Phong held Alex before anyone could say another word.
It was not dramatic. He did not sweep across the room, did not make some grand declaration to the fort or the dungeon or the dead woman in the Messenger Stone. He simply reached for her, and Alex, who had been standing too still since Alexis Valantris appeared in the projection, let herself be pulled into his arms.
At first, she was rigid.
Not resisting him, never that, but braced, like a weapon waiting for a hand to release it. Her shoulders were tight, her breathing shallow, her eyes remained on the dim star-shaped stone in Emma's hand, as though the image of the other woman might return if she looked away.
Alexis Valantris.
A woman who looked like Alex, spoke with Phong's awkward gentleness, had slain something called the Monkey Kings, and still recorded a message expecting her own death.
Phong tightened his arms around Alex.
Only then did her body soften.
The tension left her slowly, in layers. Her shoulders sank first, then her spine. Then the hand that had been half-curled at her side opened and found the front of his shirt. She leaned into him, face turning slightly toward his chest, accepting the embrace with the kind of quiet honesty she rarely gave in front of everyone else.
Which, of course, meant everyone else immediately behaved like everyone else.
"Boooo," Rico called from the table, both paws around a cup of coffee he had absolutely not been authorized to possess.
Joanne, without missing a beat, added, "Get a room."
Alex's head turned just enough for one eye to become visible over Phong's shoulder.
Joanne raised both hands.
"I said it with love."
Phong ignored them.
He looked at the team instead.
The room was still heavy with the message. Dominic's question had not left the air. If someone like Alexis had failed, what chance did they have? If a slain floor boss could return, what did killing one even mean? If Night Kings recovered once humanity advanced enough, then was progress itself a trigger? A bell rung for old monsters to wake?
Fear, Phong had learned, did not always look like shaking. Sometimes it looked like silence. Sometimes it looked like smart people running out of jokes.
So he spoke.
"Hey," he said.
Everyone looked at him.
Phong took one breath, still holding Alex.
"They didn't have me, remember?"
For half a second, nobody reacted. Then Joanne blinked. Jake's mouth opened slightly. Emma stared as though she had just witnessed a cat declare tax policy.
Phong pressed on before his own embarrassment could catch up and drag him into self-deprecation.
"I've got your back," he said. "We can survive this."
He paused. The confidence strained, bent, and turned into something much more honest.
"Somehow."
That last word saved it from becoming a speech. It made it Phong, and somehow that helped more.
Dominic was the first to laugh. It started low, caught somewhere between exhaustion and relief, then grew just enough to loosen the room. Alexei's shoulders lowered. Janet let out a breath she had been holding. Séline looked down with a small smile. Camille's expression softened. Emma leaned back against the table and closed her eyes for one brief second like someone accepting that, yes, this idiot farmer was still their central strategic asset against cosmic horror.
Because Phong was not wrong.
Alexis Valantris had commanded armies.
She had reached level one hundred.
She had slain a floor boss.
But as far as the message showed, she had still thought like a warrior standing before extinction. Kill, fight, win. Defeat the dungeon with force. March armies into old nightmares and hope that enough steel, mana, and courage could carry a species through.
Phong had never worked that way.
He killed when he had to. He schemed constantly.
But somewhere along the way, while everyone else asked how to conquer the dungeon, Phong had asked how to exist alongside it. He had fed enemies until they became partners. Planted trees that turned camps into networks. Made children out of pods and treated them as children. Turned monsters into allies, refugees into citizens, and hostile frontiers into trade towns. He made utility plants that saved lives as often as they ended them. He built safe places where safe places had no right to exist.
He did not beat the dungeon by being stronger than it. He survived it by teaching parts of it to sit at his table.
Dominic rubbed his face, still smiling tiredly.
"If Alexis had Berserking Strawberry," he said, "maybe she would've won."
That got a real laugh.
Even Alex's mouth twitched against Phong's shirt. Then she pulled back just enough to look at the Messenger Stone again. Her eyes were clearer now. Still serious, but no longer swallowed by the image of Alexis.
"I'm not losing to Alexis Valantris," she said.
The room quieted.
Alex lifted her chin.
"I have ten years or so to catch up."
Jake pointed at her. "That is the most Alex way possible to react to seeing your dead alternate-universe commander self."
"Not alternate me," Alex said immediately.
"Fine. Your suspiciously similar golden edition."
Joanne squinted at Phong. "I'm more surprised by him."
"By who?" Phong asked.
"You," she said. "That was confidence."
Jake nodded solemnly. "Actual confidence. In himself. I'm scared."
Rico gasped and pointed both paws at Phong.
"He has been infected."
Phong narrowed his eyes. "By what?"
"The A virus."
Everyone stared. Rico nodded gravely.
"Alex virus. Symptoms include confidence, direct eye contact, and poor respect for impossible odds."
Alex looked at the raccoon. Rico immediately hid behind his coffee.
"I said it as medical professional."
The mood broke properly after that.
Not because the fear vanished. It did not. The Night Kings, Alexis, Kdiê, the Monkey Kings, and the Grey One all remained in the unseen architecture of their thoughts. But the fear now had company. It had jokes beside it, warmth underneath it. Phong's ridiculous, infuriating, quietly world-warping certainty standing under it like a support beam no one had realized was load-bearing until it held.
So Team Nemean went to bed with their motivation renewed.
Not peacefully one might add. The dungeon never gave them that much.
But with enough steadiness to sleep.
Phong and Alex retired to their room inside the fort, one of the more private spaces Phong had insisted on building once he realized Team Nemean would keep treating battlefields like hotels if not provided alternatives. Their usual love that night was quieter than most, less hunger and more reassurance, bodies finding proof in each other that they were still alive, still themselves, still here despite dead futures whispering from ancient stones.
Afterward, Alex lay against him with her ear over his heart.
She did not speak for a long time.
Phong ran his fingers slowly through her hair.
Outside, Fort Erymanthian creaked and murmured. Ropes shifted in the canyon wind. Timatoes muttered threats at shadows. Somewhere far above or below, water dripped through stone. The dungeon lived around them.
Alex fell asleep listening to his heartbeat.
Phong stayed awake a little longer.
He thought of double-irised eyes in primordial dark.
Of Alexis Valantris and her golden circlet. Of Kdiê petting body-snatcher spiders like beloved kittens. Of Night Kings recovering when humanity advanced enough.
Then he looked down at Alex sleeping against him and decided, with a stubbornness that was perhaps not entirely rational, that the dead future would simply have to wait its turn.
He had bridges to build.
The next morning, Team Nemean chose the next ruin.
The mice of the Great Burrow had marked several possible sites during their mapping runs, but one stood out: nine miles due east of Fort Erymanthian. Farther than the Yeak ruin, less conveniently placed too. Not impossible, but deep enough into the canyon that the route would require planning, supplies, and perhaps the use of the expanding infrastructure Phong had already begun threading through the cliffs.
The map lay across a reinforced wooden table in the fort's command shelter, weighed down at the corners by stones, seed bags, and one sleeping Timato that had rolled onto the parchment and refused to leave until Phong bribed it with praise.
Phong studied the markings.
"This place is strange."
Dominic stood beside him, arms crossed. "More specific."
"There are too many ruins," Phong said. "Too close together."
Emma leaned over the map. "Dense ancient settlement?"
"Maybe." Phong tapped the canyon outline. "But I haven't heard of the Obsidian Canyon shifting anywhere. Not recently, or from the mice, the H'Re, or Baratok scouts."
Dominic's eyes narrowed.
"What do you want to say?"
Phong hesitated, then said it anyway.
"The canyon might be a black box."
Jake frowned. "Like on a plane?"
"Yes. A vault. A place to preserve cultures and lost civilizations." Phong's finger moved from the Yeak ruin to the newly marked eastern site. "Maybe not peacefully. Maybe not intentionally by them. But the result is the same. Things end up here. Ruins. Relics. Messages. Records of civilizations that failed."
The room went quiet.
That explanation fit too well to be comforting.
Emma smiled faintly after a moment, though her eyes remained sharp.
"In that case," she said, "you should not let the raccoon sneak behind the expedition again."
Rico, seated on a box nearby, froze with a mouthful of something crunchy.
Phong turned very slowly toward him.
"No."
Rico swallowed.
"You don't know what I was going to say."
"You were going to say you should come."
"Incorrect. I was going to say Kamen Rider is essential to archaeological justice."
"No."
"Killer Form provides academic protection."
"No."
Rico slumped dramatically off the box and onto the floor.
"Oppression continues."
This time, Phong kept him in Fort Erymanthian under direct observation. Or rather, under redirection.
"You're going to Floor 1," Phong said.
Rico popped upright instantly. "Punishment dimension?"
"No. Leveling."
That got his attention. Phong crouched to his height. "Nyx and Bruno have stayed in the level twenties for too long. Take them out. Hunt safer targets. No unnecessary risks."
Rico placed one paw over his chest.
"Rico shall lead cat and dog through heroic training montage."
Phong stared.
"Safe heroic training montage."
"Acceptable."
Rico paused.
"Can I take the chickens?"
Phong considered.
The chickens, born from Little Fireball's feather and Alexei's strange ongoing relationship with poultry-shaped miracles, had become exactly the kind of problem Phong had learned not to underestimate. They were useful. Ridiculous, but useful.
"Fine," he said. "Ask Little Fireball."
Rico marched off with immediate purpose.
Little Fireball was perched on a warm stone near one of the inner garden beds, puffed up like a tiny noble phoenix pretending not to enjoy attention. Rico approached with unusual solemnity.
"Great Fire Princess," he said. "Grant this humble rider one feather to command the chicken battalion."
Little Fireball stared at him, then pecked him on the head.
"Ow."
She pecked him again.
"Diplomacy is violence."
After the third peck, she finally let one small glowing feather fall.
Rico picked it up with reverence, then Little Fireball pecked him a fourth time for good measure.
Phong watched from across the courtyard and decided that counted as supervision.
With Rico redirected to Floor 1, Team Nemean prepared for the eastern ruin without him. Phong, however, stayed behind at Fort Erymanthian. The expansion mattered too much now, and the H'Re cooperation had reached the fragile stage where attention could turn transaction into alliance.
He had given them food.
Far more than they needed for a year.
In return, they had built elevators and gondola systems that were already changing the strategic shape of the canyon. But Phong did not want them merely as contractors. The H'Re were wounded people, strange people, terrifying people in their own way, but people. Dry Sea survivors, refugees of a kind. The sort of group everyone else would avoid until needing something from them.
Phong knew that pattern too well.
So he stayed.
He supervised ropeway expansion, supply storage, platform reinforcement, and planting schedules. He sat with H'Re engineers and asked questions instead of giving only orders. He learned which foods traveled best for them, which plant scents unsettled the worms keeping them alive, which kinds of work they preferred, and which camp areas they wanted kept dim.
The H'Re did not trust quickly.
That was fine.
Phong had time.
The canyon itself seemed to favor insectoids, and that gave his expansion plan its living backbone. The Giant Crickets of the United Tribes thrived here.
Where lizardmen complained of dryness and Kamohai grew irritable away from water, the crickets moved through the Obsidian Canyon as if it had been built for them. Their legs found purchase on narrow ledges. Their bodies handled the arid air better. Their jumps turned ravines from barriers into suggestions. Several had already matured into the level 35 and 36 range, fed by work, danger, and careful protection.
They were still no match for the native spiders and cockroaches in direct combat. The canyon's original monsters averaged too high and hunted too viciously.
But for building?
They were miraculous.
Crickets leaped across ravines carrying enchanted rope in their mandibles and harnesses. Others hammered stakes into high shelves of black stone. Teams of them worked with H'Re pulley masters to suspend lines where no ordinary labor crew could safely stand. By midday, they had woven a hanging bridge between two minor outposts using reinforced ropes, root-fiber cables, and stabilizing knots taught by the H'Re.
Phong stood at one end of the new bridge while it swayed gently over a dark gap.
A Timato rolled up beside him and growled at the abyss.
"Yes," Phong said. "Very scary."
The Timato puffed proudly.
He looked across the bridge and saw the shape of the future: routes, waystations, a canyon network of walled fortress and storages.
A chain of defensible points that could move troops, plants, food, scouts, and refugees through land that had once been unusable. A black-glass road grown from rope, fungus, cricket labor, H'Re engineering, and farmer stubbornness.
To arm the crickets, he opened trade with the Greencap Bunnies at Camp Harpy.
Better weapons, lighter armors. Spears and hooked blades suited to long jumping legs and fast skirmish retreats. The Greencaps were not allies yet in the way he wanted, not fully, especially with their own hidden troubles brewing beyond his current sight, but trade was trade. Food, surface dirt, plant goods, and safe passage had value. Greencap metalwork and cavalry arms had value in return.
Phong made the deal carefully, making sure not to use any of his influence as pressure or coercion.
By evening, Fort Erymanthian had stretched a little farther into the canyon.
One bridge here, two new platforms there, three reinforced pulley anchors rose where nothing had stood yesterday. A cricket patrol armed with Greencap weapons. H'Re engineers eating warm food in the shade of a half-finished tower.
And somewhere on Floor 1, Rico was presumably leading a cat, a dog, and a flock of fire-touched chickens into the most ridiculous leveling expedition the dungeon had ever suffered.
Phong stood under the growing rope network and looked east, toward the ruin Team Nemean would soon investigate.
The Obsidian Canyon kept its dead civilizations close. If it truly was a black box, then every ruin was a message from someone who had lost.
Phong adjusted the seed pouch at his hip.
Then he turned back to the fort.
Messages were useful.
But bridges were how the living answered.