Klaus’s glowing silver eyes narrowed as he looked out the front windshield of the control room as the horizon was rapidly turning dark.
It wasn’t a snowstorm though.
Massive swirling clouds of kicked-up white powder were racing across the tundra, heading directly toward the collapsing tower, and by extension, heading directly toward the moving carriage.
The monsters were coming.
"We’ve got company," Klaus yelled back toward the cabin, his voice carrying through the heavy wood.
He wasn’t exaggerating.
Drawn by the smell of the dying dungeon and the scent of the terrified mountain bear, a massive wave of Winterland abominations erupted from the tree line.
There were mutated Frost-Stalkers, heavily armored and dripping freezing saliva.
There were dozens of emaciated, rabid dire wolves with glowing red eyes.
Skittering alongside them were the ice-crawlers... hideous, multi-legged insectoid monsters that looked like praying mantises made of frozen corpses.
It was a literal avalanche of teeth, fur, and rotting claws.
In the back of the cabin, the heavy wooden doors violently burst open.
Mirela stepped out onto the rear iron runner of the moving carriage, her heavy winter furs blowing wildly in the wind.
She didn’t look scared but instead she looked terrifyingly focused.
She gripped her moon-crystal staff with both hands, raising it high above her head.
"Sparky! Left flank!" Mirela barked, her combat instincts taking over completely.
The chibi fairy phased through the roof of the carriage, hovering in the air above the moving vehicle. "Don’t tell me what to do, goat-girl! I see them!"
Mirela closed her eyes, tapping into the newly expanded fortified magical core beating inside her chest.
The residual white Soul Mana from Klaus’s divine seed flared to life, mixing perfectly with her innate elemental affinity.
When Mirela opened her eyes, they were glowing with a brilliant silver light.
"Moonfall," Mirela whispered.
She slammed the butt of her staff heavily against the iron runner.
The crystal at the tip of the staff didn’t just glow... it detonated.
A massive sweeping shockwave of sub-zero freezing mist erupted from the crystal, expanding outward in a wide devastating arc behind the carriage.
The first wave of lunging dire wolves didn’t even have time to whimper.
The exact microsecond the silver mist touched their bodies, their blood flash-froze in their veins. They were instantly transformed into solid brittle statues of ice mid-leap.
Mirela didn’t stop. She spun the staff, firing a concentrated, highly compressed beam of purple Moon Magic directly into the frozen pack.
KRAK! SHATTER!
The impact was catastrophic.
The frozen wolves shattered into millions of tiny, bloody ice shards, raining down across the snowpack.
Her mana power had increased by a completely absurd margin.
Before fucking, a spell like that would have drained half her reserves. Now, she didn’t even feel a twinge of fatigue.
"Ha! My turn!" Sparky shrieked from above.
The fairy raised her tiny hands, generating a half-dozen condensed orbs of blinding blue plasma. She didn’t fire them as a single bolt, instead Sparky rained them down like artillery fire.
KRA-BOOM! KRA-BOOM! KRA-BOOM!
The plasma strikes hit the right flank of the advancing swarm, detonating with the force of heavy mortar shells.
Three massive Frost-Stalkers were instantly vaporized with their heavy ice-armor melting into superheated steam before their bodies were completely turned to black ash.
For the first thirty seconds, Mirela and Sparky held the line flawlessly.
The rear of the carriage was a chaotic symphony of shattering ice and exploding plasma, wiping out dozens of monsters with casual efficiency.
But it wasn’t enough.
The Winterlands were endless, and the swarm was massive.
For every dire wolf Mirela shattered, three more poured out from beneath the deep snowdrifts. For every Frost-Stalker Sparky vaporized, another massive multi-legged ice-crawler skittered out of the pine forests.
They weren’t just attacking from behind anymore.
The horde was fanning out, completely surrounding the carriage in a massive, terrifying sea of red eyes and snapping jaws.
"Master!" Mirela yelled, panting heavily as she fired another beam of Moon Magic, taking out two more wolves. "There are too many! They’re going to overrun the bear!"
Inside the control room, Klaus sat back in the plush leather chair.
Klaus didn’t panic. He didn’t draw his massive Soul Broadsword, and he didn’t reach for the heavy iron brake.
He looked through the reinforced glass windshield at the literal wall of abominations charging directly toward the front of the carriage.
The giant mountain bear was roaring in blind terror, running as fast as its massive legs could carry it, but the swarm was closing in fast.
A slow grin spread across Klaus’s handsome face.
He had his fun letting the girls warm up but this was his carriage, and he was the Soul King.
"Stand down, Mirela," Klaus’s deep voice boomed out, magically amplified through the control panel, echoing clearly over the howling wind. "Sparky, get back inside."
Mirela didn’t hesitate.
Her devotion to his orders overrode her combat instincts.
She instantly lowered her staff, grabbing the iron handle and throwing herself back inside the wooden cabin, slamming the heavy doors shut.
Sparky phased directly through the roof a second later, grumbling about kill-steals.
Klaus placed both of his hands flat against the glowing dashboard.
VWOOM!
Klaus simply opened the floodgates of his inner domain and projected his raw divine energy directly outward into the physical world.
A massive perfectly hemispherical dome of pure, transparent white Soul Mana instantly snapped into existence.
It expanded rapidly, enveloping the entire moving carriage, the control room, and the terrified mountain bear pulling them. It sealed them entirely inside an impenetrable glowing bubble of divine gravity but Klaus wasn’t interested in just playing defense.
He wasn’t going to sit there and let a bunch of starving mutts scratch up his newly rebuilt ride.
He clenched his hands into loose fists against the dashboard.
"How do you like this...?"
The smooth transparent surface of the mana dome violently reacted to his intent. Thousands of massive, jagged, razor-sharp spikes forged from highly condensed Soul Mana instantly erupted from the outer shell of the barrier.
The spikes didn’t just sit there statically... the entire outer layer of the dome began to rapidly, violently rotate, acting like a colossal, grinding chainsaw blade completely surrounding the moving vehicle.
"Let’s see how the new windshield holds up," Klaus muttered.
The first massive ice-crawler reached the front of the carriage, leaping high into the air with its scythe-like claws extended, aiming directly for the mountain bear’s exposed flank.
The monster never even touched the bear’s fur.
The exact microsecond the abomination’s body made contact with the rotating, spiked outer shell of the Soul Mana dome, the laws of biology were aggressively canceled.
SPLAT!
There was no struggle and there was no prolonged epic fight.
The mutated insectoid didn’t bounce off the barrier.... it was brutally pureed.
The dense spinning mana spikes hit the beast with the kinetic force of an industrial meat grinder, instantly vaporizing chitin, muscle, and freezing ichor into a fine completely unrecognizable explosion of green and red mist.
A heavy spray of dark gore splattered loudly across the transparent inner wall of the dome, sliding down the invisible curvature like rain on a windowpane.
The rest of the swarm didn’t care. Driven by starvation and pack mentality, the massive horde threw themselves blindly at the moving carriage from all sides.
SPLAT! CRUNCH! SQUELCH!
The sounds of the casual slaughter were deafening.
It wasn’t a battle anymore.
It had become a mobile high-speed meat processing plant. Dozens of dire wolves lunged at the right wheels... they were instantly shredded into a shower of blood and shattered bone fragments that sprayed thirty feet across the snow.
A massive Frost-Stalker tried to leap onto the roof of the cabin from a high snowbank; the spinning mana spikes caught it mid-air, ripping its heavy ice-armor and thick body entirely in half, painting the pristine white snowdrifts around the carriage with thick heavy streaks of steaming red gore.
Inside the dome, it was peacefully safe, but visually horrific.
The transparent barrier was rapidly becoming coated in a thick, sliding layer of monster viscera, blood, and shattered bone.
The giant mountain bear pulling the carriage was absolutely, completely losing its mind.
It could hear the wet tearing sounds of a hundred predators being liquefied inches from its head and it could smell the overwhelming suffocating stench of fresh blood raining down around it.
Driven by primal terror of the apocalyptic blender it was currently strapped to, the bear put its head down and ran faster, hauling the heavy carriage across the snowpack at a terrifying breakneck speed just to get away from the noise.
Inside the control room, Klaus sat casually in the plush leather chair with his posture completely relaxed.
He rested his right elbow on his knee, his chin propped up on his hand, keeping his left hand loosely on the dashboard.
He looked out through the transparent dome with half-lidded, utterly bored silver eyes.
He didn’t have to lift a finger.
The dome did all the work, casually turning a massive, high-tier Winterlands ambush into a mild inconvenience that barely required his attention.
In the back of the cabin, Mirela was sitting cross-legged on the floorboards, her staff resting uselessly across her lap.
She stared out the viewing window at the blizzard of gore erupting all around the carriage.
She watched a massive dire wolf get effortlessly bifurcated by a mana spike, its upper half spinning away into the blizzard while the bottom half was crushed under the carriage wheels.
She wasn’t scared. She knew she was perfectly safe as long as Klaus was sitting up front but she was incredibly bored.
Mirela let out a long, dramatic sigh.
She puffed her cheeks out, her blue lips pulling into a fierce, frustrated pout.
Her goat ears drooped entirely flat against her head, and she rested her chin heavily in her hands with her tail swishing with intense irritation.
"I finally get a massive power boost, and I don’t even get to use it," Mirela grumbled miserably to herself, watching another monster get pureed into red mist against the dome. "What’s the point of being a caravan guard if the Master just turns the whole carriage into a blender?"
"The structural inefficiency of their pack tactics is very illogical," Anya observed clinically from the velvet seat beside her, entirely unbothered by a severed wolf’s head bouncing off the invisible barrier right in front of the window. "They are repeatedly throwing themselves against a dense grinder with a zero-percent probability of penetration. It is an immense waste of mass."
"Yeah, well," Sparky muttered from the roof, crossing her tiny arms. "The Boss is a show-off."
Up in the control room, Klaus just grinned, casually driving the terrified galloping mountain bear directly through a literal storm of flying monster viscera.
He left a wide, blood-soaked trail of devastation in his wake as they finally, definitively left the dying Endless Tower behind them, heading straight for civilization.
...
At night, the Haunted Winterlands did not just get cold.
The air fundamentally changed, turning into something malicious and hostile to the concept of life.
Sitting in the enclosed reinforced control room of Lord Varhem’s restored carriage, Klaus could feel the drop in temperature.
It was a creeping, invasive chill that gnawed at the edges of the spatial barrier he had erected around the vehicle.
Beyond the invisible, rotating dome of Soul Mana that was casually pureeing any monster stupid enough to get close, the iron-gray clouds had completely blotted out the moon.
The wind was a continuous deafening shriek.
Inside the small control cabin, Klaus watched the thick, heavily reinforced glass windshield that separated him from the massive mountain bear.
The glass was actively freezing.
Despite the residual heat bleeding off the magical dashboard, intricate webs of thick white frost were rapidly crawling across the pane.
The ice cracked and popped, fighting a losing battle against the sub-zero atmospheric pressure outside.
Klaus narrowed his glowing silver eyes, watching the frost creep closer to his line of sight. He didn’t feel the cold since his divine core was still burning like a nuclear furnace behind his ribs but the aggressive nature of the environment was a stark reminder of where they were.
Klaus let out a long sigh with the sound echoing quietly in the small room.
He leaned back into the plush leather captain’s chair, pulling his hands away from the glowing mana-crystals on the dashboard.
The carriage didn’t stop.
The mountain bear was completely linked to his residual intent, dragging the heavy oak vehicle through the deep snowpack with terrified obedience.
He stared at his calloused palms.
The translucent white glow of Soul Mana danced just beneath his skin, waiting for a command.
’I really need to experiment,’ Klaus thought to himself.
He was walking around with a completely broken class.
He had leveled up, sure, and he had unlocked new skills, but the system descriptions were vague.
Soul Configuration and whatever... They were just words. Until he actively pushed the boundaries of what this divine engine could actually do, he was just a guy swinging a really heavy sword.
He needed to know the exact parameters of his control before they hit civilization.
If he ran into another powerhouse like Varhem or someone worse, he couldn’t afford to be guessing his own limits mid-fight.
Klaus stood up from the leather chair.
He opened the heavy iron latch connecting the control room to the main cabin and stepped inside, shutting the door quietly behind him to keep the draft out.
The interior of the main cabin was a completely different world. It was warm, thick with the smell of old wood, the lingering spice of Mirela’s stew, and the soft sound of breathing.
He looked toward the back of the carriage.
Anya and Mirela were currently sleeping on the heavy, fur-lined cot they had pushed into the corner.
Mirela was sprawled out on her side with her hair spilling over the pillows, her long tail curled securely around her own leg.
She had one arm thrown protectively over Anya.
The six-year-old Shinigami was tucked neatly against the demi-human maid’s chest, her silver head resting peacefully, looking like a normal exhausted child.
A genuine, completely unguarded smile broke across Klaus’s handsome face.
He stood there for a moment in the dim light of the cabin’s mana-lantern, just watching them.
"Very cute..."
Klaus stepped further into the cabin, his heavy boots silent on the oak floorboards.
As he passed the small wooden table bolted to the wall, he noticed the stack of dirty wooden plates and spoons left over from dinner.
Mirela had been too exhausted after the adrenaline crash to clean them, and Anya obviously didn’t do dishes.
Klaus’s smile widened slightly as he picked up the stack of dirty plates.