Chapter 164: The raccoon had discovered what?
Rico climbed down only after a formal promise.
Not an informal one, not a vague “later.” He demanded wording.
“You will return to assist Rico in retrieving the secret wall snack once people stop being broken?”
Alex, still pale from Berserking Strawberry backlash, stared at him like she was considering whether the dungeon would judge her if she threw him into the pond.
Dominic, whose ribs still felt like they had negotiated personally with lightning and lost, said, “Yes. Once everyone can stand without blacking out, we’ll help you pull whatever it is out of the wall.”
Rico narrowed his eyes.
“Swear on emergency coffee.”
“No.”
“Then your promise means nothing.”
“Rico.”
The raccoon sighed with tragic disappointment, but finally climbed down from the narrow hole in the painted hallway. His paws and forearms were dusty, one ear slightly dropped down, and there was a smear of ancient pigment across his cheek that made him look like a tiny bandit who had robbed a museum and then become distracted by snacks.
He rejoined the team with all the dignity possible for a raccoon who had missed the entire boss fight.
Which lasted until he saw the Yeak.
The black-furred corpse sprawled across the hill, tusks jutting, horn cracked, crushed eye sockets leaking dark ichor where Alex’s condensed psychic marbles had obliterated the parasites within. The cavern still stank faintly of burnt fur, wet stone, and the metallic aftertaste of relic lightning. The skeletons around the altar had shifted from the impact of the giant’s fall, as though even the ancient dead had flinched.
Rico stared.
Then his whole body went rigid.
“No.”
No one answered.
He took three slow steps closer.
“No.”
Joanne, still slumped with her back against a rock, lifted a weak hand. “Yes.”
Rico spun toward them with absolute betrayal in his beady eyes.
“Kamen Rider missed the monster fight?”
“You were having a side quest,” Jake said.
“I was doing archaeology!”
“You were yelling about secret wall snacks.”
“Archaeology has snacks!”
Rico clutched his head with both paws, dropped to his knees, and let out a tiny howl of despair that echoed through the sacred cave with appalling disrespect.
“I had Judgement Form, Fortress Form! I had carrockets! I had angry chilies! I could have said something cool before the finisher!”
Dominic leaned back against the stone and closed his eyes. “You would have said something terrible.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I absolutely know that.”
Rico staggered toward one of the packs, sniffed, dug inside with the confidence of a creature whose relationship with personal property was purely theoretical, and pulled out a can of Pepsi.
He cracked it open.
Dominic opened one eye. Rico took a long, consoling drink.
Dominic’s gaze sharpened. The raccoon froze mid-swallow.
“That,” Dominic said slowly, “was my emergency reserve.”
Rico lowered the can by one millimeter. The silence that followed was longer than several funerals.
Dominic stared.
It was the full Dominic Torres stare, the one that could make younger divers reconsider life choices, gods reconsider smiting, and raccoons—apparently—begin sweating spiritually.
Rico looked from Dominic to the Pepsi, then back.
“I am emotionally injured,” he said carefully. “This is medical.”
Dominic continued staring. Rico took a smaller sip.
“Tiny medical.”
No one had the strength to laugh properly. They did anyway. That was when the ruin finally started feeling less like a battlefield and more like a temporary shelter.
Phong was not there, but his plants were. That made all the difference.
The Sympathy Enoki went around first, pale little mushroom bundles tasting faintly earthy and warm despite the cave’s chill. Their effect was subtle at first, not so flashy like skills from a proper healer adjacent class would be. It started easing the body, softening the jagged edges of pain, allowing muscles to stop clenching around injury long enough for natural recovery and mana-assisted repair to do their work. Then came Relaxing Shiitake, richer, darker, carrying a drowsy calm that settled over the team like a blanket.
Alexei’s breathing became less careful.
Dominic stopped flinching every time he shifted his torso.
Joanne’s trembling gradually eased.
Alex, who had been forcing herself upright out of pride, finally let her head fall back against the stone and closed her eyes.
Emma’s hands stopped shaking.
The cave grew colder as night deepened, or whatever passed for night in the dungeon settled over the Obsidian Canyon outside. The lush inner chamber held moisture too well. Water kept slipping down the walls in silver threads, filling the pond around the skeleton hill up again, and the damp air crawled into clothes no matter how close they sat to the controlled fire.
The ladies solved the problem with ruthless efficiency: by selecting Rico as the most suitable plushie.
The raccoon protested for about a minute.
“No. Rico is warrior. Rico is artillery. Rico is not emotional support pillow.”
Alex, from her cloak, opened one eye.
“We have coffee.”
Rico went still. Janet patted the space beside her. Rico looked at the coffee, looked at his dignity, then back at the coffee.
“Warrior requires rest cycle,” he announced, and climbed into the pile.
He was warm. Fluffy too, and surprisingly compliant once bribed. Joanne hugged him first, then Camille leaned against Joanne, then Janet dragged part of the cloak over all of them while Rico grumbled about unfair working conditions and accepted tiny controlled sips of coffee from Emma like a conquered noble allowed one luxury in exile.
Dominic watched them with a tired smile, then winced.
Janet noticed instantly. “How bad?”
He exhaled slowly.
“Better than it should be.”
That was true, though not entirely comforting.
Dominic had taken Emma’s full buffs while already under Berserking Strawberry. The stacking had been obscene. Nearly 300% compare to his usual output at the peak, layered over the damage he had absorbed from the Yeak’s first lightning strike. His body had become a weapon too overfilled with force and then discharged it through God’s Roar Canon in one impossible blue blast.
It was a miracle he was not in worse condition.
But Dominic was tankier than Alex by nature, by his former training, and by class. His Raging Judgenaut body could endure bloated stats in a way Alex’s more precision-built frame could not. Back when Alex had first pushed too hard in the Obsidian Canyon and had to fight their way back to the gate leading up to Floor 2, her body had nearly destroyed itself trying to contain power it was not ready to hold.
Dominic had come close to the edge. He still looked like someone had thrown him through a divine engine. But thankfully, alive.
Stable. Grumbling, which meant improving.
By the time the team settled into proper rest rotations, the ruin had become strangely cozy despite itself. The Yeak’s corpse had been dragged farther down the slope with more effort and less dignity than such a boss perhaps deserved. The vajra rested near Emma, wrapped but within reach. Jack kept flexing his left leg under his blanket, feeling the new Celestial Skeletal fragment settle into him like a second inheritance. No one spoke too loudly. No one slept too deeply. But the air between them was warm.
Self-preservation had become routine.
Care had become instinct.
And above them, unseen by anyone in the cave, the surface world caught fire.
The notification had struck the globe like a second Sky Emperor roar, only this one was made of screens.
Congratulations to Team Nemean for slaying the legacy boss: Yeak of the Black Mountain.
Every major diver network broke into urgent commentary within minutes. Clips of Team Nemean’s recent league fights were replayed against wild speculation about the boss’s identity. Legacy boss, an unknown location: Black Mountain, level unknown, relic possibilities unknown, Celestial Skeletal possibilities unknown. Viewers filled the empty spaces with terror and greed.
The value of Team Nemean rose so fast that several analysts sounded frightened while trying to explain it.
They were not simply a promising East Coast team anymore. They were not merely Alex Vogel and Dominic Torres plus support. They were the first publicly confirmed league team to take down a legacy boss after the Sky Emperor opened the Celestial Skeletal age... in the world. Precisely what the doctors ordered for the USA's pride as a country.
To fans, it was legend. To governments, it was leverage, influence, power on geopolitics. To investors, it was a gold vein walking around in matching jackets. To elites sitting on the fences, it was a warning that Joshua Harlan might no longer be the only American youth diver worth building a myth around.
Some pundits said the quiet part aloud before midnight.
Maybe Team Nemean should replace Josh as the new face of the American diver scene.
The sentence spread.
Then multiplied.
Alex’s fandom exploded first. That was inevitable given her reputation, righteous act even before the fame, and pleasing to the eyes appearance. Her back-to-back fights against Kenai and Tara had already pushed her into the highest tier of public obsession. Now, with the boss notification, edits of her “spinning top of death” style flooded every platform that could still function under the traffic. Fan accounts grew by hundreds of thousands overnight. Artists drew Bai Hu’s storm as a crown. Commentators argued over whether Adam Choi’s statement—that only Kaiser, Yue Ting, or Vân might beat her in a duel—had already become outdated.
Dominic’s fandom surged next.
The image of him as Team Nemean’s wall had finally crystallized into something the public could worship. God’s Roar Canon clips, Eyeless Heaven speculation, old boxing footage, interviews with people who claimed to have known him before the dungeon—all of it surged through feeds. “The Great Wall of Queen” trended in three countries before anyone could confirm he had, in fact, lived in Queen.
Emma’s growth was stranger but just as intense.
Support classes rarely drew the same raw devotion as frontline monsters. But Emma had beauty, name, strategy, wealth, and now proof that her buffs belonged at the center of a legacy boss kill. Her fandom began calling themselves “The Swordppets” after the Muppets and demanded a new album with all the songs used in the boss fight released.
Séline, too, rose sharply.
Her air-step clips from the Maine match had already been circulating among martial artists and mana theorists. Now people rewatched them obsessively, linking them to Team Nemean’s boss kill and declaring her the “hidden genius” of the roster. Half of France seemed to claim they had always known she was special. The other half complained that she should have joined Jeanne de Valois' team instead of a foreign team.
Hans Tannenbaum moved faster than everyone.
Before sunrise, Tannenbaum-backed stores opened pre-orders for Team Nemean action figures.
The first website crashed in eight minutes. The second lasted twelve. The third survived longer only because someone had apparently learned from the first two disasters and immediately failed under four times the traffic.
By the end of the hour, the pre-order system had crashed four times.
Hans issued a calm statement about unprecedented demand.
Emma, asleep in a cold cave under Floor 3 beside a coffee-bribed raccoon, had no idea her father was currently converting their trauma into collectibles with ruthless efficiency.
Josh saw everything. He sat in a private room above a training facility, screen after screen showing Team Nemean’s name, Team Nemean’s clips, Team Nemean’s rising numbers. On half of the other screens, there were the recordings of his attempt to push toward the Death Peak, and failed. He clenched his teeth hard enough his jaw ached.
Beside him, Olen said nothing for a long time, and that was worse than mockery.
Their alliance had been reforged after Olen’s team was eliminated. It had not been an affectionate reunion. Necessity did not need love. Josh needed numbers and power. Olen needed relevance and access. Necromancer had made Olen dangerous again, maybe more dangerous than before, but one A-class diver was no longer enough to save the Golden Bridge Warriors after three losses before his return. Not when Team Nemean was turning boss kills into global events.
And Olen was still furious.
Not only because Alex had rejected him. Because Alex was now engaged to Phong. That old humiliation had become public fact. Every rise of Team Nemean made it worse. Every mention of Phong made Olen’s expression harden by one more degree.
When the Yeak notification arrived, Olen’s face went still in a way that made Josh almost prefer his anger.
Then Kurosaki Kitahara entered. She had temporarily taken over the Harlan company while Josh rebuilt both his image and the family’s through his diver career. She looked at the screens once, took in the numbers, and spoke without wasting cruelty.
“You need to hunt.”
Josh looked at her.
Kitahara continued, “Bring Olen. Bring the Brooklyn Knights. Bring the Boston Jokers. Go into the dungeon and start producing results.”
Olen’s eyes flicked toward her at the mention of Boston, but he did not object.
Kitahara’s voice remained cold.
“If you do not, the elites will stop investing in the idea that you are the future of young American divers.”
Josh’s hands curled.
In his eyes, there were a new flame burning, suggesting he was no longer a coward who only fight sure-win battle anymore. Not after losing his biggest backing: Daniel Harlan, his father.
Kitahara slightly nod her head.
That fire was the only reason she deemed her son worth investing in further.
Back in the ruin on Floor 3, morning arrived with Rico standing on Alex’s chest.
She opened her eyes, just to see the raccoon staring down at her, vibrating with purpose.
“You promised.”
Alex blinked once.
Rico leaned closer.
“Secret wall snack.”
A few minutes later, after multiple groans, curses, and one accusation from Joanne that Rico had invented alarm-clock terrorism, Team Nemean returned to the painted hallway.
The hole was exactly where Rico had left it, narrow and awkward, hidden between old pigment cracks in the mural of the Sky Emperor's descent. That made everyone more cautious than they might have been otherwise. Anything buried in that particular wall deserved suspicion.
Rico climbed up first, stuck both arms in, and resumed pulling.
This time, Jack helped by holding the raccoon up while Séline and Jake climbed up to assist. Dominic stood beneath them with the expression of a man ready to catch either people or disaster. Emma held the vajra close, just in case. Alex watched the surrounding mural.
The object came loose with a dry crack.
Not a snack, because of course it wasn't.
It was a hand. More precisely, a skeletal human hand, severed cleanly at the wrist. What one would notice first was the bones were silver.
Not painted on, or metal-plated. It was made of silver all the way through, smooth and luminous in the dim hall, each finger locked into a fist so tight it looked like death itself had failed to pry it open.
Rico stared at it.
Then whispered, “Forbidden snack.”
“No,” everyone said at once.
They carried it back to the inner chamber before trying to open it. The fingers resisted at first, then unfolded one by one with a faint crystalline creak.
In the palm rested a small star-shaped crystal.
It glowed with mana. Neither violently, nor like a weapon waking. More like a captured night sky breathing slowly inside a jewel.
For a long moment, no one spoke.
Then Emma closed the silver fingers back around it carefully.
“We store it,” she said. “We test it somewhere safer.”
“Phong’s camp,” Dominic said.
Everyone agreed immediately. The ruin had already given them one level sixty-two boss, a relic, a Celestial Skeletal fragment, and a global scandal. No one felt the need to let Rico’s secret wall snack explode in their faces before breakfast.