Emma, unsurprisingly, already had plans.
By the time Team Nemean returned from Boston's stadium and the noise of the reverse sweep had started turning into highlight reels, soundbites, and twenty different narratives online, Emma had already redirected the convoy, booked the rooms, and lined up the next public appearance.
"We're not going back to NYC tonight," she said as if informing them of the weather. "My family owns shares in a hotel here. We'll sleep there."
Phong didn't even ask anymore how many things the Tannenbaums had shares in. He suspected the answer was either "too many" or "yes."
Emma continued, "Tomorrow morning, MIT."
That got more of a reaction.
"Why MIT?" Jake asked.
"For a televised event," Emma replied. "They want Team Nemean to check out some bleeding-edge mana-tech prototypes. Promotion, mostly."
"And of course," Joanne said, "the Tannenbaums have shares in that too."
Emma didn't even pretend otherwise. "Of course."
No one had the energy to argue. Not after the match. Not after the reverse sweep. Not after Adam Choi had nearly stolen the whole day with one piece of preparation and Team Nemean had answered with one of their own.
So they went to the hotel.
It was another one of those places that reminded Phong how absurdly far his life had drifted from the version of himself who used to count bills carefully before deciding whether to eat out.
Dominic took control of the kitchen that night.
Not the hotel kitchen, because Emma had firmly vetoed the idea of letting Dominic personally invade a professional cooking space. Instead, she had them set up in one of the luxury suite's larger dining areas, where catering ingredients had already been arranged.
Dominic stood there, rolled his shoulders, and announced with full authority, "Savior of the match privilege."
That was enough explanation for him.
He decided on paella.
It was a very Dominic choice. Comforting, proud, loud in flavor without being complicated for the sake of it. And because they were in Boston with access to excellent seafood again, he took full advantage. Shrimp, mussels, clams, fish stock, saffron, smoked paprika, rice, peppers, peas. The whole suite slowly filled with the smell of seared shellfish, warm spice, and toasted rice.
Phong watched him work for a while and felt that small, familiar warmth that came from seeing his people settle into their own ways of taking care of each other. Dominic cooked when he needed to feel useful outside violence. Alex folded napkins wrong and then stopped pretending she cared. Joanne kept trying to steal ingredients. Jake and Jack got chased out twice. Rico circled the edge of the room like a caffeine-addicted vulture waiting for fallen scraps. Nyx sat on a chair like a tiny queen judging the process. Bruno just waited for anything resembling meat.
After dinner, the mood eased enough that people could breathe again.
Not for long.
Because that night, Alex decided her rule had expired.
She cornered Phong the moment their door shut behind them and looked at him in a way that made him think of avalanches, final exams, and legal loopholes all at once.
"You're using this to vent your frustration," he said immediately.
Alex unbuttoned the cuff of her shirt with maddening calm. "Can you prove it?"
"No."
She smiled.
That was answer enough.
Phong went to sleep later in what Joanne would probably have called full zombie farmer mode, and he suspected Alex would have accepted that title as a compliment.
The next morning, Team Nemean had breakfast in the hotel restaurant before heading to MIT.
Emma was in a sharp cream coat and dark trousers that made her look like she owned the institute or would within the next quarter. Dominic wore simple dark clothing and the expression of a man who had accepted that his life now alternated between death arenas and media tours. Alex looked composed, but Phong recognized the quiet turn of thought behind her eyes. She had not let yesterday's loss go. She was chewing on it, taking it apart, figuring out where it had entered and where it would never happen again.
Phong himself was running on coffee, spite, and the stubborn refusal to look too tired in public.
Then the convoy crossed the Charles and MIT came into view.
The campus looked exactly like what humanity would build when given too much intelligence, not enough humility, and a new magic system to exploit. Students moved in clumps across the paths, some ordinary, some visibly altered by mana and class awakenings, and a surprising number of them stopped dead when they saw Team Nemean walking toward the designated media hall.
The event was being held inside one of the newer engineering buildings.
The atrium had been dressed up for cameras, but not enough to hide its bones. This was still a place for prototypes. Clean white floors, exposed support beams, glass-walled laboratories on upper levels, and huge banners reading MANA-TECH FRONTIERS and THE NEXT AGE OF DIVER EQUIPMENT. Screens looped stylized demo footage while students, investors, league staff, and journalists gathered in excited knots around cordoned-off displays.
The professor receiving them was a thin, sharp-featured man in his sixties with silver hair and the expression of someone who had spent forty years losing patience with lesser minds and had no plans of developing more. His name was Professor Langford Mercer, and he treated Team Nemean less like celebrities and more like test subjects who happened to be useful.
"Good," he said when he saw them. "You're on time. That already puts you above most investors."
Emma's mouth twitched in appreciation.
Mercer wasted no time.
He led them first toward a table where several pairs of gloves were displayed beneath bright lights. They looked strange even by dungeon-era standards. Fingerless, reinforced along the back of the hand, threaded through with narrow LED strips that pulsed faintly in different colors. Dungeon-mined ores had been set into the knuckles and wrist joints, and several flattened gemstones were embedded at key points like the gloves had been designed by someone who wanted to splice a circuit board, a gauntlet, and a ritual tool into one device.
"These," Mercer said, lifting one pair with surprising care, "are training gloves designed to visualize mana transit."
That got Séline's attention first.
Mercer handed them to her almost immediately. "You. The French one. The one with the fists."
Séline gave him a flat look for his phrasing, but took the gloves anyway.
"Put them on. Strike the dummy."
A heavy padded target stood nearby with sensor lines already wired into the display.
Séline slipped the gloves on and flexed her fingers. The fit adjusted slightly, the gemstones along the wrist lighting in sequence. Then she hit the target once with a quick, ordinary jab.
The LED strips flashed, then lit up along a path.
The cameras leaned in. The whole audience around them did too. Mana lit through the gloves in a delayed wave, entering from one side, carrying through the forearm, spiraling across the hand, then blooming outward from the knuckles a half-beat later than the muscle movement itself.
Séline's eyes sharpened instantly.
Again, Mercer gestured.
This time she slowed the punch, letting the motion breathe the way Vân taught them.
The lights changed completely.
Now the mana path glowed thicker, brighter, cleaner. The impact reading on the screen jumped.
Séline stared at the glove, then the target, then the glove again.
"It helps with timing," she said quietly.
Mercer nodded. "That's the point. We cannot standardize everyone's pathways, but we can help the user see them."
For the first time that morning, Séline actually looked impressed instead of merely appraising.
Next they brought Jack to a prototype that looked like armored shoes designed by a very practical sadist.
The boots were thick-soled, reinforced along the ankles, and linked to plated extensions that ran up behind the calves and thighs. When Jack put them on, the rear extensions folded inward along his legs until Mercer tapped a control.
Metal rods extended with a sharp click behind both thighs, anchoring into a support brace that shifted his center of gravity lower.
Jack went still.
Then his eyes widened slightly.
He could feel it. Everyone near him could tell.
The boots were pulling, giving mana under the ground a route, a preference. The support rods acted like temporary channels, helping him root into the floor harder and cleaner. When Jack called a minor stone manipulation, it happened faster, sharper. The rock-sense of his Stone Lord class bit deeper into the structure around him.
Mercer looked delighted by Jack's reaction.
"Made with Stone Warden lines in mind," he said. "We expected later branch compatibility, but you're confirming that nicely."
Jack looked like someone had just shown him a legal way to become even more obnoxiously durable.
Alex's prototype came last among the main headline pieces.
Mercer led them to what stood under a black cloth in the center display bay. When the cloth came off, the room reacted all at once. Armor. Full-body, high-tech, severe, enough to make Rico's eyes lit up with one word: "Kamen Rider".
It looked less like something a knight would wear and more like what happened when military R&D and a surveillance state had a child and asked a tailor to make it beautiful. Matte black plating with silver seams, flexible joint mesh, reinforced chest and shoulder sections, and a helmet shaped with sharp smooth lines that still left the face visible once opened. Across every limb, every plate, every contour ran tiny lenses and sensor nodes.
Mercer said the number with terrible pride.
"One thousand six hundred and eighty-two cameras."
The room murmured. He continued.
"They continuously analyze the environment with an integrated AI and feed the processed data directly to the matching helmet display."
Alex crossed her arms.
Mercer looked at her directly.
"For an Arbiter Mindblade, blind spots are inefficiency. This removes them. It gives full battlefield mapping, predictive vectoring, and live positional overlays for construct deployment and defensive reaction."
That was a terrifying sentence.
Even Emma looked more impressed than amused now.
Mercer, being a scientist and therefore incapable of selling a prototype without also admitting its flaws, added, "It does run hot under intensive use, and it is somewhat bulky. A Mindblade would need to use telekinesis constantly to compensate for mobility loss."
Alex stepped toward it. The cameras nearly vibrated with anticipation.
She put it on.
The technicians helped fasten the torso, seal the limb joints, calibrate the helmet. Once active, the visor projections lit and reflected across the interior shield over her eyes. For a moment, she stood perfectly still while the system fed her data.
Then she moved.
At first, only a step.
Then another.
A shallow pivot. One simulated construct pattern. A glance at the side monitor. A longer breath.
Phong watched her face more than the armor.
She did not like it.
That much was obvious. It was too heavy, too clunky, too external. Alex's fighting style came from direct psychic command and personal control. This suit inserted machinery, heat, bulk, and visible dependence into that process.
But she was thinking. That was the dangerous part.
Mercer saw it too and smiled like an old shark.
She took the helmet off after a few minutes and said only, "Interesting."
That one word was enough.
Cameras captured the moment. The image of Alexandra Vogel, fresh off her first league defeat, looking serious in a prototype armor built to eliminate blind spots. By the time Team Nemean left the hall, the internet had already erupted.
Some people took it as weakness. Proof that Alex had been shaken. That her illusion of invincibility had finally cracked and now she was hunting for help.
Her antis celebrated.
Her fans argued.
Most of the serious divers were simply radio silent.
Rico, naturally, had his own priorities.
He demanded gear for the "raccoon size."
Professor Mercer took one long look at him and said, without hesitation, "Absolutely not."
Rico gasped.
"My brain cells are too precious to be massacred by raccoon's nonsenses," Mercer added, already turning away. "Take him to the ball court."
So Rico was escorted—not gently—into one of the multipurpose sports rooms nearby, where he immediately began playing pretend in the basketball court and shouting "henshin" at his own reflection in the backboard.
That left Phong to wander the smaller displays.
He found the mana-tech weapons station almost by accident.
At first glance, the guns looked normal enough. Compact rifles, sidearms built with clean lines and modular frames. But the magazines themselves were different. Their housings were made from processed dungeon ores threaded with gem dust and fine conductive channels, and the weapons had small mana chambers built into the body near the trigger assembly.
A graduate researcher with bloodshot eyes and real enthusiasm explained it all to him.
"They store mana," she said, tapping one of the magazines. "Then shape it into condensed bullets at the point of firing."
Phong handled one carefully.
It felt heavier than a normal gun.
Colder too.
The researcher continued. "They're built especially for production classes. People who can't rely on combat skills early on, before they've leveled enough or found methods to develop them through secondary pathways."
Olen's method, unspoken but present in the room. Production class users who needed a way to defend themselves before they had monsters, secondary skills, or a proper team around them.
Phong immediately saw the business model.
The ammunition. Or rather, the magazines.
Once emptied, they would need recharging. Mana service, licensed stations, subscription-style logistics if corporations pushed hard enough. Another one of creating a problem then sold the solution. He could already pictured a battle pass system with skins, support, extra shots, and so much more packaged neatly into a "pay me to make this into your second job" type of deal.
He tried one of the pistols in the range booth.
Two shots. Missed both.
The researcher pretended not to notice his embarrassment out of professional kindness.
Phong still decided he would buy some when they came out. He had not bought any gun because Phong didn't want to alert Daniel and Josh that he hadn't become a give-up shell of a man. And a normal gun barely do anything in the dungeon, else Olen's monetization model of offering body guards would have fallen apart, and US people would have taken over the dungeon with their excessive amount of owned fire-arms by now. Most projectiles seemed to be dead the moment they enter a spatial anomaly inside the dungeon without mana wrapping them.
Not far away, Mercer was trying and failing to bully Dominic into lending over Eyeless Heaven for analysis.
"Absolutely not," Dominic said.
Mercer pushed his glasses up. "Do you have any idea how much data—"
"No."
"You're being anti-scientific."
"I'm trying to stay alive."
That ended that. By the time Team Nemean left MIT, they were all carrying slightly different versions of the same thought.
Humanity was getting better at this.
Fast.
Not just at leveling. At building around mana, around class lines, around the new rules of the world. Some of the prototypes were clumsy. Other were brilliant. All of them pointed toward a future where the surface was going to become even more dangerous in the name of progress.
Back at the hotel, the mood shifted again.
Their next match would not be until the day after tomorrow. This time, they would be the home team welcoming the challengers. With Alex barred from participating because of her recent loss, the pressure shifted to everyone else. Team Nemean no longer had the simple answer of just letting her erase a bracket.
Phong wanted time.
Time to think. Time to categorize possibilities. Time to make sure Boston Jokers had been a lesson and not a crack.
And it seemed to him, despite none had said anything, all members of team Nemean were reflecting with themselves against a near loss before Boston Jokers.