The fan meeting the next day was held in one of those polished Midtown event halls that looked like they had been built for corporate charity dinners and then hastily repurposed for the age of dungeon celebrity. There were banners for the East Coast Diver League hanging between sponsor logos, soft lights positioned to flatter fighters and executives alike, and enough cameras that nobody could forget for even a second that every smile, every handshake, every glance might end up clipped, captioned, and spread across the internet by nightfall.
As the home team, Team Nemean had been invited early.
That alone felt strange to Phong.
Not because he still didn't understand the concept. He did. Team Nemean was popular. More than popular, now. They were one of the stories of the East Coast league. The team with Alexandra Vogel. The team with Dominic Torres. The team that looked like it had been forged in the dungeon instead of by sponsors and training camps.
Still, it was odd seeing staff hurry over to greet them by name. Odd seeing a seating arrangement prepared with their logo. Odd hearing the emcee announce them with practiced excitement while a room full of fans applauded as if they had been waiting for this exact entrance.
Phong stayed a little behind the others on instinct.
Emma did the opposite.
She stepped into the room like it belonged to her family already, which, Phong supposed, in some awful indirect way it probably did. Dominic wore public attention the way he wore punches: with ease, with grounding, with the quiet knowledge that if things got out of hand, he could simply endure longer than the situation. Alex had long since learned how to keep her composure under a crowd's gaze, but after the Boston loss there was something different to the way people looked at her now.
Not less respect, more curiosity maybe. Like everyone had glimpsed a crack in marble and wanted to know whether it made the statue more human or more breakable.
Team New Jersey Rangers were already there when Team Nemean arrived.
That got a reaction from the room.
Both teams were sitting at the top of the group table. Both had earned six points over three fights. A perfect win, a win, and a draw. The sort of symmetry the league loved because it made a good story. Team Nemean was flashier, the Rangers were steadier. New York versus the outsiders. A team built around monsters of reputation versus a team built around hard, disciplined killers.
Kenai saw them first and lifted one hand in greeting.
Tara looked over as well, and her mouth curved in something that could almost be called a grin. Koda gave Camille and Séline a respectful nod. Denahi, who somehow looked more like a hunter on leave than a public figure, watched the room the way he probably watched wood lines and scopes.
The interaction between the teams was surprisingly easy.
That was the thing about fighters who had already tested one another honestly. They either came away with a grudge or with a certain rough respect. Team Nemean and the Rangers had gotten the second kind.
Tara was the first to speak once they drifted close enough for casual conversation without needing to shout over the room.
"Next fight," she said to Dominic, "I won't let you stalemate me with a suicidal attack again."
Dominic barked out a laugh. He had a plate of finger food in one hand and the relaxed posture of a man whose answer to public tension was to eat through it.
"That attack wasn't suicidal," he said. "Just creative."
Tara snorted.
"It leveled the ring."
"Still worked."
"Only once."
That got Dominic grinning wider. Across from them, Alex looked directly at Kenai. No cameras needed for her to mean it.
"In the second leg," she said, "you'll get what you wanted."
Kenai's expression barely changed, but the focus in him sharpened.
Alex continued, "Fair and square. So don't lose before that."
That line alone would have fed the fan forums for a week if said into a microphone. Here, delivered in the middle of a sponsor hall with quiet directness, it landed harder.
Kenai answered with the same kind of seriousness.
"I won't. And just for the record, I did go down before Joanne. Would have been my loss in a duel to the dead. Not gonna happen again."
Good, thought Phong. Very good.
That was the sort of challenge he could respect. Not Josh's poison, not Olen's smiling slime either. Just two dangerous people agreeing that the next time they met, the ring would carry it properly.
Denahi, meanwhile, had found Rico.
Or perhaps Rico had found the drinks table and Denahi simply noticed an opportunity the way all ex-special forces types seemed to notice potential bad decisions in motion.
Either way, Phong turned just in time to see Denahi crouched slightly, holding out a small plastic cup of beer toward the raccoon like he was offering initiation into adulthood.
"You ever try it?"
Rico sniffed. Then recoiled.
"Still too bitter. Fermented wheat dissapointment."
Denahi laughed softly and switched to a sample pour of red wine from another tray.
"This one then."
Rico took a suspicious sniff, licked once, and made the face of a creature personally offended by wine culture.
"Too spicy."
Jake nearly choked laughing. Joanne covered her mouth with one hand and looked delighted. Denahi looked at the wine, then at Rico, then back at the wine like the beverage had betrayed him personally.
"Spicy."
"Very," Rico declared, gravely offended. "Human poison juice."
That ended the experiment.
For a while, the mood was easy.
Photographers got their shots, fans were ushered through controlled greeting lines. Merch was signed. Emma handled short exchanges with fans with the sort of polished efficiency that made Phong think she could probably sell both salvation and apocalypse if the family portfolio benefited. Camille and Séline were still a curiosity, and the French duo got almost as much attention for simply existing in Team Nemean's orbit as they did for their actual skills. Dominic signed things, Alex signed fewer things. Joanne signed one napkin with "don't trust press predictions" and nearly got in trouble for it. Rico was out stealing caffeine with puppy eyes again. Bruno and Nyx enjoyed being pampered by the public.
Then Brooklyn's Knights arrived.
The room shifted, just enough for Phong to feel it.
Josh had that effect. He knew how to fill a space without earning it. With expensive suit, team colors integrated just enough to signal leadership without looking childish, the face of a young man groomed to be heroic by publicists and raised to believe rooms owed him atmosphere.
His team moved behind him with all the hard polish of people who had learned how to be photographed beside money.
Brooklyn's Knights had earned five points over three matches. One perfect win, one win, then a loss.
The loss had come because Josh had gone down in the second fight and, under league rules, couldn't reenter the third. That fact alone had taken a bite out of his aura, though his media people were clearly doing their best to stitch it back together.
Josh played the charismatic leader beautifully for the cameras.
He congratulated Team Nemean with all the public warmth one would expect from a rival trying to look gracious. Shook Dominic's hand. Nodded to Emma like a gentleman. Even smiled at Alex with a version of respect that would have looked convincing to anyone who had not already seen his real face.
Then he stepped just a little too close to Team Nemean's core and lowered his voice. The smile stayed. The eyes though, it changed.
"For the double-elimination stage," he said, "the organizers are going to allow team merging."
That got everyone's attention. Josh, seeing he had it, continued smoothly.
"Considering you've got nine members already, it makes sense. Couldn't have team Nemean steamrolled the competition with sheer number."
Phong said nothing.
Josh looked between them.
"I've already got Boston Jokers on board."
Emma's expression did not move, but Phong knew her well enough now to see the calculation behind her eyes. Josh was trying to build a coalition. One big enough to brought team Nemean down to their knees.
Then Josh turned that bright, polished smile toward the Rangers.
"Kenai," he said. "You should join us."
Kenai didn't even pretend to consider it.
"No."
Just that. The rejection came straighter than a ruler and more direct than a wrecking ball.
Josh's smile tightened a fraction.
"Why not?"
Denahi answered before Kenai had to.
"We are not someone weapons. Especially when it was to be used against a champion's seed."
That hit. Hard enough that even some of the nearby sponsors glanced over.
Josh recovered quickly, of course. He always did in public. The mask slid back into place like it had never moved, but Phong saw the flash of cold underneath it and filed it away.
Good, he thought. Let him be denied in front of people.
That night, after the fan meeting, Team Nemean went where Team Nemean increasingly went whenever the world became too loud: Hà Nội Corner.
The moment Rico heard the destination, his mood improved by half. Long took one look at the group walking in and started pulling cups without asking who wanted what. The expanded space of the shop was busy, warm, and full of that low steady comfort the city never managed anywhere else for Phong.
The team settled around pushed-together tables.
Someone laughed, someone stole food, someone complained about the fan meeting.
And then, since the universe had decided team Nemean was having too much peace, the news broke. Sharp little tremor through the room as several people looked down at their notifications in the same second.
Emma read the headline first. Then looked up.
"The Golden Bridge Warriors swept."
Silence hit the table. That was not supposed to happen. Not after they had already forfeited two out of three matches, not with Olen's team still looking half a step behind everyone else in the league.
Phong read the link sent to the group chat by Emma, then felt something cold move under his skin.
Olen had reached level 30.
His class had evolved, but not into anything people knew, or into some production support specialization or troll-keeper nonsense.
Necromancer. A class that had not appeared anywhere in the world before. Media and class specialist classified it as a secret evolution branch that accessible only to the production class.
The article and clips were already spreading. Olen walking into the ring with that polished rich-boy solemnity still hanging off him like a school uniform. Then the summon, then the whole field changed.
With Necromancer, he could call forth specters and phantoms from the race he had slaughtered one hundred members of to level. The dead monsters came back wrong, incomplete, obedient. Not fully alive, not just mana constructs either. Something in between. Something like the elongated Tortura of the Croak Wood. Something that made every spiritualist, every occultist, and every decent human being online start screaming at once.
And he had swept Richmond Beavers by himself. Perfect win carried out by a former production class made the scene exploded.
Three points was not rare in the league. It, however, became its own headline when the one who did it was Olen Ellison.
The team around Phong went quiet in different ways.
Alex had the most dangerous look. Not because Olen had become stronger. That was expected. Because the man she wanted dead most, the one whose presence had already poisoned too many pieces of the board, now had a new class built from the dead.
"Of course," she said softly. "Of course he gets worse."
The next day Olen and the Golden Bridge Warriors came to the fan meeting.
That alone made the room feel filthier.
He played the role of the respectful young man beautifully for the cameras. Offered condolences about Alex's first loss in that tone rich bastards always used when they wanted to sound compassionate and superior at the same time. Smiled at the press, spoke of perseverance, adapting, and of respecting all opponents.
Phong wanted to put his face through a wall.
Alex looked one comment away from volunteering to help.
Then the league, because it had no interest in morality beyond how it trended, rolled on. Team Nemean's final opponent in the first leg of the group stage would be the DC Otters.
On paper, the team looked like a joke. Three level 35 girls who had already lost to Maine Vikings, Boston Jokers, and the New Jersey Rangers. All without a single winning match.
The media had written them off almost entirely and, worse, had done so in the most embarrassing way possible: by calling them eye candies. A bag full of eye candies that gave every team a precious three-points.
That alone made Team Nemean dislike the narrative on instinct.
Joanne read one headline aloud with disgust.
"League's prettiest team struggles to find bite."
Jake made a face. "I hate media some time."
Emma, surprisingly, nodded. "They're being underestimated."
Dominic crossed his arms. "So we do the opposite."
And they did. Even if DC Otters had lost all three matches, Team Nemean still researched them. Boston had taught them what happened when they mistook public narrative for truth. So they gathered clips, class notes, bad angles, good moments hidden in losses. Who did well under pressure. What parts of their losses came from being weak and what parts came from meeting harder teams too early in the bracket.
As the night deepened at Hà Nội Corner, and coffee cups gave way to later food and slower conversation, the noise of the league kept circling them.
Josh was building alliances. Kenai refused them. Olen rising with a class the world had never seen.
The Rangers staying level-headed at the top of the group.
The Otters waiting at the bottom like a test everyone else had already decided was easy.
Phong sat among his people and listened to them talk through all of it. And beneath the talk, beneath the caffeine, beneath the laughter and irritation and strategy, something quieter held.
They were improving.
Not in level, since they were in the surface now, and it would be anarchy if the system allowed the murder of people to grant exp.
Not in strength, at least not the direct, stats bound strength that came with the levels and gifts from Pillars.
In how they thought.
In how seriously they took the board now.
And that, more than the standings or fan narratives, made Phong think they might survive what came next.