Phong returned to Camp Stymphalian alone.
Mostly alone.
Little Fireball sat inside the hood of his hoodie like a tiny royal furnace, her warm body tucked against the back of his neck, one bright eye occasionally peeking out as if inspecting whether the Lime-Oak network had improved since the last time she had used it. The transition left the familiar green afterimage in Phong's vision. One moment Fort Erymanthian's black glass cliffs and rope bridges surrounded him. The next, Camp Stymphalian opened around him with damp soil, distant bird-cries, and the heavy mountain silhouette of Death Peak looming beyond the walls.
He stood there for a moment and simply breathed.
No interviews, boss notifications, level sixty-two corpses, or ancient messages from a dead woman who looked like Alex. Just the smell of earth, moss, cooked grain, and a faint sour tang from chickens that had no respect for him or the rest of the dungeon floor.
Little Fireball chirped from his hood.
"Yes," Phong said. "We feed your army."
She pecked the back of his head. It did not hurt, but was enough to make her displease clear.
"Your remaining army."
Apparently that distinction was acceptable. She settled again.
Rico had taken some of the chickens to Floor 1 for Nyx and Bruno's leveling mission, which meant the ones left behind were acting as if abandoned by their commander and owed compensation. They rushed Phong the moment he approached the coop enclosure, a ridiculous tide of feathered aggression, some normal-sized, some not, all carrying the faintly unnatural energy that came from being tied to Little Fireball's existence.
Phong scattered feed in careful arcs.
"Don't trample each other."
They ignored him. The chickens attacked the food like a hostile civilization. One leapt over another's back, wings flapping with the flame of their lineage. Another pecked a Timato that had rolled too close to the fence.
The Timato bit back. The chicken shrieked.
Little Fireball leaned out of the hood and made a sharp sound.
Both sides immediately stopped.
Phong turned his head slightly.
"You know, it's unfair that they listen to you more than me."
Little Fireball made a tiny smug noise.
As he finished feeding the chickens, Phong noticed more Timatoes rolling around the inner paths of Camp Stymphalian. Three of them patrolled along the wall base. Two others sat under a watch platform like red, tiger-faced gargoyles. One had floated onto a crate and was glaring down at a group of mice as if conducting inspection.
Phong stared.
"When did you claim this place too?"
The closest Timato puffed up proudly.
Camp Stymphalian had a Lime-Oak. It had Phong's plants. It had people he considered under his protection. Therefore, by Timatoes' logic, it was theirs to guard. They apparently had no understanding of borders beyond Phong's place means Timatoes' place.
He should have been annoyed.
He should have questioned himself if the Timatoes had used the Lime-Oak network to gather more of their brethren from lower floors settlements.
Instead, he found himself smiling.
"Fine," he said. "But no bullying the chickens."
The Timato gave him a look that suggested the chickens had started it.
"Fine. As long as no escalation beyond individual conflict. I don't want to return and see my camp get wrecked by a civil war."
Little Fireball chirped in agreement, which immediately made all nearby Timatoes pretend they had never done anything wrong in their entire short, violent lives.
After the chickens were fed and the Timatoes had been warned against poultry warfare, Phong walked toward the troll territory.
Camp Stymphalian had changed since the founding of Yuè.
Not as dramatically as Baratok Town, which had grown fat with trade and water, or Fort Erymanthian, which was becoming a rope-and-plant spine through the Obsidian Canyon. But the change here was deeper in some ways.
Trolls did not adapt easily.
Once, they had been vicious, bloodthirsty goat-headed monsters with healing moss and a reputation that made most sane beings avoid their mountain altogether. They had kept to themselves not out of shyness but because they liked their own violence and trusted little else. Death Peak had been theirs by strength, stubbornness, and regeneration.
Then Josh had come.
Human forces had marched with arrogance and weapons and enough power to make even trolls understand that the old hierarchy was no longer safe. The battle had taught them something painful: humans were not weak anymore. Not all of them. Not when they came with relics, levels, classes, strategy, and that terrible surface-born ability to scale everything they touched into industry.
The troll king had understood before many of his people did.
That was why he had accepted change.
Not happily, or softly, but because survival sometimes meant swallowing pride before pride became a grave marker. And because Phong was the one who suggested it. That mattered more than Phong liked admitting.
Had any lizardman envoy, Kamohai commander, Greencap knight, or human politician told the trolls to open their territory, they would have refused. They would have taken it as weakness, insult, or attempted conquest.
But Phong's people and a tiny raccoon had bled for them, fed them, treated them like people before they had fully agreed to behave like people toward others.
So they listened a little.
It was enough.
Now new structures rose on Death Peak's lower slopes.
They were not pretty. Troll construction had a heavy, blunt honesty to it. Thick beams, wide stone bases, and reinforced roofs meant to survive both weather and tantrums. But among the new buildings were signs of other hands. Tortura archers had brought older, wiser geometry. Their platforms were better angled. Their lookout posts used the mountain's sightlines more efficiently. Their storage huts were sealed against damp with care trolls would never have invented because trolls solved damp by ignoring it until it became moss.
Half of the old Tortura archers had moved here.
That, too, pleased Phong.
The trolls respected them. Not immediately, perhaps, but steadily. The Tortura had survived exile, age, and monsters. Their archery was not merely accurate; it carried the authority of people who had seen enough to stop wasting motion. The trolls understood strength, and the Tortura had plenty of that even with deleveling bodies.
Near the base of the mountain, the canal was taking shape.
It began far away at Lake Baratok, curved around Camp Stymphalian's perimeter, and ended in a small artificial pond at the foot of troll territory. The work was slow but constant. Mud banks had been reinforced by woven roots and stone. Lizardman engineers had left scale-marked posts along the route. Mice ran messages between digging crews. Crickets hauled baskets of stone. A few Kamohai inspected the waterline with the seriousness of soldiers judging a road to war.
Because that was what it was: a water high way.
If human forces ever tried another campaign against Death Peak, the Kamohai and lizardmen could deploy reinforcements through the canal system much faster than by marching over bad land. Boats, rafts, swimming units, supply barges—everything the lake peoples did well could now extend toward the trolls.
The lizardman queen had once tried to subdue the trolls with blood and lives.
She had failed.
Phong had done it without a war.
Standing there, watching muddy water slowly gather at the unfinished pond, he did not feel triumphant. He felt tired. Grateful, perhaps. Wary, a little embarrassed by how much had changed because he kept feeding people and refusing to accept that old enemies had to remain old enemies forever.
A Great Burrow mouse popped out of a nearby cave entrance and saluted.
"Farmer-king!"
Phong looked over.
The mice had claimed a cave here too.
The cave mouth was small by troll standards but comfortable for Great Burrow work. Already he could see rope ladders, little shelves, storage niches, and small lamps glowing deeper inside. Mice moved in and out carrying rolled maps and bundles of dried food.
They would never be much help in direct combat against a serious assault. But direct combat was not the only kind that mattered.
In war, intelligence often decided who got to choose the fight.
The mice scouted, listened, mapped, carried warnings, and knew how to exist under everyone's feet without being noticed. In a place like Death Peak, with canals, troll paths, Tortura watch posts, and possible human incursions, their cave might become more valuable than a barracks.
Phong crouched slightly to greet the mouse.
"How is the cave?"
"Good dry. Good shadow. Trolls loud but not step on us."
"That is high praise."
The mouse nodded solemnly. "Very high. And the troll king has locked himself and his elites in a cave for a while. Should we be worry?"
"How long has it been?"
"About a week or so."
"If they didn't come out in 3 days, tell me."
The mouse saluted him.
Little Fireball leaned out and chirped.
The mouse saluted her too.
Phong continued his slow walk through the camp for another hour, checking things without truly working on them. That was the rule he had set for himself today: Do not start new projects, do not reorganize an entire supply chain because one basket was placed inefficiently. Checking on things, resting, observing, that were today works to do.
The word still felt suspicious.
He had been expanding on three fronts for days. Baratok Town, Fort Erymanthian, Camp Stymphalian. Add with the league pause, the Yeak notification, Alexis Valantris's message, the Night Kings, the Grey One, Kdiê, Josh, Olen, and government pressure, his mind had begun to feel like a field planted too densely. Every thought needed water, every problem wanted pruning, every fear pretended to be urgent.
So he did something revolutionary: making frozen lemonade.
Not ordinary lemonade, too. He used Frost Lime, crushing the chilled fruit carefully with sugar and water, then blended everything with condensed milk taken from Long's place and ice until the drink became a blended icy thing somewhere between dessert, medicine, and emotional surrender. He poured it into a cup large enough to be unreasonable, added a straw, and sat in the shade near one of the inner gardens.
Little Fireball climbed out of his hood and settled beside him like a warm orange bun.
Phong took one sip.
Cold sweetness hit his tongue, then cold sour, and a touch of creaminess from the condensed milk. His shoulders lowered before he gave them permission.
"Okay," he murmured. "That's good."
Little Fireball chirped.
"No, you can't have it. It's cold."
She pecked his sleeve.
He gave her a tiny bit, and Little Fireball puffed up, seemingly experiencing brain freeze for the first time.
Then, against his better judgment, Phong checked his phone.
He expected nonsense about Team Nemean. He expected speculation, investor hysteria, arguments about the league format, maybe another Josh headline if the universe hated him.
Instead, the first major story made him close his eyes.
Human greed had overcome common sense. Again. Due to Celestial Skeletal, some divers had tried to challenge the Mushroomkhan, thinking they would be passive, peaceful, waddling around waiting to be slaughtered for exp like Mushroomires.
Those, apparently, were the ones who did not bother to look up Mushroompires before making that decision.
It had not ended well.
Phong opened the article and skimmed, his icy lemonade suddenly less relaxing.
The Mushroomkhan had not fought directly. That was somehow worse. Instead, it had created something new.
Mushroomtron.
The first image showed a humanoid mushroom figure slightly smaller than the Mushroomires, but more defined in limb and posture. Where Mushroomires had their strange passive and waddling silliness to them, Mushroomtrons looked more like soldiers grown from a nightmare's idea of infantry. Thick mushroom caps angled like helmets, arms and legs clearly formed, bodies packed with dense fungal fiber. Their eyes—if the glowing spots under the caps counted as eyes—were blank and unreadable.
Level 50, and came in groups of three variants.
Mushroomtron - Defender could create forcefields so powerful current divers could not penetrate them.
Mushroomtron - Technique copied and replicated skills and spells used against it. Since its level exceeded any known current diver, the copied attacks came back stronger, cleaner, and crueler. Divers had been crushed by their own signatures before they understood what was happening.
Mushroomtron - Power was simple. One punch had turned a level 33 diver into bloody mist.
Phong stopped reading for a moment.
The camp around him remained peaceful. He looked down at the screen again.
The Mushroomkhan had dozens of Mushroomtrons.
A dozen groups of three, at least. And now they were roaming Floor 1.
Phong set the phone down very carefully. For a moment, all he could think was that he had helped create this by giving the Mushroomires a safe place to grow and merge into Mushroomkhan.
Then he remembered the emblem. The moon symbol.
He stood, walked into the nearby storage hut, and checked the cupboard where he kept the badges marked with the lime-oak tree entangling the crescent moon—his emblem, the sign he had shown the Mushroomkhan and told it meant friend.
The box was open. Several badges were gone, clearly taken by Rico.
Phong let out a breath so deep it felt like his bones emptied.
"Good raccoon."
Little Fireball chirped from behind him.
"Yes. Don't tell him I said that."
The animals should be safe around the Mushroomtrons. Probably. Hopefully.
As safe as anyone could be around level 50 humanoid mushroom soldiers created by a level 150 hivemind structure that considered Phong a friend.
He went back outside, sat down again, and stared at his phone.
More updates waited, more worries. More experts saying obvious things in expensive language. More comments from governments, investors, divers, influencers, and fools with confidence inversely proportional to survival prospects.
Phong turned the phone off.
Little Fireball tilted her head.
"I have had enough updates today."
He leaned back against the wooden post and picked up his lemonade again. The ice had melted slightly, making the drink softer, less sharp, but still good.
For a while, he did nothing.
At first, doing nothing felt like guilt. Then, slowly, it became rest.
He noticed the breeze moving through the camp. The sound of mice laughing somewhere near their cave. The distant rhythm of troll hammers. The cluck and fuss of chickens. The smell of moss, canal mud, grilled food, and plant beds warming under dungeon light.
He realized, with mild surprise, that he was no longer as likely to work himself to the point of collapse.
Not completely cured, he was still himself.
There were still too many problems, too many people to feed, too many nightmares wearing crowns and old names. But after finally honoring his aunt and uncle—after incense, graves, photographs, and the quiet apology that had taken two years to reach his mouth—something inside him had loosened.
The dead had been acknowledged. The grief had been given a place to sit. So work no longer had to be a punishment he inflicted on himself for surviving.
Not every minute. Not every day.
Phong finished half his lemonade, set the cup beside him, and let his eyes close.
Little Fireball hopped into his lap, warm against the coolness of the drink and the shade. Somewhere nearby, a Timato growled at a chicken and then immediately pretended innocence when Little Fireball opened one eye.
Phong smiled faintly without opening his own.
For once, he did not chase the next task, he simply let the camp breathe around him.
Then, under the shadow of Death Peak and the fragile peace of a kingdom still learning how to exist, Phong took a nap.