Carl privately warns Princess Donut not to trust Shi Maria, now a card, and to avoid giving the spider any useful information. While trekking back north toward a saferoom near the Desperado Club, the squad grinds flying bird mobs for experience, with Donut spotting ambushes and Mongo dispatching targets while Samantha rolls around looking for distractions.

Following Samantha’s instincts off the marked path, Mongo kills a sleeping legendary monster, La Ciguapa, before Carl can evaluate her for capture. The loss is a missed chance for their deck, but La Ciguapa drops two valuable cards: an uncommon snare called Damnation that forces an enemy totem to discard when its timer ends, and a one-use mythic effect card called Glow-Up that permanently “locks in” a totem/card’s current buffed state for future fights.

As Carl continues fighting, he learns more about the Scavenger Daughter’s patch: the Daughter’s Kiss attack becomes far stronger when the stored souls are all the same species, and it also amplifies that species’ special effects (e.g., a vastly stronger scream from gull souls). With a full deck but concerns about unreliable summons like Asojano and “Uzi Jesus,” Carl insists they practice in a simulation room before using the deck in real combat, and he notes they may soon appear on Odette’s show.

They stop at a roadside saferoom to catch the daily update, eat, and regroup. Carl grows alarmed when Katia stops responding; Bautista tells Carl that Katia is “asleep” and “out of sorts” after finding a secret merchant inside the Desperado Club, and that their planned operation may need to be delayed. Carl, unconvinced, starts reaching out for help as the update interrupts.

Cascadia’s daily announcement explains phase two and three: at 12:01 AM on December 24th, squads will be teleported and must pick a destination within sixty seconds; any totems not in the active deck will be lost, and from then on squads can never possess more or less than six totems. Phase two requires reaching a distant marked location within 48 hours to retrieve a key to open the stairwell near the original start; at midnight December 26th, keyholders return to the original area to exit, while keyless squads are sent to block keyholders and can steal keys by killing them. Realizing the game is setting up desperate crawler-on-crawler fights, Carl and Donut brace themselves for what they may have to do to survive.