After killing the hidden lemur and waiting for a reaction, Carl and Princess Donut inspect the nearby crawler corpses and confirm they were left as bait. The dead women—Grace, Nica, and Lea Bautista—appear to have been hastily looted by surviving allies or enemies, but Carl still removes two strength rings and a wooden anklet from the bodies. Carl uses the rings to restore his badly needed strength, and Donut reluctantly equips the anklet for its constitution and Double Tap bonuses.

Carl, Donut, and Mongo keep advancing toward the circus, quietly killing more sentinel lemurs along the way. Mongo grows stronger, reaches level four, and proves both useful and impulsive. From a ruined building overlooking the encampment, Carl sees that the circus is much larger and more organized than expected: multiple tents, cages, wagons, giraffes, clowns, and other monsters fill the area, and a sideshow poster marks Tsarina Signet as a wanted traitor.

As they watch longer, Carl realizes the circus is actively preparing for war. Clowns and lemurs return to camp at dusk, skins are draped over defenses, barbed barricades are erected, cauldrons are tended by robed figures, and monster cages are moved into position. Carl contacts Mordecai, learns Mordecai remembers nothing of his drunken absence, and gets a furious warning to retreat immediately because they are far out of their depth and night is almost here.

Carl, Donut, and Mongo try to escape once the sentries thin out, but the circus answers with magical mortar fire from the cauldrons. The bombardment destroys the street around them and collapses a building, dropping the trio into a basement below the city. They survive by healing and taking cover, and Donut briefly jumps outside to find a single figure waiting for them: the tattooed elf woman from the poster, Tsarina Signet.

Back outside in full darkness, Carl examines Signet and learns she is a level 60 elite summoner. Her extreme charisma overwhelms Carl with sudden desire, and Mordecai identifies the effect and tells Carl to break his own finger to snap out of it, which Carl does. Signet claims she only came to help after her former circus family attacked them, but when Carl and Donut refuse involvement, she reveals they are already trapped. At her gesture, the circus cages stand open, hostile dots fill Carl’s minimap, and the released beasts close in from every side.