They holed up inside the ruin.
There was no pride left in pretending otherwise.
The Yeak was dead, the global notification had already ruined whatever secrecy they might have wished for, and the backlash from the overdrive fruits had arrived like a divine tax collector. Joanne could barely keep herself seated upright. Alex had gone frighteningly pale beneath the sweat and dust. Dominic was trying to look steady despite the fact that his own body was clearly reconsidering its relationship with being in one piece. Alexei had one arm pressed carefully against his ribs, jaw tight whenever he breathed too deeply.
Even Emma, who had not eaten a Berserking Strawberry, looked drained down to the marrow after dumping everything into Dominic's final blast.
So they chose survival over momentum.
The inner cave became their shelter. The pond still whispered around the skeletal hill. Water fell from the green walls in silver threads. The dead Yeak lay sprawled near the altar like a collapsed mountain of black fur and old horror, while the white vajra rested near the pond, silent now, its lightning gone as if the relic had never tried to plough the entire chamber in half.
For a long while, no one touched it.
They checked each other first.
That was always the real measure of Team Nemean.
Loot could wait.
People could not.
Janet helped Joanne sit with her back against a rock, then forced water between her lips in small sips while Joanne muttered that she was fine between sharp inhale due to pain. Séline and Camille checked Alexei's ribs with careful hands and cruel honesty. Jack found a flatter patch of stone for Alex and set a rolled cloak behind her back before she could protest. Jake pretended not to hover and failed so thoroughly that Alex eventually opened one eye and told him to stop looking like a Bruno when he heard steak dinner was postponed.
Dominic sank down beside one of the stone formations and let out a groan that made everyone turn.
"I'm fine," he said automatically.
Janet gave him a look.
Dominic reconsidered.
"I am alive."
"That one I believe," she said.
Only after they were certain no one was about to collapse permanently did they move toward the Yeak's corpse.
The vajra waited beside the pond, beautiful and white and far too clean for something that had just been wielded by a ten-meter furred nightmare with parasite eyes. Emma approached carefully, appraisal already glowing faintly in her gaze, but before she could reach it, something cracked.
The sound came from the Yeak's left leg.
Everyone froze.
A strip of bone tore itself free from inside the dead boss.
Not with blood, or with flesh clinging to it the way natural bone should. It pulled out cleanly, as if the body had only been a sheath waiting to release it. Long, dark-white, slightly curved, and etched with faint patterns that looked like both muscle fiber and old fire damage, the bone floated into the air.
Then it drifted toward them.
Jake raised both daggers despite looking like he had the energy level of damp paper.
"Please tell me the dead monkey-ogre-pig does not have a phase two."
"No movement from the body," Alex said weakly.
"Still hate it."
Emma appraised the bone.
For a few seconds, her expression changed from exhaustion to comprehension, then to something much more grim.
"Either the eyes did not know how to control the Yeak yet," she said, "or they looked down on us."
No one liked that opening.
Emma looked from the bone to the corpse.
"Otherwise we would be dead."
The cozy quiet of the cave thinned.
Dominic shifted, wincing. "Explain."
Emma held up one hand toward the floating bone, reading the information only she could see.
"Left leg bone of the Yeak. Celestial Skeletal fragment." She breathed out slowly. "When equipped, it increases Dexterity and Constitution by 50 each."
Dominic groaned.
This time it was not from injury.
"That is a huge stat buff."
As Raging Judgenaut, his Constitution sat at 191 at level 40. That single leg bone gave more than 25% of his total CON.
"Yes," Emma said. "And the skill is worse."
"Define worse," Joanne mumbled from her rock.
"Elemental Requiems. The user can make pillars of fire and extremely cold air burst up from the ground."
Silence followed.
Then Jake said, "So it had that and didn't use it."
"Exactly," Emma said.
The team looked back at the corpse.
The Yeak suddenly seemed less like a conquered enemy and more like a test they had passed partly because the examiner had been distracted, arrogant, newly awakened, or not fully himself. The parasite eyes came to mind. Those wriggling things descending from the ceiling, forcing themselves into sockets not yet ready.
Dominic's jaw tightened.
"We got lucky."
"We also fought well," Janet said.
"Both can be true."
Alex, still seated but now clearly more alert, looked at the floating bone with narrowed eyes. Her mind had already started moving past horror and into utility.
Emma saw that and smiled faintly.
"I think it fits Alex best."
Alex blinked. "Me?"
"Bai Hu's Storm plus fire and ice pillars?" Emma said. "You would become worse."
Jake whistled.
"Firestorm. Icestorm. Psychic murder marbles. Yeah. That sounds like a war crime with cheekbones."
Joanne raised one limp hand. "Seconded."
Alex did not smile.
She stared at the bone, then shook her head.
"No."
Emma arched a brow. "You are turning down 50 extra DEX and CON?"
"Yes."
"That is a concerning amount of restraint."
Alex pointed—not at Jake, not at Dominic, but at Jack.
"It should go to him."
Jack looked personally offended by being considered.
"What?"
"Stone Lord already manipulates terrain," Alex said. "But you lack true attack options outside throwing boulders or making stone pillars rise from below. The bone gives you fire and ice pillars. More angles. More pressure. More ways to control the field."
Jack frowned.
He did not dismiss the logic. That was the problem. Everyone could see him understanding it before his refusal fully formed.
Then he shook his head.
"Jake benefits more."
Jake recoiled. "Do not throw responsibility at me."
"Dex makes you faster," Jack said. "Con gives your class survivability. Rift Striker II can get into enemy backlines, trigger Elemental Requiems, wreck their formation, and retreat."
"Why are you making such a good argument against my peaceful lifestyle?"
"You don't have one."
"I aspire to one."
Emma stared at them.
Then slowly pressed two fingers to the bridge of her nose.
"The damn farmer infected all of you."
That made everyone turn toward her.
Emma gestured at the floating bone with tired aristocratic outrage.
"Do you understand what another team would do over this? This thing gives fifty Dexterity, fifty Constitution, and a level sixty boss skill. Other teams would fight. They would split. They would spend three days smiling while planning how to stab each other over it." She pointed at Alex, Jack, and Jake in sequence. "Meanwhile, you lunatics are throwing it at each other because every single one of you thinks someone else needs it more."
Joanne, still half-dead, raised one finger.
"In our defense, Phong is not here, so we must produce his nonsense ourselves."
Dominic laughed softly, then regretted it when his ribs reminded him of the lightning.
The debate went on.
Not loudly. Not greedily.
That was what made the moment strange and warm despite the corpse in the room and the old skeletons lining the hill. They were all exhausted, injured, and sitting in the heart of an ancient sacrificial cave, yet the argument around one of the most valuable rewards any of them had ever seen felt less like a political crisis and more like a family deciding who needed the last bowl of soup.
Alex insisted Jack could turn the skill into terrain artillery.
Jack insisted Jake could use the stats better.
Jake insisted that putting a fire-and-ice eruption skill on a speed-based backline assassin would only encourage him to make bad choices, which, while true, did not help his case.
Séline quietly noted that Jack could shape cover to control where enemies stood, then use the Requiem from unexpected lines.
Emma, after listening, finally leaned back against a stone and sighed.
"Alex's wall idea is too good."
Jack looked wary. "Wall idea?"
Alex nodded once, as if this had settled the entire moral and tactical universe.
"You raise a stone wall. Then make the pillars shoot horizontally from it."
Everyone paused.
Jake looked at Jack. Joanne slowly lowered her water flask. Dominic's brows lifted.
Séline murmured, "That is disgusting."
Camille smiled. "Very."
Jack stared at Alex.
"That might actually work."
"That will work," Alex said.
And just like that, the bone was his.
Not because he had asked.
Because everyone else had decided his battlefield would become more terrifying with it, and because in Team Nemean that was somehow enough to outweigh personal greed.
The bone drifted toward Jack when he reached for it, then dissolved into a stream of dark-white light that vanished into his left leg. He stiffened once, teeth clenched, as the Celestial Skeletal fragment settled into place.
"How is it?" Janet asked.
Jack breathed through his nose.
"Like my leg remembered a mountain it never climbed."
"Poetic," Jake said.
"I hate that too."
The vajra was worse.
Not because it was difficult to carry. Because everyone understood what it meant.
A relic made from a tooth of the Sky Emperor himself. A legacy weapon from a Stone Age human resistance. The thing that had been raised in cave paintings like the answer to extinction. The weapon the Yeak had used to nearly kill them within seconds.
Alex was the first to refuse.
"No."
Emma had not even finished appraising the relic.
"You don't know what it does yet."
"I know enough. I already have enough firepower."
No one on Team Nemean could say she was wrong.
Dominic refused next.
"I already have Eyeless Heaven."
"That does not make this useless to you," Emma said.
"No. But someone else needs a relic more."
That one was also hard to argue.
Jake and Joanne both turned it down almost immediately after that.
"I just got murder daggers," Jake said.
Joanne patted her revolver with the kind of affection that made the weapon seem almost alive. "And I am in a committed relationship."
Jack shook his head.
"I just took the bone. Taking the relic too wouldn't be right."
Séline flexed her gloved hands.
"I use my fists."
Camille shrugged. "Venom Claws. No room for it in my style unless I become worse at what I already do."
That left Alexei, Janet, and Emma.
The three of them looked at the white vajra, then at one another.
Alexei spoke first.
"More attack options would be nice," he admitted. "Very nice."
Everyone waited.
"But I am a tank. I stand where hits come. Janet and Emma need it more."
Joanne immediately pointed at Janet.
"War Valkyrie. Flight. You throw the vajra down like judgment from heaven."
Janet reached over and pinched Joanne's cheek.
"Ow," Joanne said, not very convincingly because she was still too tired to make it theatrical.
Emma laughed once, then sobered.
"I agree with Joanne, minus the poetry crime. I'm the main support of Team Nemean."
She paused.
"If we leave Phong's plants out of the equation."
"Impossible," Jake said.
"Sadly true."
Janet looked at the vajra for a long moment.
Then shook her head.
"No. It should be Emma's."
Emma's face fell.
"Oh no."
Janet ignored her. "The vajra can vanish into space and reappear. Nearly a sure-hit, from what it almost did to Joanne."
Alexei nodded slowly.
Janet continued, "If I have it, I fly high and throw it. Good, yes. But visible. The enemy will see me throwing the vajra. Meanwhile, Emma stays in the middle of the formation. Protected, covered. And frankly, who would expect a killer move from the team support?"
Emma opened her mouth.
Janet cut her off gently.
"And I have ways to defend myself. Emma doesn't. Not enough."
That landed.
The support's weakness had always been obvious. Emma carried their rhythm, but when something reached her, the whole formation could fracture protecting her. The light armor helped. The second mana pool helped. But a relic that could attack through space from the protected center?
That changed the shape of their formation.
Emma groaned like she had been personally betrayed by ethics.
"The damn farmer infected you too."
Janet smiled sweetly.
"Yes."
Emma stared at the vajra with the expression of someone accepting a crown she had argued herself into avoiding.
"Fine."
She reached for it.
The white vajra lifted from the stone and came to her hand lightly, almost politely, as if it had decided long ago that all ownership was temporary and all wielders were merely stories passing through its teeth.
For a moment, Emma's expression softened with both determination and responsibilities.
Then she held it against her chest and breathed out.
"I'll make it worth it."
Dominic looked around the group, at Jack adjusting to the bone, Emma holding the relic, Joanne half-asleep against Janet's shoulder, Alex resting with forced dignity, Alexei breathing carefully through cracked pain, Jake pretending not to be moved, Séline and Camille murmuring quietly together.
Phong was not there.
And yet somehow, he was everywhere in the room.
In the way they gave power away. In the way they measured need before desire. In the way none of them reached for the biggest prize simply because they could.
Then Jake frowned.
"Speaking of... where is Rico?"
The warmth died.
Everyone looked around.
No raccoon. No out of the blue commentary. No inappropriate declaration. No caffeine-deprived wailing.
Alex, who had been trying not to move too much, opened both eyes.
"He was here."
"He was for a moment," Séline said slowly.
Camille looked toward the hall. "He missed the entire fight."
That was somehow more alarming than if he had been injured.
They rose with varying levels of pain and annoyance, following the path back through the cave mouth and into the painted hallway. The murals watched them pass again: the charge against the Grey One, humans fighting, the Sky Emperor's tooth.
And there, halfway down the passage, on the painting depicting the descent of the Sky Emperor, they found him.
Rico was high up on the wall, braced awkwardly inside a narrow hole hidden between the cracks that form the Sky Emperor horns. His back legs kicked in the air, his tail lashed. Both little paws were jammed deep into the dragon head as if Rico was trying to pick the nose of a floor boss with his paws. He strained with every ounce of raccoon determination to pull something free.
He had apparently been doing this the entire time.
The whole battle. The lightning. The Yeak. The global notification. Everything.
Rico grunted, pulled, slipped, then hissed, "Come on, secret wall snack, surrender to justice!"
Team Nemean stared up at him.
No one spoke.
Then Alex, exhausted beyond mercy, said flatly, "Rico."
The raccoon froze.
Very slowly, he looked down over his shoulder.
"Oh," he said. "Good news. I was on... ehm... strategic side quest?"