Phong left the others not long after Emma's escort disappeared from sight.
He looked toward Alex, then Selena. "Come with me."
Alex raised a brow. "Where?"
"The scorched land."
That was enough explanation.
Alex straightened from where she had been leaning against a post, and Selena pushed off the crate she had been sitting on. Neither asked him to justify it. The patch of burned earth the Sky Emperor had requested was not something any of them treated casually.
As the three of them started off, Dominic turned in another direction entirely.
He found the Greencap bunny captain near the training ground.
The elite monster stood with his usual impossible composure, small in body compared to most of the heavy hitters around Camp Stymphalian, yet somehow carrying more battlefield weight than many men twice his size.
The two war banners on his back were furled for now, spear points gleamed whenever the light caught it. Dominic had seen him use them before. Not often. Only when he got serious.
Dominic gave the captain a respectful nod.
"Captain," he said, "would you be willing to train us too?"
The bunny captain's ears twitched once.
His dark eyes moved over Dominic, then past him to Janet, Jake, Jack, Joanne, Alexei, Séline, and Camille gathering behind him.
There was no surprise in his expression. If anything, he looked like he had been expecting this eventually.
He rested one paw lightly on the shaft of one of the banners but did not draw it.
"Very well," he said.
That was all the warning they got.
The next several minutes were miserable.
The bunny captain moved through them like a compact natural disaster.
He did not even use the banners.
That somehow made it worse.
Dominic came in first, not because he was ordered to, but because Dominic was Dominic. The bunny captain slipped past the first committed hit, struck him in the ribs with brutal precision, then used Dominic's own momentum to turn him halfway around before kicking the back of his knee out from under him.
Dominic hit the ground hard enough to grunt.
"Too much restraint," the captain said.
Janet lunged to punish the opening.
Thinking she had one was her first mistake.
The captain pivoted, led her two steps farther than she wanted to go, and swept low. Janet twisted, barely recovering her footing, only to realize she had just been pulled exactly where he wanted her.
Jake darted in from the side.
Jack raised stone to box the captain in.
Joanne lifted a hand, spell already forming.
Séline and Camille moved together from opposite angles. Alexei came straight down the middle like a shield given legs.
The bunny captain beat all of them anyway.
His positioning efficient. His timing precise.
And his understanding of how a formation breathed, where it bent, where it split, and where each of them still thought like individuals instead of one hunting pack, was absolute.
Jack's terrain rose half a second too early. The captain used it as a step.
Jake's timing was sharp, but his angle left him isolated. The captain struck his wrist, then his chest, then was gone before the counter could come.
Séline nearly landed a clean hit. Nearly. The captain gave ground just enough to let Camille overtake the line by an inch, turning their tandem into interference instead of layered pressure.
Alexei held longest, absorbing a sequence of hits that would have put other people on their backs, but even he got turned, repositioned, and used as temporary cover against Joanne's spell line.
By the end of it, everyone was breathing hard, bruised, irritated, and more than a little offended.
The Greencap captain stood in front of them looking almost untouched.
Then, because the beating itself had apparently not been sufficient, he began to explain.
He looked at Dominic first.
"You should lean more into the barbarian branches of your Raging Judgenaut path."
Dominic straightened, wincing only slightly.
The captain went on, "You still keep trying to be the main anchor. That is no longer the best use of you." His gaze flicked toward Alexei. "Leave the primary tank role to the paladin. He is better suited for holding the center."
Alexei, still breathing through the nose like a man trying not to collapse with dignity, gave a weary thumbs-up.
The captain turned to Janet.
"You are important enough that enemies will commit to you." His tone stayed calm, almost academic. "Use that. Let them think they are forcing your movement. Bait them into favorable ground instead. You're a war Valkyrie, not a human floating vajra."
Janet blinked once, mildly offended that the captain just compare her to one of Alex's psychic constructs. Then, she nodded slowly as the thought settled.
Next was Joanne.
"You still think of your spells too much as direct damage." He gestured to the training field around them. "Your roster has more damage sources now. Use your magic to zone. Deny lanes. Force choices. Push enemies into a zugzwang."
Joanne wiped sweat from her temple. "That does sound more annoying."
"It is effective," the captain said.
She grinned despite the bruise on her shoulder. "Good."
Then his eyes shifted to Jake, Séline, and Camille.
"You three should be the trident of the team's assault."
Jake smirked. Séline folded her arms. Camille's expression barely changed, but she was listening closely.
The captain continued, "Simpler words: teamwork between you three sucks. Advance as one. Fast. Layered. Merciless."
That got a more serious nod from all three.
Finally, he looked to Jack.
"Your terrain manipulation is an useful tool."
Jack rubbed his jaw and waited.
"Use it to funnel enemies. Create choke points. Force them toward Alexei's hold." The captain's gaze moved between them again, assembling the shape of the team in words. "Do not simply chase an enemy with your pillars. In a nut shell: create an advantageous location for your teammates, then force the enemies to fight you there. You make the terrains. You make the rules."
Silence followed.
Not empty silence. Processing silence.
The kind that came after someone had just turned a pile of talented fighters into a clearer machine.
Then Rico, who had been watching from a safe distance with complete delight, clapped.
"Go violence."
He stopped...
Then added...
"Educational violence."
No one thanked him.
After the fight, while the others were still catching their breath and quietly rethinking their lives, Dominic stepped back toward the Greencap captain.
"There's one more thing," he said.
The bunny captain regarded him steadily.
"Our gear took a bad hit during the ice wolf fight." Dominic rolled one shoulder, then nodded toward his people. "We'd like to buy new equipment from the Greencap Artisanal Workers, if they're willing."
The captain's ears tilted back for a moment in thought.
Then he gave a short nod.
"The request is acceptable."
Dominic let out a breath that was almost relief.
The captain continued before he could speak.
"In exchange, I would like your people to bring normal dirt, fertilizer, and surface seeds."
That got immediate attention from the whole team.
The captain turned and looked toward the direction of Camp Harpy, where surface soil had already made ordinary farming possible for the Greencap bunnies in ways dungeon ground never allowed.
"We intend to expand the fields."
That was a fair trade. More than fair, really.
Dungeon restrictions still warped most farming inside its own soil, but surface dirt brought below remained usable. Camp Harpy had already proven that. More normal fields meant more stable food. More stable food meant stronger positions for everyone allied to Camp Stymphalian.
Dominic nodded right away.
"Done."
The captain studied him a second longer, then inclined his head in agreement.
"Then we have terms."
Phong took Selena and Alex out past the busier parts of camp and toward the scorched patch of land.
The path there had changed over the past week.
Not just because people had walked it more often. The ground itself felt different now. The moletatoes had been working under the soil for days, tunneling, loosening, shifting, breaking up the hard-burned layers that had once looked dead beyond saving. Their unseen network had turned the patch into something halfway between a battlefield ruin and a field under forced recovery.
Still ugly.
Still strange.
But alive in a way scorched land should not have been.
Alex walked beside Phong with her hands in her hoodie pocket, looking far too refreshed for someone who had committed crimes against his stamina the night before. Selena trailed on the other side, eyes sharp as always, taking in the ground conditions, the root spread, the changes in texture, the little signs that the moletatoes had done exactly what Phong told them to do.
Selena looked at Phong's face, then at Alex, then sighed.
"You know," she said, "I kind of want to research mythological case studies now."
Phong glanced at her. "What."
She pushed her glasses up slightly. "Steve Trevor."
Alex blinked. "What about him."
Selena spread a hand. "I need to know exactly how Steve Trevor survived being in a relationship with Diana Prince, because apparently human men can endure impossible conditions if romance is involved."
Phong gave her a flat look.
Alex looked offended for about half a second, then pleased. "That implies I'm Wonder Woman."
"That is not the part you should focus on," Phong muttered.
Selena kept going anyway, because of course she did.
"I'm serious. There has to be a pattern. Some hidden biological adaptation. Maybe your body entered a survival state. Maybe your soul detached for safety."
Alex laughed. "I told you he'd live."
Phong rubbed his face. "I hate both of you."
"No, you don't," Alex said.
"That depends on the next five minutes."
Selena opened her mouth again, probably to make it worse.
Then all three of them stepped past the last line of broken stone and saw what had grown in the scorched land.
The jokes died instantly.
For a moment, none of them spoke.
The land ahead had become a grove.
Not a normal one.
Great thick vines and root masses spread through the blackened soil, fed by the moletatoes' terraforming work. Rising from those roots were giant pods, each one taller than a man and slick with a faint pale sheen, like living cocoons made from plant flesh and something almost luminous. Their surfaces were veined with soft light that pulsed in slow rhythm, as if each pod had its own heartbeat.
There were six of them.
Too many.
And inside, visible through the half-translucent walls, were shapes.
Humanoid.
Alex stopped dead.
Selena's voice came out thin. "No way."
Phong took one slow step forward.
Inside the nearest pod was a figure curled in on itself, suspended in fluid and light. Arms. Legs. A face half-hidden by long pale hair drifting weightless around it. The features were too fine to mistake for human. The ears were long and sharply pointed. The skin looked almost faintly radiant, touched by that same strange ethereal quality the whole pod gave off.
At the lower back of the figure, something like an umbilical cord ran from the body into the inner wall of the pod and then deeper, vanishing into the root system below.
Phong looked at the next one.
And the next.
Every pod held one.
Alex's hand slowly slid out of her pocket.
Selena stared wide-eyed, her usual calm completely gone. "Those are umbilical cord," she said, as if she needed to hear it out loud to believe it. "Like... fetuses grow from the ground."
Alex stepped closer to one pod, her face lit by the pale glow inside it.
The figure within looked almost asleep. But one thing was certain: they were developing, growing.
The features were unmistakable the longer you looked. The slight angles of the face. The narrow chin. The strange beauty that did not feel fully human even in a half-formed state.
Alex said it first, very quietly.
"Elves."
Selena turned to look at her, then back at the pods. "Are those the seeds from the German at Lyon you told me about?"
"He claimed those seeds came from the back of Horns of the Earth. Seemed like he was telling the truth."
Alex nodded.
Phong had thought they would revived the land scorched so badly one might mistake a volcano just erupted all of its lava on the surface.
Instead...
He got elves growing in plant pods.
It felt less like a gamble.
Now it felt like a problem.
Or maybe several problems stacked together inside glowing pods.
Phong walked to the edge of the nearest root cluster and crouched, studying the cords, the moletato-worked soil, the way the scorched land had somehow become a cradle for whatever these things were.
He knew plants.
These were growing like plants.
But if he had learnt anything, then the dungeon could blur the line between kingdoms.
Case in point: the trolls were more moss than animals.
Selena laughed once.
Not because anything was funny.
Because her brain had clearly hit a wall and started making sounds in self-defense.
"Oh no," she whispered. "Oh no, no, no."
Alex looked at Phong.
His expression had gone very still.
She knew that look. It was the one he wore whenever reality had done something so strange that even he needed a moment to catch up.
Selena pointed at the pods with the helpless outrage of a researcher being personally attacked by existence.
"Phong," she said, "tell me I am hallucinating."
Phong kept staring at the nearest sleeping figure.
Then he answered, in the calmest voice possible under the circumstances.
"I think," he said, "I grew elves in the dungeon."
That did not help.
Selena covered her face with both hands. "Why is that a sentence."
Alex let out a slow breath, somewhere between disbelief and laughter and dread.
Around them, the scorched land pulsed softly with pale light. The giant pods swayed almost imperceptibly in the dark soil, roots deep in the ground Phong had reclaimed.
And inside them, the elves kept growing.