Plants vs Dungeon (litRPG, kingdombuilding, slice of life)

Phong had expected the first match of the double elimination bracket to be ugly in some familiar way.

He expected sponsors, cameras, and commentators sharpening every movement Team Nemean made into marketable narrative. He expected Josh’s shadow somewhere in the bracket, even if Josh himself was no longer in the same immediate room. He expected the Bronx Musketeers to smile too politely, Emma to feed them only partial strategy, and Alex to stand beside him with the controlled calm she had been wearing more often since Bai Hu’s storm had evolved into something that could ride as an army. He expected the league organizers to pretend that all of this was still sport, while every elite watching understood that the bracket was a weapon for measuring people who might shape national power.

He did not expect Orange County.

More specifically, he did not expect Gia Định’s Saviors.

The name appeared on the bracket screen in clean white letters above the team portrait, and for a moment Phong simply stared at it while the noise of the Tannenbaum clubhouse dulled around him. The team’s emblem was a stylized yellow flag with three red stripes worked into the image of a fortress gate, framed by lotus petals and crossed sabers. The branding was polished, emotional, and old in the way exile politics often became old, preserved in amber until descendants inherited not memory but obligation.

Emma noticed his stillness first, because Emma noticed most things that might become problems. “Phong?”

He did not answer immediately.

Alex looked from the screen to his face. Her hand, which had been resting loosely near his wrist, moved closer without quite touching. She had learned that sometimes he needed the choice to reach back, and the small restraint made him love her more than grand gestures ever could.

Dominic read the team name again. “You know them?”

Phong exhaled slowly. “I know of them.”

That was not quite true, but it was the first sentence he could speak without letting too much history fall out.

The leader of Gia Định’s Saviors was Andrew Nguyen, a captain in his early thirties with a clean jawline, hard eyes, and the sort of practiced public posture Phong associated with men who had learned ideology as family inheritance. Beside him in the team staff portrait stood Cuong Nguyen, coach, father, and local legend in certain parts of Orange County’s Vietnamese refugee community. He was older now, of course, white-haired and narrow-eyed, his face cut into permanent suspicion by decades of anger. The league biography called him a former South Vietnamese commando, a survivor, a community organizer, and one of the early patrons of Vietnamese-American divers on the West Coast.

Phong’s uncle had called him a bitter old bastard once, then immediately apologized to the kitchen shrine because his aunt had glared.

The memory hurt more than Phong expected.

“My uncle and aunt knew the father,” he said at last. “Cuong Nguyen. He made their life harder than it needed to be.”

Joanne’s expression lost its casual boredom. Jake, who had been leaning against a chair while pretending not to eavesdrop on everything involving personal drama, straightened a little. Emma did not ask a question yet, which Phong appreciated. She gave him space to decide how much of the past belonged in the present.

Phong looked at the bracket and saw, beneath the glossy team graphics, the old restaurant sign in his memory: The Red Lantern, painted red and gold, hanging over a narrow storefront that smelled of garlic, fish sauce, charred onion, and the patience of two people who worked twelve-hour days because survival had never felt like something to delegate.

His uncle had come to the United States as a student, not as a refugee, which sounded like a technical distinction to anyone who did not understand how much history could be loaded into a plane ticket. He had not carried the same exile story as the boat people who built entire neighborhoods out of loss, fear, resentment, survival, and fierce loyalty to a republic that no longer existed. He had not taken a student loan from the American system, something certain community men treated as either suspicious pride or communist arrogance depending on how drunk they were. Most importantly, he had never agreed to the simple story Cuong Nguyen demanded from everyone: that Vietnam had been a stolen homeland, that the North were thieves by blood and doctrine, and that anyone who refused to hate in the proper direction was either naive, compromised, or secretly red.

Phong’s grandfather had been from Quy Nhơn.

That mattered to his uncle.

It mattered because his grandfather had spoken something most refugees did not dare to say: that the leaders of the Republic of Vietnam were mostly christians and catholics from the north, migrated south in 1954. And the people who kicked them out of the country was the people of the South, who they so shamelessly tried to represent and stole the voice from, just because they conveniently could speak English.

But most important of all was how his uncle had seen the country developed, how life became better back home with Vân's family.

So when Cuong Nguyen demanded confirmation for his fantasy, that Vietnam had been ruined by only one side and would remain a shithole forever because the Republic of Vietnam had fled with its American owners, Phong’s uncle had refused to play along with their fairy tale.

The isolation began quietly, because community punishment often wore polite shoes first.

People stopped recommending The Red Lantern. Church aunties whispered that the owners were too friendly to visitors from modern Vietnam. Men who had never paid their own workers properly muttered that Phong’s aunt and uncle must be hiding something because honest restaurants could not survive without “giving chance to fellow country men,” by which they meant exploiting Vietnamese students washing dishes for cash while owners evaded taxes. Someone reported them to inspectors twice in one month. Someone called the IRS. Rumors spread that the kitchen was dirty, that money was being sent to communists, that the restaurant watered down sauces, bought old fish, cheated customers, disrespected veterans, mocked refugees, and served as a meeting place for suspicious people.

The worst part was how boring the cruelty had been.

The Red Lantern was inspected, and inspected again, and audited, and inconvenienced, and every time, it remained stubbornly ordinary. The kitchen was clean. The taxes were paid. The workers were legal and properly compensated, which offended certain competitors more than any political position ever could. In the end, Cuong Nguyen lost the defamation lawsuit badly enough that even the men who privately agreed with him stopped saying the rumors loudly. Ten thousand dollars in damages did not make Phong’s aunt and uncle rich, but it put a court record where gossip had been.

His uncle had framed the judgment and hung it in the office for one week.

His aunt made him take it down because customers did not need to eat phở under legal paperwork. Remembering this now made his mouth taste like bile, as it reminded Phong of how easy that same system that was once protected his aunt and uncle from Cuong turned a blind eye when people like the Harlans were involved.

Phong learned later, after they died, that some of Cuong’s circle had thrown a celebration. Nothing big, maybe a dozen tables in a local restaurant who naturally used this chance to overcharge the food, since hatred was as easy to monetize as patriotism. It was petty, irrelevant, attended by old men and younger inheritors of old poison who toasted the closing of a restaurant they had failed to destroy while it lived. Cuong, naturally, made fortune from this grudge. At the time, Phong had been too deep in grief to notice them. Their satisfaction had been a mosquito whining outside a burning house.

Now, years later, the son of that man stood on the bracket opposite Team Nemean.

Andrew Nguyen - captain of Gia Định’s Saviors.

“Phong,” Alex said quietly.

He realized then that his silence had gone on long enough for the room to tighten.

“I’m fine,” he said.

Joanne gave him a look. “That sentence has been banned from this team.”

He almost smiled. Almost. “I know.”

Emma’s voice came level and precise. “Do we need to account for personal provocation?”

“Yes,” Phong said. “Mostly against me, possibly against the team if they think disrespecting me creates an emotional opening.”

Alex’s eyes changed.

There were many versions of anger in her. Phong could not read what kind of lightning his fiancé had in her bottle for these people.

The league had dressed the space for sportsmanship. Flags of participating teams hung from the rafters. Sponsor logos glowed on curved screens. Commentators spoke from a platform behind glass, their voices muted in the hall but likely booming into broadcast feeds. Officials in dark suits arranged both teams into lines, because nothing made violence more respectable than forcing it to shake hands first.

Gia Định’s Saviors approached in matching jackets of deep blue and yellow trim.

Andrew Nguyen walked at the front, chin lifted. He was handsome in the hard way, fit, disciplined, and already smiling for cameras while keeping his eyes cold for Phong. Behind him came his teammates, all Vietnamese-American, all carrying the posture of people who had been told this match was about more than points. Cuong Nguyen stood behind them with the coaches, older and thinner than Phong remembered from photographs, but with the same eyes as his son: sharp, judging, and already certain.

Cuong recognized Phong first.

The old man’s mouth tightened.

Phong bowed his head slightly, not enough to flatter, only enough to acknowledge history without kneeling to it. Cuong did not return the gesture.

The handshake line began.

Dominic shook Andrew’s hand first, firm and polite. Alex came next, her expression neutral enough that anyone who did not know her might mistake it for calm. Emma shook hands like she was signing an unfavorable contract she would later exploit. Joanne gave a smile that promised future inconvenience. The Bronx Musketeers, newly provisional, behaved beautifully under Emma’s watchful eye.

Then Andrew reached Phong.

He took Phong’s hand in front of the cameras, held it for half a second longer than necessary, and turned his head slightly toward his team while speaking in Vietnamese.

“He is not boatman blood like us,” Andrew said. “He comes from a communist lineage.”

The words were not shouted. They did not need to be.

They were meant for the Vietnamese ears nearby, meant to mark Phong in a language the broadcast might not catch quickly enough, meant to make the insult intimate while the handshake remained polite for the cameras.

Phong did not squeeze harder.

He did not answer in anger.

He simply looked at Andrew and saw Cuong’s old poison wearing a younger face, tailored better, trained better, media-ready and system-leveled. That was perhaps the cruelest part of inheritance. Some sons received recipes, songs, land, tools, stories, or photographs. Andrew had received a wound and mistaken it for a compass.

“My uncle said your father always needed enemies to feel honest,” Phong replied in Vietnamese, softly enough that only those near them heard. “I see he raised you carefully.”

Andrew’s smile thinned.

For a second, Phong thought he might break the handshake.

He did not. Cameras were watching.

They moved on.

The rest of Gia Định’s Saviors did not bother hiding their disrespect after that. One woman looked Phong up and down as if measuring contamination. Another muttered something about northern dogs despite Phong’s family history being more complicated than the slogans allowed. A broad-shouldered man with a scar over one eyebrow gave a theatrical sniff near Phong’s sleeve, then smirked at his friends.

The youngest member was the stupidest.

He could not have been more than nineteen, perhaps twenty, with dyed hair, nervous aggression, and the desperate need to prove he belonged among older hatreds. He stepped close as the line finished and spat at Phong’s boot.

The glob landed near the toe.

The staging hall froze in that subtle way public places froze when everyone understood something had happened but the rules had not caught up.

Phong looked down.

Then at the boy.

The boy lifted his chin, eyes bright with borrowed contempt.

Phong felt Alex beside him go utterly still.

That was when he silently wished the boy luck. He was going to need all of it to survive whatever an angered Alex decided sportsmanship allowed.

Dominic’s hand landed gently on Alex’s shoulder before she moved. It looked casual from the camera angle. Janet’s hand found Dominic’s wrist a second later, not restraining him, but reminding him that escalation had directions. Emma stepped half a pace forward, blocking the cleanest camera line to Phong’s boot, while Joanne smiled at the boy with such pleasant malice that he finally seemed to realize Team Nemean had more than one problem.

Alex did not speak.

That was the mercy.

Her eyes stayed on the young diver’s face, and something in him faltered.

Andrew noticed and gave the smallest shake of his head, ordering the boy back into formation. The boy obeyed, though he did it with the sulky twitch of someone who believed retreat was strategy when elders commanded it and cowardice when enemies survived.

The officials, pretending not to have seen enough to require paperwork, pushed the ceremony forward.

“Both teams will now receive thirty minutes of coaching time to finalize today’s seven-person roster,” the announcer declared with artificial cheer. “When the break ends, the first match of the double elimination stage will begin.”

Commercial time, Phong thought.

That was all it was on the broadcast schedule. Thirty minutes for sponsors, analysis panels, slow-motion hype packages, and commentators pretending roster selection was a sacred ritual rather than a convenient gap between advertisements. The organizers wanted drama, but they also wanted ad revenue, and the shape of the bracket had been designed around both.

For once, Phong did not object.

Team Nemean genuinely needed the time. Or more precisely, all teams needed time in this format, where the focus had clearly shifted from careful preparation and planning pre-fight, to on-the-flight decision making. The change must have been made deliberately too, else team Nemean would have been informed who they were fighting in advance.

They walked toward their assigned coaching room in a silence that held too much heat. Alex remained beside Phong. She did not touch him in the hallway, perhaps because she knew that if she did, the cameras would search for a story in it. Dominic walked ahead with unusual heaviness, and Joanne kept glancing back at Gia Định’s Saviors like she was already choosing bullet angles. Emma’s face was composed, but Phong could see her restructuring the match in real time, weighing the value of a clean win against the cost of giving Andrew Nguyen exactly the emotional war he wanted.

Only when the door closed behind them and the room’s privacy field activated did the team let the silence breathe.

Jake was first. “I do not speak Vietnamese, but I understood the vibe, and the vibe needs punching.”

Joanne looked at Phong. “Tell me I get the spitter.”

Alex said nothing.

That made everyone look at her.

Her face was calm. Her hands were relaxed. Her storm had not risen. Yet Phong knew her well enough to understand that she had already placed the young diver somewhere inside a future sequence of events and was deciding how much humiliation could be called tactical necessity.

Phong took a slow breath.

“They want us angry.”

“I am aware,” Alex said.

The softness of her voice was somehow sharper than steel, like a blade made of silk yet fatal. Phong looked at the roster board, and thought.. Seven fighters. Team Nemean now had more bodies than before because of the Bronx Musketeers, but the match was not only about levels and skills. It was about family ghosts, public narrative, and an opponent who would gladly turn personal resentment into ideological theater.