the folds. It was spikier too, the outer membrane studded with short horn-like protrusions that made it look less like a womb and more like a seed trying to become armor. He couldn't see through it. Not even a silhouette within. Just a pulsing red shell and the sense that something inside was taking its time.
Alex followed his gaze.
"That doesn't look friendly."
"No," Phong said. "It doesn't."
He stared at it for another few seconds, already feeling the future version of himself groaning in protest.
Then he did the only sensible thing: He filed it away as a problem for future Phong.
Which, in his experience, meant present Phong would still end up suffering from it sooner than planned, but that was tomorrow's betrayal.
Dominic got them moving after that.
Through the Lime-Oak network, he led Team Nemean to Fort Erymanthian.
Alex's mood made the urgency obvious. She wanted levels. Fast. Aggressive. The fight with Kenai and Tara had been glorious, but it had also reminded her of the gap between winning and becoming untouchable. Level 40 had become the next horizon in her mind, and once Alex picked a horizon, she stopped treating everything between herself and it like scenery.
So Team Nemean entered the Obsidian Canyon again.
This time they were not panicked hamsters retreating in haste. They came back expecting what the canyon had to offer, with new options at their disposal, and ultimately: with Phong's ridiculous support, both from his newly established kingdom and his plants.
The fort held behind them with all the quiet confidence of a place grown instead of merely built. The Lime-Oak rooted deep there now. The boar skull still watched over the gate. The smell of Timatoes haunted the black glass ridges enough that the nearest roach trails kept their distance on instinct.
And the mice of the Great Burrow had done wonders.
Phong had known they would be useful. He had not expected just how much value they could wring out of small bodies, courage, and one carefully handled Timato.
20% of the canyon was mapped already.
That did not sound like much until one understood the place. The Obsidian Canyon was a labyrinth of reflected black, jagged verticals, hidden crevices, roach corridors, old spider nesting pockets, and the ruins of something too old to have belonged to any human civilization. Mapping a fifth of it under active monster pressure was an absurd achievement.
The trick had been simple and insane enough to work perfectly.
Each mouse carried one Timato with them while scouting.
That single little red tyrant was enough to make both the giant cockroaches and the body-snatcher spiders reconsider entire routes. The smell did more work than swords ever could. So while the Timatoes snarled at every moving shadow and looked deeply offended by having been turned into a ward, the mice ran their surveys, marked paths, measured descent lines, and returned with maps that no human team could have made so quickly.
Dominic studied the latest sketches and tapped one section near the broken center of the explored zone.
"A ruin," he said.
The mice had found it tucked into a dead pocket of the canyon where the obsidian opened up around old stone that did not belong there. Enough structure remained to suggest more than just collapsed walls. Enough intact geometry to make everyone think the same thing.
Eyeless Heaven.
Or something like it.
Dominic wanted to see if there were more relics, or remnants, maybe more echoes of those old civilizations that had been swallowed by the dungeon and left to rot in fragments. No one argued with him on that.
So the team left Fort Erymanthian behind and began killing their way toward the ruin.
The canyon welcomed them the old way—with spiders that stole bodies and roaches whose whole body acted as a mouth, chitin clacking and silk whispering and black stone making every light feel inadequate.
But this time Team Nemean came prepared.
Alex moved through the front line like a storm with anger issue. Dominic held center whenever the path narrowed. Jack covered the bad angles. Jake, Séline and Camille assumed the three tips attacking formation that had worked so well for them. Joanne's shots cracked against shell and shadow. Emma's voice and mana held the tempo together. Alexei's shield and faith turned ugly ambushes into shorter regrets. Janet used her skills to improve the team morale, granted minor attack buffs, and sorted through their ration of utility plants. Snow Lime for speed, Stoic Garlic for defense. Sympathy Enoki and Arrogant Ginger whenever someone got clipped.
Slowly, they made their way through the insectoid army.
Back on floor 2, Phong was doing paper work and even more diplomatic with dungeon species while the elf children played with Nyx and Bruno when he suddenly shot out of his chair, eyes opened wide:
"Where is Rico?"