I’d dreaded the coming of this day for weeks. Not just because the next challenge was dangerous, but because [Catastrophe Sense] had been constantly reminding me of the danger, every single warning, and it was utterly useless.

  Because “indistinct danger striking everywhere at once” would have been almost entirely pointless before I considered that anyone with a System could look up when the next challenge would start.

  That fucking Skill was driving me up the wall to give me information that every adult on planet Earth could pull up with a thought and had been shared with virtually all humans currently alive.

  Soooooooo not helpful.

  I glanced at the countdown.

  Five seconds, four seconds, three, two, one … cue the chaos.

  Chaos.

  Where were the monsters at?

  You could have heard a pin drop in the silence that followed, everyone was just gaping and/or staring at the screens showing our surroundings.

  No monsters, no noting.

  And then they started to shift, switching over to news reports and internet live-streams, showing that monsters were showing up literally everywhere else, or at least that’s what it felt like.

  Our trick of playing lightning rod seemed to have been played out. Because the Fifth Challenge apparently had fundamentally different spawning mechanics, it didn’t seem to be an active adaptation, thankfully.

  No, this was simply a matter of representations of all the shit that had happened in the past appearing where said shit had gone down, not where the ancients were. And, well, the Untersberg was located at a significant distance from the sites of any important events.

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  But things were still very far from great.

  Charlemagne was already snapping orders, redirecting people to open the mountain so that forces could be sent out while I took the time to think. I had maybe ninety seconds before I was called upon to provide transportation and magical support.

  Third Reich Nazi crap was showing up all over the continent, physical or metaphorical embodiments of the driving force behind the most lethal war the world had ever known emerging to play out the devastation humanity had already put behind it.

  Sometimes it was obvious what was being represented, sometimes it wasn’t.

  But the worst part was that the more I paid attention to what the wall screens were telling me, the clearer the System window in the corner of my eye became.

  … Shit.

  At least I didn’t have to make myself heard over the hubbub, the new information was automatically fed to Charlemagne, who promptly reacted. New orders via the Skill-formed coms network, accompanied by fresh profanity audible to only those near his physical location.

  Simultaneously, I was already thinking of where the Boss’ core could be, if it had a core, where my nearest teleportation coordinates were, and so on.

  And I finally looked at the tab for this challenge.

  Yes, Chaoskampf.

  Gott verdammt. Schei?e!

  That … that was going to be a problem.

  Because guess what that term told me?

  The next wave was primordial monsters, embodiments of the chaos that preceded creation.

  Apothis-level monstrosities.

  But honestly, I no longer even cared. Come hell or high water, come the devil himself, backing down was no longer in the cards!