Phong asked Alex and Dominic to escort him back to camp for a day.
That request alone made the room pause.
Not because the logic was unclear. Everyone knew the world had shifted again after the Sky Emperor's appearance, after Mushroomkhan, after the talk of Celestial Skeletal and the league's possible transformation into a four-month dungeon spectacle. Of course Phong would want to inspect Baratok Town with his own eyes. Of course he would want to know what exactly his "killing the lion" order had created.
Still, asking for both Alex and Dominic at once meant Team Nemean would walk into the rematch with Maine Vikings without their two heaviest hitters.
Jake booed first. Joanne followed immediately, louder, because if she was going to be dramatic she would at least do it properly.
"You can't just say that with a straight face," Jake complained. "Without our two apex predators?"
Phong only looked at him.
"You can handle Maine."
That made the room laugh, because it sounded both insulting and completely true.
Joanne pointed at him. "You say that like we're interns."
"You're worse than interns," Phong said.
That got another round of noise.
But underneath the joking, the team understood. Maine Vikings were good. Tough. Honest. Harder than the casual public gave them credit for. But they were not a team that required Alex and Dominic both if the rest of Team Nemean played well.
Emma understood more than the others, though. She knew there was a second layer to Phong's decision. He wanted the less shiny parts of the team to stand under the light.
Jake. Jack. Séline. Even Alexei, if it came to that.
The league had spent too much time orbiting around Alexandra Vogel and Dominic Torres, with Emma herself helping that orbit grow because the public liked simple constellations. But once the format shifted—whether into formal team fighting or into this new proposed group dive with Celestial Skeletal on the line—the team would need every member carrying weight in the public eye. Influence mattered, reputation mattered, visibility mattered. The less famous parts of Team Nemean needed their own moments to solidify their shields against the elites.
It was Phong's way of protecting them now that he understood how useful exposure could be.
So when he left for Camp Orthrus with Alex and Dominic, Emma took command of the surface side without complaint. She brought the rest of Team Nemean to Yankee Stadium and met the Maine Vikings with all the confidence of a woman who had been born into the exact sort of crisis PR rooms like these were built to survive.
The absence of Phong, Alex, and Dominic immediately raised eyebrows. The Maine Vikings noticed. The press noticed. And Josh's media team, always circling for weakness now that Daniel Harlan was dead and the old world had started eating itself, tried to spin it instantly as Team Nemean looking down on Maine, so Josh could use that as leverage to recruit the Vikings later.
Emma crushed that narrative in one answer.
"Phong had a private matter he needed to handle," she said into the microphones, voice calm and smooth and rich enough to sound like truth wearing silk. "So his best friend and his fiancée went with him."
The room changed.
Every reporter in earshot forgot Maine for a full ten seconds.
"Fiancée?"
"Alexandra Vogel is engaged?"
"Since when?"
Emma did not smile, but everyone around her could feel the satisfaction in how easily she had redirected the whole machine.
The story spread through the media pit like fire through dry paper. Alexandra Vogel engaged to Phong Tran. Team Nemean coach and level-one farmer not merely boyfriend and girl friend, but fiancé. Suddenly the absence looked romantic, personal, even respectable. Josh's attempted spin about disrespecting the Maine Vikings drowned under the flood of engagement speculation.
To their credit, the Jameson brothers took it well. Rory, especially, gave a short nod and said, "Good for them." And because Maine still remembered that Alex had told them to protect their roster when she did not need to, the Vikings offered congratulations with no trace of cheap bitterness.
That was one of the reasons Phong had not minded leaving this match to the others. Maine fought hard, but they did not rot the air around themselves the way Josh did.
When the match announcements rolled around, Team Nemean sent Jake first.
That surprised a few people, though not as much as Camille had surprised the Rangers or Joanne had shocked Kenai's crowd. Jake was known enough now, fast enough, and sharp enough in the highlight reels that nobody thought he was filler. Still, against the Maine Vikings, many expected Jack or perhaps Séline for a more direct stylistic clash.
Instead, Jake strode into the ring with his usual cocky looseness, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet as if he had been born one bad joke away from violence.
Across from him came Rory Jameson.
Bear Soul.
The broadest of the brothers.
Thick beard. Thick shoulders. Thick forearms. Dark blue sleeveless jacket hanging from his waist over black fight trousers, tattoos visible under the arena lights. He looked like the sort of man who would have been cast as a barbarian before the dungeon and then punished reality for the accuracy afterward.
The crowd liked the matchup immediately. Jake was speed, angles, and irritation. Rory was mass, force, and durability. The old story wrote itself.
The horn sounded.
Rory activated Bear first.
A spectral shape rose around him—not a full bear, but the idea of bear made into pressure. Broad phantom forelimbs settled over his shoulders and arms, his stance widening, the line of his body sinking lower and heavier as if gravity itself had chosen a favorite.
Jake moved at once.
Rift Striker II had only sharpened the parts of him that were already dangerous. He did not rush like a simple speed fighter. He vanished from one bad angle and reappeared at another, step patterns breaking expectation just enough that the audience could not quite track him without the camera helping.
He opened with a testing exchange.
Quick jab to the left shoulder.
Low kick feint.
Shift right.
Short strike toward the ribs.
Rory answered with exactly what Jake expected from Bear Soul and exactly what made the match interesting.
He did not overreact. He took the shoulder hit. Ignored the feint. Let the rib touch scrape him rather than waste his whole structure chasing speed. Then he swung once. Just once.
Jake had already left that lane, but even the air displaced by Rory's return made the audience understand the terms. If he got caught clean, there would not be a second mistake to make.
Jake started kiting him properly after that. Long arcs around the ring, baiting entries, testing whether Rory could be made impatient. Two sharp hits to the body. One flicking shot to the outside of the knee. Then gone before Bear Soul's heavier pressure could lock him into the corner.
Rory, to his credit, refused to become stupid.
That was the problem. He had already fought elites like Kenai and Tara. Already learned what it felt like when a stronger team offered advice instead of humiliation. The Jamesons had grown from those losses. That showed now. Rory did not chase with his ego. He kept his lines tight, cut off the center, and let Jake spend movement whenever possible.
The first minute belonged to Jake in the public eye.
Not because he was winning decisively. Because he was prettier.
Fast movement always looked like control to a crowd until it hit something too solid to matter.
Rory's answer came in the second minute. He stopped trying to meet Jake's feet. Instead, he began attacking the space Jake needed to keep his rhythm. Wide shoulder checks into passing lanes. Low stomps that shook the ring enough to break clean acceleration timing. Short, ugly Bear-pressure bursts that forced Jake to reset his hips before striking again.
That earned the crowd back. Jake clipped Rory twice more. Rory forced Jake into one bad retreat. The commentators started talking in the usual shallow way—speed versus mass, mobility versus durability, the eternal sports logic of "can he keep this up?"
Then something changed.
Jake's posture lowered.
Rory's too.
For one strange second, both men seemed to settle inward.
The audience did not understand it. Alex would have, from the stands or the screen. Dominic certainly would have. Vân would have laughed first and explained later.
Prana coat.
Jake brought it up first.
Not visibly to the untrained eye, at least not at once. But for anyone sensitive enough, the shift was obvious. A thin, disciplined layer of mana wrapped close around his body, not flashy, not like an armor, dense enough that the shape of his movement changed.
Rory answered with the same.
The commentators froze.
"What changed?"
"Did they just—did you see that?"
"The texture of the mana around them is different."
Neither booth commentator knew what to call it.
The crowd sensed it anyway. The ring suddenly felt denser. More dangerous in a way that was harder to explain than simply "they hit harder now."
Jake felt the difference immediately too. And in that instant, he understood all over again how good Vân really was.
Because Rory's control was not as good as his.
The Bear Soul brother had clearly been trained in prana coat as well, and not recently. His mana sat close and heavy over his body without leaking into stiffness.
Jake's next clean strike, one he would normally trust to sting and disrupt, landed and did less than expected. At the same time, Rory's return pressure got worse. The first proper prana-coated exchange made the whole stadium feel the strangeness.
Jake stepped in on a broken rhythm, slipped the outer edge of Rory's guard, and landed a compact body shot under the ribs. Normally that would have earned a visible reaction. This time, the hit seemed to sink, drag, then disperse against the mana layer wrapped around Rory's torso.
Rory answered with a short bear-handed hook to Jake's shoulder.
Jake got both arms mostly in place. Mostly.
He still staggered three full steps and nearly lost his footing from the sheer weighted force of it.
The commentators began talking faster now after they had been fed information about the thin layer of mana around both fighter from the VAR room, trying to invent names for a technique they did not understand in real time.
"Some kind of mana-sheath?"
"Is this an enhancement skill?"
"They're both using it!"
And that was the true shock to the audience. Two fighters from opposite teams activating the same hidden technique at the same moment.
It made the fight feel like the tip of some submerged world the public had only now realized existed.
Jake adapted first.
That was where the difference lay. Rory's prana coat was strong, disciplined, and clearly well-trained, but it fit his existing style like a better shield fit a wall. Jake used his more dynamically. He let the layer flex thinner when he needed sharper movement, denser when he expected impact, and he began feeding his Rift Striker II movement through that awareness.
The whole fight changed.
Now Jake's kiting had bite again. Not because he got faster. Because his hits started arriving with more complete mana behind them. Slower than pure instinct wanted, yet more committed. Every touch now carried better pressure through Rory's defenses.
Rory noticed too. The Bear brother stopped taking body shots on his coat and began respecting Jake's entries more. He switched to forcing corner geometry harder, trying to pin the lighter man into places where even superior prana timing could not save him from simple arithmetic.
And nearly succeeded.
Jake got trapped once against the edge.
Rory closed like a landslide, Bear Soul fully thick over his shoulders, one massive strike already chambered.
The entire stadium came up to its feet.
Jake vanished at the last possible second.
A Rift Striker angle change fed through prana timing so cleanly that Rory's punch hit only ring and barrier wake, while Jake reappeared on the outside line and drove a sharp mana-laced strike into the back of the knee.
Rory dipped.
Jake did not let him recover.
Three-hit sequence.
Shoulder. Ribs. Jaw-line glancing shot.
Then gone again before Bear could truly answer.
For the first time, Rory looked irritated. Not rattled, but forced to admit the match no longer belonged to his terms.
The final stretch became a race of control. Rory needed one clean catch, one committed exchange, one place where his weight and Bear Soul could finally drag Jake into the wrong kind of honesty. Jake needed to stay just a little cleaner than that, just a little smarter, just a little more fluid with the new technique.
He won because he did. With better control over prana coat and mana timing.
The deciding moment came when both men committed to the same lane at once. Rory saw Jake's entry and brought Bear pressure across centerline, expecting the usual snap-speed strike. Instead, Jake delayed by a fraction, let the mana travel fully, and drove his attack not into Rory's chest where the coat was strongest, but into the transitional gap between shoulder line and collar where Rory had just shifted his own mana layer to support the attack.
It landed.
Rory's whole body lurched.
Jake followed with one more angle-change strike to the side of the head and then a kick to the planted leg.
Rory went down to one knee.
The horn sounded before he could force the issue further.
Winner: Jake.
The stadium erupted.
Not only because Team Nemean had taken the first fight. Because the whole match had revealed something bigger than one result.
The commentators were still trying to explain prana coat with words they did not yet have. The analysts on the side screens were circling slow-motion clips of mana riding close over skin and trying to compare it to armor skills, reinforcement techniques, or passive class effects. Online, the phrase "hidden mana technique" started trending before Jake even got out of the ring.
At Team Nemean's bench, Joanne stood and shouted, "That's my boy," with exactly enough sarcasm to make Jake flip her off in triumph instead of dignity.
Emma checked her phone once and smiled, already watching narratives mutate.
Jake came back breathing hard, grinning wider than his face should have allowed. Alexei clapped him once on the shoulder.
"Good."
Jake nodded, still catching his breath. Then said the only thing that mattered to him in that moment.
"Vân really is a terrifyingly good teacher."
No one at Team Nemean argued with that.
"Do not tell him that."