Team Nemean's caution against the DC Otters went to waste.
The media had called them vain, clout-chasing eye candy, and for once the media had not been cruel enough.
They really were exactly that.
There had been no hidden ace or buried tactical depth. No trap waiting beneath the soft smiles, expensive lashes, and carefully practiced poses. The DC Otters fought like people who had mistaken the league for a stepping stone to sponsorship deals and beauty campaigns, and Alex punished them with the cold efficiency of a woman who had already been embarrassed once this season and had no patience left for anyone trying to turn a battlefield into a photo shoot.
She went into the ring and swept them two-zero so quickly the commentators barely had time to invent a narrative worth saying out loud. The match felt less like a competition and more like a correction. Team Nemean took a perfect three points, and Alex left the ring without a scratch, without a smile, and without even the satisfaction of feeling challenged.
Afterward, back in the club house, they turned on the television to watch New Jersey Rangers face Boston Jokers.
The mood at the start of that match had already favored Boston. The Rangers were coming in wounded from their fight with Team Nemean, and the damage went deeper than the public standings showed. Koda, Kenai and Tara were gone for the round. Worse, two of their heaviest hitters had been taken out by Team Nemean's draw-heavy brutality, and whatever pride the Rangers carried into the rematch against another dangerous team had to do so with their sharpest teeth broken off for the day.
Still, the Rangers refused to go quietly.
Denahi, coach and fourth player, stepped into the ring and made it clear in less than a minute why Phong had refused to underestimate him.
The older man had none of Adam Choi's polished cleverness and none of Kenai's spiritual elegance. He fought like a hunter who had spent too many years solving life and death through angles, patience, and pain. He bullied Andre Holmes in a way that made the crowd wince, then only barely lost to Mathias Watson after dragging the fight so deep into the mud that victory looked ugly on both men.
In the end, the Rangers were defeated, but they were not diminished. If anything, the loss reminded everyone watching that New Jersey Rangers had depth enough to bleed and still make the ring expensive.
Then the league paused for a full week before the second leg.
A week for repairs, media appearances, sponsorship negotiations, tactical obsession, and all the other machinery that had wrapped itself around the diver league the moment money understood what it could become.
Phong used that week badly. Or perhaps very well, depending on which god of revenge one prayed to.
The ten-day deadline crawled closer with the kind of patience only hatred could feel in full. In two days, Daniel Harlan would go down into the dungeon to inspect the stable spot his company had found on Floor 1. A private visit. Security would be heavy, but not enough. Josh would not be there. The mice had confirmed that much again and again. Daniel would descend with bodyguards, tech people, and certainty.
And Phong prepared his alibi with the same care he had prepared his ambush.
He asked Séline and Camille to ask after the children in Lyon. The report came back almost immediately and exactly as expected: the elf children had been spoiled nearly rotten.
Mrs. Delacroix and Mrs. Lambert had taken to them with a frightening level of grandmotherly force. They fed them too much, fussed over their hats, corrected their table manners, praised their very existence, and then, when Phong checked in through video, scolded him soundly for leaving them with frozen meals and a cooktop like some negligent forest father who had mistaken six level-fifteen leaf goblins for self-sufficient adults.
Phong accepted the scolding with bowed head and zero defense.
After that, he made himself visible.
As visible as possible.
He went with Dominic and the boys to a public gym and let himself be seen doing terrible work with equally terrible stamina. A few regulars laughed at how skinny he was. One trainer asked if he was really the coach of Team Nemean or just a man they picked up because he knew how to carry water bottles. Phong took all of it with a weak smile and a body that looked one set away from folding into powder.
The cameras there caught him being ordinary, sweating, losing breath too quickly, smiling awkwardly beside Dominic like the level-one farmer he publicly was.
Then he took Alex and the animals to the Vogels.
Mama Vogel welcomed Nyx, Bruno, and Little Fireball with open arms so immediate and total that even the cat stopped pretending she was above affection for a full minute. Bruno nearly tackled her with joy. Little Fireball climbed straight into her embrace like a princess returning to a loyal subject. Nyx endured being called beautiful with the long-suffering dignity of a creature beginning to suspect she enjoyed praise too much.
Papa Vogel, meanwhile, took one look at Rico and invited him to the basement "for more tests and experiments."
Phong did not ask.
Rico went willingly. That alone was enough to make Alex laugh into her sleeve.
Then, on the day Daniel Harlan planned to go into the dungeon, Phong and Alex finally held the engagement party they had put off far too long.
It was small, intimate. Exactly what they had promised each other it would be when the world first gave them enough peace to imagine such a thing.
Team Nemean came, and so did Long. The Vogels came, of course. Vân joined through video, looking both too pleased with himself and too emotional for someone trying to act casual. Phong's grandpa joined as well, his weathered face filling the screen with all the stern gravity of a man who had already decided this marriage would happen whether the world deserved it or not.
Outside the dungeon, automatic translation no longer bridged the gap between languages.
So Phong played translator as best he could.
He translated grandpa's blessings, warnings, old-man advice, and deeply sincere approval of Alex. He translated Vân's shameless teasing and the old man's threats to beat him with a toothpick if he ever embarrassed the family too much on camera again. He translated Long's quieter congratulations when the words stuck in his throat and he needed them carried gently.
The party was warm.
Good food. Laughter. Light. Alex at his side. Their people around them.
For a few precious hours, Phong let himself stand in that life.
Deep in the dungeon, Daniel Harlan descended toward the stable spot.
He brought twenty divers with him, all level thirty-five and above. Professional, expensive, heavily equipped. Some were bodyguards in the old sense, men and women whose loyalty belonged to salary and contract. Others were Springwell security contractors who had adapted well enough to the new world to keep their jobs by becoming dangerous inside it. One of them, the head of security, was level forty and carried a rare class: Blood Blader.
The stable spot itself looked almost offensively harmless.
A hill overlooking Lake Baratok, low and green in the dungeon's strange light, crowned by a small golden tree no taller than a child. Around it, the land held a fragile-seeming calm. No shifting was occuring, no obvious threat either. Just wind moving through the grass and the faint shimmer of mana that clung to all things in the deeper floors now.
Daniel climbed the slope in polished boots that had never been made for mud. He looked annoyed by the terrain itself, as if dirt had personally failed him by refusing to become easier.
The Blood Blader halted once near the base of the hill and narrowed his eyes.
Something moved in the grass.
A low ripple.
Then another.
He stepped away from Daniel's side, hand already near the blade at his hip, and followed the movement with the sharp stillness of a man who had stayed alive by learning when instinct was a gift and when it was cowardice wearing urgency as a costume.
The grass parted, and he found were mice.
Small, low-level dungeon mice carrying tomatoes.
The head of security stared at them for a second longer than necessary.
Then straightened.
Nothing but vermin. Local creature moving produce through the grass in a way too beneath his concern to matter. He ignored them, those who he thought could be trampled on and crushed any day he wanted. To Daniel, Phong was like that, once.
And the dungeon, as it always did, punished contempt faster than caution.
Daniel reached halfway up the hill before the trap sprang.
The mice let go once they were in positions. Five hundred Timatoes burst into motion. A red tsunami of violent fruit tyrants crashed on the expedition team.
The bodyguards barely had time to understand what they were seeing before the first row of tiny tiger-faced fruits hit them.
One man shouted warning, another fired too early.
A woman near Daniel tried to pull him back and got three Timatoes on her chest at once, their fangs sinking through reinforced fabric and into flesh as if leather, mana lining, and human confidence meant nothing.
Then the screaming started.
Timatoes rolled, floated, leaped, and tore across the hill in a frenzy of boiling red malice. Some bit and hung on while others vomited thick tomato lava into exposed skin, eyes, mouths, armor joints. The bodyguards were level thirty-five to forty, strong enough to dominate most of Floor 1 a year ago, strong enough to kill trolls in organized groups, strong enough to bully weaker divers and lesser monsters without losing sleep.
They were nothing here.
Nothing compared to fruits that had stood against Soerai and Bai Hu's beasts.
Nothing compared to creatures bred in danger, hardened in siege, and loyal only to the farmer who planted them.
A shotgun blast tore one Timato in half.
It did not matter.
Two more were already inside the shooter's guard, chewing at the backs of his hands while another climbed his shoulder and poured boiling juice into his ear.
The Blood Blader actually fought well.
He cut six apart in less than ten seconds, blood magic turning his weapon edge into a crimson blur. He severed vines, smashed one beneath his boot, and turned his own spilled blood into slicing threads to sweep a lane clear toward Daniel.
That earned him the right to die last among the guards.
The rest of the formation collapsed in under a minute.
People tried to fire downward and only hit one another in the panic. Others ran and slipped on the incline while Timatoes swarmed over them, burrowing teeth into calf, wrist, and throat. More than one guard screamed not because they were dying, but because they could not process dying like this—torn apart by sentient fruits while the air filled with the smell of cooked blood and acidic tomato steam.
Daniel Harlan tried to command.
That was his instinct to the very end. He shouted at people to hold the line, to secure him, to kill them, to use explosives, to do something useful for once in their pathetic lives. Loud made him stood out to the rampaging fruits of violence.
The Timatoes answered by climbing him. One latched onto his face first. He ripped it away and the skin of his cheek came with it.
Another hit him in the throat.
Another clung to his coat and bit through layers until it reached the meat beneath.
Then the lava came.
A Timato split itself open right against his jaw and turned into a napalm bomb, releasing boiling tomato fire across his mouth, chin, and one eye. Daniel screamed—a raw, animal sound, stripped clean of class, money, and all the authority he had ever believed protected him.
The guards around him died trying to save him.
Or trying to save themselves. In the end, it made no difference.
The Blood Blader reached him just in time to see two Timatoes disappear under Daniel's shirt while others ripped at his legs and face. He killed four. Five. Maybe seven. Then a cluster of the little monsters burst themselves open around him like suicidal artillery shells, tomato lava spraying in all directions.
When the smoke of it cleared, he was on one knee, his blade hand shaking, half his face cooked, and three Timatoes already chewing through the back of his neck.
He died looking uphill. Toward the little golden tree. Toward the stable spot that had lured them all here. Toward the hill where human ambition had walked into a garden ambush and found out too late that the farmer no longer needed to be present to kill.
By the time the massacre ended, one hundred Timatoes were gone.
Not because the bodyguards had truly matched them. Because some of the fruits had torn themselves apart on purpose to finish the work faster.
The rest rolled back down the hill in blood-slick triumph, some dragging shreds of clothing, other still steaming. When Springwell retrieval teams finally reached the site, they found no battle.
They found a butchered aftermath.
Daniel Harlan's corpse was almost unrecognizable.
Face ruined, body torn, limbs marked with dozens of tiny bite wounds that looked obscene in their scale and number. Large sections of flesh had been cooked, peeled, or rendered into something that no longer resembled a man important enough to ruin lives by signing things.
The bodyguards were not better.
The retrieval team did not speak much after that.
No one wanted to be the first to describe what had done this.
No one wanted to be the first to say it aloud and turn it from nightmare into recorded fact.
Josh was informed on the surface.
At first, he denied it.
Flatly.
He said there had been a mistake. Misidentification surely. Dungeon interference, media sabotage. Anything but the truth.
Then he saw the body. And denial broke.
He lashed out first. Hit everyone nearby. Staff, security, one physician trying to guide him away. A chair went over. Glass shattered. Someone bled. Yet none of it mattered.
After rage came pleading.
He dropped to his knees beside what had once been Daniel Harlan and begged his father to wake up. To open his eyes, stop playing with him, to get up and say something, or simply to tell him what to do.
But Daniel said nothing.
Then Josh remembered.
Not the hospital first, not his own attacks, not all the other steps in the chain.
He remembered the group draw.
Phong standing calm under the lights, saying in that sincere voice impossible to spin:
I hope the Harlans get everything they deserve for what they've done.
Josh screamed.
The kind of scream that empties a person out from the inside.
It took a video call from his mother to force him back into his own body.
Kurosaki Kitahara appeared on the screen with the face so cold one would mistake her for an ice sculptor if they could not see her skin. She scolded him into stillness with brutal precision. Josh obeyed because even in grief, old fear remained stronger than collapse.
And once he was quiet enough to breathe, he swore revenge.
Against Phong.
Against the farmer who had killed his father.
Against the man whose words now rang through every piece of his grief like a curse finally claiming its price.