Carl leaves the former Madness stronghold as the War Mage Rebellion holds Team Retribution’s castle and the Larracos defenses are less than half an hour from activating. A lava flow is approaching Shanty Town, most allies are trapped in Donut’s rolling ball of flesh, and several free allies, including Ferdinand, Juice Box, Britney, and Li Na, are missing or being chased. Donut reports that the city is suddenly full of Zarogoths, oily shadow-like mobs on the war mage team, and Mordecai and Rosetta identify them as generated monsters tied to a hidden, intensely hot soul-crystal antenna.

Carl runs toward the giant ball with Dong and Rend nearby while sending Jamal and the other survivors to a safe room. Baroness Victory appears and explains that Agatha has been made co-warlord of the War Mage Rebellion alongside Akuma, apparently to Akuma’s displeasure, and that Deng Bao is now the war mages’ adjutant inside flooded Larracos. Victory says the war mages are fighting both crawlers and NPCs while tearing apart the castle, and once the defense towers activate, reaching them will become brutally expensive.

Donut casts a tower-enhanced You’re Not Done Yet on the field of corpses, triggering a system-wide atrocity message. The corpses’ skins rip free and become fleshers, which fly into the ball and seek enemy soldiers trapped inside. At the same time, meteor-like projectiles launch from Larracos; Bianca intercepts two, is injured, and one altered projectile strikes the ball. Donut begins using Magic Missile to break the ball open, intending to cast Bad Attitude when the occupants scatter.

A woman is suddenly expelled from the ball and revealed to be Nami, Eris’s off-worlder influencer or driver. Fleshers attack Nami, and Carl destroys Nami and the fleshers with a hob-lobber. Carl realizes a war mage must have entered the ball and removed Eris’s soul armor, and Victory and Fopsy identify the larger danger: the war mages traded the Gate of the Feral Gods at the Midnight Market for hell-kissed conscription potions capable of forcing gods onto their team. Samantha confirms that a war mage has already conscripted Yarilo, though the caster died in the process.

Because breaking the ball could release Eris or Meatus under war mage control, Carl and Li Na order Donut to stop attacking it. Carl throws a healing potion at the ball to keep it intact, while Li Na reveals she has installed Li Jun’s eye into herself and stopped another mage from reaching Harpocrates, though Harpocrates is still a threat to Donut. Carl tells Donut to steer the ball toward Larracos and abandon the tower, then orders everyone free to follow Rosetta’s commands and converge on the city.

As the ball rolls back toward Larracos, Fopsy theorizes that the residual controlling the war mage team may not merely want to win Faction Wars, but to kill the crawlers, end the ascendency game, and trigger the system’s shutdown and hibernation sequence because the spreading AI threatens the Eulogist. With fleshers beginning to creep toward Carl despite not being meant to target him, Carl abandons the field and runs for the safe room with Rend.