It was the exact same script.

It was the same desperate emotional promises... the same wide eyes... the same fragile devotion and it ended with a letter written in black ink, mocking his size and calling him a filthy, worthless peasant.

Klaus felt a sudden sickening wave of absolute revulsion wash through his chest though it was not for her.... But for himself.

He didn’t believe a single word Mirela just said.

He knew that the exact second a better option came along, or her ’programming’ shifted, she would stab him in the back just like Sylvia did.

Klaus didn’t open his eyes... He didn’t push her away, and he didn’t tell her the truth.

She was a useful asset... Her moon-crystal magic was highly effective against corrupted beasts ad to keep the asset functioning efficiently, he simply needed to input the correct dialogue response.

"I love you too, Mirela..." Klaus lied and Mirela gasped softly, her heart soaring. She leaned down and pressed a gentle kiss to his forehead.

Klaus didn’t feel it.

He completely detached his consciousness from reality letting the bone-deep exhaustion finally drag him under.

He surrendered to the darkness slipping into a deep dreamless sleep.

Or so he thought.

The transition wasn’t gradual... Klaus didn’t slowly drift into the subconscious void.

One second he was laying on velvet cushions in a freezing wasteland, and the next, he was standing upright.

He opened his eyes.

The Haunted Winterlands were completely gone. The howling blizzard, the black obsidian tower, the Snow Caravan... everything had vanished.

Klaus found himself standing in the center of a breathtakingly beautiful serene environment.

It was a massive, endlessly rolling field of tall, golden wheat that swayed gently in a warm summer breeze.

In the distance, lush, vibrant green trees formed a peaceful forest canopy. The sky above was a brilliant, unblemished cerulean blue, bathed in the warm comforting light of a midday sun.

It was the exact same dreamscape he had visited once before.

Klaus looked down at his hands. He wasn’t wearing his dark combat gear. He was wearing simple, clean white robes and he felt light.

The crushing, heavy density of the souls he carried inside his domain was completely absent. He felt entirely human.

"Where am I?" Klaus muttered with his voice sounding strange in the open air.

The gentle breeze suddenly shifted.

The tall, golden wheat in front of him parted effortlessly, as if bowing in reverence to the entity approaching him.

Klaus froze with his breath catching in his throat.

A woman materialized just a few yards away. She didn’t walk; she simply existed where she hadn’t been a second before.

She was a Goddess...

There was no other word to describe her. She possessed an ethereal, utterly flawless beauty that transcended mortal comprehension.

Her skin was perfectly pale, radiating a soft divine luminescence. She had long, cascading hair that shifted between the colors of twilight and dawn.

She wore a flowing, immaculate white gown that seemed to be woven from starlight itself but her most striking feature was her face or rather, what covered it.

Wrapped tightly around her eyes was a thick, dark, silken blindfold.

Despite the blindfold, Klaus knew she was looking directly at him.

The pressure radiating from her wasn’t malicious, but it was overwhelmingly absolute. It felt like standing at the bottom of an ocean, looking up at the crushing weight of the water above.

Klaus couldn’t move... He couldn’t speak... All of his arrogant gamer mentality completely evaporated in the presence of true divinity.

The Goddess didn’t offer a grand sweeping monologue as she simply tilted her head slightly, her delicate lips parting.

The wind kicked up, rustling the golden wheat violently.

"Schlem..." the Goddess muttered.

Her voice wasn’t a sound.

It was a vibration that echoed directly into the deepest, most foundational core of his soul. It was a single cryptic word and then, she began to fade.

Her ethereal form turned translucent, dissolving into particles of golden light that were instantly caught and carried away by the rising wind.

"Wait!" Klaus shouted, the paralysis suddenly breaking.

He lunged forward, desperately reaching his hand out to grab her... He needed answers.... He needed to know what that word meant.

He ran through the golden wheat with his legs pumping hard but without his Agility stats, without his Beast’s Vitality, he was just a regular enhanced human.

His foot caught on a hidden, knotted root buried in the dirt.

Klaus stumbled violently, losing his balance and crashing hard into the dirt.

’Fuck...’

He scrambled to his hands and knees, looking up wildly at the empty field. The Goddess was completely gone.

"Schlem?" Klaus repeated as his voice cracked with confusion. "What the hell does Schlem mean? Come back!"

The serene golden world didn’t answer. Instead, the sky above him suddenly fractured.

A massive, jagged, black crack tore through the cerulean blue sky, accompanied by the deafening sound of shattering glass.

The warm summer breeze instantly vanished, replaced by a violent, concussive shockwave that ripped through the golden field.

The ground beneath Klaus’s hands began to heave and tremble violently.

It wasn’t a metaphor... The entire dreamscape was caught in the grip of a catastrophic earthquake.

The lush green trees in the distance collapsed, the earth splitting open to reveal bottomless, roaring voids of pure darkness.

The world was tearing itself apart.

"Master!" a voice shrieked from the void.

SMACK!

A sharp stinging pain exploded across Klaus’s left cheek.

SMACK!

Another sharp slap hit his right cheek.

Klaus gasped with his eyes snapping open.

The golden field was gone and he was back in the dim, velvet-lined cabin of the Snow Caravan but the violent trembling hadn’t stopped.

The entire massive, steel-plated vehicle was shaking so violently that the reinforced glass windows were rattling in their iron frames.

The heavy ironwood hull groaned and buckled under immense unnatural pressure.

Hovering directly above his face, her tiny hands pulled back for a third slap, was Chibi Valeria.

Her crimson eyes were wide with unrestrained panic.

"Master, wake up!" Valeria screamed, pointing frantically toward the front windshield. "The spatial barrier is breaking!"

"I’m up! I’m up!" Klaus yelled, swatting the tiny spirit away as he scrambled to his feet.

"The spatial barrier is breaking!" Valeria screamed, pointing her tiny finger frantically toward the front of the cabin. "Look!"

Klaus didn’t need to be told twice.

The psychic backlash from the steering matrix was already pounding against his skull.

He stumbled through the shaking cabin, grabbing the steel handrails to keep his balance, and threw open the reinforced door leading to the enclosed driver’s cabin.

Mirela was in the driver’s seat.

The woman was absolutely terrified. She had both hands clamped desperately around the psychic steering levers, her knuckles turning white as she tried to pull them back but she didn’t have the mental link or the raw mana capacity to command the massive Armored Dire-Bears.

The bears were panicking, thrashing wildly in their harnesses as the environment around them completely collapsed.

"Master!" Mirela cried out, turning her head.

Tears were streaming down her face as her goat ears pinned completely flat against her skull. "I don’t know what to do! Everything is falling apart!"

Klaus grabbed the back of her seat with his dark eyes snapping to the front windshield.

The endless, howling whiteout of the blizzard that had plagued them for a week was entirely gone.

The spatial maze... the infinite, looping treadmill of distorted reality that surrounded the Endless Tower was shattering.

Massive jagged cracks of pure starry blackness tore through the iron-gray sky, exactly like the sky in his dream.

The air itself was fracturing like broken glass, peeling away to reveal the true landscape hidden beneath.

Through the massive, widening rift in the spatial field, Klaus could see the base of the monolithic black obsidian tower. It wasn’t an illusion anymore... It was real, and it was less than a mile away but the path wasn’t clear.

Drawn by the sudden collapse of the magical barrier, the entire ecosystem of the Haunted Winterlands had converged on this single point.

It was a stampede of apocalyptic proportions.

Thousands upon thousands of corrupted ice monsters were charging blindly toward the opening.

It was a tidal wave of rotting flesh, jagged ice armor, and glowing neon-blue eyes. Klaus saw packs of hundreds of Frost Wolves.

He saw towering, multi-story Ice Golems lumbering forward. He saw massive, serpentine Frost Wyrms slithering over the snow, crushing smaller beasts beneath their icy scales.

They weren’t coordinating.

They were in a state of mindless, rabid frenzy, desperate to escape the collapsing outer zone and reach the dark tower.

They tore into each other, biting, trampling, and ripping their own kind to pieces just to move a few inches closer to the rift.

The roar of the horde was deafening, drowning out even the sound of the collapsing sky.

"Move!" Klaus barked, grabbing Mirela by the shoulder and slowly hauling her out of the driver’s seat.

He didn’t wait for her to scramble into the passenger side. He threw himself into the leather chair and immediately clamped both hands down on the psychic steering levers.

He didn’t try to soothe the panicking Dire-Bears.

He bypassed their natural instincts entirely. He tapped into his Soul Vessel, flooding the steering matrix with a massive, overwhelming surge of pure white Soul Mana.

Outside the windshield, the two massive Armored Dire-Bears instantly went rigid.

The panicked rolling of their eyes vanished, replaced by a blinding solid white glow as Klaus’s magic forcibly overrode their nervous systems. They stopped thrashing and locked their massive, steel-plated claws into the frozen earth.

"Hold on!" Klaus yelled.

He slammed the steering levers forward.

ROAR!!!

The magically dominated beasts let out a unified, earth-shattering bellow. The spiked iron treads of the Snow Caravan engaged, biting deeply into the ice.

The heavy vehicle lurched forward with neck-snapping acceleration, launching directly into the fray but the Endless Tower wasn’t undefended.

As the Caravan hit the outer edge of the monster stampede, the true defense mechanism of the spatial zone activated.

An expansive terrifying barrier of deep purple energy suddenly materialized, forming a massive, translucent dome completely surrounding the black tower.

The barrier hummed with an immense, sickening amount of raw spatial energy. The sheer density of it made Klaus’s stomach churn, feeling like a physical weight pressing down on his chest.

The purple dome began to rotate, and the sky above the stampede darkened.

"What is that?" Mirela screamed, pointing a trembling finger through the reinforced glass.

Klaus looked up.

High above the battlefield, the clouds parted as massive, glowing reticles of purple energy formed in the sky, locking onto the densest clusters of the monster horde.

"Wipe mechanics?" Klaus muttered with his gamer instincts instantly recognizing the lethal threat. "The tower is defending itself."

VWOOOM!

A sound so deep it vibrated in their bone marrow echoed across the wasteland.

A massive pillar of concentrated purple spatial annihilation rained down from the sky. It was easily fifty feet wide.

The beam struck a dense cluster of Corrupted Frost Mammoths... Tier 5 beasts that could easily level a small city on their own.

The impact wasn’t explosive and there was no fire... no shockwave of displaced air...

There was only erasure.

The purple beam touched the ground, and everything within its radius instantly ceased to exist.

The massive Frost Mammoths didn’t burn or shatter. They were simply vaporized into subatomic dust.

The beam lingered for a fraction of a second before winking out, leaving behind a perfectly smooth fifty-foot crater of scorched black earth where the snow and the monsters used to be.

VWOOOM! VWOOOM! VWOOOM!

Three more purple beams of annihilation rained down across the stampede, instantly deleting hundreds of high-tier monsters.

The defense system was ruthless, prioritizing anything that moved toward the opening in the spatial rift.

If one of those beams touched the Snow Caravan, the Ring of the Winter Lord wouldn’t save them. The heavy ironwood hull wouldn’t save them. They would be erased from reality.

"Master! We can’t go out there!" Mirela cried out, gripping the dashboard as the Caravan violently crushed a stray Frost Wolf beneath its treads. "We’ll be vaporized!"

"We can’t stay here either!" Klaus shouted back, his eyes darting frantically across the chaotic battlefield. "The outer zone is collapsing! The rift is closing! If we don’t get through that gap before the barrier seals, we won’t be able to reach it!"

Klaus pushed the steering levers down as far as they would go.

The Snow Caravan tore into the heart of the stampede... It was an insane high-stakes sprint through absolute hell.

The carriage became a rolling battering ram.

The steel-plated hull slammed into the charging monsters.

CRUNCH! SPLAT!

Blood, ice, and rotting organs splattered wildly across the front windshield as Klaus drove directly over smaller beasts.

The heavy suspension of the vehicle bounced and groaned as they rolled over the corpses of Ice Trolls and Razor-Bats but the monsters weren’t just running; they were fighting back.

A massive, multi-armed Ice Arachnid leaped from the flank, landing heavily on the roof of the Caravan.

The heavy thud dented the ceiling panel above their heads as the beast raised a massive, scythe-like appendage, aiming to pierce straight through the metal roof.

Before it could strike, a blinding flash of blue light illuminated the side window.

ZZZAP! BOOM!

The enslaved Lightning Spirit, tethered to the roof of the Caravan, unleashed a hyper-condensed bolt of pure electricity at point-blank range.

The lightning struck the Arachnid’s core, instantly superheating the moisture inside its body.

The monster exploded in a shower of boiling gore and shattered ice, its ruined carcass sliding off the back of the moving carriage.

"Good job, sparky!" Klaus yelled, his hands fighting the steering levers as a Frost Wyrm sideswiped the Caravan, nearly knocking them off balance.

The Lightning Spirit didn’t have time to celebrate.

It was acting as an automated turret, working overtime. It darted back and forth across the hull, raining down a relentless barrage of thunderbolts on anything that tried to latch onto the vehicle.

ZZZAP!

A leaping wolf was turned to ash.

ZZZAP!

An Ice Golem’s arm was severed at the shoulder but there were simply too many monsters. The Spirit’s blue glow was beginning to dim, its mana reserves draining rapidly under the sustained assault.

"Mirela! The windows!" Klaus commanded, swerving the bears hard to the left to avoid a stampeding herd of corrupted boars. "Clear the flanks!"

Mirela didn’t hesitate. The terrified, shivering maid vanished replaced by the battle-hardened survivor Klaus had trained.

She unlatched the heavy sliding panel on the passenger-side window, exposing herself to the chaotic roar of the battlefield.

The freezing air rushed into the cabin, but her magic ring completely neutralized it.

She shoved the tip of her moon-crystal staff out the window as the crystal at the top hummed violently.

Three massive Ice Trolls, their bodies covered in thick layers of frost armor, were charging alongside the Caravan, raising their massive fists to smash the side panel.

"Get away from him!" Mirela screamed, channeling every ounce of her lunar mana into the staff.

FWOOSH! FWOOSH! FWOOSH!

She fired a rapid volley of concentrated silvery moonbeams. The lunar magic acted like a hot knife through butter against the corrupted beasts.

The beams punched clean through the thick skulls of the Ice Trolls.

The massive monsters collapsed instantly with their momentum sending them tumbling end-over-end into the snow, creating a pile-up that tripped dozens of monsters running behind them.

"Right side clear!" Mirela shouted, her face flushed with adrenaline as she pulled the staff back in, the crystal smoking from the rapid discharge.

"Hold on!" Klaus roared.

VWOOOM!

A massive purple beam of annihilation struck the ground less than thirty yards ahead of them as the concussive shockwave of displaced air hit the Caravan like a physical wall.

The massive vehicle tipped onto its left treads, hovering precariously on two wheels for a terrifying, heart-stopping second.

Klaus yanked the steering levers, forcing the dire-bears to lean into the turn. The heavy iron treads slammed back down onto the ice with a bone-rattling CLANG! shattering the frozen ground beneath them.

They were halfway to the rift. The black, jagged opening in the spatial barrier was looming closer, offering a glimpse of the dead silent ground at the base of the Endless Tower but the barrier was actively healing. The edges of the rift were slowly stitching themselves back together, glowing with thick cords of purple energy.

"It’s closing!" Valeria shrieked, floating frantically inside the cabin, pointing at the narrowing gap. "We have less than a minute, Master! Push them!"

Klaus gritted his teeth, his dark eyes locked in a death stare.

He pushed more Soul Mana down the tether, forcing the dire-bears to accelerate beyond their biological limits.

The massive beasts were bleeding from the nose and mouth with their muscles tearing under the strain, but Klaus’s magical domination kept them running at a full, reckless sprint.

The stampede was thickening. As the rift narrowed, the bottleneck of monsters became a chaotic impassable wall of thrashing flesh and ice.

They couldn’t just plow through it...The bodies were too dense. The Caravan’s treads would get bogged down in the gore, and they would be crushed.

Suddenly, the hair on the back of Klaus’s neck stood straight up.

A vibrating hum filled the cabin, drowning out the roar of the monsters as the ambient lighting inside the Caravan shifted from the warm orange of the furnace to a sickly luminescent purple.

Klaus looked up through the glass roof of the cabin.

Directly above them, the gray clouds had parted as a massive glowing purple reticle was locked dead-center onto the roof of the Snow Caravan.

The tower’s defense system had targeted them.

"Master!" Mirela screamed, looking up at the glowing purple circle of death tracking their movement. "It’s on us!"

They had exactly three seconds before the beam fired.

There was no time to brake... There was no time to accelerate out of the blast radius... The reticle was tracking their current speed perfectly.

If they kept moving forward, they would be vaporized.

Klaus’s brain shifted into extreme overdrive as the world around him slowed down.