Carl watches Donut’s giant ball of flesh roll toward the corpse field beyond the Madness castle while Harpocrates follows it. Wanting to reach the castle first, Carl stores Rend, uses invisibility potions on Carl, Jamal, Gonk, and Dong, and leads the group through the trap field at high speed. Donut insists the ball must reach the corpses before Harpocrates breaks it open, so Carl asks Britney to have the Dream castle’s digger distract the god.

As Carl approaches the castle, Carl notes that Baroness Victory and Juice Box are deliberately prolonging a trial elsewhere, though Carl does not understand why. The castle’s protections cancel the party’s invisibility, but Carl reaches a disguised rear door, disables three traps, forces it open, and enters a garage-like room with dune buggies. Carl releases Rend inside the Castle of the Madness.

Outside, Donut uses the battlefield PA system to insult Harpocrates and play “Lollipop,” successfully making the god stop and cover his ears. Donut turns the distraction into a battle playlist, buying the ball roughly ten more minutes to reach the corpse field while the digger approaches. Carl, Jamal, Dong, Bigs, and Rend prepare to clear the castle quickly so they can be positioned when the larger force arrives.

Inside, Carl casts Ping and learns the castle holds about twenty soldiers, only three of them offworlders. Most are gathered nearby, while Architect Houston appears to be in the operating theater with a white NPC, a living crawler, and a crawler corpse. Carl’s Book of Voodoo updates, revealing three crawlers: two conscripted into the Madness military, the dead crawler Zeynep, and Burcu, who is alive but not conscripted in the operating theater.

Carl tries to message Burcu, but the system blocks the message as illegal coordination. Burcu nevertheless updates Carl’s Book of Voodoo with a map of the surgical theater and fireball traps, but the AI slams the book shut and warns Carl to stop exploiting the loophole. As Donut’s playlist briefly backfires by making Harpocrates turn back toward the ball, the enemy soldiers begin moving toward Carl’s group and launch psionic attacks that fail to affect them. The chapter ends with the soldiers entering the room and Carl, still invulnerable, ready to fight.