Phong did not waste time.
The moment the Sky Emperor vanished from the world's horizon and left humanity choking on fear, greed, and a new system tab, Phong understood one thing clearly: the second step of his plan could not wait.
He took out his phone immediately and called Lyon. Mrs. Lambert answered first, then turned the screen toward the elf children when she heard it was daddy. The six little leafy monsters rushed into frame at once, beanies crooked, eyes bright, all talking over each other in a mess of half-formed words and excited chirps.
Phong cut through the noise with a single order.
"Tell them," he said. "Issue the order. Killing the Lion."
The children went still. Then all six tried to salute at once.
It was clumsy. Uneven. One of them nearly smacked their own face. But the seriousness in their eyes made Phong's chest tighten anyway.
"Yes, daddy."
They scampered off immediately, vanishing from the call in a blur of wool hats, leaves, and small determined feet. Phong lowered the phone and only then realized what their status screens had shown him in passing.
Level seventeen.
All six of them.
The defensive variants of peas and dills had done their work.
Alex, standing beside him, watched his face and asked, "What do you want."
Phong looked toward the dark window where the city still shook beneath the Sky Emperor's declaration.
"A surprise," he said. "For Team Nemean."
Back in Camp Orthrus—though by now the local races had started calling it Baratok Town—the elf children moved with all the solemnity six small rulers could muster.
The town had expanded once more. Lizardmen patrols moved along sharpened walls. Mice of the Great Burrow ran messages. Crickets hauled timber and stone. Inkborn traded in the market lanes. Buforians croaked over marsh bundles and reed stock. Kamohai mercenaries lounged like sharks who had figured out how juicy body guard contracts could be.
The children gathered them all.
The lizardmen elite guards came first, led by women whose scales still shone despite the lingering scarcity around the lake. Then came the newly arrived Tortura elders, moving slower than their younger kin but with the quiet gravity of old warriors who had lived long enough to see exile become routine. A representative of the Greencap Bunnies arrived as well, sent by the Greencap emperor himself, stiff-backed and suspicious. A Wolven representative stood nearby, younger than a true war champion but old enough to wear weapons with pride. The Kamohai came too, because any meeting connected to the farmer usually led to food, violence, or both.
The elf children climbed onto crates and announced the conquest order. They wanted to take the Obsidian Canyon.
Not the whole thing. Not yet. Only enough to build a third camp.
The H'Re already guarded the gate that led down toward the canyon, their worm-eaten bodies and blind faces enough to make most sensible creatures keep a distance. But the canyon itself remained a nest of monstrous cockroaches and arachnid body snatchers, a place even seasoned divers treated like a bad memory given stone walls.
The children wanted a thousand Timatoes.
That part made almost every race present go quiet, because everyone around Lake Baratok had learned the same lesson about the Timatoes.
They were small red war crimes with fangs.
And the elf children wanted to loose one thousand of them into the canyon and see how the spiders and cockroaches liked it.
The Greencap representative was the first to speak after the silence stretched too long. He looked toward the lizardmen elite guard and asked the question none of them wanted to put into words first.
"What does the farmer want?"
That was the problem.
If Phong wanted reinforcement, then their numbers were too small to make a meaningful difference in a real war against humanity. If he only wanted the Greencap Bunnies, the Wolven, the Tortura, and the lizardmen to stand there and watch him take the canyon, then that was its own kind of strange too.
The lizardmen had no answer. Their captain, after a long pause, said only, "We trust the farmer is not aggressive or power-hungry."
That did not explain anything.
But around Baratok Town, Phong's reputation had already grown into something stranger than simple authority. He fed people. He made crops that could be harvested way too fast and yield way more compare to dungeon native fruits and vegetables they could gathered. He built safe places in the middle of a dungeon. He struck bargains and somehow kept them. He was dangerous, yes, but not in the way tyrants were dangerous.
So they listened.
And the Timatoes were brought.
Crates and baskets of them rolled in from Camp Orthrus, carried by mice, guided by lizardmen, and already baring their tiny fangs as if insulted by the delay between being summoned and being allowed to kill.
The moment the canyon opened before them, the Timatoes bounced.
Neither formation nor discipline nor hesitation.
They poured into the Obsidian Canyon like red floodwater with predator teeth.
The first wave of cockroaches died almost too quickly to matter. The giant black roaches, all chitin and clicking limbs and dungeon-grown malice, swarmed toward the intrusion out of instinct. That instinct betrayed them. The Timatoes bit through joints, crawled under shell gaps, and vomited their lava-thick tomato juice into eye sockets, mandibles, and breathing cracks. Roaches cooked alive from the inside, twitching and shrieking as steam burst through their armor.
The arachnid body snatchers fared no better. They came down from obsidian walls and silk-dark crevices with the old ambush confidence of creatures used to claiming flesh before the prey understood what was touching them. But the Timatoes had no fear of body theft, no caution, and no self-preservation worth mentioning. They launched themselves upward into webs, tore at spider legs, latched onto abdomens, and burst open in showers of boiling red ruin when the chance came.
The canyon became a nightmare.
The various races watching from the safer ridges understood even more than before that the Timatoes were worse than any soldier they had ever seen. More vicious than the Greencap knight lines. More aggressive than the Kamohai. More reckless than the Wolven. They had less regard for their own well-being than a starving beast and more appetite for murder than some war bands.
The lava-like tomato juice remained the true horror. The roaches' chitin should have protected them better. It did not. The heat seeped into joints and under plating. Those that survived the first blasts often staggered off only to collapse later, cooked alive under their own shell. Some spiders retreated up the canyon walls trailing steam and the smell of burned meat. The Timatoes reminded those spiders that they could float, they just preferred rolling around for reasons unknown to all but them.
After a few days, the impossible happened.
The roaches and spiders learned fear.
The scent of the Timatoes drifting through the canyon made whole clusters of body snatchers retreat deeper into cracks before the first red shape was even visible. Roach waves broke and scattered rather than commit fully.
The elf children watched all this with the solemn delight of small conquerors and then gave the next order.
Build.
Walls, watchtowers, barriers, housing, storage.
The conquest would mean nothing if they could not hold it.
So the races of Baratok Town got to work.
The lizardmen cut and carried stone, moving with the hard discipline of people who had always known how to turn labor into fortification. The Great Burrow mice measured routes, crawlspaces, and weak points with their own kind of genius. Giant crickets dragged timber from lake Baratok through the gate. Kamohai hauled heavier loads with open grumbling and open greed for later payment. Tortura elders directed lines of fire and safe elevation, their old eyes still knowing how to read a battlefield better than most younger men read a map.
The smell of the Timatoes kept the deepest threats back while the work went on. And when more Timatoes were needed, they simply brought more from Camp Orthrus.
They could not grow new ones without the level 1 farmer there to plant and trigger the conditions, but that no longer mattered. The canyon already knew the smell. The spiders and cockroaches had learned what it meant. A lingering crate of red little tyrants sitting beneath a half-built wall was enough to make the nearby darkness think twice.
By the time the core of the third territory was secured, the obsidian ridges around it no longer looked like a death zone. They looked like the edge of a frontier town still daring the dungeon to try again.
Then came the last announcement.
The elf children climbed onto the finished wall and declared Phong's next will. He wanted a union.
Not an empire exactly. Not one crown over all. Something looser and perhaps therefore more dangerous.
Camp Stymphalian would remain the heart. The source of food, shelter, and safe hideouts. Baratok Town would hold the lake and its peoples. The new camp at the Obsidian Canyon would serve as the third point in the triangle, forming the base of a new kingdom.
The Greencap Bunnies, the Wolven, the Tortura, the lizardmen, and the trolls would unite under shared purpose. Push back against human activity. Protect Phong's secrets. Guard the camps and each other.
The Kamohai and the lizardmen agreed to the idea with little trouble. The Kamohai because they already lived by practical alliances and had tasted the value of the farmer's crops. The lizardmen because their queen had long since understood that survival in the new age meant choosing the right neighbors before they chose for you.
The Greencap representative did not agree immediately. Neither did the Wolven. Both said they would have to ask their monarchs.
The Tortura had a similar answer. Their chief must be consulted. But their elders added something else.
Even if their chief refused, they would fight for Phong regardless. He had given them a place to stay. A place to age. A place to wait out the curse of their levels without having to run from the shadow of cà rồng or die in exile.
That debt, to the Tortura, meant something close to sacred.
And beneath the jagged black walls of the Obsidian Canyon, with Timatoes still prowling the ridges like tiny red wardens and multiple races now building under one plan, the second step of Phong's design took shape.
Not just camps. Not just allies. A real block of power.
A frontier union the world above had no idea was being born beneath its feet.