Rico decided to take a detour.
It was, by every reasonable metric, a terrible decision.
The sensible route was obvious: return to Camp Orthrus, use the Lime-Oak network, step through Phong's carefully cultivated infrastructure like a responsible citizen of Yuè, deliver the pixie queen under supervision, report that the H'Re chieftain had personally endorsed the encounter, then enjoy whatever amount of praise and coffee seemed politically achievable.
Rico chose adventure.
"We go on foot," he announced.
Nyx stared at him.
Bruno wagged once, then looked around as if checking whether anyone wiser would object.
The fire chickens stood behind Rico like an unruly honor guard, each one puffed with the confidence of creatures that had just discovered an entire species feared them. The pixie queen clung to a broken stone with her grotesque swollen abdomen tucked under her, drones and soldiers hovering in a tense cloud around her. The H'Re chieftain said nothing.
That silence should have worried Rico.
It did not.
"Heroic route," Rico declared. "Cinematic. Educational. Better travel montage."
For almost a full day, he was insufferably excited.
He narrated ravines, named oddly shaped rocks, assigned dramatic music to slopes and pauses, and declared every harmless shadow "possible ambush energy" and every actual ambush "content." Nyx ignored him as she slept on Bruno's bark. Bruno remained supportive because Bruno's heart was too good for the world. The chickens followed, and occasionally sneezed out embers as if to show off their lineage. The chieftain and the queen talked about the world before the great darkness, and the world before it, and the dawns of them.
Rico ruled them out as "boring lore drop".
Then they reached Floor 1.
And Rico got bored.
The open stretches of Floor 1 were too familiar, too green, too lacking in cosmic-battery loot logic. No goblins or slimes in their right mind would stand against an army of level 40 pixies, level 60 H're chieftain, and chickens born from a floor boss. Camp Orthrus was now far behind them, camp Stymphalian was still far ahead. The Lime-Oak network, which Rico had rejected for narrative purposes, was now unavailable unless they wanted to backtrack like cowards.
Rico walked for another twenty minutes in silence.
Then said, "Adventure has pacing issue."
Nyx's tail flicked.
The H'Re chieftain did not say, I told you so.
That made it worse.
They pressed on anyway. And by late afternoon, the air changed.
The H'Re chieftain stopped first. His bandaged face turned toward the northwestern slope, where a sparse line of trees gave way to a shallow valley. The worms beneath his wrappings shifted subtly. The vertical slit in the center of his forehead remained closed, but the skin around it tightened.
Nyx crouched low. Bruno's ears lifted. The pixie queen's swarm rose higher, wings vibrating with sudden unease.
Rico sniffed.
He smelled blood, then mud, then something colder: ghostly gooey demonly things that he disliked immediately. Among them were familiar scents. Rico smelled the Greencap Bunny Captain... and the rich weeds. Olen, on whom he had rained down a barrage of Phong's artilleries plants during the push against Trolls Mountain, and Josh - farmer enemy.
They crept toward the valley edge.
Below, the Greencap Knights had been dying with honor.
The rabbit cavalry had been caught in ground that should not have been ground. What had once been grass and dirt had become a slushy swamp of ghostly bodies, spectral limbs, and grey-white muck. The flaming wildebeest and lightning zebras the Greencaps rode—thrashed knee-deep in it, trapped by hands that were not hands and faces that dissolved whenever hooves struck them.
Olen stood beyond the swamp with a necromancer's calm.
His spectral army had become terrain: a dead marsh that held the Greencap steeds in place and robbed cavalry of the one thing that made them terrifying: motion.
Around him stood Joshua Harlan's gathered force. The Brooklyn Knights, thinner now but still armored and tense. The old Boston Jokers: Mathias, Andre, Shirlene. Their presence made the battlefield feel uglier. This was no clean dungeon hunt, this was politics wearing blood.
At the center, the Greencap Bunny Captain fought Josh.
The captain who had trained Alex and Team Nemean. His green cloak was torn, his spear tipped war banners clenched by tiny paws. One side of his armor had been dented inward. Mud clung to his legs and blood ran down the white fur of his face, but he still stood between Josh and the trapped knights like a flag refusing the storm.
Josh was level 40 now.
That number should have mattered less.
It did not.
Josh had always been dangerous when he chose the moment carefully, and now he had chosen the kind of fight he liked best: an enemy restrained, allies applying pressure, civilians implied beyond the battlefield, and retreat still available if things went wrong.
The Bunny Captain spun his right war banner low, forcing Josh back half a step. The left banner thrust toward the throat. Josh blinked aside, his movement cutting space in that sickening Harlan way, and reappeared near the captain's flank.
The captain had already read it.
He pivoted, banner cloth snapping like a battle cry, spear tip grazing Josh's sleeve before Josh could fully commit.
The rabbit was beautiful.
He fought the way old banners in classical epics were described: flags moved like dancing flames, knights whose core values were still chivalry and bravery fought even though they saw no way out. Each movement preserved discipline even while the ground betrayed him. Each banner strike guarded not merely his body but the honor of the knights sinking behind him.
Then Olen spoke.
"If you keep struggling," the Necromancer said, voice clear across the field, "I will turn your knights into my specters."
The Bunny Captain froze for less than half a heartbeat.
Olen smiled. He had seen enough.
"Then I'll use them to kill the civilian rabbits."
The captain's eyes flashed.
That threat did what wounds had not: it distracted him. Not from fear for himself, but from the desecration of his people's honor. Greencap Knights could die. They could fall in battle. They could be buried under songs and banners.
But to have their dead used to slaughter civilians?
That was filth.
Josh blinked in. He formed his hand into a claw and slash at the Greencap Bunny Captain.
The captain's left ear came off.
Blood sprayed across the green banner cloth.
The Greencap line shouted in horror.
The captain did not scream. He riposted instead.
His left war banner came around even with blood pouring down the side of his head, spear tip slicing toward Josh's face. Josh ducked away fast, too fast for a clean hit, but not fast enough to escape completely. The blade edge grazed him from left cheek, past the left eye, and up to the forehead.
A red line opened across Josh's face.
For a moment, his expression went blank, more from shock rather than pain.
The Bunny Captain did not press. He turned, and rushed Olen. Because Josh was strong, yes. Cruel, yes. Dangerous, absolutely. But for the captain, Olen was the larger threat. The Necromancer was the one who could turn the dead into a weapon against their own people. The one who could soil what the Greencaps valued most. If the captain had one chance left, it had to be spent on the source of that corruption.
He charged through the slushy spectral swamp on foot.
His steeds were trapped, his knights were trapped, his own body was bleeding too fast.
Still, he ran.
The banner in his right hand drove forward like a lance. The left, now slick with blood, trailed low and ready to rise. Spectral hands clawed at his legs. dead faces rose from the mud and bit at his greaves. He tore through them by force of will and level alone.
Olen's smile faltered.
Then Josh blinked.
Unlike his former self, he did not panic and teleport for the escape. He knew, with his father death, he could not afford to be a wimp now that his biggest back up had crumbled. He had to take the risk. And so, Josh blinked into the captain's path.
He appeared at the captain's side and kicked him hard in the ribs.
The impact cracked loud enough to reach across the ridge.
The Bunny Captain staggered, and Josh moved with cold efficiency. He seized both war banners before the captain could recover and tore them from his hands. The green cloth snapped, the spear tips scraped stone. Something in the Greencap line broke audibly—not bodies, not armor, but spirit.
The captain had been disarmed.
Olen walked closer, then did something grotesque. He picked up the severed ear. Bit into it.
The Necromancer chewed once, swallowed, and his body shimmered. Bone, flesh, fur, and armor shifted in a tide of stolen appearance until Olen stood wearing the Greencap Bunny Captain's form.
The captain's face. The captain's green. The captain's blood.
The trapped knights stared. One of them cried out in confusion.
Olen used that moment to kill him. Wearing their captain's face, he drove a blade into the first Greencap Knight and watched the body slump into the spectral swamp.
The real captain staggered to his feet.
No banners.
One ear gone.
Blood matting his fur.
Ribs likely cracked.
His knights trapped behind him, one murdered by a stolen face.
He raised his bare hands, took a fighting stance.
And it was this moment that Rico and his escort arrived at the scene, 500m away from the main battlefield.
Rico started running forward without thinking. Killer Form, Fortress Form, anything—he did not know, only that the sight of the captain standing barehanded against Josh and Olen made his chest feel too small.
The H'Re chieftain stepped in front of him.
"I got this."
Rico looked up sharply.
The pixie queen, hovering nearby, gave a low rasp.
"He does."
The chieftain moved to the ridge edge.
For the first time, he let his third eye opened wide. That long, pale eye set in the brow, its iris dark at first. Then the pupil inside it shifted, as another slid into view: an eye with double irises.
Rico forgot to breathe.
Across the battlefield, images of that eye appeared in the air.
One. Ten. Fifty.
All around Josh's group, hanging like eldritch lanterns in empty space. Each opened with the same vertical stare. Each held double irises nested in impossible focus. From them, rays of light descended. Thin, straight, silent rays of light pointed at the people in Josh's party.
At Josh, Olen, Mathias, Andre, Shirlene. And the Brooklyn Knights.
The rays did not burn, did not blind, and did not wound anything either. For one stupid moment, several of Josh's allies looked almost amused.
"Is this yours?" Andre called toward Olen, still confused by the fake Greencap form.
"Necromancer skill?" Mathias asked, backing up despite the question.
Olen's stolen face frowned.
Josh did not laugh. He had a hunch. A terrible once.
Rico saw it happen—the instant instinct cut through arrogance. Josh looked at the lights, at the double irises eyes hovering around them, at the captain bleeding below, and his expression changed.
"Retreat!" Josh shouted.
He blinked first to Olen. Grabbed him.
Then space itself folded.
The giant eye aimed at Olen blinked.
Josh vanished with him in time. Almost.
They reappeared farther back, beyond the main kill field.
Olen screamed.
His left leg was gone from halfway below the knee.
No wound.
No blood.
No torn flesh.
The missing part had simply disappeared, like it had never existed in the first place. Where the ray had still pointed at his leg when Josh teleported, existence had closed without including it.
Then the other eyes blinked.
Carnage came without sound at first. One Brooklyn Knight vanished completely. Then another.
There was no blood spilling. There was no time for even a single scream for help to be uttered. One instant armored bodies stood under pale rays; the next there was empty air and weapons clattering to the ground, with hands still holding them. The cut at the wrists had been rounded up, covered by flesh and skin, as if their owners had been erased from the sentence of the world.
Shirlene shrieked and stumbled back, clutching her left hand. Her pinky was gone. Gone, clean and impossible, the skin reshaped as if she had been born without it.
Andre and Mathias survived mostly intact thanks to Josh's warning, though Andre fell hard and Mathias stared at a patch of missing cloak where the ray had brushed too close.
The remaining Brooklyn Knights did not handle it.
He dropped his weapon, screaming at nothing, eyes blown wide with such terror that he seemed to fall out of sanity before he hit his knees.
Josh looked at the battlefield.
For one moment, greed warred with calculation.
The captain might drop a Celestial Skeletal fragment. A level 47 Greencap warrior, a decorated commander, a likely underling of Phong, a worthy kill to send that farmer he detested a message.
Then Josh looked at the stolen war banners in his possession.
Enough. That was enough for the day.
"Fall back," he snapped.
No one argued. They retreated with Olen half-carried, half-dragged, Josh's face still bleeding from the line the captain had carved across it. Only after they were gone did the Greencap Bunny Captain collapse.
The battlefield exhaled.
Rico was already moving.
"Bruno! Nyx! Chickens! Medical chaos!"
The animals surged down the slope with him. The H'Re followed. The pixie queen's swarm hung back at first, then drifted after them with predatory curiosity carefully leashed by recent diplomacy.
The Greencap Knights were in bad condition. Some were trapped under spectral muck that began dissolving once Olen retreated. Others were wounded, stunned, or sobbing in fury and shame over the stolen face and murdered comrade.
The Bunny Captain was worst of all.
Blood loss had turned the fur around his head dark. His left ear was gone. His ribs shifted wrong when he breathed. His hands were still curled as if gripping banners that were no longer there.
Rico crouched beside him.
The captain's eyes flickered open. For one second, his body tried to rise again.
Rico put both paws on his chest.
"No. Down. Hero says rest."
The captain rasped something in Greencap speech Rico did not understand.
The H'Re chieftain knelt nearby.
"He asks if his knights live."
Rico looked around. Some did. Some weren't so lucky.
"You've saved many," Rico said.
Then his mind, hyperactive and wild but not useless, found the correct answer through panic.
"This is Phong plant job."
He dug into his pack: Sympathy Enoki, Relaxing Shiitake.
The same plants that had pulled Team Nemean through backlash and pain in the ruin. They were neither miracle resurrection, nỏ instant healing, but enough to calm the body, ease shock, reduce panic, and keep wounded people from dying stupidly while being moved.
Rico started distributing them with frantic authority.
"You eat. You eat. You stop crying and eat. You with missing blood, double eat. No, chicken, not yours!"
The fire chickens helped by glaring at anything that looked like it might cause trouble.
Nyx guarded the perimeter.
Bruno stayed close to the captain, whining softly.
The H'Re worked with eerie calm, bandaging, lifting, binding, and directing bodies with the experience of people who had survived worse than battlefields.
Eventually, they hauled the Greencap survivors toward Camp Stymphalian.
Not proudly. Not quickly. But alive.
The Bunny Captain was carried at the center, unconscious now, one hand still clenched around empty air.
Rico walked beside him, tail low for once.
He had wanted adventure.
He had found war.
A war with a changed Josh, still not enough to catch up with Phong's ridiculous plants, but had grown from mild annoyance to someone who could pose serious threat to their allies.