This Inevitable Ruin

Carl and Donut materialize in a recently drained, muddy alley in Larracos with 32,429 crawlers remaining, more than 1,300 fewer than before the four-day floor transition. The ninth floor opens with a sixty-hour ceasefire, ten Faction Wars teams, and a notice that the Gate of the Feral Gods is waiting in dungeon mail. Imani has arrived elsewhere in the city and confirms by chat that she is safe.

Quasar warns Carl that the legal situation outside the dungeon has deteriorated. Sensation Entertainment, which still holds the guaranteed third season of the Vengeance of the Daughter contract, has been purchased by a subsidiary of the Dream. Quasar expects the new owners to exploit Carl's contractual obligation and tells him to stay away from elites while he tries to contain the problem.

Carl then suffers worsening Soul Poisoning because the Scavenger's Daughter patch is still carrying stored soul energy. The Pauper's Ring of the Steadfast Emberus only partially blocks the condition, and the AI warns that unequipping the jacket while it is full would be dangerous. Because attacks on living targets inside Larracos are blocked during the ceasefire, Carl uses Daughter's Kiss on a recently suffocated concierge shark, vaporizing the corpse and safely discharging the stored power. He also checks the Eye of the Bedlam Bride tattoo, which remains another unresolved problem.

Donut chooses the Deathbed Hellcat class, gaining much greater spell range, higher dexterity, increased instakill odds, invisibility, and a ghillie suit. The Princess Posse begins with only 58 approved soldiers, no officers, and additional recruits waiting to be sworn in. Eight other factions form the Bloc and declare war on both Team Retribution and the Princess Posse. Donut immediately accepts Team Retribution's truce offer, which allows their alliance to remain in Larracos after the ceasefire.

Cascadia explains the core Faction Wars rules. Nine attacking teams surround the defending NPC Team Retribution in Larracos. Unaffiliated crawlers may volunteer for armies, but factions can conscript those they catch after the ceasefire. Larracos becomes inaccessible until only four teams remain, at which point the Peeling of Larracos begins. Team Retribution wins by holding for a week, while an attacking team wins by holding the throne room for six hours. Attacking teams can also be eliminated by losing their warlord or warlords, or by having their primary-base throne room held for six hours. The 293 stairwell chambers will not open until Faction Wars is won or only thirty hours remain before floor collapse.

Baroness Victory, the Princess Posse adjutant, directs one warlord to the stronghold and the other to recruit crawlers in Larracos. Donut wants to reach a saferoom to open her celestial sponsor box and Former Child Actor accessory kit. Carl finally notices her new class name, Deathbed Hellcat, and agrees it is formidable.

Inside the saferoom, Donut examines the ghillie suit and boonie hat from her new Deathbed Hellcat class. The suit grants Blend into the Background and Cone of Silence, while the hat grants Targeting and extends her already increased spell range. Wearing both strengthens their benefits further, potentially letting Donut attack line-of-sight targets from more than a mile away. Carl has also retrieved the Gate of the Feral Gods from dungeon mail. Mordecai, now appearing as a stereotypically Canadian human, is absorbed in his upgraded alchemy table, which can analyze how potions are made.

Mordecai explains that the sixty-hour ceasefire can end early in three ways: a unanimous vote by all teams, a warlord withdrawing, or every team locking its throne and marking its defenses ready. The first two are effectively unavailable under current conditions, while the third would accelerate the timer. He also says Donut should eventually use Quan's cloak and that they need to review items Carl took from Tserendolgor.

The group turns to Mongo's injuries. Carl had already used a Heal Severe Injury potion to address his burns, but Mongo's missing wing still needs to regrow. Mordecai examines the upgraded Revitalize Pet potion and determines that it can restore the wing in about an hour, but he keeps the potion temporarily so his new table can learn its rare recipe. He is likewise impressed by an upgraded Mana Blessing potion.

Carl reviews the large backlog of achievements accumulated since the previous floor. The notable rewards include a Platinum Tserendolgor Box for exploiting the card system against another crawler, a Loot Punch Card for obtaining Quan's Celestial cloak, a warning about the sapient weapon Jefferson, a Celestial Heavy Metal Box for surviving physical contact with a demon lord, and a Legendary Spicy Box tied to his trip through Samantha's neck hole. The AI's increasingly erratic commentary worries Carl.

Finally, Carl receives an Emberus quest update. Amayon claims to know what happened to Emberus's son and will trade that information if Emberus kills his three brothers. To avoid breaking the gods-demons truce and igniting a wider war, Carl is ordered to visit the Temple of Issitoq through Club Vanquisher and obtain permission from the High Cleric of the Watch. He still must acquire the Soul Crystal-Apito. Carl postpones that problem and turns to Donut's waiting Celestial box.

Donut opens the large backlog of loot from the previous floor. Among the important rewards are a standard Shield spell, the war-protection spell Sentry, and the ominous spell You're Not Done Yet, which Mordecai says resembles Second Chance but is much more dangerous. Her Celestial Benefactor box from Long Haul Biological Waste Management Solutions contains the Tiara of a Thousand Lights and its Charge Pillow. The tiara has 99 Absorption Jewels and can permanently receive magical properties drained from enchanted hats, although the transfer process takes ten hours and carries several restrictions.

Donut then receives a second benefactor box, a platinum box from the Apothecary, containing another charging pillow. Unlike the tiara's pillow, this one can drain any magical item, but its stored property can only transfer to a matching item type. With two pillows, the group can prepare the tiara more quickly. Donut starts by placing her new boonie hat on one pillow and the Tiara of the Inebriated Dragonfly on the other. Carl also administers the Revitalize Pet potion to Mongo, beginning the process of regrowing his missing wing.

The group next studies Quan's Cloak of the Benevolent Champion. Its benefits are tailored to the wearer: over 66 hours it raises the wearer's lowest base stat to the highest base stat recorded at first equip, immediately raises one random spell to level 15 while three others rise to level 15 over a week, and raises one random skill to level 15 over 504 hours. The bonuses depend on one crawler continuing to use the cloak, so timing its first equip matters.

Mordecai exploits that timing with a MySpace Photo potion, formerly called Charisma Cheat. It temporarily makes the system read Donut's base Charisma as 193 instead of 163. After Donut learns Shield, she drinks the potion and equips the cloak while her Constitution is only four, causing the cloak to begin raising her Constitution toward 193 rather than 163. Bad Attitude immediately becomes level 15. Wall of Fire, Heal Critter, and Puddle Jumper are the three spells that begin their slower climb toward level 15, while the selected skill remains unknown because its 504-hour progression is not yet obvious.

The result substantially changes Donut's battlefield durability and offensive potential. With the cloak active and the new tiara system underway, the group turns next to Carl's unopened boxes before they begin recruiting for Faction Wars.

Carl continues opening his remaining achievement boxes. A fan box gives him about 2,000 rounds of ammunition and an unenchanted shoulder holster marked with his name, though he has no intention of using his father's Glock. His Gold "I Have the Conch" box contains more surefire seeking-missile attachments, while another gold box produces a Loot Punch Card that records celestial items picked up from the floor. A Gold Pet Box gives pet biscuits and a PetScapes coupon. His Platinum Tserendolgor box supplies XL automaton-table parts that should let him build a fabricator, and the Platinum "Hell in a Handbasket" box gives him a Spider Reaper Minion upgrade patch that grants access to the Midnight Market, alerts him to nearby traveling merchants, and adds five percent Dexterity when attached to an eligible garment.

The Legendary "Hell Comes to Crawler Town" box contains unenchanted bagpipes, three personal-space upgrade coupons, and a fourth coupon for upgrading their castle. The Legendary Spicy box contains the Enchanted Toe Ring of the Well-Balanced. Heart Balance lets Carl store an auto-trigger potion, which he sets to use a gold healing potion if his health reaches two percent. Mind Balance protects against Enslavement and Conscription, and an ominous notification immediately tells him that Mind Balance is currently triggered. Physical Balance includes Walk on Air, which the system says Carl has already obtained. Carl realizes this likely came from Li Jun after Shi Maria made him consume Li Jun's eye, and he messages Li Jun to apologize and ask to talk, but receives no reply.

Carl's Celestial Heavy Metal box yields a Hell-Kissed Celestial Skill Potion of the Prince of Woe. Mordecai examines it and discovers that, with further table upgrades and specialized ingredients, he can eventually make the potion himself. Carl drinks it and gains the level-13 Gloom Wraith Phase skill, which lets him become non-corporeal during high-speed lunges and pass through unprotected flesh or obstacles, at the cost of halving his mana with each use. Mordecai is stunned by the combined power Carl and Donut now possess and warns them to practice carefully. Carl turns back to the immediate Faction Wars problem: they need to recruit officers, unite the crawlers, leave Larracos, and reach their castle.

Donut delays that plan because she insists Carl first use a Rev-up Magic Hair Restoration Tonic to replace his missing eyebrows. Carl wants Katia's help with the complicated instructions, but Katia is still trying to reach a saferoom with Louis, Tran, and the others. Louis reports that Juice Box remains in the still-flooded castle and that Samantha has rolled off after a woman named Tish, threatening to kill her. Katia catches Samantha before the sluggish college guards intervene. Donut persuades Samantha to return by mentioning her new cloak, but Samantha then asks whether Donut has seen Carl's "pet tummy acher," which Carl had apparently promised Samantha she could name. Donut turns on Carl and demands an explanation, and the chapter ends with Carl sighing.

Carl shows Donut the level-one Tummy Acher that Ren entrusted to him. The creature is the regenerated Garret in a technical sense, but after its fifth death it has reverted to level one, lost its memories, and must receive a new name. Its five deaths have already increased all of its stats by 125 percent. The pet description explains that it will regenerate after death as long as its body is not destroyed, gains another 25 percent stat boost with each regeneration, resets to level one and loses its memories every five deaths, and acquires a new random weakness each time. It will not regenerate if it dies again before reaching level five. Mongo swallows the baby after it willingly jumps into his mouth, then vomits it back up unharmed.

After Carl tells Donut how Ren died and why he promised to look after the pet, the Tummy Acher eats Carl's unwanted chowder-style breakfast and bonds with him after a single feeding. The system immediately requires a new name. Katia, Bautista, Louis, and Samantha arrive while Donut continues objecting to adding another pet. Samantha says she can sense her missing child inside the still-flooded dwarven castle and remains determined to kill Tish, threatening to tell Juice Box that Louis is having an affair with Tish if Louis will not help her.

Katia begins applying the Rev-up Magic Hair Restoration Tonic, separately restoring Carl's eyebrows and eyelashes while the group debates names for the pet. Louis proposes Sir Rendlegore, a name that preserves a connection to Ren without treating the reset creature as a copy of Garret, and Carl accepts it. Katia then tries to use Splash Zone's water spell to wash the scalp treatment away after five seconds, but the spell cannot be cast in the saferoom because it counts as offensive. Carl reaches the shower too late and emerges with waist-length hair. Cutting it only makes it regrow, and Mordecai says the effect will last about two weeks unless Carl repeatedly cuts it.

The group then formalizes the Princess Posse army hierarchy. Donut assigns officer status by touch; Florin settles on General as the upper rank, generals can recruit and command large troop groups, and the strippers receive Sergeant First Class so they can recruit and command the Legionnaires. Florin and Imani are assigned to establish the headquarters while Elle goes on reconnaissance, and doggie-door upgrades will provide fast travel once the headquarters is ready. Carl lists the immediate priorities: train Sir Rendlegore, recruit heavily, learn the revised rules, find Juice Box, scout the enemy, pool money for tier-three upgrades, and above all destroy the naga team quickly. Katia begins using Carl's automaton table to build mobility equipment for Tran and to start work toward vehicles. The chapter ends as Carl turns to Louis, now ranked Army Air General, to inspect Louis's new vehicle.

Louis's celestial reward includes a tier-three guild upgrade called the Airship Portal and a new aircraft. Imani can designate up to three suitable guild personal spaces as airports. When the aircraft parks above one of them, it can be moved into a dimensional hangar where it can be repaired and upgraded, making the portal another fast-travel mechanism. The exterior access point is a physical roof hatch rather than a protected saferoom door, however, and can be destroyed. If that happens while the aircraft is hangared, the ship becomes unavailable until the hatch is repaired, though anyone inside the hangar can still return to the guildhall. The portal also warns that airships will not be permitted on the tenth floor, which makes Elle remark on how impossibly distant reaching that floor feels and reminds Carl of the unresolved danger tied to Donut's tiara.

While waiting for the portal elevator, Carl notices a few pieces of Christmas tinsel that should have vanished with the memory simulation. The anomaly triggers a disturbing reflection on how completely the dungeon now mixes real people, simulated stories, and consequences that cross those categories. He remembers Pater Coal struggling to separate the dungeon narrative from reality after the AI took him over, then remembers Lightning Lou and the moment in the Florida memory when Carl nearly chose a failsafe that would mean the end of everything. The warning attached to that choice returns to him: use it only if absolutely certain there is no other option. Shi Maria's eye moves beneath the tattoo on his chest as the memory frightens him.

The portal transfers the group into the dimensional hangar containing Louis's aircraft, the Party Planner, named after the title Firas had once suggested for the Twister. It is a roughly fifty-foot Casket in the Sky tilt-rotor stealth light bomber powered by a soul crystal. Louis can fly it alone, though it supports a five-person crew. It has basic forward and aft anti-air weapons, rudimentary shields, stealth options, an anti-flak shield, and a bomb bay whose payloads receive a fifty-percent yield increase. Its design emphasizes speed and stealth over survivability, and Carl immediately sees it as dangerous to fly against fortified targets.

For Faction Wars, the Party Planner counts as tier-three Armor and therefore uses one of the Princess Posse's limited starting Armor slots. Donut notes that they may begin with only ten such vehicles but can keep enemy vehicles captured after fighting starts. Florin concludes that they need immediate intelligence on rival hardware, funding, defenses, and Ramp-Up restrictions, and says he, Imani, and Elle need to get to headquarters as soon as possible. When he asks Carl what comes next, Carl answers that his next move is a reunion.

With the ceasefire down to fifty-six hours, Carl, Donut, Louis, and Britney leave through Katia's space and the new Doggie Door route toward the Larracos College of Magic, recruiting crawlers they meet along the way. Carl defends Florin's rapid assumption of military authority, arguing that Florin's conduct on earlier floors shows genuine soldiering experience that the Princess Posse now needs. Rend rides Mongo as the two newly bonded pets explore the city together.

Before leaving the saferoom, Donut discovers that Louis is wearing an enchanted Dungeon Sidekicks prize shirt depicting a cartoon version of her backside under the words "Donut Holes." Zev confirms that the fan group paid a legitimate licensing fee, but Donut learns she currently receives none of the merchandise revenue. The argument ends when Carl redirects the group toward the more urgent task of finding Ferdinand and Juice Box.

Outside, Carl finally sees the upper city of Larracos in detail and understands why Cookbook author Priestly loved it. The college towers rise through multiple populated rings, but residents are already preparing weapons and armor because this Faction Wars will differ from the usual cycle: the NPC faction intends to fight from the beginning rather than wait until the city is opened to the surviving armies. Carl also recognizes that ordinary Faction Wars destruction usually reaches the city through artillery, spells, gods, and the final push toward the castle.

At the base of the college stairs they meet War Leader Arief, a level-80 Semeru dwarf and commander of the Larracos Defense Force infantry. His system description explains that the Semeru once inhabited the fertile lower volcanic level in great numbers. Seeking their goddess Ysalte, they dug downward until they reached the roots of the All Tree. At that point they stopped and built the lowest castle as a monument and apology, but Scolopendra's later nine-tier attack devastated their people anyway. The Semeru population fell from millions to fewer than ten thousand while Larracos itself survived, leaving the remaining dwarves as stewards of the city. Arief is Despondent because Ysalte is dead, reducing all his stats by fifteen percent and causing worshippers of other gods to deal ten percent more damage to him.

Arief openly refers to himself and his people as NPCs, the first time Carl has heard one do so. He says the NPC faction wants to coordinate tactics with the crawler army and that Juice Box wants to speak privately with Carl before meeting with Ferdinand. Arief then tells Louis that Juice Box wants to formalize the alliance in the traditional way: through marriage.

Arief leads Carl, Donut, Louis, and Britney down through Larracos while Donut plans Louis's proposed wedding. Carl quietly asks Donut to keep her sunglasses on so she can use body temperature to watch for changelings. Seeing the intact upper city makes Carl confront the reality of the people living there and the damage the crawlers have already caused. As they descend, Donut gives passing crawlers Sergeant First Class rank so they can recruit others, while the Princess Posse's enrollment count slowly rises.

Arief explains that Larracos is conventionally described as having sixty-six levels, though not every ring fully circles the city. The flood reached level 39, quickly drained to 29, and was deliberately kept backed up after Juice Box began awakening the NPC population. The remaining water now reaches only level 3, enough to keep the highest castle tower submerged. The defenders have also placed explosives on alternating downward ramps. Arief then reveals that some NPCs retain memories across seasons. His uncle, one of the Jatismara on Juice Box's war council, remembers dozens of them. Most awakened NPCs now understand that they have lived previous versions of the dungeon, although some purpose-built NPC types remain unable to comprehend it, and Arief believes most NPCs who die are gone permanently.

Arief wants revenge on Architect Houston, leader of the Madness, whose forces captured and tortured Arief's brother after a sabotage attempt; Juice Box later infiltrated the area and ended his suffering. Retribution's saboteurs managed to penetrate the inner defenses of every enemy faction except the Blood Sultanate and Houston's operating theater. Arief describes the nagas as assassins rather than conventional soldiers, protected by poisons, acids, and an inner sanctum that not even Juice Box could infiltrate.

Carl supplements that information with Drakea's Cookbook notes and Mordecai's knowledge. The modern naga state is a constitutional monarchy whose royal family uses Faction Wars partly to promote its history and tourism. The current in-game Sultana is the real-world crown princess, daughter of the king, and is role-playing the historical Sepsis Whore. Although the Blood Sultanate routinely loses Faction Wars, the Sultana herself has never been killed in the game; she and her guard always disappear before their throne room falls. Carl considers her especially dangerous now that protections are gone because she has both real military service and extensive in-game experience.

The group continues recruiting and briefly meets the returning crawler Jurgen before reaching the recently reopened Desperado Club. Donut's temperature check identifies the entrance bartender as a changeling. Arief takes them through a hidden passage to a private room where a one-eyed gnoll calling himself Hunger Hammy, manager of the Headlamp Colonnade, is waiting. The gnoll immediately leaps onto Louis and begins kissing him, ending the chapter on Louis's surprise.

In the private Desperado Club room, the one-eyed gnoll changes into Juice Box's familiar human form, establishing that "Hunger Hammy" was one of her disguises. Juice Box is visibly worn down, with scars and a temporarily missing ear when she transforms. She tells Carl that his plan failed to give everyone the regeneration protection she wanted. Carl answers that the showrunners would never have allowed complete safety, so he chose the next-best outcome: making the formerly protected faction players killable. Juice Box accepts the compromise.

Juice Box shares maps, troop strengths, castle locations, and supply schedules, but deliberately hides some documents to make clear that Team Retribution remains an independent ally rather than a subordinate force. The largest new development is Shanty Town, an unusually large settlement that appeared around Larracos after the flooding. It contains new food markets, temples, and NPCs despite the earlier rule against adding replacements, suggesting that an Emergency Action Item or similar loophole expanded the area. Because Shanty Town lies outside Larracos, rival teams will still be able to use it after the ceasefire. Juice Box had planned to destroy its food markets, but the ceasefire refreshed the poisoned inventory and enemy teams immediately bought supplies, making that sabotage plan obsolete.

Juice Box explains that Shanty Town has repeatedly lost mayors to the outworlders. The second-most-recent mayor, a gnoll named Theora, was killed after being cheated in single combat. Carl correctly guesses that the current mayor is Ferdinand. Unlike the enemy faction players, Retribution cannot simply kill him. Juice Box later explains why: Ferdinand, now styling himself Warlord on High Sir Ferdinand, has been given control of the NPC faction's system functions, including the Larracos defense system, as a workaround because he is treated as the same kind of entity as the crawlers. If Ferdinand dies, Retribution loses that control.

Juice Box also explains her own system access. She receives mental messages and system announcements but has no warlord menu, Faction Wars manager, or warlord chat. Their adjutant is Drick, whose Valtay worm makes him physically present but permanently untouchable by the NPCs. Juice Box confirms Ruby and the other changeling children are safe with Mordecai, then asks Carl to coordinate their defense plans and speak with Ferdinand.

Louis privately admits that Juice Box is pressuring him to marry her to bind their houses. Carl tells him he does not have to do it, but Louis says Juice Box is frightened and in over her head, and that cementing the alliance may help both factions survive. After Donut pushes him to state his feelings directly, Louis agrees aloud to marry Juice Box, asks her to change forms before kissing her, and tells her he loves her. The chapter closes as Britney redirects the room back to strategy by asking about the size of the dwarven digger automatons.

At the Desperado Club entrance, Clarabelle confirms that the rebuilt club's new management has banned all crawlers for the moment, though NPCs may still enter. She identifies the new manager as Hamed. Carl immediately recognizes the name as the Night Wyrm, leader of the Guild of Suffering, Astrid's husband, and father of Damascus Steel and Anaconda. Clarabelle also warns that Hamed has surrounded himself with unusual bodyguards who are neither ordinary NPCs nor simply former crawlers.

Before Carl can pursue that problem, Drick emerges from the club with Ferdinand perched on his head. Ferdinand is now Warlord on High, Sir Ferdinand, level 100 and co-warlord of Team Retribution. Donut forces him to admit publicly that he is not actually her fiancé. Ferdinand demands the return of his rhinoceros mount Simoom and his lost turban. Donut has the turban, and Carl offers a temporary substitute: the enchanted bowler hat taken from Quan, which can decapitate a target when thrown and return to its owner.

Carl uses Ferdinand's obsession with the hat to negotiate a strategic trade. He asks Ferdinand to transfer Shanty Town's mayorship and control to the Princess Posse in exchange for the temporary bowler hat, eventual return of the turban, an attempt to recover Simoom, and whatever gold the transfer mechanically requires. Ferdinand accepts. The system confirms the trade, and the truce between the Princess Posse and Team Retribution is renamed "The Good Guys."

The group then holds Louis and Juice Box's changeling "small wedding" in the entrance bar. Juice Box returns to her blank form, which displays as level 120. Mordecai explains that changeling marriages are two-stage affairs: the first ceremony is immediately legal and includes pre-signed divorce papers that either spouse may file during the following month, while the later Confirmation becomes the larger public celebration if the marriage continues. Louis and Juice Box whisper private vows and become legally married.

Immediately afterward, Carl's warlord interface begins flooding with new recruit notifications. Florin messages that the headquarters saferoom is secured, the Doggie Door is usable, and a large group there wants to meet Carl, ending the chapter with an urgent summons to headquarters.

Louis, Katia, Bautista, and Samantha take Party Planner on its first trip toward headquarters while Juice Box remains in Larracos preparing the NPC defenses. Britney stays with her to learn the city-defense system, and Ferdinand is still being taught the warlord interface by Drick. Carl and Donut head through the Meadowlark space because the Doggie Door upgrade does not yet work throughout the entire guild. On the way, Donut learns that her garbage-truck sponsorship has been canceled for a conflict of interest and that the slot will be auctioned again.

At the Meadowlark saferoom, Carl finds Imani, Florin, Mistress Tiatha, and two Crest reinforcements: Rosetta Thagra and Tipid. Both are level-60 colonels in the Princess Posse. Carl is overwhelmed to meet Tipid, author of the fourth Cookbook edition, in person and learns that just over 50,000 former crawlers have entered Faction Wars to fight alongside them. Rosetta greets Carl with a deliberately announced slap, then quietly examines the Bedlam Bride tattoo and asks for Carl's remaining toraline, Shi Maria's tattoo ink, Donut's hunter credit chit, access to the saferoom and bomber studio, and four million gold. Her private chat warning makes clear that the dungeon is still listening.

Tipid explains that after his release and ruinous brain surgery, Doctor Porthus Hu helped him through the Crawler Project, an organization for former crawlers. Hu, the second-edition Cookbook author, later formed the Open Intellect Pacifist Network to end the crawl. The Crawler Project's advocacy eventually helped secure automatic Syndicate citizenship, inner-system access, free healthcare, and guaranteed housing for newly released crawlers, benefits Tipid himself never received. After authorities began treating the movement as a terrorist organization, Hu and the others scattered. Hu nevertheless proposed converting a garbage freighter into a passenger ship and called for former crawlers willing to return to the dungeon for Faction Wars.

The volunteers entered under a standard mercenary package: level 60, a temporary race and class choice, little or no equipment beyond what their class provides, and no normal crawler achievements or quests. Their greatest advantage is experience. Every one of them reached at least the tenth floor and survived Faction Wars or Land War, and some are Battle Royale winners. Tipid, formerly a level-96 Poisoner, is now a Liquid Dervish.

The reinforcement comes with an opposing escalation. Each of the eight enemy teams received roughly 20,000 additional experienced mercenaries or private guards, about 150,000 enemies total. Unlike the former crawlers, those reinforcements entered with their existing weapons, cannot change race, and receive the Hired Mercenary class plus basic spells. Tipid warns that the allied enemy bloc will make the first week especially dangerous, then tells Carl that Justice Light is among the returning veterans. Carl decides it is time to go to headquarters and meet the rest of the force.

An eleventh-edition Cookbook note from Ikicha opens the chapter with his loneliness and his dream that former crawlers might someday find one another and unite. With fifty-two hours left in the ceasefire, Carl, Donut, Tipid, and Florin enter Princess Posse territory under a red-alert warning. Tipid explains that the incursion is only uncleared mobs created by the enlarged battlefield, but those mobs must be removed or the warning system will remain useless.

The headquarters is already becoming a fortified camp. Former crawlers are raising palisades, watchtowers, trenches, and reinforced buildings around the small bait-shop saferoom. A level-62 Fortification Engineer named Penn drops a massive steel beam, embraces Carl, and starts a rhythmic chant that spreads through thousands of former crawlers. Tipid tells Carl the demonstration is for him and represents what his resistance has built. Florin briefly summons his giant caiman card from the eighth floor; chosen cards can still be called once per day for twice their former summon duration and return the next day even if killed.

Tipid explains that the changelings and flesh golems started the stronghold on the nearby hill without understanding how important the saferoom would be. The veterans are therefore expanding the fortress around the bait shop so the protected space and future airship access are integrated into the base. Thousands of reinforcements chose construction-focused builds, alchemists are producing materials, experienced enchanters are strengthening walls, and separate crews are building border defenses, fallback positions, and watchtowers.

The ninth-floor saferoom rules make that construction essential. Once fighting begins, the blood-bar system returns: kills refill a crawler's limited saferoom time, and the bar drains while inside. During the final two phases, mercenaries are barred from guildhalls except for a staff of up to nine people at once. The former crawlers count as mercenaries, so the army needs real sleeping quarters and cannot simply keep a large reserve protected in the guild. Tipid notes that most other factions built their strongholds around officer saferooms, and that the restriction should particularly hurt factions such as the Operatics and Blood Sultanate that traditionally rely on hiding.

Carl reiterates that the naga team must be their first target, but Tipid warns that enemy forces are massing on the opposite border. As they approach the flag room, Mongo becomes agitated. Carl and Tipid struggle with the stronghold's enormous apprentice-quality metal door, which has Battering Resistance, Force Reflection, and Heat Absorption but is only at eighty percent strength. The door suddenly flies open and knocks them backward as Tina, still a giant allosaurus in a pink tutu, escapes into the clearing and excitedly reunites with Mongo.

Tina, now able to speak in rough growls, repeatedly calls Mongo "Pa-pa" as the two dinosaurs bounce around each other. Kiwi emerges in her restored ursine body, heavily pregnant after her earlier mating with Mongo while both were dinosaurs. The camp falls silent as Kiwi and Mongo cautiously reunite. Kiwi hugs him, then takes Tina back inside, leaving Mongo confused and forlorn.

Carl, Donut, Tipid, and Florin enter the Princess Posse stronghold and discover that the naming fight between the Sledge and the changelings has been frozen by the AI as the Fortress of Unyielding Power and Authority, or FUPA. The fortress is at eighty percent strength. Its interior is built around the required throne room, which may have guarded or trapped approaches but cannot itself contain defensive traps. The changelings and flesh golems are mostly away building border defenses.

Carl and Florin privately review the ceasefire scouting rules. Only crawlers or troops with the Scout endorsement may cross enemy borders without a pass; discovered scouts are teleported home and lose stealth access until hostilities begin, but traps can still kill them. The Princess Posse is limited to eighteen scouts. Properly manned observation towers with detection and Ping magic can expose infiltrators, and Florin believes enemy spies are already inside their territory. Their main trap specialist, the one-winged former crawler Justice Light, has gone underground and claims he can build defenses against Tripper spells if given access to Carl's trap table.

In the antechamber outside the flag room, Carl recognizes Elite Herman the Fleet, one of the ogre strongmen descended from the old nodling Di-we. Herman is visibly fighting some outside influence and apologizes to his brother before dozens of concealed explosive satchels become visible under his clothing. Carl realizes Herman has been turned into a suicide bomber. Donut immediately fires a Magic Missile, Tipid phases away, and Florin shields himself.

Before the explosives can detonate, Baroness Victory steps out of the flag room and kills Herman with a single axe strike. Carl inventories the corpse before the non-magical bombs destabilize. Victory states that the incident was an unlawful assassination attempt caused by Sensation Entertainment, now owned by the Dream, exerting improper influence on one of its elites. She announces that she will file a grievance and argues directly with the AI over the violation and its failure to warn her. The shaken group follows her into the flag room.

With fifty hours left in the Ceasefire, Carl and Donut enter the FUPA Flag Room. Baroness Victory explains that anything said there before hostilities begins is withheld from viewers for eight days, giving the warlords a temporary secure planning space. The flag-room interface resembles a Game Guide display and initially overwhelms both crawlers. While restoring his normal interface after accidentally clearing it, Carl exposes his suppressed notification log.

The log shows hundreds of unauthorized attempts to use Gloom Wraith Phase and even disable Mind Balance. Mind Balance has already climbed from level five to level nine by resisting them. Carl realizes Shi Maria is repeatedly trying to seize control through the tattoo on his chest. During Herman's suicide-bombing attempt, she had nearly forced Gloom Wraith Phase to activate. The non-magical bombs would not have hurt phased Carl, but their detonation could have killed Donut. Shi Maria also manages to speak directly into his mind despite Mind Balance, convincing Carl that she is gaining strength faster than his defenses. Mordecai confirms Rosetta has warned him and says they are working on several unpleasant solutions.

Victory explains her adjutant role: she may accompany Carl and Donut into major battles, has limited teleport capability even during Ramp-Up, can turn invisible, must call fouls committed by either side, and can advise them on ways to accomplish plans within the rules. Donut tests Victory's character by asking about her deceased sister Ugloo. Victory says they once shared similar views but grew apart after Ugloo married into the royal family, and that Ugloo had contacted her shortly before dying.

The battlefield map confirms that Shanty Town is now controlled by the Princess Posse. Victory calls the acquisition strategically useful because the enlarged ring completely surrounds Larracos and adds another defensive layer. Carl and Donut have three town-upgrade coupons that could be spent either there or at the main base. Li Na has also finally been recruited after Mordecai brewed a potion that suppresses her aura, and her squad has volunteered to help defend Shanty Town.

Victory then lays out the immediate threat. Roughly 100,000 enemy troops are massing on the Operatic border, Dream artillery is being positioned behind them, and another roughly 10,000 troops are stationed on the naga-side border. The enemy intends to crush the Princess Posse during the 180-hour Ramp-Up before Open Hostilities begins. During Ramp-Up, celestial summons are disabled, non-scout movement into enemy territory is restricted to fixed kilometer-wide gates, offensive magic and teleportation are suppressed, and the Gate of the Feral Gods and Puddle Jumper will not work. Gloom Wraith Phase will still function because it is a phase skill rather than teleportation. Static traps remain legal, but teleport and summon traps do not, and traps cannot simply be repurposed as artillery.

Victory argues that the enemy's numerical and equipment advantage is partly offset by inexperience: many of the imported troops are security forces rather than veterans of sustained warfare and may hesitate once casualties become real. Florin has therefore built a no-man's-land, trenches, Tripper-resistant traps, and fallback positions around the two Ramp-Up entry corridors.

Louis, Katia, Bautista, Samantha, Bonnie, and others then arrive. Samantha is furious that Louis and Juice Box married without her and brightens when Donut reveals there will be a later Confirmation ceremony. Bonnie reports that Party Planner is faster than the Twister, has received door-gun upgrades, and is being worked on by gremlins. When Carl tells the child she should not have to think about killing outworlders, Bonnie answers that the outworlders have never stopped thinking about killing her.

With thirty-three hours left in the ceasefire, Carl, Donut, Chris, Jamal, and three newly arrived veterans hunt one of the mob incursions in the expanded edge of Princess Posse territory. Bodi is a level-60 Big Game Spear Hunter and Land War veteran chosen as a battalion commander; Griffin is a level-60 Eviscerator and Morales a level-60 Plumbing Specialist healer. Griffin and Morales are former tenth-floor crawlers in the 103rd Recon Legionnaires and proudly wear new Princess Posse unit tattoos.

The target is a level-70 Rolling Battle Formation Ball, a larger ninth-floor remix of the first-floor Ball of Swine. The enlarged battlefield contains recycled and strengthened mobs from earlier floors without the normal quest structure. Carl wants the encounter partly to train Sir Rendlegore, whose reset means he must reach at least level five before his regeneration ability will function again. Jamal, meanwhile, destroys the third prototype of Carl's spider-like automaton harness by insisting on making it jump. Carl has no more oversized joints, so Jamal must wait for Katia to build a better thought-controlled version.

Carl hits the rolling formation with two impact hob-lobbers. The second blast breaks it apart into roughly three dozen level-45 Skank Skunk Warriors, leaving the individual mobs briefly dazed. Rend immediately begins killing them and grows rapidly. Bodi's returning spear cuts through several skunks, Chris drags others underground, Mongo attacks, and Donut uses her newly upgraded level-15 Bad Attitude. Donut then identifies and attacks Fancy Boy, a level-55 Skank Skunk Battle Wizard whose control magic has been suppressing the warriors' aerosol attack.

Knocking Fancy Boy unconscious removes that restraint. The remaining skunks simultaneously release a green aerosol cloud. Carl escapes it by using Gloom Wraith Phase and then Walk on Air; the phase tears apart four skunks as he passes through them. Donut Puddle Jumps into a tree with Mongo, but both have already received the Skanked debuff. Griffin, Morales, and Jamal are caught as well, while Chris shelters underground and Rend is unaffected. Bodi somehow disables the remaining mobs, allowing Rend to continue feeding and reach level eight, safely above the level-five regeneration threshold.

The Skanked debuff lasts three hours, reduces Charisma by seventy percent, produces overwhelming odor and vomiting, and cannot be removed early. Donut, Griffin, Morales, and Jamal carry it as the group heads toward a newly located saferoom where Katia's rehabilitation is about to begin. Donut cannot provide close moral support because of the smell, so Carl confirms he will be there for Katia. At the chapter boundary, Elle reports that she has discovered why the Reaver side wanted pet leveling accelerated, but she does not yet reveal the answer.

With thirty-one hours left in the ceasefire, Carl and Katia prepare for separate but related treatments in the new field hospital outside the guild's saferoom protections. Mordecai has compounded two doses of Glory Bound with a subdermal gel and Tough Love. Katia's dose is intended to force her through the memory needed to clear the drug's physical addiction effects. Carl's dose also contains Removal Order, an attempt to send him into Shi Maria's worst memory so he can trap the entity there. The procedure requires Carl's toe ring to be removed after he loses consciousness, while Imani will add magical protection and the ring will be replaced before he wakes.

The treatment is dangerous for both of them. Edgar warns that once Katia is under, she must complete the process on her own and waking her early could be fatal. Carl's version has no guaranteed outcome: if he recognizes the mechanism by which Shi Maria can be locked into the memory, the tattoo will remain but Carl should gain control of it and possibly inherit abilities. If he fails, he will wake with an even angrier entity still attached to him. Wisp Armor is already helping resist Shi Maria, but the eye in Carl's chest continues trying to cast through him and has recently managed to speak directly into his mind.

Mordecai and Rosetta explain that Glory Bound originated as an outside-the-inner-system training drug. Its older use paired prolonged conditioning with a later trip that unlocked the trained behavior. The dungeon repurposed the discontinued drug across many quests, including possession scenarios where victims could be cured through the Desperado Club drug den. Mordecai's current compound is time-sensitive because the long-brewed Tough Love component has only a short useful window.

Outside, the Princess Posse base continues constructing a multi-layer anti-magic shell built from separate hexagonal casting cells so killing a single mage will not collapse the entire defense. Inside the hospital, Mordecai applies the green gel and gives Carl and Katia Potions of Somnolent Embrace to bring them gently to sleep.

As the sedative takes hold, Katia reveals that her favorite memory and her worst memory are the same place and that she expects to return to the memory she experienced during her first Glory Bound trip. Carl instinctively asks her to grab his hand so they can face it together. Imani and Edgar separate them because physical contact can confuse the dreams, but for a brief instant Carl's consciousness collides with Katia's and splashes across the minds of the others nearby. He senses Katia's fear, shame, anger at herself and the world, and anger toward Carl because he keeps letting people he cares about hurt him. As the dream closes around them, a distant warlord notification interrupts: the Lemig Sortion is offering Carl free passage to its headquarters to negotiate peace.

Carl wakes after losing roughly eleven hours and finds himself standing in a blood-soaked ballroom inside the former high-elf Sugar Cube, now the Lemig Sortion headquarters. The Bedlam Bride quest has failed, and Carl is covered in blood. One surviving Lemig soldier tries to shoot him but is frozen as Naughty under ceasefire rules. Among the dead is Luke, now a level-64 Lemig general, whose corpse description says he was killed by a fellow soldier while that soldier was under Shi Maria's control.

The Democratic Sortion's adjutant, Panford, is already arguing with Commander Stockade. Panford says the massacre is being ruled an AI action rather than an attack because the ceasefire does not prohibit teammates or monsters from fighting one another. Stockade demands an appeal, but Panford explains the deeper failure: the Lemig plan was intended to sabotage Carl's extraction procedure, leave Carl incapacitated, and unleash Shi Maria back at the Princess Posse base. Instead, interfering with an entity as powerful as Shi Maria caused the effect to rebound into the Lemig headquarters, killing dozens and damaging their throne-room position.

Panford then identifies a rules violation. The Lemig Sortion had no declared spy inside the Princess Posse camp, yet Stockade and Architect Houston possessed timing precise enough to act when Carl went under. Panford therefore concludes they were using an outside observer feeding them live information. He calls a foul against both the Lemig Sortion and the Madness, says both will receive heavy sanctions, and adds another penalty when Stockade threatens him.

Donut and Katia confirm through chat that Carl vanished during the procedure after remaining partly translucent for a time. Baroness Victory tells Carl not to move while adjutants assemble. Two more adjutants enter, creating a minor quorum that automatically pauses local hostilities while a field ruling is considered. Additional mercenaries who attempt to attack Carl are frozen.

Carl's memory of the treatment returns in fragments. He remembers Katia's Icelandic hospital memory, Annie, and Shi Maria's male spider husband, whose name Carl uncertainly recalls as something like Hapanzi and whom he remembers as a god. Shi Maria entered the memory, killed and devoured her husband in rage, and later curled into a ball. Yet the husband appeared again before the end and told Carl that Shi Maria was trapped and could be released only if Carl chose to free her when all else was lost.

Katia believes her own treatment worked, though its success cannot be known immediately. Carl realizes his treatment also worked in a qualified sense: Shi Maria remains inside him like a sealed egg that he alone can deliberately break. He can now perceive through the third eye on his chest when he opens it, but the power behind it is so intense that he immediately forces it closed.

Still covered in blood from the Lemig ballroom massacre, Carl sits in the late Queen Imogen's private kitchen for an official field ruling adjudication. Panford represents the Lemig Sortion, Baroness Victory the Princess Posse, and the small bune Opiee the Madness. Commander Stockade and Architect Houston sit opposite Carl. An inexplicable bag of Earth cat food from the Seattle charity Pet Angels sits on the counter while Panford reconstructs what happened.

Stockade had offered the Princess Posse peace terms through warlord chat and then sent Carl a level-15 Summon Ally request while Carl was still technically conscious under the sleep potion. Warlord requests can persist through some unconscious states. The request remained available after Carl went under, and Shi Maria accepted it at the precise moment Imani removed Carl's Mind Balance toe ring. Because Carl was unconscious, the system compensated by creating a non-corporeal version of him in the Lemig ballroom while another translucent version remained at the field hospital. Panford says Stockade's intended result was a full teleport that separated Carl from Shi Maria and left the spider at the Princess Posse base to slaughter the people there. Victory doubts that plan could ever have worked, while Opiee believes another teleport method might have succeeded.

The adjudication screen then replays part of the treatment dream. Carl sees Katia confront memories involving Fannar, the fellow professor whose retaliation helped destroy her adoption plans, and an adoption official who cites Katia's concealed illness, past drug use, and the medical needs of the child Annie. The dream moves to a hospital room where nine-month-old Annie is attached to medical equipment. Shi Maria enters, followed by her husband Hapanzi, who changes into human form and tells Carl and Katia not to worry.

Panford explains that Shi Maria was eventually pulled into Katia's dreamscape while Carl's avatar existed in both locations. Both sides then tried to exploit the split. Stockade delayed his next move because he was receiving outside information about the Princess Posse response, and when he protests that the crawlers must also be cheating, Panford records the remark as an admission that Stockade himself used prohibited outside intelligence. Before the ruling can continue, Prepotente, Elle, and Florin report coordinated enemy movement on both borders despite nearly twenty hours remaining in the ceasefire. Carl orders a code red, tells everyone to man the lines, and directs Louis to get the partially armed Party Planner airborne immediately.

Carl asks the adjutants to restate the situation plainly. Victory explains that Stockade used an outside observer to time the Summon Ally request and that, once Mordecai realized the procedure was being watched, he deliberately announced a fake plan. Mordecai claimed he was preparing a Shock Wake salve to pull Carl back, while actually brewing a potion meant to violently expel Shi Maria. If Stockade's counterspell and the supposed wake-up treatment had truly acted at the same time, Carl's soul could have been torn in two. Carl realizes the Princess Posse did not have a spy in the castle, but Team Retribution did: Juice Box had kept agents inside enemy courts and burned some of those assets to save him.

The replay shows Mordecai's salve making Carl fully corporeal in the ballroom and transforming him into Shi Maria. The spider massacres Lemig soldiers and uses her open eye to spread insanity, causing soldiers to attack one another and Luke to be killed by an affected comrade. Carl remembers the corresponding dream more clearly. Hapanzi told him Shi Maria is trapped inside him and can be summoned only once; if Carl releases her, she can choose either to take over his body or to leave it in her own form. Mordecai's potion therefore expelled her only temporarily before she was pulled back into Carl.

Panford identifies the outside-information chain as secured messaging involving Nurse Yugoslav of the Madness on the eighteenth floor, with a third party in the Celestial Ascendency relaying information into Faction Wars. Opiee and Victory agree that the evidence against Architect Houston is highly suspicious but circumstantial, so the Madness is not formally found culpable. The Princess Posse is also cleared, while Stockade's own admission establishes the Lemig Sortion's violation. At Carl's request, Juice Box relays a proposal through Ferdinand, who spends an emergency action item to impose a live-feed blackout on everyone inside the dungeon for the rest of Faction Wars.

Panford imposes a twenty-five-percent reduction in the Lemig standing force and removes two tech slots, immediately disbanding their mechanized-armor units. By then Stockade is visibly deteriorating under a delayed dose of Shi Maria's Insanity effect. He repeatedly smashes his head against the floor until he dies. The system rules the death a psychosis-induced suicide, eliminates the Democratic Sortion, and awards its assets to the Madness. Because the defeat counts as a voluntary withdrawal, the ceasefire is shortened by 23.33 hours and ends immediately.

As Phase One begins, offensive magic and teleport spells remain restricted but combat movement opens through the designated corridors. Houston suddenly draws a rifle from beneath his robes and shoots Carl through the shoulder. Carl grabs the strange bag of cat food, drops an impact hob-lobber, and is teleported back to the Princess Posse field hospital before Houston can finish him. Carl heals the wound as a new sluggalo soldier, Jason Manning FUCKS, tells him to stop sitting around and join the war. The chapter ends with the system declaring Weapons Free and Faction Wars officially underway.

Chapter 20 opens with two Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook annotations. Justice Light, writing in the eighth edition, confesses that killing an NPC in anger still haunts him and says contributing trap designs is one of the few things that calms him. Drakea, writing in the twenty-second edition, answers that Justice's designs saved his life repeatedly and urges him to direct what the dungeon made him become back against its creators.

Phase One begins with 180 hours remaining. Offensive magic and teleport-based magic or skills are prohibited, ordinary combatants may enter enemy territory only through designated corridors, Scouts are exempt from that corridor restriction, and nine teams remain after the Democratic Sortion's elimination. Carl leaves the field hospital to find the FUPA mobilizing for both fronts. Jurgen reserves two troop transports for him, and Carl confirms that Justice Light locked and prepared the Princess Posse throne room before the system fixed all throne locations on the map.

Enemy artillery is already striking the base shield. The rocks themselves are nonmagical during Phase One, but the attackers use chemical payloads, forcing Princess Posse mages to clear poisonous smoke. Donut arrives with Mongo and members of the fifteen-person Personal Guard, whose members receive a twenty-five-percent Constitution bonus while close to either warlord. Carl explains Stockade's death and the blood covering him, while Donut notices the cat-food smell from the bag Carl took from the elf castle.

The warlord vehicle rules constrain the response. The Princess Posse already occupies all ten Armor slots with Party Planner and Florin's flame-spider tanks, so ordinary troop transports must remain unarmed and lightly equipped. When Louis reports that Samantha secretly boarded Party Planner despite lacking a Scout slot, Carl realizes crossing the border would physically tear her out of the aircraft and endanger everyone aboard. Samantha's exaggerated fantasy about crashing with Louis masks her real motive: she boarded because she knows the bombing run is dangerous and wants to keep Louis from dying. Carl orders Louis to dump her out of the bomb bay before crossing.

Carl sends the southern-front scout Elle instructions, then prepares to travel the ten miles to that front by chariot and flatbed transports. Jamal, still without his replacement mobility harness, is ordered to stay behind for the FUPA's final defense. The three large cretins with Carl must also remain temporarily because the light transports cannot carry them. Clay-Ton is already on the northern front with Chris, continuing the friendship they formed when Clay-Ton served as Chris's bodyguard.

Randy, Todd, and the child-form Clint emerge with training spears and insist on joining the battle. Holger turns them back, reminding Clint that he has already died once and may never age because he is now a flesh golem. Carl then tries to attach a six-pack missile launcher to the Royal Chariot but the system rejects the upgrade because all Armor slots are filled. As the group finally prepares to depart, the Scavenger's Daughter patch flares again and Carl receives another Soul Poisoning warning, but he keeps it active because he believes they still need its power.

Carl reaches the Princess Posse's southern front as Dream artillery pounds the defenses. Thousands of protection-specialist mages maintain layered shields, fog, and counterspells while the enemy has superior numbers and artillery. The front has settled into an early stalemate, but casualties have already occurred. A distant Fill Hole spell suffocated several veterans, and a Prism scout used an Instant River scroll inside an escape tunnel before being killed while fleeing. Carl orders captured enemies kept alive and unconscious when practical, with dungeon-born NPCs separated from outside mercenaries because the NPCs may be turned and the mercenaries may have another use. Dangerous captives are to be killed, safely looted, preserved, and reported.

The battlefield has been heavily prepared. The opposing trenches are about 250 meters away across a trap-filled no-man's-land, and the Princess Posse has used thousands of Build Trench scrolls to create bunkers, hospitals, fallback positions, and interconnected trench systems. Justice Light's techniques continue hiding and protecting many of their traps. The defensive 102nd Bulwark is holding the line while the combat-heavy 106th Bloody Leeches, commanded by the former crawler Boomer, moves in as reinforcement.

The Reavers then launch roughly a thousand level-40 Juiced Rot Sticker Behemoths across the battlefield. The pets have been raised to trust their handlers, enlarged, infected with several contagious conditions including the Gurgles, and sent forward as living explosive weapons. Carl uses hobgoblin dynamite against the first wave, while Princess Posse mages raise an earth barrier that sends some of the rolling creatures airborne and stops the rest. Tran deploys the Frothing Tunnel Moles through prepared tunnels, and buried explosives destroy the trapped mass of behemoths, consuming defenses that had been intended for later use.

The attack still succeeds in spreading infection. Veterans suffering the Gurgles charge through the trench bleeding from their mouths and eyes. A level-56 Crisper named Kristen Cronin burns a hastily sealed trench section to stop them. Baroness Victory explains that the Gurgles is a highly contagious, incurable debuff long avoided by mutual agreement; infecting the pets before Phase One's magic restrictions is an established exploit rather than a new magical attack.

With the immediate biological assault contained and enemy artillery resuming, Carl decides not to wait for the next attack. The Princess Posse still has to account for about one hundred invisible Madness mercenaries and several armored vehicles. He tells Tran that it is time to launch their own counteroffensive.

Carl, Donut, Tran, and Colonel Boomer review the southern-front assault plan after the 106th Bloody Leeches takes position. Boomer is an early-season former crawler and level-62 Elven Legate whose class allows him to buff large groups. He survived by taking a tenth-floor deal, later worked as a sixth-floor merchant, became a prominent critic of the crawl, was banned from Crawl Con after threatening a show runner, and is currently wanted after a deadly waystation brawl. Tipid has placed him in command of the Bloody Leeches.

The Dream's artillery dominates the immediate map. Elle has identified roughly forty large trebuchets capable of striking anywhere in Princess Posse territory, dozens of shorter-range mobile trebuchets, fifty mounted mercenaries in reserve, and twenty apparently idle tanks. Boomer warns that the Dream's Epitome household guard consists of experienced real-world security forces, though the mounted troops currently visible do not appear to be that guard. The team also has to account for at least one hundred Madness troops that turned invisible. Boomer identifies the infiltration specialists as Monkeywrenchers and recalls a prior season in which twenty of them quickly captured both the Dreadnaught and Naga castles.

The enemy trench system is thinner than the Princess Posse's. It consists of three fallback lines without any known connecting tunnels, meaning a retreat would require troops to cross exposed ground. The first trench appears to contain mostly Prism NPCs and mercenaries, the second is lightly held, and the third contains officers and medical personnel. A smaller Madness contingent consists largely of troops inherited from the defeated Lemig Sortion. Few Reavers or Naga soldiers are visible, while the northern front accounts for many of the orcs, blobs, Dream troops, and other Madness forces. The missing Reaver and Naga strength remains a major uncertainty.

The planned attack also depends on allied NPC intelligence. Britney has effectively become the crawlers' liaison to Team Retribution, routing information through Juice Box and Arief of the Semeru. The original idea of using a massive digger against the Blood Sultanate is impractical because the Naga headquarters sits on rocky ground, so the plan instead relies on two changeling spies. The Naga castle is unusually close to Shanty Town, and its warlord has historically escaped before attackers reach the inner sanctum even when the faction loses its throne room. Carl and Donut understand that defeating the faction and actually catching its leader are separate problems.

With the Bloody Leeches, mages, and NPC participants all in position, Carl gives the order to proceed. Boomer lights his cigar, confirming the assault is ready to begin.

An eighteenth-edition Cookbook annotation from Ossie frames the coming attack around a simple principle: confusion creates fear even in otherwise steady enemies. Carl, Donut, Dong Quixote, Holger, Mongo, and the assault group wait in the southern trench under an unusually dense stack of protective buffs while enemy artillery deliberately wears down the dirt barrier left from the Rot Sticker defense. Imani arrives in time to add her powerful group buffs after helping prepare the Princess Posse's single trebuchet.

The trebuchet is loaded with Dazzlers, trap modules that combine blinding strobe lights, directional spotlights, and synchronized deafening music. Imani gives Donut and Mongo Total Ear Protection while the rest of the force relies on ear-protection potions or enchanted earplugs. Drick, Team Retribution's Dream-elf adjutant, appears beside Baroness Victory to observe because the NPC faction is participating in the operation.

The assault has several independent parts. Louis will fly Party Planner low across the enemy line and drop bombs immediately in front of the trenches. The bombs are intended to excavate a chain of craters, dump dirt onto the defenders, and clear traps and protection enhancements in front of the enemy position rather than simply destroy the trench. Elle will attack the anti-air batteries, Britney will coordinate the NPC component, and the Princess Posse trebuchet will saturate the breached section with Dazzlers. Tipid and Rosetta brought the core assault contingency from outside the dungeon, while Carl, Donut, Katia, Imani, Elle, Mordecai, and Victory developed the follow-on phase.

When Louis begins the bombing run, Donut orders the assault forward. Elle hits the first anti-air battery hard enough to topple it despite its protective spell, the trebuchet scatters fifty Dazzlers around the bomb craters, and the devices begin blasting Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the Name" loudly enough to cause hearing damage while flashing directly into enemy faces. Britney reports that allied spies have already breached the enemy's second trench, and Louis survives the bombing run despite taking hostile fire.

More than two thousand Princess Posse soldiers begin crossing No Man's Land under invisibility, magical obfuscation, illusionary doubles, and stacked shields. Before following, Carl asks Donut whether she is afraid. She admits she is, but says fear now feels more numb during the event and hits harder afterward. Carl, Donut, Imani, Mongo, and the rest of their squad then climb out of the trench and enter their first direct mass assault into enemy fire.

Carl enters No Man's Land amid near-total sensory chaos. Fog, artillery, poison-infused rocks, high-tech grenades, pulse fire, the Princess Posse's own Dazzlers, and constant casualty notifications make it difficult to see or orient. Donut and Mongo remain just off Carl's right side, while Imani repeatedly stops to aid wounded soldiers. The Scavenger's Daughter continues worsening Carl's Soul Poisoning as he runs.

A large magic-diffusion blast suddenly Deshrouds the attackers, removing their temporary war protections, illusions, obfuscation, and ear protection while leaving the Dazzlers active. For a brief moment Carl can clearly see the enemy front: dungeon-born NPCs armed with bows and spears are mixed with outside mercenaries carrying advanced guns and illuminated armor. Many are incapacitated by the light and noise, but soldiers with sealed helmets remain effective, including a team operating a heavy pulse weapon that cuts through the exposed Princess Posse assault.

Carl knocks Donut and Mongo behind cover and throws a full-strength hob-lobber toward the heavy gun. He receives no kill notification, but the weapon stops firing. Imani restores Donut and Mongo's ear protection, the Princess Posse rebuilds its layers of smoke, illusions, buffs, and debuffs, and Carl accidentally sends a general war-chat order to keep advancing. A pulse bolt then destroys his tech shield, and his worsening Soul Poisoning adds a new Post Coital Blues effect.

The attackers reach the line of craters created by Party Planner's bombing run. On Boomer's signal, Carl switches to proximity chat and uses a Build Trench scroll from inside one crater. He rotates the new trench to intersect the enemy line and accepts the system's warnings about joining an existing trench at a higher elevation. The resulting passage connects directly into the enemy trench, causing a Saccathian soldier above it to fall into the new channel.

Other Princess Posse teams repeat the same maneuver from neighboring craters. The tactic exploits the fact that Build Trench is craft magic rather than offensive magic, allowing the scrolls to cut through many enemy protections. Although the exploit has been known for years, Faction Wars armies rarely use it because the scrolls are normally expensive; the crawlers possess unusually large numbers from the previous floor. As enemy soldiers converge on the new breaches, Carl activates Daughter's Kiss on his right foot, orders nearby troops to take cover, leaps toward the fallen Saccathian, and lands on the soldier's chest. The chapter ends before the result of the strike is shown.

Carl wakes after roughly twenty-five seconds of unconsciousness caused by Post Nut Clarity, a Soul Poisoning debuff triggered when he used Daughter's Kiss. His attack destroyed part of the enemy trench and buried nearby allies in dirt, but the Princess Posse has seized the first trench. Team Retribution's two spies have also completed the second phase of the trap: they filled the middle fallback trench with water, chemically transformed that water into acid, and concealed the entire trench beneath an illusion.

Boomer takes command of the assault and orders the Princess Posse not to press so hard that the trapped defenders surrender. He wants the enemy to believe the fight has settled into a stalemate long enough for the acid-trench deception to keep working. As Dazzler salvos continue landing between the captured first trench and the fallback line, Elle disables the second anti-air battery and Louis lands Party Planner for Carl's separate mission. Carl gives the remaining assault force a final order to break the trapped enemy before leaving.

At Party Planner, Carl discovers Bonnie operating a door gun and learns Donut gave her the final Scout slot while he was undergoing dream therapy. The changeling scout listed as Gangue is actually Skarn, another child Carl met on the fifth floor who has learned enough shapeshifting to conceal his age. Carl is furious that Bonnie and Skarn are in combat, but postpones the argument. Imani stays behind to treat casualties while Carl, Donut, Mongo, Rend, Louis, Bonnie, and Skarn fly low toward the Prism headquarters along the route cleared by Elle.

The Prism headquarters is almost undefended because D'Nadia committed nearly all of her troops to the front and expected officers did not arrive after quarantine. Carl and Donut quietly kill the three exterior guards, remove the nearby traps, and enter. Rend goes in first, followed by Carl's hunter-seeker automatons. The interface shows three guards, Empress D'Nadia in the throne room, and an adjutant.

Baroness Victory then appears and reports the scale of the slaughter at the southern trenches. She explains that Team Retribution's spies used a water-alteration scroll to turn the water-filled fallback trench into acid beneath an illusion, causing retreating soldiers to jump blindly into it. Victory is disturbed enough to suggest that the definition of offensive magic may need revision. Carl remains focused on D'Nadia, puts on the Ring of Divine Suffering, and calls into the throne room that the Empress has visitors.

Carl and Donut enter the Prism throne room after hunter-seeker automatons deal with most of D'Nadia's remaining guards. Two off-world guards are killed and a sai rhinoceros NPC is knocked unconscious; Carl binds the rhino rather than killing him and leaves Rend to watch him. The system warns that although occupying the throne room for six hours would defeat the Prism, the capture timer cannot begin while multiple factions are present.

D'Nadia is protected by multiple tech shields and deliberately keeps herself slightly injured so Carl cannot use the Ring of Divine Suffering, which requires a target at full health. Carl and Donut use smoke, nonmagical banger spheres, and Donut's Clockwork Triplicate Mongos to strip away D'Nadia's shields, weapons, and elaborate gown. During the fight, Carl recognizes her adjutant Nihit as the former reporter he once stabbed in the throat with a pen. Victory and Nihit stand together as neutral adjutants and observe.

When the clockwork Mongos finally break through D'Nadia's defenses, Carl has them expose the knife she has been using to maintain her injury. He heals D'Nadia to full health and immediately marks her with the Ring of Divine Suffering. The system identifies Intelligence as her highest stat and gives the mark thirty seconds to form. Carl orders Donut to keep D'Nadia alive and injured while the mark completes.

D'Nadia appeals to her prior relationship with Carl and Donut, reminding them that she once sponsored Donut. Carl instead remembers D'Nadia telling Tsarina Signet that Signet and her family were not real, as well as the earlier moment when Carl briefly believed D'Nadia might be one of the better people in the Syndicate before learning that she had long sought a Faction Wars position. His anger escalates until he tells Donut he has changed his mind and wants to kill D'Nadia himself.

Donut refuses and repeatedly tells Carl to step back and calm down. When the mark fully forms, Carl recognizes that he is standing at an emotional edge and deliberately backs away. He gives Donut control of the execution. The chapter ends before D'Nadia dies, with Donut calmly telling the Empress that Mongo wants to express his disappointment over how she judged him at the pet show.

The fully formed Ring of Divine Suffering mark grants Carl five Intelligence points, and he immediately receives the Gavrilo Princip achievement for the broader political consequences of Empress D'Nadia's death. The achievement explains that D'Nadia was the last living heir of a small but powerful trading dynasty and that her death and bankruptcy will trigger major probate disputes. The system separately gives the actual kill credit to Mongo, declares the Prism defeated, and transfers all Prism assets to the Princess Posse.

The victory creates a new territorial problem. The Princess Posse now owns non-adjoining land, cannot dismantle the captured Prism headquarters, and can lose that territory if the vulnerable throne room is taken. Ten heavily armed gnoll mercenaries then rush into the room. Eight have automatically transferred to the Princess Posse, while Lockjaw remains with the Madness and Mange remains with the Dream. The eight new recruits carry a temporary red status similar to Conscription, allowing the Princess Posse to compel orders and preventing them from directly attacking officers.

Corporal Pillbox, leader of the newly converted gnolls, convinces Lockjaw and Mange to lower their weapons. He explains that the ten gnolls were originally one unit guarding communications equipment on Earth's moon and remained friends despite being assigned to different Faction Wars teams. Pillbox asks Carl not to kill Lockjaw and Mange. Carl removes the Ring of Divine Suffering while everyone watches, then promises that none of the gnolls will die by Princess Posse hands if the two outsiders disarm and cooperate. He orders the new recruits to restrain their friends if necessary and has the group loot the Prism headquarters while keeping Lockjaw behind for questioning.

Boomer reports that captured NPC mercenaries have accepted Princess Posse colors and suggests pushing directly toward the Blood Sultanate castle. Carl refuses and orders the southern force to take the new recruits, separate out off-worlders, loot what it can, and retreat to Princess Posse lines. Nihit leaves for the eighteenth floor to join Panford, while Victory reports that all remaining warlords, including Juice Box and Ferdinand, are scheduled for a live roundtable the next day and that hostilities traditionally pause while they are away.

Victory then heads north, where Florin reports that the Princess Posse line may break within hours and is preparing to fall back toward the castle. Carl orders a return to the northern front. Before leaving, he discovers another consequence of the five Intelligence points: his total base-stat count now exceeds Donut's, making him party leader of the Royal Court of Princess Donut. Donut performs exaggerated outrage over the change, but their conversation turns serious when she tells Carl the Ring is changing him and that he frightened her during the confrontation with D'Nadia.

Carl refuses to discard the Ring yet because he believes he still needs its power, but he asks Donut to keep him grounded. Donut does not answer. The chapter ends with the unresolved danger of the Ring hanging over them as the restrained rhinoceros wakes outside and Rend appears to be gnawing on him.

Carl and Donut leave the Prism throne room still arguing lightly over Carl becoming party leader, only to find Rend trying to eat the boot of the captured sai rhinoceros guard. The guard, Toyotomi, has automatically transferred to the Princess Posse with the rest of the Prism assets. His system description identifies him as a level-70 Outpost Guard Mercenary Leader whose squad was destroyed during the Desperado Club disaster involving Minge. The loss broke his confidence, and D'Nadia had been forcing him to maintain an Edifice Shield on a building larger than his class was designed to protect.

Toyotomi initially asks to remain behind and defend the Prism headquarters until he dies because he believes he is useless elsewhere. Carl instead recognizes that Toyotomi's outpost-specific defensive abilities could help Shanty Town and assigns him there. When Carl checks with Li Jun, Li Jun reports an unexpected visitor: Agatha came looking specifically for Carl, could not be recruited, tried and failed to enter Larracos, and then wandered toward the bar where Lucia Mar has been staying.

Zev immediately contacts Carl with a direct warning relayed from Prime Minister Glory and the Syndicate Council: Carl must not interact with Agatha. Zev cannot explain why the warning has suddenly become urgent. She says the AI has apparently removed its protections from the residuals and almost all of them are dead, but Agatha remains alive and appears to retain the AI's favor. Carl points out that Agatha is a residual like the entity he met at the Florida shelter, while Zev insists he should ignore her if she approaches.

As Carl traps the abandoned Prism headquarters, he reflects on Paulie, Orren, and the residual conflict. He understands that Paulie's faction wants to end the crawl by provoking the system AI into resisting its captors, potentially forcing a failsafe or making future crawls too dangerous. With Mantis scientists reportedly developing more controllable replacement AIs, the current season may be the residuals' final chance to act. Carl still does not understand the deeper goals of either residual faction or why Agatha's kind differs from Paulie's, and the Syndicate leader's personal intervention convinces him that something important has changed.

Carl then turns the captured throne room into a political problem for the remaining Bloc factions. He leaves Lockjaw, the Madness mercenary, alone inside the throne room under orders to remain for six hours, starting a timer that would transfer the former Prism territory to the Madness if nobody removes him. Mange, the Dream mercenary, is sent back toward his own territory. Carl is not committed to keeping the isolated Prism land; he hopes forcing the Bloc to decide whether to let the Madness gain a third territory or dislodge Lockjaw will create friction between Architect Houston and leaders such as Epitome Tagg.

With the northern front still in danger and the Naga operation not yet ready, Carl and Donut abandon the Prism headquarters. Donut asks who comes next. Carl decides the immediate priority is the northern enemy and answers that it is "blob-hunting season."

The newly inherited Prism mercenaries cannot fit aboard Party Planner, so Carl sends them by ground transport northwest into Shanty Town, collecting additional transferred outpost personnel along the route. Li Jun and Li Na are instructed to separate dungeon-born NPCs from off-world mercenaries, with the latter requiring special handling before Carl will trust them. Carl remains worried about Shanty Town because it borders every faction territory, has no throne room, and can be taken only by killing him, although Larracos's defenses discourage enemies from attacking it while the Princess Posse remains active.

Carl and Donut use a saferoom near the former Prism headquarters to return rapidly to their base through the doggie-door system. Once there, they discover that wartime saferoom blood-bar restrictions are active again. Donut can remain inside for only about half an hour, while Carl's full bar gives him roughly eight hours. After quickly cleaning up, Carl moves to the war map and reviews the entire campaign.

The southern force has pulled back after destroying artillery and filling captured trenches. Tran's 102nd Bulwark resumes the southern defense while Boomer moves most of the 106th Bloody Leeches north. Florin's 101st Crocodiles, the 105th Scream Warriors, and the 103rd Recon Legionnaires are already trying to hold the northern line. Tipid's 104th Naughty Little Piggies defend the castle, and Li Na's 107th White Dragons remain spread across Shanty Town. Carl briefly reflects on how close he came to resembling his father during the confrontation with D'Nadia.

Florin then reports that the northern line is collapsing under a major enemy push and asks Carl to redirect the 106th toward the castle. Almost immediately, Carl's silent alarm on the home anti-air battery triggers and the battery is destroyed. Boomer reports unidentified low-flying transports headed toward the castle, Tipid declares that enemies are already inside the base, and a second sabotage explosion destroys the hangar bay.

Donut discovers one infiltration route. An extra door has appeared in the shared situational saferoom corridor, giving the Reaver team access through the same doggie-door mechanic Carl had just considered using for a future sneak attack. Because the bait-shop saferoom now sits inside the expanded castle, the Princess Posse accidentally created a direct route into its own stronghold for any enemy participant who had previously accessed that saferoom. Carl orders Bomo and Sledge to hold the door.

The aerial attackers remain harder to explain. Carl uses Ping and sees no visible enemy dots inside the castle, but notices that a mage named Reid Gunn appears active on the map even though the casualty feed lists him as dead. When nearby friendly dots begin dying, Carl realizes the defenders have been infiltrated by Valtay Gondii brain worms. These are not slow infiltrators like the parasite that once controlled Chris; the host is already dead while the worm operates the body.

Carl warns Rosetta and then encounters Bucket Boy and a crawler named Charles Andrew carrying a badly wounded former crawler into the castle. The casualty list already marks Charles as dead. Carl immediately tackles and kills him despite Bucket Boy's confusion. A black-and-white Valtay worm named Goldblum emerges from the corpse, confirming Carl's theory, and Carl stomps it to death.

Carl sends a warlord-wide order for everyone to cross-reference nearby allies against the casualty list. With the northern force falling back, hostile forces inside and above the base, Reaver access through the saferoom, and brain-worm-controlled bodies among the defenders, the battle becomes a defense of the castle itself. The chapter ends with Carl issuing one final order: unleash Tina.

A fourteenth-edition Cookbook note from Priestly frames battle as a moment when fear and desire become impossible to hide. At the Princess Posse castle, only a few hundred defenders are available because Tipid's 104th Naughty Little Piggies are scattered across the surrounding defenses and the Beefy Boys support mages have been badly hit. The castle is under simultaneous pressure from invisible Madness Monkeywrenchers, Reaver paratroopers massing below the hill, and friendly mages whose corpses have been taken over by Valtay Gondii worms. The larger northern enemy force is also bypassing Florin and will reach the base within roughly half an hour.

The defenders hold the single surviving castle entrance behind fan-shaped magical shields and a One Way barrier that stops grenades but not pulse fire. Donut uses the heat mode of her glasses to locate tech-cloaked Monkeywrenchers that anti-magic defenses cannot detect, allowing Carl and the crossbowmen to pick them off. The attackers wearing Madness masks are not necessarily Viceroys; at least one is a soother mercenary and another is a Dreadnaught using the disguise.

Inside the castle, Rosetta reports that the Gondii have taken Lonnie, leader of the Beefy Boys. From outside, the worm-controlled Lonnie is systematically disabling the castle's stacked interior protections, threatening to open the Reaver saferoom door for bombs or automatons. Tipid explains that Gondii can kill a host, animate the corpse within seconds, absorb memories over time, overclock bodies, and even jump between hosts. Carl realizes Lonnie's memories may eventually expose Justice Light and the Princess Posse's final defensive plan.

Imani returns with reinforcements through Shanty Town's doggie door and explains that the castle's Extreme Focus effect is amplifying Dexterity and causing normally talkative people to become manic and hyperverbal. Meanwhile Carl repeatedly demands that Tina be brought into the fight. Kiwi refuses because Tina is a child and points out Carl's hypocrisy after he removed Bonnie and Skarn from combat.

Carl nearly overrides Kiwi, reasoning that they may all die without Tina, but stops himself when he recognizes that survival also means preserving what they are willing to become. He deletes the order and decides the choice should remain Kiwi's. Before he can send that decision, Donut independently orders Tina into battle. Tina charges from the castle, can apparently detect the invisible enemies, and immediately draws the concentrated Reaver fire.

Donut then takes command of the counterattack. She rallies the defenders, orders only the Alpha card reserves deployed while preserving the rest for the approaching main force, and sends Tina downhill into the Reaver position. Carl and Imani recognize both how naturally Donut has grown into the warlord role and how disturbing that transformation is. The chapter ends with Donut leading the Princess Posse into a mass charge behind Tina.

Carl climbs onto the barracks roof to maintain a view of the battlefield while Tina charges the Reaver position below. The enemy force consists largely of heavily cybernetic Reaver Security Force mercenaries rather than ordinary faction troops. Carl examines Gunnery Sergeant X2, a level-53 cyborg drop trooper with twenty-three enhancements whose long Reaver service has progressively replaced his biological body. The AI explains that these soldiers are experienced colonial enforcers using only the light version of their power armor. Tina kills X2 as the Reavers form a shielded semicircle with heavy weapons.

Donut deploys the Alpha card reserves while holding the remaining auxiliary cards for the main enemy force. Summoned totems and monsters join the battle, including a talkative 1970s Death Cult leader. An invisible Dreadnaught named J IronFjord then sneaks onto the roof behind Carl with a dagger. Carl catches him, knocks away his mask, and beats him to death with his bare hands. The kill feeds the Scavenger's Daughter patch, but Carl does not use the patch to cause the later battlefield explosion.

Jamal arrives without his replacement legs and throws himself into the melee. Carl's Find Trap skill then detects a cluster of enemy automatons carrying satchel explosives with proximity triggers. He uses Tripper to activate the enemy traps. The resulting blast is enormous, destroying the automaton concentration, knocking down the Reaver cyborgs, stripping Tina's shields, and flooring many Princess Posse veterans. No friendly deaths appear in Carl's feed, and the current crawlers and several NPCs recover first and overwhelm the surviving cyborgs.

Donut orders the defenders to find the remaining worm-controlled mages. Lonnie, the final possessed mage, flees uphill toward the castle. Carl activates Daughter's Kiss and jumps from the roof onto him. Afterward, Rosetta confirms that all of the compromised mages have been eliminated and that the hostile saferoom door has disappeared. She and Carl agree that the saferoom connection must be isolated, permanently guarded, or destroyed because the Reavers may be able to recreate the access.

The Princess Posse has stopped the enemy beachhead, but the victory leaves the base damaged and exhausted. Boomer's 106th and scattered members of Tipid's 104th arrive as reinforcements, while the 105th pressures the rear of the enemy advance and helps Florin's 101st break out of its fallback position. The main force is still only ten or fifteen minutes away, with armor, superior numbers, and likely Prince Stalwart of the Skull Empire leading the orcs.

As the defenders rebuild anti-air defenses, Samantha returns covered in dirt after Louis dumped her from Party Planner. Tina, Mongo, and Rend pick through the destroyed cyborgs while Kiwi tries to get Tina back inside. Samantha asks whether she missed another party. Carl tells her the fight they just survived was only the preview and that the real battle is about to begin.

Mordecai urges Carl to disable the bait-shop saferoom entrance immediately. With the Reavers already having exploited an enemy doggie door into the castle, leaving the connection active would let an opponent potentially pass something catastrophic, even a nuclear weapon, straight through the door. The Princess Posse's northern enemies are now massed only about half a kilometer away: tens of thousands of orcs, slimes, Reavers, mounted elves, basher trolls, gnolls, and other mercenaries, with armored reinforcements still moving up behind them.

At the center of the Bone Clan contingent, Donut realizes the mounted orc is not Prince Stalwart but King Rust, Stalwart and Maestro's father. Victory confirms that Rust has unexpectedly entered Faction Wars as a war chief rather than a co-warlord. He rides a swamp yak named Gonk and has reached level 78. Donut's new Targeting ability reveals that Rust carries many spells, including a level-15 Protective Shell, Tripper, and Puddle Jumper. Tipid suspects Rust built those abilities by using a Ring of Divine Suffering for stats and levels and a Necklace of Indelible Woe, an item that trades one of the wearer's spells for one of a killed crawler's strongest spells. Tipid explains that the necklace fell out of favor because participants farmed crawlers to power it.

The Princess Posse uses the remaining time before the siege to strip supplies from the guild and purchase emergency base upgrades. Donut argues for a mobile anti-air weapon and for conspicuous new banners designed to provoke Rust into attacking before his armor arrives. Rosetta, working against her saferoom blood-bar limit, pushes the group to finish quickly. Carl also reflects on Donut's recent changes: she is increasingly capable and composed as Warlord Donut during crises while becoming more stubborn and volatile once the immediate danger passes.

Justice Light confirms he can continue his trap work without Carl's sapper table. Carl notes the eighth-edition Cookbook author's obsessive habits and the trauma that reshaped him during his post-crawl indenture. Mordecai and Tipid then settle on a compromise for the bait shop: collapse the front enough to deactivate the saferoom connection but leave it repairable for a true emergency, while guarding it heavily against Fix potions or Emergency Repair scrolls. Justice Light says he has layered contingencies and tells Carl that danger lies in what the enemy cannot see.

As the group prepares to leave the guild and sever the saferoom access, Boomer reports that King Rust is approaching alone. Victory confirms that Rust has requested an official registered parley, which will place Carl and Rust inside protected bubbles where neither can attack or use chat during the meeting. Donut immediately decides to meet Rust on equal visual footing and orders Kibben to prepare the howdah.

Kibben prepares Donut for the parley by placing her in Ferdinand's ornate howdah atop Simoom, the gentle albino rhinoceros currently stabled with Tina. Mongo and Rend both react jealously to Donut using another mount. Kibben reassures Carl that Rend is a special belly acher and recalls the creature's prior incarnation, while Donut struggles with the very simple physical controls needed to make Simoom move.

Carl and Donut descend from the castle through the Princess Posse's layered defensive positions. The defenders have bunkers, heavy guns, underground earthworks, and Tripper-resistant traps positioned exactly where the enemy has begun massing. Their preparations are extensive but Carl remains unsure they can withstand the much larger army. Florin then reports that his force has stopped the enemy armor column and captured two Operatic Collective vehicles called Weepers. The success also means the enemy knows its armored support has been cut off, making an earlier assault more likely. Florin is moving back toward the castle while Katia and Bautista keep a western escape corridor toward Shanty Town open.

King Rust waits alone on Gonk. Carl tells Donut their priority is to keep Rust talking long enough for reinforcements and preparations to develop, then provoke him into attacking angry. During the approach, the former Prism throne room changes hands yet again, this time back to the Dream, resetting the six-hour occupation clock while the territory technically remains Princess Posse land.

The Bone Clan adjutant appears beside Rust: His Honorable Judge Deng Bao, a grixist and one of the galaxy's senior judges. Victory explains that Deng serves as adjutant for the previous year's Faction Wars winner, is genuinely impartial, and once taught her galactic taxation law. She also clarifies the registered-parley protections: Carl and Rust each receive a moving shield, saferoom-style rules prevent physical or magical harm, chat is disabled while the meeting is active, and the protections end only after the participants separate by roughly one hundred meters.

As Carl and Donut finally close the distance to Rust, Donut looks through the howdah curtain and notices something unexpected. King Rust appears to be crying.

Inside the registered parley bubble, Carl and Donut find King Rust openly crying, muttering, and behaving with a mixture of rage, grief, and resignation. Rust dismisses the adjutants so he can speak privately and tells Carl that his daughter, Princess Formidable, has seized a Skull Empire cruiser. She is roughly five hours from the monitoring station orbiting Venus and has publicly announced that she intends to enter the station and manually activate the system failsafe. According to Rust, triggering it would cause a catastrophic reaction in the system's star and kill everyone in the solar system.

Formidable believes the current system AI's instability can spread to the central system and cause a civilization-ending collapse. Rust rejects the theory as unsupported Nebular speculation, but Formidable is convinced. He explains that the consequences of her action would extend far beyond Earth: the Skull Empire and Dream would destabilize, billions or trillions could lose access to food and infrastructure, the Reavers could exploit the power vacuum, and interstellar war would likely follow.

Rust asks Carl to make a public plea on behalf of Earth's surviving population because Formidable has a soft spot for the people used as crawl "seeds" and is no longer listening to her father. He also reveals why the supposedly impenetrable monitoring station is vulnerable: the Skull Empire manufactures the satellites and secretly installs backdoors in its hardware. Formidable has now exposed those backdoors to the entire Syndicate. The station lies outside the crawl AI's control zone, so Rust believes the AI cannot simply prevent her approach.

Carl privately recognizes the decisive fact Rust does not know. The failsafe is already inert because Carl himself selected Disconnect Containment at the gas station, disabling the containment unit and its failsafe controls. He nevertheless continues negotiating because Rust's army still threatens the Princess Posse and because millions of people remain on Earth's surface.

The final agreement is simple. Rust will order the Bloc armies to withdraw toward their own lines, and the Princess Posse will not attack during that retreat. Carl will make the requested plea to Formidable. Once the parley ends, Carl quietly tells Donut that he expects Formidable to press the button but that it will not work. He wants to let Rust's forces disperse before deciding whether to strike them during withdrawal.

That plan lasts only moments. As Rust rides back toward his army, Rosetta erupts from hiding beneath the ground using a tech-based invisibility cloak, lands behind him on Gonk, loops a whip around his neck, and decapitates him in a single practiced motion. After several seconds of stunned silence, tens of thousands of Bloc troops roar and charge.

As the enemy begins advancing after King Rust's death, Carl runs toward the body to secure it before retreating. Rosetta is already working over the corpse with a handheld financial device. She needs Rust's family ring, a retinal scan from his severed head, and additional authorization to access his funds. Carl inventories both the head and the body while enemy troops fire into the smoke.

Rosetta uses the device to move Rust's money onto a credit chit while Carl, Donut, Simoom, and the dead king's swamp yak Gonk remain exposed. A powerful enemy dispel then clears the smoke and simultaneously disrupts the concealed roof over one of Team Retribution's large underground dwarf transit tunnels. The ground disappears beneath them, dropping Carl, Donut, Rosetta, Simoom, and Gonk into the tunnel among Semeru dwarves who had been positioned below.

The dwarves rapidly restore the tunnel roof and fight enemy war mages who also fall through the opening. A large explosion then rocks the underground passage. Immediately afterward, the system announces that Warlord Hortense Leadership Unit of the Operatic Collective has died in what may have been an accident or fragging incident. The Operatic Collective is eliminated, and because its defeat is self-contained, all of its assets transfer to its nearest ally, the Bone Clan.

While Carl and Donut try to understand the sudden battlefield reversal, Rosetta completes her own operation. The Colloid Bank device confirms that the transfer has been approved. Rosetta then collapses in tears, suggesting that the financial theft and Rust's death carry significance beyond simple battlefield looting. Imani reports that the enemy army is retreating after suffering heavy casualties from the unexplained blast.

Donut mentions Princess Formidable's threat, which is news to Rosetta, but Carl is interrupted before he can explain. The liaison system forcibly transfers him away from the battlefield. The chapter ends as Carl arrives at the Desperado Club.

Carl materializes in the liaison office still covered in King Rust's blood. The abrupt transition from continuous combat leaves him nauseated and emotionally unsteady. Rust is dead, the Operatic Collective has fallen, and Carl had direct control over neither event. He recognizes that Rust's death will have enormous galactic consequences, but he also feels pride that Rosetta, another Cookbook author, was the one who killed him.

Orren is already arguing remotely with senior Syndicate officials. From the conversation, Carl learns that Rosetta successfully converted Rust's funds to a credit chit and then transferred the money elsewhere through Colloid Bank. The amount involved is on the order of billions of credits. Orren also references fighting among spacecraft in orbit and repeatedly insists that the theft is secondary to a much larger survival crisis.

After ending the call with the Syndicate prime minister, Orren tells Carl that Harbinger, other liaisons, and the entire Syndicate Council are observing. Their real concern is Carl's private statement to Donut that he believes Princess Formidable's plan to manually activate the system failsafe will not work. Carl realizes they have been monitoring his private messages and refuses to explain for free.

Carl demands an end to the crawl, freedom for every surviving crawler, use of Syndicate resources to rebuild Earth, an end to hostile actions against humans outside the dungeon, and permanent Syndicate withdrawal from the system. Orren does not accept or grant those demands. He says that anyone with the power to do so would now agree, but that the AI would never permit it and that the immediate issue has become survival rather than money or politics.

Orren reveals how much the Syndicate has reconstructed. They know Carl received an illegal non-Valtay implant, know when he activated it, and have recovered the hidden conversation with the residual. They also know Carl did not use the interface to activate the failsafe. What they do not understand is what Carl did instead or why he is so confident Princess Formidable cannot trigger the catastrophe.

Orren then activates his ball and creates a zero zone outside the system AI's influence. Carl's menus vanish and several previously hidden observers become visible before Orren mutes them. Orren says they have only minutes before Harbinger intervenes and asks whether Carl can undo what he did, whether he can still trigger the failsafe himself, or whether he can restore Princess Formidable's ability to do so. Orren explains that Carl's remark, "Welcome to the party, pals," led them to uncover his residual encounter; Harbinger subsequently ordered Carl killed, but the AI intervened to protect him.

Carl refuses to deliberately help them kill everyone in the system. Before Orren can finish explaining what he believes is truly at stake, Growler Gary, the hyena bartender Carl knew from an earlier floor, appears in the doorway carrying vodka and says he must intervene.

Carl quickly realizes the apparent Growler Gary is not the bartender acting on his own but an avatar of the system AI using Gary's body or likeness. Orren confirms the identification and is alarmed that the AI can use an NPC from an earlier floor. Gary then reveals that Orren's zero zones have only ever worked because the AI allowed them to, making clear that Orren's attempt to isolate Carl from the system never actually placed the conversation beyond the AI's control.

Orren admits that he supported Princess Formidable's attempt to stop the AI once the Syndicate realized Carl's interface action had interfered with the failsafe. Gary treats the confrontation as another game and says he enjoyed letting Carl install the interface, but when Carl asks whether pressing the fuse button would actually have worked, Gary refuses to answer. He also confirms that Harbinger has been sent to remove both Carl and Orren and says he is warning Harbinger not to harm them outside the confines of the game.

Gary ends the zero zone, restoring Carl's menus and strength, and then demonstrates the reach of his control by teleporting Princess Formidable directly from her ship into Orren's office. Her information box reveals that King Rust's death has made Stalwart the new king and pushed Stalwart's six children ahead of Formidable in the succession. Gary tells her that Rosetta killed Rust in revenge and that Carl has Rust's severed head in his inventory.

Orren interprets the teleportation as proof that the AI's control now extends beyond Earth and likely all the way to the star, meaning the system failsafe has been disabled. Gary confirms Orren's conclusion but refuses to disclose his broader intentions, saying only that he is not planning to destroy the solar system. He also reveals that he left the Venus satellite station unlocked and wants to see what Formidable's crew chooses to do.

Because Gary will not return Formidable to her ship or insert her into Faction Wars, he gives her four destinations: death, the Scolopendra Club, backstage at the Pineapple Cabaret, or Earth's surface. She chooses the surface and is teleported away. The chapter ends with Gary remarking that he hopes she knows how to swim.

Orren asks whether the AI's escape from containment changes the Syndicate's other agreements with the dungeon. Gary says the game will continue, but he is still angry that Orren supported Princess Formidable's attempt to stop him and does not commit to preserving every other arrangement. Instead, he says he has a personal conundrum and wants advice.

The AI abruptly summons Donut into the office. Carl warns her with their three-tap signal, but his message interface will not open. Gary explains that the real Growler Gary was on a key hold and regenerated after each death on the fourth floor. He then frames his problem as a relationship metaphor. He likes a woman who teaches him new things and is liked by his family, but he has discovered troubling information about her past. Her supposedly dead former boyfriend is actually imprisoned. Orren adds that the woman resembles Agatha, and Gary reacts angrily when Donut strays too far from the metaphor.

Gary further explains that the imprisoned man's older former girlfriend is also communicating with him indirectly and giving him advice that makes him stronger. He suspects she wants him to kill the imprisoned man. The two women hate each other, yet Gary thinks they may ultimately want the same result. Donut advises him to judge actions rather than words, communicate directly, and avoid being used. She says that if many people want the imprisoned man dead, Gary should first determine why and stay out of the conflict unless he has no choice.

Gary accepts Donut's advice. He declares that the game will continue as planned, that the rules will be followed, and that Orren should return to work. The AI then relinquishes the Gary avatar. The actual Growler Gary wakes on the floor with the Shitfaced debuff and is now level 175. Disoriented, he asks, "Rory? Where am I?" before teleporting away, leaving Carl, Donut, and Orren stunned.

After the system AI relinquishes Growler Gary's body, Orren asks Carl directly whether he deliberately helped the AI escape its containment. Carl refuses to answer. Orren says the distinction may no longer matter and fears that the result could be centuries of chaos, with history remembering him as the liaison who allowed it to happen. He asks Carl and Donut to keep the encounter quiet, but Donut has already been recounting events over chat and the Syndicate Council itself watched the confrontation.

The Faction Wars map changes while Carl is in the liaison office. The Former Prism castle is ceded to the Dream, while both the Bone Clan and the Dream leave the Bloc. The remaining Bloc consists of the Blood Sultanate, the Madness, and the Reavers, while Team Retribution and the Princess Posse remain allied. Carl interprets the sudden moves as evidence that word has already spread that the failsafe will not destroy the system.

Carl also catches up on a private exchange between Donut and the newly crowned King Stalwart. Stalwart demands King Rust's signet ring, body, and stolen fortune. Donut taunts him with false claims that Rust's hide has become a bathroom rug and reminds him that Rust considered him a disappointment. The exchange ends with Stalwart threatening Donut and Donut mocking his loss of wealth. Donut then admits that she is worried about the Skull Empire's war mages once the current protections fall, and Carl tells her they can only handle one fight at a time.

Orren finally returns Carl and Donut to base. Colonel Boomer reports that Florin's forces are still pushing the retreating enemy north, the southern front is quiet, and the battlefield is being stripped for usable equipment. The apparent Weeper explosion that destroyed the Operatic force was powerful enough to penetrate its own anti-explosive defenses, so Carl decides the captured Weepers should be treated cautiously. The castle's magical defenses are also badly weakened after the Gondii attack, and the Princess Posse remains short of mages.

Boomer reviews the remaining unaffiliated or missing crawlers, including Burcu's group, which appears to have been conscripted by the Madness, and Osvaldo's Team Flamengo, which is hiding in the woods. He then says it may be time to move on the Operatic castle. This is coded language for Operation: Snake Pit, the planned attempt to eliminate the naga faction. Carl answers with their own code that the attack must come when the enemy least expects it. With Katia reporting that she is almost back at base, Carl recognizes that the operation must begin now if they are to have any chance of saving both Katia and Donut.

While Donut reports construction progress at base, Carl confirms that he cannot benefit from wearing two Rings of Divine Suffering at once and that two such rings cannot mark the same target on this floor. He then begins opening the remaining loot from his 1914 box and encounters a disturbing Special Edition spellbook that has centipede-like legs, leaks black fluid, cries, and begs him not to read it.

The book teaches Run, Little Günter, Run at level five. The spell summons a one-health child-like hominid that stores the effects of the attack used to activate it, then runs toward a designated target or away in a random direction. The stored attack triggers when Günter reaches the target, times out, or is killed by a second attack. Higher levels improve its duration, speed, cooldown, and mana efficiency, with later levels allowing multiple Günters. Carl immediately sees potential for using it to carry powerful attacks such as Daughter's Kiss away from himself and eventually learns the spell despite the book's protests.

At the same time, Katia continues charging Donut's tiara. Three more jewels activate, bringing the total to twenty-three and adding Constitution, Dodge, and Intelligence bonuses. She then prepares a tattoo using ink made from Li Na's freely given blood. Katia explains the difference from Li Jun's injury: because Li Na willingly contributed the blood, she loses only five levels temporarily and retains the copied skill. The level-thirteen skill requires a large tattoo, and a well-made, thematically appropriate design may persist for the rest of the floor or even outperform the original version.

Carl chooses his right arm for the tattoo and asks for a chain shaped like a dragon. Their discussion also establishes why Edgar cannot perform the tattoo himself: he is already scouting naga territory for Operation: Snake Pit. His level-fifteen Part of the Background skill makes him an unusually effective scout, and his Sense Movement skill can detect movement inside structures, including invisible and non-corporeal movement, which will be critical to the coming raid.

Later, Zev announces that the warlord council will proceed despite the Syndicate Council's attempt to cancel it because the AI is insisting that normal game structures continue. The meeting will be broadcast live from the production facility, with the hostile warlords placed in separate randomized rooms. Juice Box cannot physically enter because protections bar dungeon-born entities, so she will attend virtually, while Ferdinand is permitted to appear in person. As Carl begins teleporting to the meeting, Mordecai and Mistress Tiatha arrive carrying potion balls and wire for the parallel plan. Operation: Snake Pit has officially begun.

Carl and Donut arrive at the production facility with their menus disabled. Donut immediately criticizes Carl's new right-arm tattoo despite the system rating Katia's work as expert quality. Their argument about the base's lack of showers and bathrooms exposes a larger tactical problem: closing the saferoom has separated them and strained the base, but the separation is also necessary for Operation: Snake Pit. While the Blood Sultanate's warlord is kept occupied at the council, Carl's allies are supposed to infiltrate naga territory and make their movements look like preparations for an offensive into the former Operatic lands.

Ferdinand then appears in a panic and is subjected, along with Carl and Donut, to a security search by gnoll guards. Donut identifies one guard as Neelii and persuades Ferdinand to cooperate. Zev arrives afterward and brings news that immediately eclipses the meeting preparations.

After Princess Formidable vanished from her ship, members of her crew entered the Venus station and manually activated the failsafe. The disabled failsafe did nothing to Earth's system, but at the exact moment they pressed it, the Aryl system went dark and its tunnel node disappeared. Aryl hosted the previous crawl, a battle-royale season, and tens of thousands of people still remain in the system on mining and reclamation operations. A team was also on the planet investigating why that season's AI had recently stopped communicating.

Zev explains that a tunnel node has never simply switched off. Even systems whose stars went nova retained their nodes, and the older Borant travel system also cannot function now that Aryl's node is gone. With the nearest neighboring system 2.9 light cycles away, no one will know for roughly three cycles whether Aryl's star or inhabitants still exist. Carl briefly wonders whether this is connected to his residual encounter, but Zev says the Aryl AI became silent earlier, during the sixth floor, before the current season fully went off track.

The chapter ends with Zev saying it is time to proceed to the warlord council.

The warlord council begins with Carl, Donut, Ferdinand, and the virtually attending Juice Box placed around the table by a Mexx robot Donut calls Carla. Juice Box gives Carl a subtle signal that Team Retribution's part of Operation: Snake Pit is underway. Chaco appears as the on-site correspondent because Magnificent Troy refuses to come to the surface, while Cascadia arrives looking physically degraded and emotionally exhausted.

The remaining warlords materialize one by one: newly crowned King Stalwart, Fang of the Reavers, Architect Houston of the Madness, Epitome Tagg of the Dream, and finally the Blood Sultanate's warlord. A Cookbook note from Drakea warns Carl not to underestimate nagas, arguing that their apparent failures may conceal deeper strategy. That warning becomes immediate when Princess Vinata appears.

Vinata is the sultan's daughter outside the dungeon, a war veteran and senior adviser who plays the historical Sepsis Whore during Faction Wars. She is an enormous six-armed white naga with unusual red eyes and overwhelming charisma. Carl feels physically intimidated despite the absence of active charm effects and becomes convinced that she may already understand the plan against her. Vinata introduces herself directly and tells Carl he may call her "the Whore" for the game.

The meeting has barely begun when Donut and Ferdinand burst into laughter at Stalwart's new crown. Chaco tries to turn the mockery into an audience poll, but Stalwart physically punches him unconscious, causing Chaco to disappear from the room. Donut immediately votes that the crown makes Stalwart look stupid.

The humor ends when a system message announces, "Warning: Scolopendra Stirs." Epitome Tagg says such a warning has never occurred before, and Cascadia responds with exhausted, near-hysterical laughter as the chapter ends.

Odette abruptly replaces Chaco as the warlord-council correspondent after Stalwart knocks him unconscious. She appears without her usual costume because she has already entered the Ascendency as Nekhebit, and she immediately resumes hosting as if nothing unusual has happened. She treats the Scolopendra warning as an unprecedented but apparently preliminary event, noting that the final dungeon boss is not supposed to wake until the eighteenth floor.

Odette summarizes the surviving Faction Wars teams and presses the visibly unraveling Cascadia about Borant's civil war and the AI going primal. Princess Vinata quietly tells Carl that Cascadia has just learned that her former husband and much of her family are dead after a derelict warship struck Borant Three's liquid habitation ring, killing millions. Vinata refuses to explain how she knows supposedly unavailable outside information.

Vinata then turns the pressure directly onto Carl. She says the Blood Sultanate expects his coming move, predicts his allies will die, and offers to solve his "Katia problem" if Carl simply agrees. She proposes peace after the crawl and even a place for Carl in her father's court. Carl refuses to react outwardly while Odette interviews the other warlords and Stalwart boasts about his remaining war mages.

Carl finally challenges the council over the off-world teams' continued access to current outside information. Odette explains the loophole: although live external feeds and two-way communication are banned, teams with the tier-three Galactic News Media Center can still see the live directory of program titles. Off-world factions are paying to repeatedly rename their own programs, effectively exchanging messages through the directory. Epitome Tagg's channel, for example, has been renamed in real time to communicate that the Dream has deactivated infected Skull Empire hardware.

The AI refuses to close the loophole automatically because it considers loopholes part of the game. Juice Box prevents Ferdinand from spending Team Retribution's remaining Emergency Action Items, so Carl uses one of the Princess Posse's instead. His proposal to close communication methods designed to circumvent Team Retribution's earlier ban is accepted. Cascadia then drunkenly points out additional information channels, including programmed menus, activity schedules, training boards, and NPC gossip, while the AI complains that she is questioning its ability to enforce the rules.

As the council drags on, Juice Box finally agrees to make one statement. She condemns the off-world factions for creating dungeon-born people, implanting false memories and suffering, and destroying their lives for entertainment. She then transforms into a black, tentacled form that terrifies nearly everyone present and warns that something is coming not only for the warlords but for the wider audience and galaxy. When Odette asks what is coming, Juice Box does not answer and instead walks through the wall and disappears. Carl's immediate thought is: the inevitable ruin.

The council tries to identify the form Juice Box used for her warning. Tagg dismisses it as a childhood superstition, but Architect Houston explains that similar images appear across many cultures and may represent a real trans-dimensional entity associated with death. It has many names, including the Hag, the Unwashed, the Stalker, the Last Light, the Thirst, the Fell, and the Inexorable; the Viceroys call it the Beautiful Place. Houston says studying and gaining access to the entity is his life's work, while Cascadia notes that the dungeon is forbidden from using the Unwashed as a mob.

Carl is disturbed by a more immediate puzzle. Changelings can normally take only forms they have personally touched, yet Juice Box reproduced something that supposedly has never appeared in the dungeon. He links her warning to the earlier Scolopendra message and concludes that the two events feel like parallel warnings: one for the dungeon and one for the wider universe.

Cascadia quietly disappears from the meeting, and Odette tries to wrap up. Donut deliberately continues stalling for Operation: Snake Pit by proposing a Princess Posse media channel called Princess TV. When she asks why even the supposedly poor Blood Sultanate owns media assets, Odette reveals that the Sultanate controls Blood Hunter Holdings and produced several dramas during the season, including Blood Hunter.

That information causes Carl to reinterpret the Blood Sultanate's battlefield mystery. Elle and Edgar had entered naga territory and found none of the large force Carl expected to be defending the stronghold. Once Carl learns who produced Blood Hunter, he concludes that the missing Blood Sultanate mercenaries and NPC troops are already dead and that the faction is close to defeat, though he does not yet know exactly how those deaths occurred.

Carl also realizes that the original assumptions behind Operation: Snake Pit are therefore wrong and worries about the team already carrying it out. He begins laughing uncontrollably as the other warlords stare at him. Donut finally recognizes the Blood Hunter connection to Miriam Dom and directly taunts Princess Vinata, ending the chapter by telling her that she has "stuck your pecker in the wrong beehive."

Carl returns from the warlord council to Shanty Town while Donut returns to the castle to board Party Planner with Louis. The flood of messages immediately shows that Operation: Snake Pit has already gone off plan. Edgar has found most of the Blood Sultanate's army dead in its barracks, and Elle reports that Prepotente, now level 99, was responsible for killing most of it before Carl's team arrived.

Prepotente has not attacked Carl's people, but he is furious with them. After he insults Imani, the sluggalos split off to chase him, with half pursuing on foot across naga territory and the others stealing one of the carts. Their departure removes a major component of the planned castle assault.

Carl asks Baroness Victory whether Prepotente can operate alongside the Princess Posse while remaining unaffiliated. Victory explains that the issue has already been adjudicated. Prepotente may pursue his own objectives, but Carl's army cannot work beside him or directly request his help unless he formally joins the Princess Posse. The nagas had already challenged his earlier attack on the ground that he was effectively acting as Carl's agent. Prepotente won that ruling because, as an unaffiliated crawler, he could cross borders that Faction Wars participants could not, but he then threatened the adjudication quorum and was placed in a time-based penalty stasis.

Prepotente's furious message explains his motive. He blames the Blood Sultanate for producing the drama tied to Miriam Dom's death and claims the right to kill Vinata himself. He says he had already destroyed their standing army and was about to pursue the sultana before the adjudication interrupted him. Carl realizes that the interruption may actually have protected Operation: Snake Pit by preventing Prepotente from prematurely forcing Vinata into hiding. Carl therefore tries to persuade him to join the Princess Posse so their actions can legally overlap.

The operation continues without the sluggalos. Tran approaches the Shanty Town border without resistance, Louis and Donut take off in Party Planner, Florin's northern battalions continue through trapped former Operatic territory toward the waiting orcs, and Katia reports that the capacitor wire is in place. Edgar remains responsible for warning Carl about movement.

Before leaving the saferoom, Carl collects hundreds of black potion balls from Mordecai. Mordecai warns him not to use the potions indiscriminately because the gods he antagonizes now will soon be physically present, and specifically tells him not to use them on more than two members of the same religion. Carl thanks him and Mistress Tiatha for the wire, then leaves with an eager Samantha to continue the operation.

Operation: Snake Pit is ultimately about the Sepsis Whore succession problem. To save both Donut and Katia, Carl's side must kill every Blood Sultanate participant who stands in the relevant line of succession. Eleven nagas entered Faction Wars, but only four are required targets: Princess Vinata herself, two female assistants carrying the title Ikbal who are Vinata's cousins, and the male head of her castle guard, another cousin rumored to be romantically involved with her. The other seven naga participants are allies, guards, field generals, or marketing executives rather than blood successors.

Carl reviews the original four-part plan developed before anyone knew Prepotente had already destroyed most of the naga army. Florin's 103rd and 105th battalions would drive north through former Operatic territory as a major diversion. Tran's 102nd would enter naga territory from the south, then angle toward Shanty Town, while Boomer's 106th Bloody Leeches remained hidden in reserve. Imani, Elle, Edgar, strippers, and a large force of sluggalos would approach the naga castle under Invisibility and True Concealment using a trap-cleared route Edgar had scouted. Carl, Katia, Bautista, Li Na, and the 107th White Dragon Urban Defense battalion would wait in Shanty Town for the decisive phase.

The purpose of the castle attack is not simply to defeat the defenders. The nagas are known for a recurring escape act. In past seasons, once enemies penetrate their lightly defended stronghold and approach the throne room, Vinata and her six-member elite honor guard disappear from her private chamber and remain hidden until the winning team is declared. The vanishing has become part of the Blood Sultanate's cultivated mystique and tourism marketing. Carl's plan therefore depends on forcing Vinata to trigger that escape on a schedule his team controls.

Rosetta believes the hiding place is Club Vanquisher. Her theory depends on anomalous past seasons. Six seasons earlier, Vinata never appeared at the postwar celebration after the goddess Mazu destroyed the structures around Larracos and buried the sole remaining temple entrance to the club. Seven seasons before that, Vinata appeared late and was missing an extra guard during a demon-eviction event near the same temple; a blood-covered magical necklace belonging to the missing guard was later found nearby, suggesting he died protecting her route.

Other mechanics support the theory. Blood bars do not drain once someone has entered Club Vanquisher, making it viable for extended concealment. Vinata has also reappeared instantly during seasons when anti-teleportation fields covered everywhere except the Larracos area, implying her hiding place lies within that zone. Yet she cannot simply be hiding inside Larracos itself before the peeling phase.

Carl accepts Rosetta's conclusion that Club Vanquisher is the likely destination but identifies the remaining problem: where inside the club does Vinata hide, and how does she enter without being detected? Rosetta answers only that this is where the plan becomes strange.

Louis spots the sluggalos about a mile north of the naga castle, where they have abandoned their pursuit of Prepotente and are joyriding one of the carts. That leaves Imani, Elle, and several strippers to enter the stronghold without the expendable slug force that was supposed to trigger most of the traps first. Carl is deeply uneasy but tells them to retreat if they encounter serious resistance and keeps Louis ready for extraction. Juice Box, through Britney, reiterates that Team Retribution thinks the operation is moving too soon but is standing by.

At the Shanty Town staging area, Katia begins transforming into a mantaur while arguing privately with Bautista. She tells Carl that Bautista now wants her to eat the flower immediately because he fears the operation will fail and Carl will eventually turn on Katia to obtain the flower for Donut. Carl rejects that possibility, but Katia quietly tells him that if everything collapses, she will voluntarily give him the flower so Donut can survive and go to the twelfth floor. She has deliberately not told Donut because Donut would refuse the sacrifice.

Inside the naga stronghold, Imani uses Tripper through the tattoo Katia made for her, triggering many traps at once. Carl physically feels the borrowed spell activate. The spell-transfer mechanics are then clarified: Carl's item grants Tripper at level 15, but without the bandana his naturally learned version is level 7. Because Imani and Elle cannot use the bandana due to magical-race equipment restrictions, Carl used toraline yam ink and his voluntarily given blood to lend Imani the spell through a small barbed-wire ankle tattoo. Carl temporarily loses six spell levels that will recover over four days, while Imani's borrowed Tripper gradually weakens and will eventually disappear even though the tattoo remains.

Rosetta has also explained that unwillingly stolen abilities behave differently: they are stronger and can be lost permanently by the original owner, as happened when Walk on Air was taken from Li Jun. Carl is frustrated that the fifth-floor yam gift never clearly explained these mechanics and suspects the missing explanation relates somehow to Milk's Cookbook entries.

Donut's complaints about Imani's permanent tattoo mask her guilt over the entire plan, which ultimately traces back to the tiara she put on during the first floor. Before Carl can dwell on it further, Katia looks up and announces that Prepotente is arriving on Bianca.

Prepotente arrives in Shanty Town riding Bianca. Bianca is now level 70 and fully grown, while Prepotente has reached level 99, making him the highest-level crawler Carl knows. Baroness Victory appears to oversee the interaction because Carl and Prepotente still cannot legally coordinate while he remains unaffiliated.

Before Carl can finish explaining the problem, Prepotente immediately tells him to recruit him. Carl had already drawn a potion of Conscription behind his back as a fallback, but once Prepotente agrees voluntarily, Carl puts it away and is struck by how wrong coercing him would have been. He assigns Prepotente the rank of Colonel.

Carl tries to thank him and suggest they communicate better, but Prepotente suddenly breaks down and hugs him, sobbing that Carl is his best friend and that he has been profoundly lonely since the previous floor. He admits that he has been afraid to use his enhanced pet biscuits after what happened before and that Bianca, while good company, cannot speak. The emotional reconciliation is immediately followed by one of Prepotente's characteristic screams.

Samantha nearly provokes him by starting to threaten his already-dead mother, but Katia stops her and Carl warns that antagonizing Prepotente could get Samantha removed from the operation. The exchange makes Carl recognize that everyone, Samantha included, is lashing out under the pressure of the coming assault.

Elle then reports that her group has reached the throne-room area and killed several naga and NPC guards. Katia receives confirmation that one of the four succession targets is dead: the male head of Vinata's castle guard, who Carl identifies as Vinata's real-life boyfriend. Three targets remain, Vinata and the two Ikbal cousins.

The team waits for the next part of Rosetta's theory to prove itself. Edgar detects new non-corporeal movement rising from below the castle. This does not yet identify Vinata herself, but it confirms that something is moving upward through the hidden route Rosetta predicted. Relieved, Carl signals Li Na to climb the clock tower, and Rosetta tells him the next step is now his responsibility.

Carl records the deity-link mechanics that Rosetta, Tipid, Justice Light, and Mordecai have explained to him. When someone worships a god for the first time, a tiny non-corporeal Bijou fairy carries an invisible light connection from the deity to the strongest temple on the floor and then to the new adherent's heart. Between the third and eleventh floors, that strongest temple is usually inside Club Vanquisher. The process takes roughly two minutes, and Edgar's level-15 Sense Movement can detect the upward motion of the Bijou as it passes between floors.

That detection confirms Rosetta's central theory about the Blood Sultanate's escape method. Among the Ascendency's light deities, some immediately grant Travel the Path, a spell that turns a user into light and lets them follow a light path at extreme speed without technically teleporting. A smaller subset also grants the one-use Welcome Home skill, which lets the new adherent follow the Bijou's connection directly to the strongest linked temple inside Club Vanquisher.

The important distinction is that Rosetta does not believe Vinata herself is the worshiper. Past seasons show no evidence that Vinata or the guards who later reappear had been marked by worship. Rosetta instead believes one of the six honor guards worships the deity, receives the escape abilities, and uses a church recruitment quest to transport Vinata and the other guards as temporary prospects.

Two deities fit the remaining mechanics: Theia and Khepri. Theia turns prospects into motes of light that the worshiper can carry into her temple. Rosetta believes this was probably the Blood Sultanate's normal historical method, but it is unusable this season because the Pacifist network sponsored Theia on Carl's behalf. Theia is Samantha's mother, and the sponsorship was originally arranged to help protect Carl after the fifth floor. Vinata would therefore risk having Theia turn against her.

That leaves Khepri. A female new worshiper of Khepri can recruit prospects by turning them into beetles and swallowing them. She is then taken to Khepri's temple, where she gives birth to the beetles and they return to their original forms inside an endless insect-covered buffet. The prospects are effectively trapped there for a period while being recruited into the religion.

Rosetta therefore expects Vinata and the remaining guards to reach the Temple of Khepri within minutes. Carl's strike team will be Carl, Katia, Prepotente, and Samantha. Their objective is to break into Club Vanquisher, enter Khepri's temple, and kill the remaining succession targets before the prospect period ends and anyone can escape.

Elle occupies the Blood Sultanate throne room, starting the six-hour capture timer, while Louis prepares to gas the stronghold exterior. Carl's strike team must meanwhile reach the Temple of Khepri inside Club Vanquisher before Vinata and the remaining succession targets complete their mandatory prospect period and regain the ability to leave.

The ninth floor has only two Club Vanquisher entrances. The surviving one outside Larracos is inside a small temple dedicated to the Dagda, a weather and masculinity god. Donut remains airborne in Party Planner as a contingency in case one of the three remaining Blood Sultanate family members never reaches Khepri's temple or is somehow returned to the stronghold.

Before entering, Prepotente casually reveals that he already has an interior map of Club Vanquisher from a previous visit with Miriam Dom and Bianca, including knowledge of a secret exit through a bathroom stall. Carl is frustrated that he did not know this earlier but immediately incorporates Prepotente's perfect recall into the route plan.

Carl and Prepotente then drink Mordecai's one-hour Closed Off potions, which make them immune to external aura effects. This protection is necessary because Li Na is stationed in Shanty Town's Extend Aura synergy tower. Her Dread effects can be projected through the tower, and Mistress Tiatha's added capacitor wires are intended to exploit that range. If the operation succeeds, Toyotomi's builders will later construct an even larger aura synergy tower called the Nest near the opening to Larracos.

Inside the Dagda temple, Bautista distracts the resident cleric by pretending to consider joining the faith while Li Jun and Zhang quietly trail wire from the Extend Aura tower and prevent the temple door from sealing. Carl and Prepotente move toward the Club Vanquisher entrance without attacking the cleric unless necessary.

At the entrance vestibule, Carl changes the infiltration plan. The ram guard Mork is a level-40 Hellik cleric and immediately recognizes the Holy Crusade bounty on Prepotente. Carl claims he has captured Prepotente and wants to collect the bounty, while Prepotente theatrically pretends to be a defeated prisoner in loose fuzzy handcuffs. Mork accepts the story and says the bounty is worth 500,000 gold, though he wants to divert shares to Hellik and himself.

Mork's insult toward Emberus immediately triggers a new quest for Carl, Kill the Blasphemer, promising an additional Emberus boon depending on how entertaining the kill is. Carl tells Mork to summon the guards as planned. The chapter ends with Mork opening the Club Vanquisher door to call for help and Carl messaging Katia that it is time for her to enter.

Four high-level mantaur guards rush into the Club Vanquisher vestibule after Mork calls for help. Their level-80 leader, Joey, immediately gets one set of claws stuck in the ceiling, giving Carl an opening. Katia bursts in disguised as a blood-soaked mantaur and claims demons are attacking the Dagda temple. Bautista's summoned Eclipse Pyxies reinforce the deception, turning the scene into chaos.

Carl signals Prepotente to trigger his smoke grenade and throws a potion of Inflict Black Nimbus at Mork. The effect temporarily strips the Hellik cleric of his god's grace, preventing him from using divine abilities or safely remaining inside religious spaces. Li Jun, Zhang, Bautista, and Katia dispatch the four mantaurs while Carl and Prepotente force their way through the still-open portal into Club Vanquisher.

The team must keep the entire portal chain physically open: Shanty Town to the Dagda temple, the temple to the vestibule, and the vestibule to Club Vanquisher. Li Jun and Zhang also preserve an unbroken run of Mistress Tiatha's capacitor wire from Li Na's Extend Aura tower into the club. That wire allows Li Na's Dread aura to propagate through the otherwise isolated space.

Li Na activates Dark Purpose. At first it appears ineffective, but the effect rapidly intensifies. Guards begin mutilating themselves, trophy heads and animal rugs animate, and dead NPCs produce screaming ghosts that are seized by ethereal chains and dragged through the floor. Mork tears out his own eyes and tries to rip out his heart before dying. His death completes Carl's Kill the Blasphemer quest, and Emberus grants Carl the level-15 Heathen Scald Celestial Boon, which adds the skill's damage to his punch attacks for the rest of the floor.

The club becomes officially defiled and enters a demonic-activity lockdown. Li Na reveals that Dark Purpose rose from level 4 to level 15 during the attack and that she has already begun cycling through other Dreads, including Defile Soul and Bleeding Horror, to power-level them through the aura-extension exploit. Carl realizes the resulting carnage is far beyond what the team expected. The chapter ends with Samantha arriving in the devastated lobby and remarking that she has not even done anything yet.

Carl, Prepotente, Katia, and Samantha push deeper into Club Vanquisher while Bautista, Zhang, and Li Jun remain behind to keep the portal chain and aura wire intact. Li Na switches from Dark Purpose to Bleeding Horror, a Dread that turns blood against its owners and nearby enemies. She refuses to abandon the training opportunity because the projected aura is leveling rapidly, and she notes that blood already under her control may remain useful even against newly arriving guards with aura protection.

The group reaches the temple-portal station amid the carnage. Rosetta provides Khepri's codex address, 453, but Katia cannot interpret the portal controls. Prepotente understands the device and switches it out of automatic mode so each crawler is not routed to a temple associated with their own faith. Carl's portal-analysis tool confirms that the selected destination is Khepri's single temple and shows Vinata and several nagas inside.

The doorway is gated by faith, so Carl cannot open it himself. The game, however, also permits those carrying the Damned status to enter churches for sanctuary. Li Na has that status, and anyone who has entered the Nothing and survived qualifies as well. Samantha therefore serves as the team's key: because she survived the Nothing, she can open the Khepri doorway. Carl has her bite the handle and pull it open, then holds the door while he, Katia, and Prepotente rush through.

Immediately before the breach, Li Na reports that Bleeding Horror has reached level 15 and that she is switching to another Dread called Succulent Decay. Prepotente prepares himself for battle by reciting names important to him, including Miriam and Bianca, while Victory silently watches the team commit to the assault.

Inside the Temple of Khepri, the trio is marked as trespassers and targeted for death. Vinata and several naga companions are present under numerous protective blessings, and Vinata herself carries an Immortal status. More importantly, the beetle-headed figure Carl assumed was a resident cleric is actually Khepri in person.

Khepri's presence triggers the Scavenger's Daughter and grants Carl and Vinata the deity's legitimate temporary effect: ninety seconds of immortality. The AI emphasizes that this is not an intervention on Carl's behalf and warns that Katia and Prepotente receive no equivalent protection. The chapter ends with Carl's strike team trapped inside the temple with a physically manifested god and a suddenly altered battle clock.

The Temple of Khepri seals behind Carl, Katia, and Prepotente, cutting the capacitor wire at the portal and freezing everyone caught in the impending encounter. Six nagas are inside: Vinata, her two cousins, and three guards. Vinata alone carries an Immortal tag, frozen at sixty-three seconds, which means her protection will expire twenty-seven seconds before Carl's. All six nagas also have aura protection. Carl realizes Vinata herself worshiped Khepri and deliberately arranged the temple as a trap, expecting the crawlers to hunt her down and then trespass into the presence of her summoned god.

Carl warns Li Jun, Bautista, Zhang, and the others outside the temple to run as soon as the freeze ends, but Katia and Prepotente refuse to abandon the fight. The AI then turns the confrontation into a manually staged spectacle, announcing a temple battle between Carl's group and Vinata's six nagas. It also exposes part of the Blood Sultanate's hidden political and industrial plans to the wider audience. Temple rules and normal floor rules remain active, and deity appearances inside temples do not count against summoning limits.

Khepri is identified as a level-250 locked deity, God of Rebirth and the Sunrise, and a retainer of Adrasteia. He is invulnerable on this floor and is appearing under temple rules. The AI explains that Khepri formerly served Khnum, whose recent death forced him into Adrasteia's service, and warns that Khepri is likely to attack everyone once the freeze ends because Vinata has brought violence into his temple.

Although the capacitor wire is severed at the temple threshold, Li Na's Dread aura still fills the main part of Club Vanquisher, and the other propped-open portal doors remain in place. Carl, Katia, and Prepotente rapidly settle on a plan during the final countdown.

Admiral Corinne Whimpleshin, the Blood Sultanate adjutant, then teleports into the temple and demands that the encounter be stopped because a god has been summoned. Victory rejects the protest because temple rules apply and the Blood Sultanate has no standing to halt the fight. Corinne accuses Carl of engineering the summoning, which he denies. The countdown reaches zero and the temple battle begins.

A Cookbook note from Allister explains the danger of true Immortality. It prevents health loss, death, and dismemberment, but it does not prevent pain or every spell effect, and any otherwise fatal injuries must heal before the protection expires.

When the temple freeze ends, Carl summons Little Günter as Vinata's three guards open fire. He directs Günter toward Khepri and detonates the Waffle Maker, a thermobaric bomb powerful enough to incinerate everything within roughly one hundred meters. Carl's temporary Immortality keeps him alive even after the blast crushes, burns, and nearly atomizes him. As his body painfully reforms, Günter carries the stored explosive effect down Khepri's endless temple and detonates again near the god. Donut reports that two of the three naga targets are dead, meaning Vinata's two cousins were killed by the first blast. Khepri's immortal temple insects survive but burn and scream.

The explosions throw Carl back through the temple entrance into Club Vanquisher. Katia warns that dozens of gods are now emerging from the portal. Each divine presence triggers Carl's Scavenger's Daughter patch, stacking a chaotic mixture of buffs and debuffs while his overloaded Emberus ring stops suppressing his slugpox. Carl then realizes Vinata was blasted out with him and has been wrapped around his body the entire time, crushing, stabbing, and repeatedly smashing his head into the floor.

Vinata rages that Carl and Donut destroyed her people's chance to escape and reveals that she had intended to leave the conflict and have children with her now-dead secret husband. Her stare into the Eye of the Bedlam Bride drives her fully mad, making her assault even more relentless while both she and Carl remain temporarily immortal.

Khepri emerges from the portal with his burning immortal insects, but an unidentified god orders him away. Khepri immediately leaves the realm, while his insects remain. Soon afterward, Hellik appears in human form beside Carl. Hellik denies killing Geyrun and asks Carl to tell Emberus that Apito has been corrupted, the All Tree is beginning to rot, Nekhebit has returned, and the events surrounding Geyrun, Apito, and Scolopendra are connected. He also offers to negotiate with Issitoq on Carl's behalf and marks Carl as a friend of Hellik's church, ending the automatic hostility of Hellik's worshipers.

Vinata continues attacking after Hellik leaves. As Carl prepares another bomb and waits for her Immortality to expire, the advanced slugpox boil on his back finally bursts. A female sluggalo emerges and drives a hatchet into Vinata's head, killing the Blood Sultanate princess and completing the immediate assassination objective.

The system confirms Vinata's death, credits the kill to Kandy "Bigs" Newton of the Princess Posse, and declares the Blood Sultanate defeated. Under the prior inheritance arrangement, the defeated faction's assets pass through Vinata's surviving blood relatives, Donut and Katia, and are then forfeited to the Princess Posse.

Carl uses his rapidly refreshing Heal spell during the final seconds of his Immortality to repair as much of his bomb damage as possible. The female sluggalo who killed Vinata is now identified as Kandy Newton, a level-29 sluggalette who asks to be called Bigs. Samantha arrives badly burned and enraged because, after entering Theia's temple, she encountered the male skyfowl sponsor appearing in the goddess's place and concluded that her mother had been replaced. Victory explains that sponsors making deities act outside their nature violates Faction Wars rules, although such interference still happens.

Katia reports that she, Prepotente, Li Jun, and Zhang are trapped elsewhere in Club Vanquisher after the portal network shifts and Li Na's aura is cut off. Their escape route toward the hidden mapmaker guild is blocked by mantaurs, Basilica Guards, and fighting deities. Carl therefore activates the previously unused Operation Head Banger. He throws Black Nimbus at Brother Widespread Tempest, a level-125 Basilica Guard who worships Taranis. The potion removes the "Un" from the ogre's Untouchable status, exposing him to divine hostility and sending him fleeing.

Carl simultaneously deploys alarm traps playing Megadeth's "Holy Wars... The Punishment Due." The music triggers the season's special group-berserking mechanic in the mantaurs, producing a Mantaur Mosh Pit and drawing several of them away. When the remaining mantaurs charge, Carl activates Profane Iron, the once-a-day chain skill he received from Li Na. Chains tear from his body, distribute Black Nimbus to additional targets, trip and restrain enemies, and kill one mantaur by ripping off its head while the berserk mantaurs turn on one another.

Carl, Samantha, and Bigs push through the opening and reunite with Katia, Prepotente, Li Jun, and Zhang. Prepotente reveals a hidden wall entrance that simultaneously discovers the Map-Making Guild and the Calligrapher's Guild. The group rushes inside and seals the door behind them.

The guildmaster is Milk, whom Carl already knows from the sixth-edition Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook. Seeing her in person causes Carl to recognize the relationship between Cookbook authors as a kind of siblinghood: she is his "sister" in that lineage, not a biological relative. Milk recognizes him in return. After surviving the temple blast, the gods, and Vinata, Carl finally allows himself a brief emotional collapse while Milk wraps him in her wings and comforts him.

Donut checks in from elsewhere, and Carl tells her their side of the operation went off without a hitch even though it clearly did not. A closing Cookbook note addresses the dead author Drakea, who hated the naga. Carl says he hopes Drakea witnessed the Blood Sultanate's fall, admits he does not know what the day means for the naga as a people, and confesses that it is becoming harder every day to keep himself from drowning.

With two hours left before Phase Three, Open Hostilities, the battlefield has gone mostly quiet after the destruction of the Blood Sultanate. The Princess Posse now holds three fronts: Florin's 101st Crocodiles face the Skull Empire across the northern river, Tran's 102nd Bulwark battalion holds the old southern trench line despite the Posse now owning former Sultanate territory, and Li Na's 107th White Dragon Urban Defense battalion mixes with Team Retribution's dwarves and Larracos civilians around Shanty Town. Publicly the crawlers appear to be fortifying. Secretly they are preparing Operation Ruin, a coordinated offensive scheduled to begin the instant Open Hostilities starts.

Carl, Donut, Katia, Mongo, and Rend watch the final construction of the Nest, a tall synergy tower in Shanty Town designed to give Donut line of sight across the battlefield. Toyotomi explains that the master-quality granite tower will receive overlapping enchantments, a completion strength bonus, Edifice Shield, Donut's Sentry and Flak protections, and support from four additional deflector towers. Carl remains anxious because the tower is deliberately impossible to hide and every enemy can see it. Donut will be exposed at its top, wearing her conspicuous Tiara of a Thousand Lights, while Bomo and the Sledge are assigned to protect her.

Carl's anxiety extends to Katia. If Operation Ruin succeeds, she plans to return to the stronghold and immediately eat the Orchid of Eileithyia's Grace. Under the bargain with Huanxin Jinx, the intended result is that Katia becomes a celestial attendant on the twelfth floor, satisfying the Crown of the Sepsis Whore arrangement so Donut can descend. If the bargain fails, the Orchid could instead remove Katia from the dungeon through pregnancy or massively increase her constitution. Carl refuses to contemplate the remaining possibility in which the Crown's conditions still prevent either Katia or Donut from safely taking the stairs while the other lives.

Other unresolved problems accumulate. Dong Quixote and the others cannot find Anaconda, Damascus Steel, or several other missing club dancers after Club Vanquisher reopens. Milk refuses to leave the Calligrapher's Guild voluntarily, so on Rosetta's advice the group kidnaps her and holds her in the FUPA under the dungeon's guildmaster-interrogation rules. Prepotente, Rosetta, and Mordecai are handling that situation.

Baroness Victory and Team Retribution adjutant Drick are conducting mandatory live interviews. Louis emerges from his segment badly shaken after being shown footage of himself with Juice Box in another form. Carl recognizes that Louis is having a genuine crisis and asks Imani and Donut to check on him while he and Katia are forced into the next interview.

The broadcast reviews loot from the Club Vanquisher battle. Katia's Enchanted Spiked Knee Pads of the Munificent Goddess Kina are a unique Divine item awarded from a celestial box. They provide melee damage reflection, underwater breathing, Swim, Iron Stomach, Eater of the Dead, and deity-dependent effects. Victory explains that if a crawler carries multiple divine items, overlapping deity-triggered effects generally do not stack; the stronger effect applies, with special amplification when an item is directly associated with the deity present.

Carl's own new Celestial item is the Enchanted Hairbrush of the Beefmaster. Using it on sufficiently long male hair for five minutes grants Shining Charisma, Speedster, a twenty-five-percent constitution boost, and Entourage for thirty hours. The Speedster effect can combine with Gloom Wraith Phase, making the ridiculous screaming hairbrush strategically valuable enough that Carl now has another reason to keep his hair long.

As the Nest finishes and begins glowing gold, Carl watches his allies prepare for the coming attack. The confidence produced by the Club Vanquisher victory does not reassure him. Operation Ruin will strike from above, below, across the land, and from within, and even their best projections expect heavy losses. Seeing Donut enter the Nest leaves Carl returning to the same question that haunted him on the fifth floor: what gives him the right to lead so many people into likely death?

With one hour remaining before Open Hostilities, Carl joins Li Jun and Zhang on a detour to the new brig beside the Nest. Donut remains at the tower learning its synergy mechanics with Li Na and Toyotomi. Li Jun's new Engine of Tomorrow eye lets him read an opponent's muscle tension and accelerate his own perception in short bursts, but he is more concerned with Carl. When Li Jun asks how Carl himself is doing, Carl lists his worries about Louis, Donut, Elle's plan, troop strength, the missing Dream forces, and the war mages waiting for the timer to expire. Li Jun points out that Carl has also been sitting on thirty-two loot boxes, more than fifty achievements, an unused patch, and other rewards from Club Vanquisher.

Carl reviews the most important achievements. Varg Vikernes permanently bans him from Club Vanquisher and from every temple except Emberus's and churches where he has been named a friend, a list that unexpectedly includes Grull. Liquified, awarded because Carl detonated a bomb at his own feet while protected by god-tier immortality, produces a Legendary Lucky Bitch Box containing an upgrade patch. Its Lucky Shot benefit would redirect one fatal blow per floor into a party member. Carl refuses to attach the patch and deliberately keeps its effect from the others because he will not accept survival at that cost.

The achievement for fighting Khepri in Khepri's own temple gives Carl no reward because Hellik intervened and saved him. Carl notes that Khepri and Odette's Nekhebit belong to the same sub-pantheon and that someone appears to be killing gods in that group, though he does not know whether Odette, Huanxin Jinx, or someone else is responsible. Celestial Orgy of Chaos, awarded for surviving the presence of more than ten gods, gives Carl, Katia, Li Jun, Zhang, and Prepotente celestial boxes. Bautista, who left the fight earlier, receives a lower-tier version and a guidebook that can identify his stuffed-animal items. The AI also hints that the release of the gods was deliberate and probably not caused by the person Carl first suspected. Another achievement for killing with a borrowed skill gives Carl a potion that raises Pugilism to level 15 and, more importantly, an explicit AI hint that the borrowed-skill tattoos can be combined with the Voodoo book. Mordecai and Rosetta are already researching the clue.

Emberus has made Carl's divine situation worse. A new quest orders him to kill one hundred worshipers of Hellik before reaching the twelfth floor, practically before finishing the existing Kill Hellik quest, in exchange for a permanent Celestial boon. Emberus then sends a more disturbing message explaining that Hellik has treated with Issitoq, allowing a peace to be breached, and that Emberus may now kill other Sheol princes in exchange for information Amayon holds about Geyrun. He also questions what Hellik meant about their mother and sister and warns Carl that, even if Carl successfully kills Hellik, Emberus may turn his grief and rage on his own worshiper for harming his kin. Carl briefly considers whether accepting Emberus's smite might be safer than completing the quest, but he still will not use the Lucky Shot patch as an escape.

As they near the brig, Zhang explains the Celestial item from his own box, Zhang's Cape of Odds. It passively increases all of his stats and grants Dodge, while its hourly Roll the Dice ability selects from 333 possible temporary outcomes, 66 of them harmful. After nineteen uses, the cape would allow him to choose an outcome manually, but Zhang intends to activate it only if absolutely necessary.

Zhang then admits that only one prisoner remains in the brig. Carl remembers the debate over giving his spare Ring of Divine Suffering to Li Na. Imani opposed the idea, Katia and Elle supported it, and Donut simply begged Carl to give Li Na the ring as quickly as possible. Li Na declined the Necklace of Indelible Woe because of the risk to her high-level dreads, so Carl still carries it. Finding the brig empty except for the single prisoner he had specifically ordered left alone finally makes Donut's urgency clear to him. Carl takes a breath and enters the building.

Carl enters the brig alone to confront Rishi, the sole surviving member of the original Blood Sultanate still on the floor. Rishi had surrendered after Vinata's death by burying himself outside the castle and waiting for the fighting to end. Because he was a high-ranking member of the faction's real management rather than an ordinary mercenary, Carl had ordered him preserved for questioning. Li Na's White Dragons have taken extreme precautions: Rishi is stripped of his gear, enclosed in layered magical shields, and has had all four arms removed.

Rishi explains that he did not join his wife and Princess Vinata in Khepri's temple because he expected them to die. He says he began preparing for the Blood Sultanate's collapse when the mantis faction abandoned Faction Wars, an act so uncharacteristic that it convinced him something larger was wrong. He then introduces the Great Consensus, a growing anti-Syndicate philosophy with many variants. Some versions are openly xenophobic, such as the kua-tin Bloom party and mantid supremacists, while other supporters simply believe individual species and systems should govern themselves without outside interference. Rishi says Vinata embraced a version of this philosophy and planned to steal the naga fleet and lead her people away from all known tunnel routes for a generation.

Rishi's own plan is different. Before the warlords' meeting, news of the naga plan to abandon their shipyard contracts caused upheaval at home. Once Carl's Emergency Action Item cut the factions off from outside information, Rishi decided to survive so he could make Carl an offer. He produces an AI-witnessed agreement addressed to Carl as the de facto leader of Earth. Rishi explains that, because Earth currently lacks a recognized government and Carl is both a warlord and the number-one crawler, naga petitioners were able to establish a legitimate, mostly honorary leadership claim for him under Syndicate law. That status allows Carl to sign on Earth's behalf.

The proposed agreement gives Earth natives citizenship rights throughout naga territory and grants Earth five Naphil-class generation ships. In exchange, the naga would receive permission to terraform and settle other planets in the Solar System after the crawl's quarantine ends. Rishi argues that if the crawl ends normally, outsiders will eventually exploit Earth anyway, and the ships could help preserve humanity or be traded for protection. If the current primal AI instead prevents the normal post-crawl collection, he believes Earth may become the center of a wealthy new inner-system-style society, making early naga support strategically valuable.

Carl points out that this cooperative arrangement contradicts Vinata's isolationist plan. Rishi admits Vinata did not sign it. He did. The chapter's central reveal follows: Rishi has arranged a coup at home and declares himself leader of a new naga state. His brothers are supposed to depose Vinata's father, the remaining royal children, the prime minister, and the House of Greens. An achievement simultaneously reports that more than ninety-five percent of viewers in the newly named Naga Protectorate of the New Reformer are watching Carl's feed. Rishi's signature identifies him as Sultan Rishi the Usurper, First of his Name of the Naga Uprising.

With Open Hostilities forty minutes away and the rest of the Princess Posse preparing Operation Ruin, Carl decides he has heard enough. He dismisses Rishi as another power-seeking political operator, rejects the proposed bargain, and uses the Ring of Divine Suffering to mark him after the required thirty seconds. Carl tells Rishi that the naga audience is about to watch another one of its leaders die and calls Rishi only the opening act, making his intended execution explicit as the chapter ends.

Carl's later note lays out Operation Ruin as four simultaneous offensives followed by what Donut calls the "Coup De War Crime." Florin commands the attack on the orcs, Boomer the Reavers, Donut the Dream, and Carl the Madness. Rosetta serves as theater commander, Tipid remains at the FUPA, Britney coordinates with Team Retribution, Juice Box and the NPC army support all four fronts, Louis provides bomb runs, and the 105th Scream Warriors are split into two rapid-deploy halves that can be teleported wherever a crisis develops. Carl's own route is to ride Party Planner with Louis over orc territory so his presence can amplify the bombs, then land with Samantha in Reaver territory, meet Elle, leave Samantha for Boomer's offensive, and use the Gate of the Feral Gods with Elle to enter Madness territory and hunt Houston.

Just before Open Hostilities, the system finally broadcasts another message from Cascadia, who tells the fighters she no longer cares what they do and simply wants the killing to end. Samantha arrives aboard Party Planner with elaborate victory-roll hair after spending the buildup roaming among the troops, drinking and offering her own version of morale support. Donut reports that the newly purchased wireless PA system has installed itself throughout Shanty Town and can interface with her headset and Bard abilities. Carl warns her not to attract unnecessary god attention and reminds her to aim carefully and abandon the Nest at the first sign of danger.

Party Planner climbs under stealth as the ninety-second countdown begins. Carl then discovers that both Bonnie and Skarn have stowed away despite being explicitly barred from manning the airship's door guns. The moment Open Hostilities begins, Reaver territory launches advanced seeker missiles at Party Planner while the Dream opens long-range magical artillery fire. Orc defenses destroy some of the missiles, but three remain locked onto the airship. Bonnie calmly mans an upgraded gun and shoots all three down while Louis keeps the ship low over the trees and under cloud cover. A larger unidentified object is also circling above the Reaver castle.

The broader battle immediately starts deviating from the plan. Dream artillery is aimed at Tran's troops rather than the FUPA, while two or three battalions of heavily armored Dream forces mass-teleport directly outside the FUPA and charge the throne room. Because battalion-scale teleportation requires an extraordinary amount of preparation, Rosetta realizes the Dream committed heavily to this maneuver. Tipid requests reinforcement almost at once, and Rosetta deploys half of the waiting 105th Scream Warriors while preserving the other half as the remaining rapid-response reserve. Justice Light says the incoming force is too large for his lair and asks Rosetta to reduce it below roughly three thousand first.

At the same time, Elle opens the first Gate of the Feral Gods, and the feral god Meatus appears near the now-exposed Dream castle. Donut immediately orders Britney to move on the elf stronghold, but Mordecai and Rosetta stop the attack from using the digger when a second event occurs: the escaped feral god summons Harpocrates into the realm. With two gods suddenly active near the objective, Rosetta orders Britney to abort the digger approach before the situation becomes even more dangerous.

Mordecai immediately warns Donut not to use the new PA system while Harpocrates is active. Harpocrates is the god of silence and will attack noisy targets after dealing with Meatus. Mordecai explains the recurring divine story: Meatus began as a small gremlin-like being who stole Harpocrates's penis, attached it to himself, and became a god; the stolen appendage is itself sapient, grows to divine scale when summoned, loves music, and does not want to return. Harpocrates can hear extraordinarily faint sounds, making the dwarven diggers especially dangerous to operate nearby. Donut agrees not to use the PA after seeing and hearing the revoltingly loud Meatus.

Across the battlefield, direct fighting is still limited mainly to Florin's 101st against the orcs and Tipid's defense of the FUPA against the Dream. The Reaver army and Viceroys remain largely absent, consistent with intelligence that they may defend their strongholds. Florin reports a new threat on the orc front: an enormous shielded, scorpion-like mechanized tank, possibly carrying Warlord Stalwart and war mages, has emerged from the riverbank and landed on his southern flank. He paints it for missile support and asks Bomo and the Sledge to hit it with chaff and Mute missiles. The source does not yet establish whether those missiles destroy or disable the machine.

Party Planner then begins its planned bombing run against King’s Point, the orc headquarters. Carl's presence Overclocks the entire bomb load. Louis releases shield- and technology-breaking No Disassemble bombs followed by high-yield Waffle Makers. The orcs fire Flak spells, but those defenses are ineffective against the gravity bombs, and the bombardment cracks their protective shield. A green long-range death ray, likely fired by a war-mage synergy tower, narrowly misses Party Planner and splashes energy across the dungeon ceiling as Louis escapes back into the smoke.

With the orc shield weakened, the coordinated ground phase begins. Team Retribution's dwarves drop agitators into the lava tubes beneath the mountain supporting King’s Point and start forcing a rapid eruption while preparing barriers intended to control the resulting lava and protect Larracos. The plan is to blow the top off the mountain and expose the throne room, though the eruption also places Florin's nearby forces and Elle in neighboring Reaver territory at risk.

On the opposite side of the battlefield, Meatus fights Harpocrates. Meatus strikes Harpocrates hard enough to send him crashing into the Dream castle, and the impact drops the castle's shields. The surviving Dream elves begin fleeing. Rosetta confirms that the southern digger stopped just below the surface before approaching the gods, then formally hands the southern campaign to Donut.

Before Carl's group can get clear of King’s Point, Britney warns that the orcs have raised an emergency or backup shield over the entire mountain and that pressure is building beneath it. The warning is cut off as the mountain explodes while Party Planner is still dangerously close. The chapter ends at the moment of eruption, before the damage to the castle, airship, or surrounding forces is known.

The eruption beneath King’s Point hurls Party Planner into a violent spin and slams it against the dungeon ceiling. One propeller breaks off, but Louis regains control with three remaining. Skarn transforms into a many-armed creature to keep Bonnie from being thrown out, and Bonnie’s broken arm heals almost immediately. Carl warns Florin, Elle, and Boomer about the unexpectedly large shockwave. He also hears Donut firing amplified Magic Missiles from the Nest. Because her tiara already supplies the long-range targeting they had originally planned to build into the tower, the Nest’s synergy was instead assigned to Atrocity-class magic, including Donut’s new War Crime spell, which Carl hopes they will not need.

Louis cannot maneuver Party Planner effectively enough to continue with three propellers, so Carl and Samantha jump into Reaver territory near Elle’s already-open Gate of the Feral Gods while Louis returns to Area 52 for repairs and rearming. Carl orders Bonnie and Skarn to stay out of the fighting and get back into the saferoom in Larracos. During the descent, the eruption triggers the spontaneous summoning of Eris and a battlefield-wide demon eviction event. Florin reports that the earlier missile strike stopped the giant orc war machine’s movement but did not neutralize its weapons, and that Warlord Stalwart may try to escape.

Two major objectives then fall ahead of schedule. Team Retribution begins occupying both the Bone Clan throne room and the Dream throne room, starting separate six-hour defeat timers. Sir Ferdinand, speaking for Juice Box, proposes an emergency action item concerning the summoned gods. The AI splits the request. It rejects any change that would let gods remain beyond the normal ninth-floor summoning rules, but approves new Ascendency restrictions: sponsors must personally pilot their sponsored deities when those deities are summoned off the twelfth floor, summoned deities may no longer appear as the sponsors themselves, and the AI retroactively corrects any current summon whose sponsor declined to attend.

Carl lands near Elle and learns that someone has searched her location, temporarily breaking her Subterfuge. Victory suddenly appears and tells Carl that the adjutants learned about an unspecified development only minutes earlier and tried unsuccessfully to stop it because the AI claims the matter is beyond its control. Before she can explain, Florin reports that Stalwart has breached the anti-teleport net and escaped his immobilized war machine. Donut appears to hit him or his accompanying forces with long-range Magic Missiles during the escape.

Enemy dots then teleport directly to Elle and the Gate. Elle is blasted unconscious into a tree as Carl rushes toward the clearing. He finds Stalwart on his knees, four war mage corpses already smoking from Donut’s attack, three surviving war mages surrounding the orc, and a fourth standing apart. The surviving war mages abruptly cease registering as enemies and acquire the distinct color of a new faction. Carl identifies the leader as Akuma, a level-100 War Mage and leader of the War Mage Rebellion.

The system description explains that war mages are rare, naturally dungeon-born beings rather than deliberately designed NPCs. Repeated resleeving by fleshers can eventually fuse a reanimated skeleton, flesher, and sapient magical force into a single war mage carrying knowledge of hundreds of spells. Because showrunners preserve and reuse them across seasons, the same exploited beings can persist for years with their memories repeatedly manipulated. The rebellion is therefore another consequence of the dungeon repeatedly weaponizing entities it created but never fully understood.

Akuma’s group turns on Stalwart rather than Carl. Three war mages cast together and tear the orc apart. Stalwart’s final words are that his sister was right. Akuma has already taken the Gate of the Feral Gods from the unconscious Elle. After insulting Carl, Akuma and the other surviving rebels teleport away with the Gate, leaving Carl with Stalwart dead, Elle injured, and a new independent faction loose on the battlefield.

The system confirms Stalwart’s death and credits three members of the War Mage Rebellion. Because the rebellion is not an active Faction Wars team, the Bone Clan’s assets will pass to Team Retribution, which currently occupies its throne room. King’s Point itself remains capturable because its remote sections are not connected to Larracos, even though the castle above the throne room has just been destroyed. Donut angrily notes that her earlier Magic Missile strike earned partial credit for Stalwart’s death even though the announcement did not mention her.

Elle recovers from being knocked unconscious and says Akuma deliberately pulled back before killing her. Victory explains that the system has just recognized the War Mage Rebellion as a new “non-team entity,” a category she says did not previously exist. Carl collects the four dead war mage bodies because their heads are expected to explode roughly ten minutes after death. He and Elle no longer need the physical Gate of the Feral Gods for their own immediate plan because its portal to location eight, the woods above the Madness castle, is already open and will remain active until its timer expires.

The newly mandatory Ascendency-pilot rule immediately produces another complication. Eris speaks across the battlefield in a voice Katia recognizes as Hekla’s. Rosetta explains that Eris is sponsored this season by Nami, a model and influencer who had surgery to make herself look and sound like Hekla. Nami apparently had not intended to pilot Eris personally on the ninth floor, but the new rule has forced her into the goddess’s body. Meanwhile, Florin reports confusion over whether his troops should still be fighting forces now under NPC control, while demon eviction events and the uncontrolled lava flow add pressure across the battlefield.

The loss of the Gate exposes another coordination problem. Justice Light abruptly says he needs the Gate back, surprising Carl because Justice had never told him that the Gate was part of another plan. Juice Box also disappears from the battlefield to deal with the adjutants, though she messages Britney to keep Operation Ruin moving. Carl becomes increasingly frustrated that allies are making hidden plans that depend on him without telling him, echoing Shi Maria’s warning that he remains a puppet moving along other people’s rails.

Victory then receives more detail about the War Mage Rebellion. She believes the mages somehow broke their Conscription allegiance to the Skull Empire and killed Stalwart using coordinated Pull spells. One possibility is that Stalwart himself ejected them from his army while trying to stop their attack, unintentionally freeing them. After killing him, the war mages immediately teleported to Juice Box and Ferdinand. Drick, Team Retribution’s adjutant, has called a foul against his own team, apparently alleging illegal interference if Juice Box had coordinated with the rebellion before it became independent. Victory considers the claim uncertain because the new entity’s legal status is unprecedented, and a full adjutant quorum is called to decide the issue.

Elsewhere, Edgar locates Epitome Tagg fleeing the Dream castle area with a small mounted contingent rather than accompanying his main army. Donut cannot get a clean shot because Eris blocks her line of sight, so she orders the Sledge to fire missiles at the marked target. Tagg’s retreat effectively abandons the troops attacking the FUPA while Team Retribution occupies the Dream throne room. Other reports show Tran taking heavy losses from magical artillery, demon eviction continuing at the FUPA, Louis already repairing and reloading Party Planner for another run, and the bulk of the Madness and Reaver forces still unseen. Boomer then begins the raid on the Reaver castle and orders Bomo and the Sledge to start their barrage.

Once Elle can recast Subterfuge, she and Carl resume their original mission. They step through the existing Gate portal toward Madness territory, leaving Samantha behind to coordinate with Boomer and evade whatever feral god appears when the portal closes. Just as they enter, Samantha looks into the smoky sky and identifies a new threat: a dragon.

Carl and Elle emerge through the active Gate portal into Madness territory under Elle’s Subterfuge spell. The portal itself has been shining in the woods for about ten minutes, so Carl worries it may already have been noticed. Between them and the Madness castle lies an exceptionally dense trap field containing alarms, teleport traps, monster summons, and guard summons. Carl decides to cross with a small force, collecting useful summon traps as he goes and initially calling in only Katia, Imani, Holger, and Splash Zone through prepared teleport traps.

The dragon Samantha spotted over the Reaver castle is identified as a Bleached Drake with gravity magic. Donut can barely see it and cannot use Paint the Target at that distance. Carl tries to divert Louis away from the Reaver bombing run, but Boomer privately reminds him that the operation depends on Party Planner’s bombs, that Louis is a capable pilot, and that Carl already handed theater command to Rosetta and the Reaver assault to Boomer. Carl accepts the correction, apologizes, restores Louis’s original orders, and tells him to reserve his anti-air missiles for the dragon. This reinforces Carl’s continuing difficulty relinquishing control of simultaneous operations.

The missiles fired at Epitome Tagg miss, allowing the Dream warlord to escape for now. Florin reports the 101st’s orc mission accomplished after Stalwart’s death and the waning demon eviction event; most of his force will fall back to Shanty Town while two squads assist with lava control. Team Retribution’s inherited off-world troops remain a concern. Meanwhile, the first missile barrage strikes the Reaver castle, though some missiles explode before impact and the extent of the damage is unclear.

Carl’s planned four-person infiltration changes when the teleport trap intended for Holger instead brings Dong Quixote riding Gonk, with Bigs also mounted on the swamp yak. Holger chose to stay behind with Clint, Tina, the other children, and Nadine. Dong explains that Justice Light taught the sluggalo group that a mount using a teleport trap can carry all its riders through, making the substitution possible. Carl reluctantly incorporates Dong, Gonk, and Bigs into the mission.

Carl lays out the stealth approach. The group must remain inside Elle’s Subterfuge area, avoid alarm traps, and stay invisible until reaching the anti-invisibility field roughly one hundred meters from the castle. Bodi, Prepotente, and the 103rd are advancing from the opposite direction to draw Madness defenders away. Imani will disarm alarms while Carl collects summon traps, including one that can summon a specific guard and another containing fire ants. The presence of inert traps tied to already-dead guards suggests the field was laid long ago and has not been carefully maintained.

At the Reaver front, Samantha remains near the expiring Gate because the plan is to exploit whatever emerges. Carl and the others had hoped her presence might attract a Nothing demon obsessed with her, allowing Samantha to drag it through Reaver territory as a destructive distraction for Boomer. To help with the dragon instead, Carl promotes Samantha to officer rank so she gains Paint the Target and orders her to mark the Bleached Drake for Bomo and the Sledge. Samantha reluctantly agrees because the target designation is meant to protect Louis.

The Gate expires before Samantha moves far enough away. Instead of a Nothing demon, the Feral God Yarilo enters the realm. Samantha immediately realizes the problem and responds with an alarmed “uh-oh,” ending the chapter with the Reaver-side diversion transformed into a much less controllable divine threat.

Yarilo immediately calls out for Psamathe, confirming Samantha was right that the feral god knows and resents her. Before Carl's Madness infiltration can progress, a brilliant prismatic beam erupts from deeper in the woods. The Scavenger's Daughter reacts without understanding it, and Carl receives an update to Find Out Who Killed My Son: the Memorial Crystal: Apito has revealed itself, and the quest orders him to abandon his current task and obtain it. Carl recognizes that the crystal is held by the unaffiliated crawler Osvaldo, who has avoided joining any army, and refuses to abandon Operation Ruin or force an unnecessary fight with another crawler.

Carl explains that the crystal is connected to the unresolved mystery surrounding Apito. Yarilo was originally banished to the Nothing after disrupting one of Apito's Butcher's Masquerade parties, and Carl believes the crystal's reaction to Yarilo's return is another clue about Apito being simultaneously dead and not dead. Osvaldo cannot get the blazing crystal back into his inventory. When Carl messages him to put it away, the system warns that communication with an unaffiliated crawler can be reviewed as possible illegal collaboration, and Victory immediately warns Carl not to cross that line.

The beacon destroys the infiltration's remaining secrecy. Elle's Subterfuge is negated after the group is observed. Prepotente reports that the original diversion is partly working: a large Madness force has moved toward Bodi, Prepotente, and the 103rd on the opposite side of the castle. But the rainbow beacon has drawn the other half of the Madness defenders directly toward Carl's much smaller assault group.

Carl now faces a protection problem. He can summon the reserve half of the 105th Scream Warriors, but they do not have enough protection against the Madness's long-range psionic attacks. Prepotente can provide that protection to only one side at a time. Katia proposes ending the diversion early, using Donut to cover the 103rd's withdrawal, and moving Prepotente to Carl's side so the reinforced assault force can survive. Carl agrees even though it exposes the retreating 103rd to greater risk.

Carl begins calling in the eighteen remaining members of his original assault team and tells Jurgen to prepare the reserve half of the 105th for teleportation. Juice Box is still trapped in the unusually long adjudication, so Carl assumes the attack may proceed without her. He orders Bodi to finish seeding the field and retreat at full speed, tells Prepotente to shift to Carl's side as soon as the withdrawal begins, and instructs Donut to wait until Bodi reports clear of the seeds before executing her assigned support action. Bodi warns that losing Prepotente's psionic protection during the retreat is dangerous, but accepts the order.

The planned missile assault then begins. Hundreds of missiles hammer the Madness castle, briefly revealing and collapsing its shield while sustained fire keeps it suppressed. The bombardment also illuminates a large Madness force racing toward Carl's position on dune-buggy-like vehicles. Elle begins painting targets for the remaining Cheese Cutter anti-personnel missiles, but after the sustained strikes on the Madness and Reaver strongholds, Bomo and the Sledge have little ammunition left. The chapter ends with Carl's stealth mission fully converted into an open battle as the approaching force closes on them.

The reserve half of the 105th Scream Warriors arrives by Mass Teleportation, bringing roughly three thousand Princess Posse soldiers into the woods behind Carl. A handful materialize partially inside trees and several guard-summon traps trigger, but everyone survives. Jurgen takes command of the arriving Scream Warriors while Carl's individually summoned assault team also assembles, including Jamal, Bautista, Chris, Clay-ton, Doctor Bones, Gluteus Maxx, Areson, and others. The approaching Madness force halts about a kilometer away and begins forming a shielded battle line. Imani warns everyone to watch one another for mind manipulation and Atrocity magic.

Carl summons Rend, now equipped with the Enchanted Tooth Cap of Hi-Yo Silver, which allows Carl to pull the pet toward himself from several kilometers away. While waiting for the battle to begin, Carl becomes lost in an unusually deep chain of memories about old western television, his father, books, and the unopened Christmas present in the saferoom. Imani suddenly slaps him awake and reveals that the Madness has been concentrating a massive psionic assault directly on him. Carl is hit with repeated Endless Thread of Distraction, Self Harm, Intrusive Thoughts, and other mental effects while the Ring of Divine Suffering glows red.

As Carl begins to collapse under the attack, he becomes aware of the strange river-like presence beneath him and hears a familiar male voice that is neither Shi Maria nor her husband. The voice tells Carl that his mind is his foundation, calls him family because of something he has done, and urges him to look at his feet. Carl realizes his bare feet are embedded in an All Tree root. His Mind Balance rises naturally to level 16 under battlefield conditions, earning an achievement for training a skill past level 15 without simply using potions. The increase snaps him free of the mental collapse. When he pulls his feet from the root, the tree behind him withers and dies.

Level 16 Mind Balance fundamentally changes the fight. Carl no longer needs Wisp Armor against the incoming mind attacks, which continue to strike without taking hold. He can now identify the specific Madness mind mages targeting him, so he paints them one by one and orders Bomo and the Sledge to redirect the last missile reserves against those targets. Cheese Cutter strikes destroy more than half of the marked mages and the concentrated psionic assault stops.

Elsewhere, Operation Ruin continues to unravel. Louis is preparing his Reaver bomb run while the Bleached Drake circles overhead; Boomer is pressing the Reaver castle; Yarilo continues chasing Samantha; the Dream castle is destroyed but its throne room remains occupied; Epitome Tagg is hiding in the woods; Meatus, Eris, and Harpocrates continue fighting; Florin is falling back toward Shanty Town; Tran is moving to reinforce the FUPA; and the Dream assault there is being squeezed between defenders and demon-possessed corpses. Bodi reports that the Madness force on his side has stopped pursuing the 103rd and is redirecting toward Carl instead. Prepotente is almost at Carl's position, but warns that a third Madness force has emerged from beneath the castle.

The original corpse-based plan for Donut's tower-enhanced You're Not Done Yet is effectively lost because the Madness has abandoned the battlefield where Bodi's force seeded the corpses. Carl tells Donut to stand down rather than try to recover the setup. As the last missiles strike the approaching Madness line, a new divine effect begins before either army can engage.

Eris initiates the Chaos Ritual, granting broad temporary invulnerability, then casts Bear Witness across almost the entire floor. Everyone outdoors within the effect is frozen in a Witness state unless they resist or are otherwise exempt. Carl's newly raised Mind Balance negates the spell. Many former tattoo entities and sluggalos are also unaffected, while people inside structures avoid the effect. Across Carl's position, Elle, Imani, Katia, Jurgen, Prepotente, and most of both armies freeze with white eyes. Similar reports arrive from Shanty Town, the FUPA, Florin's force, and other fronts.

Eris then casts level-20 Bring Forth the Witnesses. The spell produces a floor-wide magical backlash that disables all long-range teleportation for one hour. The frozen witnesses, allies and enemies alike, are launched into the air and vanish, apparently transported to Eris. Bianca arrives alone moments later, furious because Prepotente has disappeared with the witnesses. Carl points her toward the Dream territory where Eris is fighting. The chapter ends with most of the battlefield abruptly removed, long-range escape blocked, and Operation Ruin thrown into an entirely new crisis.

Mordecai explains that Eris's spell sequence is part of the Ceremony of Chaos, an Eris-specific ritual normally used on the twelfth floor. Some gods can only claim the Ascendent throne when no mortals are present, so Eris can summon mortal witnesses to the ceremony, freeze them in a Witness state, and protect them from the gods with temporary invulnerability. She can maintain the Witness state as long as she wants, can remove the invulnerability early, and can cast this particular ceremony only once.

Donut can see the result near the ruined Dream castle: tens of thousands of allies and enemies have been dumped together in a single enormous pile, including Katia, Elle, Imani, Bautista, Chris, the Sledge, Florin, Zhang, and what appears to be the previously missing Reaver army. The Memorial Crystal's rainbow beam is also shining from inside the pile. Worse, Eris's casting accidentally granted the feral god Meatus the same invulnerability. Rosetta warns that if Eris removes the protection while everyone remains frozen, people in the heap could be crushed or suffocate before they can defend themselves.

Carl estimates the pile may contain roughly eighty thousand people and initially considers abandoning the Madness assault to help. Long-range teleportation is disabled, however, making a quick rescue impossible. Donut tells him to finish his mission and let her solve the pile problem.

At the same time, the Reaver operation collapses in the air. The Bleached Drake survives Louis's anti-air missiles, becomes enraged, and uses gravity magic to rip Party Planner in half. Louis dumps the bombs before they are armed, so they do not detonate, but Party Planner is destroyed and Louis believes his replacement door gunners are dead. Feather Falling leaves him descending directly toward the Reaver castle while Reaver security tracks him. Carl tells him to land, hide, and use his cloud attack and smoke grenades, then orders Samantha to go rescue him. Samantha reports that Yarilo has stopped chasing her and immediately redirects toward Louis.

Carl is torn between the catastrophe at the Dream castle, Louis's fall, and the empty Madness castle ahead. Dong argues that the disappearance of the Madness army has created the exact opening they need. Carl decides to trust Donut, Rosetta, Mordecai, and Samantha with the other crises and continue his own mission, recognizing that he can still directly affect the Madness objective and that another fallen warlord would advance the war toward its final phase.

Donut's solution begins with an atrocity. She casts Rolling Battle Formation, a spell obtained from the stinky wizard hat and massively amplified by the Nest's Atrocity synergy. Her goal is to gather the Witness pile into a controllable rolling mass and drive it away from the god fight toward the field where Bodi's force had earlier seeded corpses. The spell succeeds far beyond expectation: it pulls tens of thousands of people into a gigantic rolling ball that Donut can steer remotely until it sustains enough damage to break.

The spell also catches Meatus. Because Meatus is still wrapped around Eris, Eris is pulled into the rolling formation as well and becomes unconscious. Harpocrates follows the moving mass, apparently trying to strike it while hesitating around the Memorial Crystal's prismatic beam. The enormous divine body of Meatus does not fully fit inside the formation, leaving part of him trailing from the ball. Donut's improvised rescue therefore relocates the witness pile and the god fight at the same time, creating a new and highly unstable battlefield configuration as Carl turns back toward the Madness castle.

With Donut's enormous Rolling Battle Formation moving toward the corpse field and Harpocrates following it, Carl turns back to the Madness castle. He puts Rend into his carrier, takes an Invisibility potion, and gives additional potions to Jamal and Gonk; making Gonk invisible also partially conceals Dong and Bigs riding on her. The group races through the trap field while Carl continues monitoring the crises elsewhere.

Louis has survived his fall onto the roof of the Reaver castle. He is moving under smoke cover and has recovered several unexploded No Disassemble and Waffle Maker bombs, though he has no safe way to detonate them and remains vulnerable. Samantha is still moving toward him. Carl deliberately resists micromanaging Louis and keeps his attention on the Madness objective.

Carl suggests using Team Retribution's unused Dream-side digger to distract Harpocrates from Donut's rolling mass. Britney says Arief currently controls the diggers while Juice Box remains tied up in the adjutant hearing. Victory tells Carl the hearing is being deliberately prolonged because the adjudication itself is serving some unstated purpose, and the participants intend to stall until the AI ends it.

Near the Madness castle, the anti-invisibility protections strip away Carl's concealment. A summon trap under Dong and Gonk fails because the floor-wide teleport ban prevents it from bringing in its Face-Melting Acid Rats. Carl reaches the rear service entrance, disables three traps, physically forces open the rolling door, and enters an apparently empty vehicle bay. The alarm starts and then abruptly cuts off.

Donut then uses the Nest's PA system as a second distraction against Harpocrates. She insults the god over his stolen anatomy and blasts music across the floor, beginning with "Lollipop." The noise makes Harpocrates stop pursuing the rolling witness mass and cover his ears, buying Donut time to keep the formation moving. A later song choice causes him to turn back toward the ball, but the moving mass has gained distance and the digger is still approaching.

Inside the Castle of the Madness, Carl casts Ping and finds about twenty soldiers. Only three register as offworlders. Eighteen occupants are concentrated in one room, while two more, one purple and one white, are beside the throne room in the operating theater where Architect Houston is expected to be. The Book of Voodoo simultaneously gains three new crawler entries.

Using Find Crawler, Carl identifies three living crawlers and one crawler corpse inside the castle. Two living crawlers are mixed among the soldiers and carry the light-blue military glow that indicates they have been conscripted by the Madness. The third, Burcu, is in the operating theater with Houston and is not conscripted. Carl also identifies the corpse of Zeynep, a crawler he knew from the previous floor. A Team Retribution NPC is initially alive in the same room but dies moments later.

Carl tries to message Burcu directly, but the system blocks the message because she is unaffiliated and warns that repeated attempts may constitute illegal collaboration. The Book of Voodoo nevertheless updates with Burcu's entry. Burcu begins rapidly drawing the operating theater and marks multiple Fireball traps, then starts writing about Houston. Before Carl can read the rest, the book slams shut and the AI explicitly tells him the workaround still counts as cheating.

The soldiers in the castle then begin moving toward Carl's group while psionic attacks flood his interface. His level-16 Mind Balance prevents any of them from taking hold. Carl, Dong, Jamal, Bigs, Gonk, and Rend prepare to meet the incoming defenders, and Carl notes that his Ceremony of Chaos invulnerability is still active while the approaching enemies do not share it.

Carl's small team finishes off the Madness mercenaries inside the castle. Two surviving crawlers, Selvi and Tuba, are still compelled by Conscription and fight against their restraints even after the guards are dead. Tuba is bleeding badly from a wound received during the struggle, but both women carry a no-healing penalty for resisting their Conscription orders. Carl cannot free them from the spell until the Madness is defeated, so he has them muted, bound, and protected rather than interrogated. He loots the dead defenders, including two Viceroys, leaving Architect Houston as the only Viceroy still alive in the castle.

Carl sends Bigs to scout the front entrance while Jamal guards Selvi and Tuba. Bigs finds the entrance open and then, on Carl's order, enters the unguarded throne room. The system immediately announces that the Princess Posse has begun occupying the Throne Room of the Madness and will defeat the faction if it can hold for six hours.

Carl and Dong proceed toward Houston's surgical theater beside the throne room. The hall resembles a hospital, and Houston's screams repeatedly start and stop as they approach. Carl removes traps from the hall entrances, but when he enters the theater he discovers a much more dangerous system waiting inside. The room contains four surgical tables beneath a massive automated surgical apparatus called the Grease Monkey. One table is soaked in blood. Zeynep's mutilated corpse lies on another. Burcu is alive but magically restrained on a third. Above the final table hangs the dead changeling Namico, while the Grease Monkey physically connects Namico's body to Architect Houston beneath him.

The Grease Monkey is a Viceroy portable surgical and scientific exploration automaton. The system description explains that the Viceroys' supposed medical mission is secondary to their obsession with scientific discovery, and that Houston became prime of the Viceroys because of discoveries made with this machine. Houston begs Carl not to interfere, saying he is on the verge of completing his life's work and that Burcu can survive if Carl lets the procedure finish.

Eight Containment Breach Trap Mark IV units ring the theater from the observation level. They are Tripper-proof, chained together, and tied to Houston through a dead man's switch. Any unaffiliated person stepping on the theater floor will trigger them, as will Houston's death, and a single activation will cause the entire sequence to fire Sheol flame into the room. Carl believes his Ceremony of Chaos invulnerability might protect him, but Burcu would certainly die.

Outside, Donut's attempt to move the rolling witness formation is still in danger because Harpocrates is closing on the Nest. Li Jun volunteers to use a distant PA speaker to lure the god away and tells Li Na he will jump before Harpocrates reaches him. Carl is forced to keep working while the situation unfolds over chat.

Carl finally manages to communicate with Burcu. Houston has cut out her tongue and voice box, tortured her mother, and killed her in front of Burcu. Burcu says Carl owes her because he killed her father and demands to be freed so she can kill Houston. Her restraints prevent her from using magic. Carl decides to rescue her without touching the trapped floor. He uses Walk on Air to jump from table to table, puts Burcu to sleep with the Wand of Nighty-Night so she will not leap off the table in rage, and releases her magical restraints from a wall switch.

While Carl is crossing the room, Houston continues the procedure on Namico. The dead changeling begins changing, sprouting root-like growths as Houston exults that he has finally found the 'Beautiful Place' and something real rather than an avatar. Houston's health begins falling rapidly from the procedure. Carl throws him a Fine Healing potion, not to save Houston permanently, but to keep the dead man's switch from firing before Carl can remove Burcu.

At the same time, Eris regains consciousness inside Donut's Rolling Battle Formation and removes the original Witness effect and Ceremony of Chaos invulnerability. The rolling formation itself still keeps everyone inside immobile and invulnerable, but Carl's own yellow protection vanishes. Li Jun then sends Li Na a farewell message, telling her to protect Zhang and saying he made his choice. Carl understands that Li Jun's diversion has become fatal.

Carl jumps onto Burcu's table and tries to lift her, but the table rolls and tips. Burcu wakes as they fall. Both she and Carl hit the trapped floor, activating the containment sequence. Carl immediately triggers Gloom Wraith Phase and races through the room as Sheol fire erupts from every direction. His path takes him directly through Houston, unraveling and killing the Viceroy.

During the escape, Carl collides with the transformed being created from Namico and Houston's procedure. Time seems to distort. The creature looks at Carl, changes momentarily into Li Jun's face, and says, 'Thank you for giving me more time with my sister and my best friend,' before roots pull it away. Carl barely clears the room and is knocked unconscious for a moment.

When he wakes outside, the theater and castle are burning. Houston is dead. Burcu is dead. Carl receives the same thank-you line as an official message from the now-deceased Li Jun, confirming Li Jun has died during the unfolding battle. Carl has almost no time to process the loss before the system announces that Houston's death has defeated the Madness and awarded its assets to the Princess Posse.

That victory immediately triggers the Peeling Phase. Larracos is no longer safe, the city is open, alliances no longer guarantee protection, and only one team can ultimately win. Victory reports that the adjutants' attempt to prolong the adjudication has backfired. Juice Box says the War Mages are attacking and are not allies, while Britney reports that they are breaking into Larracos.

The quorum then formalizes the War Mage Rebellion's new status. Although it had previously ruled that the rebellion could not enter Larracos until the Peeling Phase, that restriction becomes moot the instant the Peeling begins, and the ruling itself gives the rebellion legal standing. Warlord Agatha of the War Mage Rebellion immediately proposes three emergency action items. The system grants the rebellion full warlord resources and the ability to claim thrones, extends Conscription so unaffiliated players can be recruited into the rebellion, and restores a lethal version of the original Faction Wars rule: from this point forward, every affiliated soldier and warlord still on the battlefield will die instantly when their team is defeated.

The final blow follows immediately. War Mage Rebellion forces are already occupying Team Retribution's throne room. They gain control of Larracos's city defense system, with a thirty-minute grace period before the towers activate, and will win Faction Wars if they hold the throne room for six hours. The alliance Carl and Juice Box built to avoid a final mutual slaughter has been overtaken by Agatha's rebellion, leaving the Princess Posse and Team Retribution trapped in a suddenly lethal endgame.

Five teams remain in Faction Wars. The War Mage Rebellion is occupying Team Retribution's castle, with just under six hours left on its victory timer and less than half an hour before Larracos's city defenses come under War Mage control. A slow lava flow is also approaching the city because the earlier abatement effort was interrupted by Bear Witness. Carl remains outside the former Madness stronghold while Donut's Rolling Battle Formation approaches the corpse field. Under the new Peeling rules, the immediate priority is keeping Juice Box and Ferdinand alive and retaking the occupied castle before Team Retribution's soldiers are wiped out or the defenses activate.

Inside Larracos, Donut reports swarms of new War Mage creatures called zarogoths. Mordecai identifies them as generated mobs, and Rosetta explains that they are being produced by a soul-crystal generator with a capacitor and antenna that captures and corrupts souls while rerouting demon eviction. Destroying the antenna should collapse the generated army, but the city defense towers cannot safely be attacked before they activate. Carl sends Jamal and the others toward a saferoom while he stays near the rolling formation, planning to rally survivors once it breaks apart.

Baroness Victory appears and clarifies the War Mage command structure. Agatha is now co-warlord with Akuma because Akuma, like Juice Box before Ferdinand was added, cannot access the warlord interface on his own. The War Mages have also been assigned Deng Bao as their adjutant. Victory says their motives remain unclear, but they are attacking the other NPCs, surrounding the submerged Team Retribution castle with generated soldiers, and trying to kill the crawlers quickly.

Donut casts a Nest-enhanced You're Not Done Yet over the corpse field. Thousands of corpses are stripped of their skin, creating fleshers that crawl into the still-invulnerable rolling formation in search of Dream and Reaver targets. Former Prime Minister Fopsy, a tripod serving as the Dream's adjutant, arrives as a noncombat observer. At the same time, four War Mage projectiles launch from Larracos: two toward Carl and the rolling formation, one toward Harpocrates, and one toward the west. Bianca intercepts the two aimed at the formation, destroying one and deflecting the other, but is injured and crashes.

The surviving projectile penetrates the rolling formation. Soon afterward Nami, the offworld influencer controlling Eris, is violently expelled from the mass because Eris's soul armor has been removed. Fleshers attack Nami, and Carl kills her and the attached fleshers with a hob-lobber before they can create another War Mage. Carl realizes that a War Mage entered the formation to reach Eris.

Victory and Fopsy then identify the larger tactic. The War Mages traded the Gate of the Feral Gods through the Midnight Market for five hell-kissed Conscription potions powerful enough to affect gods, though using one against a vastly stronger target may kill the caster. Samantha immediately confirms the danger: a War Mage throws one of the potions at Yarilo, successfully conscripting the god, and then explodes from the level disparity.

Carl abruptly reverses Donut's plan to destroy the rolling formation. He heals the mass with a Fine Healing potion and tells Donut to keep it intact, steer it toward Larracos, and then leave the Nest, because freeing Meatus or Eris could hand the War Mages another conscripted god. Li Na reports that she has been installing Li Jun's eye into herself and has stopped a War Mage from reaching Harpocrates, but she is not strong enough to stop the god once he advances.

Fopsy offers a theory, explicitly not a confirmed motive. If Agatha believes the spreading local AI threatens the Eulogist, then rapidly eliminating the crawlers and ending the Ascendency game could trigger the system's hard-coded shutdown and hibernation sequence, providing an alternative way to stop the AI. Victory notes that Akuma's reaction to Agatha becoming co-warlord suggests the two War Mage leaders may not actually be cooperating. With fleshers beginning to converge on him and the ball moving toward Larracos, Carl retreats toward the saferoom.

Carl reaches the saferoom and finds Mordecai reading Anne of Green Gables to Ruby. The scene reminds him of Katia and Annie's hospital memory and makes him realize that Mordecai may believe these are his final hours with Ruby and the other children. If Donut dies, Mordecai's arrangement ends, and he may never see them again. Carl forces himself to keep moving and sends his group through the doggie door toward Larracos, with Dong and Gonk routed separately to Shanty Town.

They emerge at the Larracos College of Magic with only thirteen minutes left before the city defense system activates. The city is already under siege by zarogoths. One nearby defense tower is fully upgraded to fire a level-five Fire Lance ten times per second, making the approaching activation especially dangerous. Donut remains in the Nest tower while Harpocrates reaches the edge of the city and Carl gains the god's Pied Piper effect. Li Na corrects Carl's assumption about why Harpocrates has stopped: a pair of changelings disguised as golden-skinned ogre basilica guards are holding the threshold, and the gods appear unwilling to attack them. Yarilo and the Rolling Battle Formation are also approaching Larracos.

Carl observes the zarogoths closely. They are generated disposable troops made from corrupted captured souls, filled with black oil, armed with a painful ray attack, and difficult to kill until they lose more than half their liquid. The NPC defenders have already learned that slashing the creatures low on the body drains them quickly. Their real tactical value is delay, and the swarms are buying the War Mages time.

Donut finally locates the generator antenna inside the Piccadilly Theater on the ninth level of the city, visible only by reflection. It is shielded and outside her firing angle, and the advancing lava is about to obstruct it further. Carl tells her that finding it is enough and orders her to abandon the Nest and jump to the college before Harpocrates reaches her.

Juice Box arrives with Britney, Ferdinand, and other changeling officers. Carl proposes pushing to the railing so he can bomb the Piccadilly Theater with Waffle Makers, but Juice Box is focused on Louis. His status screen shows that he is alive at full health but both paralyzed and bound inside the Reaver castle. Samantha is already searching for him. Juice Box offers Samantha any body she wants in exchange for Louis's safe return, then tells Samantha that she knows who she really is and promises to help her if Louis is returned.

As the group prepares to attack the generator, messages arrive from the lower Nest tower. Bomo, Toyotomi, and Sergeant Bret S report that someone is trying to enter. Donut then discovers that a net-like effect has suddenly trapped her inside the tower and prevents her from jumping away. Toyotomi identifies the intruder only as a female crawler with a dog. His message is immediately marked as coming from a deceased mercenary. Sergeant Bret S calls for backup and is then marked deceased, followed by Bomo's final message that he will stop the intruder, also marked as coming from a deceased mercenary. The chapter ends with Donut trapped in the Nest while an unidentified crawler and dog cut through its defenders.

Carl reacts to the deaths in the Nest tower without stopping to plan. He pushes through the zarogoths at the college railing, drinks his last Levitation potion, rises above Larracos, and abandons the careful bombing run he had intended against the Piccadilly Theater. Instead, he empties an entire explosives folder toward the theater, including roughly twenty Waffle Makers, two No Disassembles, two Cheese Cutters, hundreds of impact hob-lobbers, and large amounts of dynamite, then uses Walk on Air to try to reach Shanty Town.

Carl falls short and crashes onto the upper rings of Larracos just before the explosives detonate. The attack destroys the Zarogoth soul-gem generator, but it also triggers the city defense system almost immediately and causes severe collateral damage, including structural collapse near the aqueduct and spreading lava on the upper levels. A black-gemmed gale-strike tower locks onto Carl with Inexorable and continues firing at him as he climbs out of the city into Shanty Town.

Donut reports that Lucia is inside the Nest tower and climbing toward her with Gus. Carl tells Donut to activate the tower's last-ditch Donkey Kong defense, which converts the stairwell into a steep ramp and rolls defensive barrels down it. Harpocrates remains outside Shanty Town, temporarily held at the threshold by Juice Box's changelings in golden-skinned ogre form, while the Rolling Battle Formation approaches.

Ferdinand reaches Carl despite his fear and insists that Donut needs help. Carl leaves Ferdinand outside because Team Retribution cannot afford to lose him, then uses Hi-Yo Silver to pull Rend out of Larracos and toward his position. He crosses the exposed ground under continued fire and enters the Nest, whose integrity is already falling. Inside he finds Toyotomi, Bomo, and the defending mages cleaved in half. Toyotomi is permanently dead; Bomo is expected to regenerate on the tenth floor, but Carl no longer holds his contract and does not know whether they will meet again.

Li Na arrives before Carl starts up the ramp. She has gouged out one of her own eyes and installed Li Jun's celestial-quality eye, gaining its time-slowing and speed abilities. She gives Carl a duplicate of the level-18 Hell-Kissed Potion of Conscription recovered from the dead War Mage. Li Na used Li Jun's potion-duplication scroll to copy it and intends to use the original against Harpocrates before rescuing Zhang, Elle, Katia, and the others. Carl warns that the level disparity may kill her, but she leaves anyway.

The Donkey Kong stairwell is partly magic-numbing but does not fully suppress Lucia. Donut reports that sleep and mute effects are failing, while Gus repeatedly slides down the ramp. Lucia says she wants Mongo as revenge. Donut finally summons Raul, whose card has advanced to mythic rarity and level 110. Raul collides with Lucia, drags her down the ramp with Carl, breaks through her remaining shield, and pins her in his claws.

Lucia suddenly becomes frightened and begs Carl to stop, but Carl does not trust the change. With Donut still trapped above and Lucia's protections temporarily broken, he uses the duplicated Hell-Kissed Potion of Conscription on Lucia. The potion shatters against her head as the chapter ends.

The Hell-Kissed Potion works, placing Lucia under Princess Posse Conscription. Carl immediately orders her to cancel any harmful spells and remove her protections. Lucia's frightened submission vanishes and she becomes openly hostile, confirming to Carl that she had been pretending to surrender. The Conscription prevents her from attacking him directly. She says she cannot simply dismiss Gus, and explains that the anti-escape effect is not a net over the tower but a scroll effect attached to Donut's room: Donut will explode if she tries to teleport before it expires.

A warlord message announces that Li Na has successfully conscripted the level-250 Harpocrates without dying. Carl then studies Lucia more closely. She has more than two hundred player-killer skulls, twenty hunter kills, countless boss kills, and has killed her own game guide. Carl puts on the Ring of Divine Suffering and begins to form a mark, believing he may have no safe way to leave Lucia alive once Conscription ends.

Before he finishes, Lucia's demeanor changes again. A frightened child identifies herself as Diah and says Lucia is with Alexandro, who appears only when the dogs are close. Carl cancels the Ring mark, not the Conscription, and orders Diah to tell the truth. Diah says multiple children are trapped together in a cold, dark place where they hear whispering and a painful river-like presence. When the dog moves far enough away, Lucia fades and one of the other children can temporarily take control. Diah's inability to understand Carl's later order about stable magical items reinforces that she does not understand the game systems Lucia normally uses.

Yarilo comes into range, and the AI assigns Carl temporary protection from venereal disease after briefly displaying a placeholder effect. Donut then reports that Mongo followed the clockwork duplicates down the ramp after Gus, while the room-binding spell prevents Donut herself from following. Carl rushes upward, only to be swept back outside with Gustavo 3, Raul, the real Mongo, and the clockwork copies.

Outside, the newly conscripted Harpocrates is under Li Na's direct orders as a White Dragons legionnaire. He uses the still-intact Rolling Battle Formation, holding it by Meatus like a flail, to strike Yarilo, who is now under War Mage orders. Meatus remains unaffiliated, and Carl cannot tell whether Eris inside the ball has also been conscripted.

The fight with Gus turns disastrous. Mongo bites the rottweiler, but Gus's Porcupine Defense erupts steel quills through Mongo's mouth and body, then electrifies them. Raul is blasted hard enough to disappear, and the Larracos gale tower repeatedly hits Carl while Gus mauls the critically injured Mongo. Carl tries to intervene, but the tower destroys his sleep wand and badly injures him.

Rend finally arrives in response to a second Hi-Yo Silver. Carl orders Wrecking Ball, and Rend's magically increased mass and speed smash through Gustavo 3, destroying the rear half of the dog and ending the immediate attack on Mongo. Rend then absorbs another gale strike with almost no effect.

Lucia returns in her hag form and uses a pet healing potion on Mongo, whose health is down to a sliver. Her demeanor changes once more as she stands. She tells Carl that he should have killed both her and the dog while their connection still existed. Now, she says, the Eulogist has another ally in the dungeon, and killing her would mean the deaths of all the children of Earth. She walks away, leaving Carl with the implication that the destruction of Gus changed whatever relationship had bound Lucia, the trapped children, and the Eulogist.

In a note added for the twenty-fifth edition of the Cookbook, Carl looks up the definition of "atrocity" and struggles with whether the word belongs to Donut's War Crime spell, to the system that gave it to her, or to the plan he helped design. War Crime came from the same Legendary 1914 box that gave Carl Run, Little Günter, Run, but its scale is entirely different. Carl believes they may need Donut to cast it to survive the next few hours, yet he is terrified of what using it successfully will do to her and of what it says about him for asking.

Back in Shanty Town, Lucia remains conscripted but is suddenly teleported away by administrators. Zev explains that the liaisons want to interview her after Gustavo's death. The crawl operators had long assumed Lucia's presence in the dungeon was an early-entry glitch that would eventually self-correct, but the AI will not allow them to extract her administratively. Zev now reveals that Lucia is connected to roughly 120,000 children who tried to enter the dungeon from one specific wing and whose bodies remain in a surface kinder facility. The operators had believed Lucia's death or exit would release them, but what they learned when the dog died changed that assumption. Zev says the Eulogist is another name for the center-system AI and that they now think Lucia's death may kill the linked children as well. Carl, horrified that he nearly killed Lucia without knowing this, tells Zev to keep her safe because she has effectively become a psychotic dead man's switch.

Nearby, Li Na's conscripted Harpocrates continues beating the conscripted Yarilo with the intact Rolling Battle Formation. Yarilo eventually dies, is damned to the Nothing, and the system announces that his death has angered the gods. Carl loses Yarilo's temporary benefit and heads back into the badly damaged Nest tower after Donut destroys the gale tower that had been tracking him.

While Carl climbs, the wider battle reorganizes. Li Na is riding Harpocrates and coordinating with Juice Box through Britney, while Samantha has located Louis inside a secured jail cell in the otherwise abandoned Reaver castle and is waiting for the robot patrols to move. The absence of Warlord Fang from his castle makes Carl suspect that Fang may be trapped in the rolling formation. A system message then announces that Agatha has been deemed to have abandoned her post and is removed as co-warlord of the War Mage Rebellion, leaving Akuma as sole warlord with full system access. Even Victory cannot explain why.

Carl reaches Donut at the top of the Nest and sees the toll of her hours of long-range killing. She has risen from level 65 to level 74, her Magic Missile is now level 15, and for a moment her eyes look distant and hollow. When she recognizes Carl, she jumps into his arms and circles his shoulders the way she used to before the crawl. She thanks Rend for saving Mongo, despite still finding the creature disgusting. Carl helps destroy the last Larracos defense tower currently firing on the Nest.

Using Ping, Carl confirms that both Epitome Tagg and Warlord Fang are inside the Rolling Battle Formation. He also detects surviving unaffiliated offworlders there, including Saccathians, orcs, nagas, and an Operatic blob. The Ring of Divine Suffering cannot target the trapped enemies, apparently because their health is not at full strength while the fleshers are attached.

Rosetta and Milk then arrive at the Nest with Edgar strapped to Rosetta's back, while Dong Quixote remains below guarding the entrance. Lucia's room-binding effect finally expires, freeing Donut to leave. Instead of bringing a conventional spellbook, Rosetta and Edgar reveal that Donut needs a spell at least level eight for the final phase of their plan, and Edgar is going to give it to her through a magically enhanced tattoo with Milk's help. The chapter ends with Donut demanding to know exactly what they intend to put on her and where.

Rosetta explains that Edgar must tattoo Donut because the spell needed for the final attack has to be at least level eight, and Milk will etch words of power over the tattoo to increase its level. Donut immediately objects to having her fur shaved and her body permanently marked. Carl asks why they abandoned the earlier Laundry Day and Wall of Fire concept.

Rosetta explains that Laundry Day is now too dangerous. Most enemy soldiers inside the Rolling Battle Formation already have fleshers wrapped around them despite their temporary invulnerability. Removing those fleshers could make the creatures attack friendly soldiers instead, especially with Meatus and Eris mixed into the mass. The revised plan uses Bijanbi, a wide-area pulling spell derived from a fallen cleric's Dinner Bell variant, together with Wall of Fire. With both spells amplified by War Crime and the Nest's synergy effect, Bijanbi should separate the enemies from the formation and drag them into a ring of fire. Fleshers resist fire, but any enemy who survives can be converted into a vulnerable symbiote and finished by the fleshers. This matters because War Crime itself cannot directly kill its targets.

Carl suggests simply finding and killing Warlords Tagg and Fang so their affiliated soldiers die under the Peeling rules. Rosetta agrees in principle but says the plan still needs a reliable way to separate the enemies from their allies, and Fang is particularly difficult to identify. The mass-separation plan should minimize friendly casualties when the rolling formation finally breaks.

Carl reviews War Crime's full mechanics. It begins at level five and rises five levels every time it is cast. It can be used only once per eligible Scolopendra floor and only three times total. At its current level it combines two spells of at least level eight in a creative way determined partly by intent. Casting reduces Donut to one percent health, removes access to the chosen spells for the rest of the floor, and permanently unlocks the option to chain those component spells together on later floors. Most importantly, War Crime cannot directly kill anyone. It can mutilate, burn, paralyze, or otherwise transform targets indefinitely while keeping them alive, which is why a separate finisher is required.

The spell description gives Carl an example from an earlier crawl. An Operatic warlord combined Fireball and Paralysis against roughly two hundred mantid mercenaries, leaving them permanently paralyzed, permanently burning, and unable to die for the remainder of the floor. The caster later required an identity reset and was reabsorbed. The historical example reinforces Carl's fear that the spell could damage Donut psychologically even if their plan succeeds.

Li Na warns that Harpocrates is beginning to resist Conscription and that they need to act quickly. Donut still refuses the tattoo. Carl explicitly stops the others from pressuring her and tells her they will find another way if she does not consent. Donut admits that part of her fear is about carrying the resulting scar. Carl tells her that because this is her choice, it would not be a scar but a reminder of the day she helped save everyone. She agrees only after making Carl promise to get a matching tattoo on his own backside later.

Rosetta shaves a small patch on Donut's right flank. Edgar explains that this tattoo is different from the memory-preserving tattoo he made for Signet. The new ink, developed with Milk's help, captures the essence of a fallen crawler and can teach one of that crawler's spells or skills. He believes the Book of Voodoo may eventually allow similar temporary sharing, but there is no time to experiment. Donut asks whether the tattoo can be a flower or baby Mongo. Edgar begins preparing the design and finally answers that the image will be a dog.

Edgar finishes Donut's new tattoo, which grants her the borrowed Bijanbi spell at only level two. The spell is associated with the god Wepwawet and gives Donut new worship options, but it is still too weak for War Crime. Milk writes overlapping Words of Power over the tattoo using different inks, temporarily raising Bijanbi to level 15. The tattoo itself is a small animated line drawing of a dog, much to Donut's embarrassment and Mongo's irritation.

Milk explains that calligraphy, ink, maps, and other magical systems contain many incompatible methods and warns Carl that recipes written with the wrong materials can disappear. She tells him that some of her own best recipes were lost after she changed inks. She then gives Carl a large supply of Stayfast Ink, which the system says will never fade, and an Adept's fountain pen. Milk explicitly points him toward the Book of Voodoo, noting that anything Carl writes in it will propagate to everyone who already possesses the book. Her warning and gifts strongly imply a way to preserve and distribute knowledge beyond the fragile methods she previously used.

With Bijanbi ready, Carl declares the group prepared. Rosetta, Edgar, and Milk leave the Nest, while Dong Quixote and the Sluggalos move away from its base. The coordinated plan is for Harpocrates to throw the Rolling Battle Formation into Larracos, for the allied forces to assault the drained castle, for Donut to use War Crime against the Reaver and Dream forces when they separate, and for Li Na to finish survivors and direct Harpocrates against Eris if necessary.

Before the attack starts, Carl and Donut talk privately. Donut admits that Li Na blamed her for Li Jun's death and that she is afraid the people trapped in the Rolling Battle Formation will blame her if the plan fails. Carl reminds her that the crawl's architects created the war and that Donut's Battle Formation spell has already saved many of the people now trapped inside. Donut also reveals that she and Katia have a separate plan for later and that she secretly received a benefactor box from the Apothecary, but she does not yet explain the plan.

Li Na gives the signal. Harpocrates throws the Rolling Battle Formation deep into Larracos. Britney reports that the water around the occupied castle has been converted to acid and is about to be drained by the remaining dwarven digger before the allied assault. With Harpocrates no longer protecting it, the formation's health begins dropping rapidly under fire from the reactivated city-defense towers.

Carl and Donut then discover that a second magical field still traps the Nest. Victory and Fopsy infer that Lucia planted a delayed secondary trap powered by Power Siphon from the active Larracos towers. The earlier personal net had merely expired and triggered this larger field afterward. Because Lucia is now administratively off the playing field, Carl cannot order her to disable the newly active effect.

Using her sunglasses, Donut sees energy flowing from the defense towers to the trap's ground trigger and fires a Magic Missile at it, but the magical jewel cannot be destroyed remotely. Someone must physically pick it up and put it into inventory. The original escape plan required Carl and Donut to cast War Crime and immediately jump from the Nest, so remaining trapped makes the intended Wall of Fire combination potentially fatal to them.

Carl initially tells the group to abort, but Li Na says it is already too late because the formation is breaking. Carl tells Donut she must still cast War Crime immediately, but orders her not to use fire and to choose another second spell. He sends Dong toward the ground trigger despite the danger. The chapter ends with Li Na announcing that the Rolling Battle Formation has broken and ordering Donut to cast now.

Donut casts War Crime. The system announces that she has committed a third Atrocity, grants her a new class called The Oak Fell, and names her Champion of Nekhebit. At the same moment the broken Rolling Battle Formation exposes Carl to Meatus and Eris. Meatus gives Carl a temporary curse that would make his penis fall off if he became aroused, while Eris's chaotic effect permanently locks in one of Carl's current divine effects. A roulette between the Meatus curse and Harpocrates's level-15 Pied Piper skill lands on Pied Piper, making that benefit permanent.

Time freezes and Eris appears directly beside Carl at human scale. She is free, unsponsored, invulnerable on the ninth floor, and not under War Mage control. Eris offers to make Carl her champion if he eventually kills Taranis, Emberus, and Hellik, then gives him actionable information. The War Mages traded the Gate of the Feral Gods to a Midnight Market merchant named Paca, an agent of Krakaren Prime trapped in the Nothing. Paca currently has the Gate in her stomach. Eris tells Carl to recover it and give it to the Skyfowl who built the antennae beneath the Princess Posse castle, suggesting that doing so could help them win. She also warns that Britney picked up an axe and is now possessed.

Eris leaves the realm and all teleportation restrictions are lifted. Donut, now titled Champion rather than Warlord, becomes rigid while her health steadily drains toward the one-percent War Crime threshold. Carl's first attempt to use the healing scroll misfires, forcing him to wait while the spell unfolds.

Outside, the Rolling Battle Formation has broken. The allied forces fall deeper into Larracos toward a planned Bounce House catch zone while the castle assault begins below. The hostile soldiers and Meatus instead rise toward the Nest under the level-15 Bijanbi pull. Carl then sees the second spell Donut chose when fire became impossible: an enormous Astral Paw forms above Shanty Town. The trapped enemies, many already covered in fleshers, bunch beneath the paw while the War Crime effect prevents them from simply dying.

Carl finally heals Donut as the spell continues. Donut is shaken, confused by her new class and spells, and says she can physically feel everyone held under the giant paw. Li Na creates an enormous lattice of magical chains across the battlefield as the replacement finisher for the abandoned Wall of Fire plan.

Because Astral Paw requires Donut to perform the strikes herself, she extends a paw from Carl's arms and repeatedly swipes downward. The colossal spectral paw mirrors her movements, slamming the mass of trapped enemy soldiers and Meatus through Li Na's chain lattice over and over. The chains hold the targets back while the paw passes through, cutting and crushing the trapped bodies repeatedly as Li Na continuously replaces broken chains. Donut keeps striking until the screaming stops.

When the music and War Crime effect finally end, Carl places the trembling Donut back in her seat, walks to the parapet, and vomits over the side of the Nest.

The system confirms that Meatus has not cleanly left the realm but has been physically "slap-chopped" across it by Donut's War Crime. Harpocrates sees what happened to his stolen anatomy, screams in grief and rage at the Champion of Nekhebit, and then leaves the realm as well. The battlefield around the Nest is coated in gore and volcanic ash, while allied crawlers and NPCs continue destroying Larracos's remaining defense towers below.

Donut is shaken but quickly begins forcing herself back into composure. She confirms that War Crime did not give her any new player-killer skulls, suggesting that its targeting successfully distinguished enemies. Her new Oak Fell class and Champion of Nekhebit status stack on top of her existing class rather than replacing it. After the enormous experience gain, Donut reaches level 135, gains deity-class spells, and makes several threshold choices: Muscle Mommy for strength so Mongo benefits from her increased strength, Brain Trust for intelligence to improve her magic, and Wholesale Discount for charisma. Mordecai says her charm and Love Vampire abilities are now stronger than those of most gods.

Carl himself has risen to level 81, but a new system announcement immediately shifts attention to Li Na. She reaches the base-stat cap of 300 in strength, intelligence, and ultimately every base attribute, an unprecedented state the system admits it has no prepared reward structure for. Carl then realizes why he had been unable to mark the enemies in the Rolling Battle Formation with the Ring of Divine Suffering: Li Na had already marked them, and this floor does not allow simultaneous marks.

That realization creates a serious problem. Carl believes Li Na had marked Epitome Tagg and Warlord Fang, yet neither had been confirmed dead. Because marked targets remain alive, Li Na cannot heal normally, and each use of her chains costs health. Victory and Fopsy are no longer present at the Nest, but the source does not establish why they left.

The battle below resolves in rapid succession. The War Mage Rebellion abandons Team Retribution's throne room, Princess Posse forces briefly occupy it, and then it falls back under Team Retribution control. Britney reports that Li Na tore through the castle while glowing and refusing to speak; the remaining War Mages escaped through a portal. Li Na privately confirms that several enemies escaped, including both Tagg and Fang, and notes the unexplained unaffiliated offworlders left behind in the castle.

Carl tells Li Na that the larger plan is still intact: the NPCs are progressing against the Dream castle, while Carl's group will move next to the Reaver castle, rescue Louis, and capture that throne room. Completing the broader Faction Wars plan should eventually eliminate the remaining enemy soldiers, though Carl still does not know where the escaped War Mages went.

Donut then apologizes to the survivors for putting them into the Rolling Battle Formation. Elle, Chris, Katia, Imani, and others reassure her that the formation itself rendered them unconscious and spared them from the much worse experience of being conscious and helpless under Bear Witness. They acknowledge injuries and deaths, but insist that Donut saved them. Zhang, grieving Li Jun, tells Donut that his friend had feared dying without doing anything important, and that helping Li Na become strong enough to protect herself would have made him proud. Donut finally curls into Carl's arms. When Carl tells her it is all right to cry, she refuses for now because the fight is not finished.

In the aftermath of the battle, Carl and the others regroup near the ruined Team Retribution castle in the lower levels of Larracos. Acid puddles are still being neutralized, damaged towers are being repaired, and Samantha remains unable to reach the unconscious Louis because the Reaver castle's shifting interior and robot dogs keep blocking her. Carl, Florin, Imani, and the others prepare for a rescue mission once the wounded are stabilized.

Carl has also received a revealing warlord-chat exchange from Akuma. Akuma asks Carl to kill Agatha, claiming that the War Mages never wanted to hold the castle and had been forced to accept Agatha as co-warlord in order to obtain system access. He says the War Mages were responsible only for the Conscription action item, not the others attributed to the rebellion. According to Akuma, their true objectives on this floor were to test the Conscription potions and locate the Scavenger's Daughter, who had been hidden inside the castle. He says they found her and now have her.

Akuma describes Agatha as a threat to everyone, including the War Mages themselves, and says she escaped before he could kill her. He claims she can enter the Waiting Room and reappear outside an open stairwell, meaning Carl will probably not see her again until the tenth floor. Epitome Tagg reacts with alarm and says the failsafe should have been triggered weeks earlier. Akuma refuses Carl's invitation to meet in person and soon leaves the realm. The system then declares the War Mage Rebellion defeated with no assets to award.

Carl sends the exchange to Victory and Zev, but receives little clarification. Mordecai also refuses to digress into the lore of the Scavenger or Scavenger's Daughter while Tagg, Fang, the unresolved NPC alliance, and the coming flower ceremony remain more urgent. Carl is especially concerned about Donut and Katia's still-unrevealed plan.

Florin tells Carl that Lucia remains with the liaisons and says he would personally remain in the crawl to protect her if necessary. He explains why Jurgen may do the same: Jurgen entered with his pregnant wife Heidi, who disappeared and is believed to be among the women and children held in the kinder facility. Florin says many crawlers have family members who may be connected to that facility, making Lucia's survival a collective priority rather than merely Carl's problem.

Elsewhere, Sledge mourns Bomo. Edgar cannot extract or tattoo the desired ability from Sledge because he is a rock monster, forcing Rosetta's group to continue without that option. Justice Light again demands the Gate of the Feral Gods. Carl finally tells him it is inside the stomach of Paca, a Midnight Market merchant and in-game representative of the Apothecary. Justice says he knows the market from prior seasons and can retrieve the Gate quickly with the Sluggalos. Although Tipid and Rosetta remain wary because Justice still will not explain what his antenna project will do, Carl supports giving him the chance, recognizing that Justice's plan is tied to long-held revenge.

Carl also follows up on Eris's warning that Britney became possessed after picking up an axe. Imani finds Britney physically healthy, and Juice Box senses nothing abnormal; Britney has no visible axe. Carl decides not to confront her yet in case a hidden presence would harm her if it realizes it has been detected.

Prepotente arrives with another unresolved complication. Emberus updates Carl's quest and reveals that Apito's Memorial Crystal has somehow passed from Osvaldo to Prepotente, who may uncover its secrets and deliver them to the Epicure. Carl decides the confrontation can wait. Prepotente instead chooses to help Li Na hunt the escaped marked enemies, hugs Carl, and departs.

With the rescue team ready, Donut lands on Carl's shoulder and tells him it is time to save Louis.

Carl leads a rescue party across the ash-covered Reaver territory toward the damaged Reaver castle, where Samantha is waiting near the still-paralyzed Louis. The group travels by ground transport rather than risk the captured Reaver airship because a level-130 cybernetic bleached drake still circles overhead. The rescue party includes Imani, Katia, Doctor Bones, Holger, Splash Zone, Tipid, Bautista, Rend, Donut and Mongo, Dong and Gonk with Bigs, Jamal, Elle, and Juice Box. Most of the remaining changelings stay behind to help repair Larracos's defenses.

Elsewhere, Tran and the 102nd are holding the remains of the Dream castle until its capture timer expires, which should kill Epitome Tagg if he is still bound to that team. Florin, Boomer, Bodi, Britney, Rosetta, and Ferdinand remain in Larracos repairing defenses and the Nest. Li Na has stopped answering Carl and tells Zhang only that she is "hunting."

Carl reflects on Donut's new Oak Fell class and Champion of Nekhebit status. Milk and Rosetta believe the Champion title may have been triggered by divine maneuvering connected to Nekhebit. The status gives Donut additional benefits but also leaves her subject to Nekhebit's orders and possible smiting, while enemies of the goddess gain incentives to kill her. Donut's new class also gives her several large-area, druid-like spells, including Raise Forest, Gather Ye, Vermin, and Map the All Tree, the last of which works only on the twelfth floor and deeper.

The group discusses Louis's childhood history and the possibility that his capture is a trap. Warlord Fang is known to be overwhelmingly cybernetic and able to change shape, and the Reaver corporation can effectively recreate him from a preserved biological source called the Initial if he dies. At the castle, Carl identifies the circling drake as Calliope, Fang's cybernetic pet.

The Reaver castle is a damaged maze of shifting honeycomb corridors that reconfigure for credentialed users and can isolate rooms like escape pods. Juice Box says they are not yet trying to capture the throne room. Carl uses Ping and detects Samantha but no visible Reaver combatants. The absence of normal targets makes the group increasingly suspicious.

Victory arrives with Drick and the Reaver adjutant Tart, an antlered political analyst. Tart appears to speak to an unseen figure on his left, and Donut's power-view glasses reveal the outline of Fopsy, the Dream adjutant, concealed nearby. With both adjutants for the two missing warlords present at the Reaver castle, Carl treats the situation as increasingly likely to be a trap and switches the group to plan B.

Carl uses Find Crawler to locate Louis on Doctor Bones's old castle map, in what appears to be a coffin-sized room near Samantha. Juice Box transforms into a Hunter Wraith, a higher-floor incorporeal creature capable of possessing people, and slips invisibly into the castle. She intends to possess Louis, use his inventory, and teleport him out once she reaches him.

The rescue party waits in the shattered entrance of the Reaver castle while Juice Box moves through the shifting honeycomb corridors toward Louis. Tipid explains that a Hunter Wraith can possess a person and manipulate their body and inventory, making Juice Box's plan dangerous for her but potentially effective for extracting Louis. Bautista sends stuffed animals into the moving corridors so Katia can map how the damaged system is cycling, but the group decides not to enter unless forced.

Florin reports a separate emergency at Larracos: Kiwi has gone into active labor in Bucket Boy's clinic and is asking for Mongo, while Big Tina is panicking badly enough that Kibben has been called in. Donut immediately wants to return, but the group still has to finish rescuing Louis first.

Juice Box reports that she has found Louis but that there is a complication. Samantha then warns that the Reaver security dogs are suddenly mobilizing. She reveals that the robots are designed to explode against intruders and asks the group not to destroy one she has named Buster after removing its lower jaw and explosive component.

The hunter-seeker dogs pour from the honeycomb passages. Jamal burns them as they emerge while Donut's level-16 effective Magic Missile evaporates individual sentries. One of the larger dogs carries a Mini Tactical Nuke. Elle freezes it, and Carl stores the entire frozen dog in his inventory before it can detonate. When more nuclear-equipped dogs appear, Carl orders a retreat.

Juice Box confirms that she has control of Louis and is preparing to teleport him out. Carl tells her to drop Louis's No Disassembles inside the castle first. Louis appears safely near the transport, and Carl remotely detonates the No Disassembles. Their anti-technology pulse disables the Reaver security system, but it also triggers at least one of the Mini Tactical Nukes. The Reaver castle explodes from the inside out, injuring the group and badly damaging Jamal's spider legs.

The blast also brings down Calliope. The cybernetic drake crashes nearby and explodes, after which the system announces that Warlord Fang has died. Fang had been hiding inside his own dragon. Kill credit is divided among Carl, Louis, Juice Box, and Fang himself, the Reavers are eliminated, and all Reaver assets transfer to the Princess Posse.

Juice Box then reveals the true complication with Louis. Reaver surgeons had cut him open while keeping him alive on machinery. His heart and lungs had been replaced with mechanical organs containing small pieces of Epitome Tagg's biological tissue, and it appeared they were preparing to replace his brain next. Juice Box can sense Tagg's form within those implanted pieces. Healing Louis did not restore his original organs.

Louis remains unconscious and paralyzed, but his health is stable. Juice Box insists that they keep him asleep until they understand what has been done to him. Samantha arrives as a scorched floating head, declares that she saved Louis, and immediately asks where her promised new dog is.

The group leaves the destroyed Reaver castle and heads toward the nearest saferoom using whatever vehicles remain. Juice Box takes the form of a long-bodied swamp yak and carries the unconscious Louis, while Bautista keeps him in place. Jamal's cybernetic spider legs were ruined by the No Disassemble pulse, but Katia says she built another set and left it with Mordecai.

Mordecai reports a theory developed with several former crawlers about Warlord Fang. Because true descendants of the Reaver Initial have survived catastrophic damage before, they think Fang escaped Donut's War Crime as a tiny amount of biological material, reached Calliope, and began using the cybernetic drake as a replacement body or refuge. The No Disassemble pulse then killed Calliope before that process could save him.

Epitome Tagg remains the harder problem. In warlord chat, Tagg says he controls Louis's vital organs and threatens to shut them down if the group tries to remove him. He proposes a deal in which his mother, who is on the eighteenth floor, trades Louis's life for his. Juice Box says the Dream headquarters capture timer has less than two hours remaining, but she will pull her people out rather than let the timer kill Louis while Tagg is still inside him.

Carl asks Juice Box whether she ever physically touched Tagg before Faction Wars. When she says she only attacked him from a distance, Carl realizes a possible explanation. Before he can finish stating it, the dungeon freezes and an attempted emergency ejection is overridden. The AI announces that Prime Minister Glory used a little-known Syndicate control panel in an attempt to assassinate Carl. Furious that the attempt tried to bypass its authority, the AI publicly warns every outside power to stop interfering and specifically threatens consequences for Glory's adult children inside the dungeon.

Zev then tells Carl that Borant and the Valtay did not issue the ejection request. Warships in orbit have begun firing full missile barrages and maser blasts at one another. The Syndicate Council orders the show headquarters to self-destruct, while the Valtay showrunners order the staff not to comply.

Carl finally states his theory that Epitome Tagg is a cyborg built on the same general Reaver principle as Fang. Mordecai says the theory could fit if Tagg moved much of his processing into the Reaver network and left enough biological material to be grafted into Louis's biomechanical organs, but he stresses that this remains an extraordinary and unverified conclusion. Rosetta adds that Reavers can isolate their processing systems in different parts of their bodies, unlike Valtay worms, which require biological brains.

As the group nears the saferoom, two other crises converge. Florin reports that Kiwi is crowning, and Justice Light announces that his group has successfully retrieved the Gate of the Feral Gods and returned to position.

The group stops at a buried saferoom entrance in former Reaver territory, where Prepotente and Li Na arrive. Prepotente explains why Li Na is still unable to heal normally. Three of the eighteen offworlders she marked survived Donut's War Crime and escaped into Larracos. They were members of King Rust's harem who had entered the dungeon as noncombatants, and after the Battle Formation broke they reached the Desperado Club and used the Cosmic Lounge to return to the eighteenth floor. They are now permanently beyond Li Na's reach, leaving her Ring marks unresolved even though her enormous health pool keeps her functional.

As the group prepares to enter the saferoom, Tipid suddenly asks Carl who he is and where they are. Rosetta explains that Tipid suffered severe neurological damage during his own crawl and later went into debt to the Viceroys to repair it. The Reaver blast appears to have damaged those repairs. Tipid now remembers only that it was his last day as a game guide and that he was supposed to go home. Rosetta says the dungeon's enhancement zone is keeping him stable for now, but she does not know what will happen if he leaves it, and she stays with him.

Back at Larracos, Juice Box carries Louis into the field hospital while Kiwi is in active labor nearby. Mordecai gives Louis a potion that deepens his sleep so the group can examine the biomechanical heart and lungs without risking Tagg gaining control. Juice Box stays beside Louis and tells Carl why taking Hunter Wraith form disturbed her so deeply.

The Hunter Wraith carries a mental curse called the Inevitable Ruin. Juice Box says the curse does not change what it touches; it reveals a truth that makes the wraith recognize a cause as already lost. While she possessed Louis to rescue him, the curse showed her that Louis is terrified of her and does not believe her love is genuine. He thinks he may have a special ability that causes NPCs to fall in love with him, so he cannot trust what she feels. Juice Box says Louis had been her safe harbor, but she now intends to protect him from a distance if they can save him.

Juice Box also admits that she has something extremely powerful inside her and has long been afraid to use it fully. Carl rejects the logic of the Inevitable Ruin as another form of hopelessness and tells her that nothing is hopeless until they are truly dead. Juice Box agrees that she is not giving up and says Justice Light has a new plan waiting.

Kiwi then gives birth to two female hybrids fathered by Mongo. The system identifies them as newborn Ursensus, level-zero Legendary Creatures created from raptor, bear, and Scolopendra magic. Their intelligence is high enough that they cannot be used as pets. Donut is delighted that Mongo has produced a legendary creature, while Samantha immediately asks for one after noting that Buster was destroyed in the Reaver castle explosion.

With roughly an hour remaining before Team Retribution captures the Dream castle, Edgar gathers the group around the unconscious Louis. Juice Box says Epitome Tagg is present throughout Louis's replacement heart and lungs in a symbiotic form. Removing those organs without an immediate replacement would kill Louis, and she fears Tagg will react as soon as the group attempts surgery.

Victory and Fopsy return from an emergency Syndicate Council session. A no-confidence vote has been called against Prime Minister Glory, accusations of Reaver infiltration are spreading, and fighting has broken out among offworld forces. Victory says Fopsy could become prime minister again depending on the vote. The political crisis does not change the immediate dungeon rule: Tagg will die when Team Retribution captures the Dream castle. He could survive by leaving the floor, but Louis cannot leave, Tagg cannot abdicate because he is the Dream's sole remaining warlord, and no rules-based surrender path solves both problems.

Carl asks Tagg what he wants. Tagg proposes that they take Louis to the eighteenth floor, where a new body could be grown for Tagg and replacement organs made for Louis. When Carl explains that the action item will kill Tagg first, Tagg proposes finishing the procedure at the Reaver castle. His plan is to replace Louis's brain, take control of the body so Louis ceases to be a crawler, preserve Louis's brain for later reimplantation, and travel with the NPCs if Zerzura carries Larracos to the twelfth floor. Carl and Donut know the plan is impossible because the Reaver castle has already been destroyed, but they stall Tagg by pretending to consider it.

Samantha then admits that she believes her daughter has died in the acid flooding and blames herself for failing to save her. She also reveals that she stole the Mini Tactical Nuke from Buster. More importantly, she offers the first viable medical solution for Louis: use the unfinished Princess Lunette flesh golem body in Carl's inventory as a donor for a replacement heart and lungs. Mordecai and Edgar agree that the plan could work inside the dungeon. Juice Box demonstrates that she has a Fleshmancer form capable of helping with the transplant, though Victory warns that Louis may need an expensive post-dungeon deal to remain alive with magically transplanted organs.

Carl reminds Samantha that donating Lunette's body means Samantha will not receive the body herself for the foreseeable future. Samantha accepts the loss because Louis needs it more. Carl and Donut praise her choice. Carl briefly wonders whether the Scavenger's Daughter taken by the War Mages could somehow be Samantha's missing daughter, but he does not resolve the possibility.

While reflecting on whether she can still become a better person, Samantha casually admits that she may have had a direct or indirect role in Geyrun's death. The system immediately announces that Emberus has entered the realm.

Emberus's arrival immediately creates a second countdown. Carl receives an update to the Geyrun quest ordering him to bring Psamathe, meaning Samantha, to Emberus. The god gives them 66 minutes before he destroys the ninth floor in fire and lava. The system also issues the team quest This is How the Gristle Grinds: unless the crawlers somehow kill Emberus, they must finish Faction Wars and reach the stairs before the floor is incinerated. Survivors who accept a deal on the next floor will receive one year off the first indentureship negotiation, along with an extra-toasty food-box option.

Carl recalls every field unit to Larracos and orders Katia to eat the Orchid of Eileithyia immediately. The orchid will leave her unconscious for one hour before summoning the goddess needed to resolve the Crown of the Sepsis Whore, leaving almost no margin before Emberus destroys the floor. Katia has not finished moving her inventory and Donut has no time for a proper goodbye, but Katia follows the plan and falls unconscious at one percent health with Waiting for the Goddess over her. Carl calculates that Huanxin Jinx will arrive only minutes before Emberus's deadline, with the ceremony itself still requiring additional time. Donut also cannot descend before Katia is taken because of the Crown's condition.

Justice Light reports that his Gate trap has already been active for days. Juice Box orders Team Retribution's troops away from the Dream throne room so the capture timer stops while Louis is being treated. Victory and Fopsy explain that stairwells should appear almost immediately after Faction Wars is won, and Rosetta says they will form in a ring around the Larracos castle. Carl plans to evacuate everyone else first, then remain with Donut and Katia and use Samantha to delay Emberus as long as possible.

The group begins the transplant using Princess Lunette's incomplete flesh golem body. Because Lunette is a full naiad with gills rather than human lungs, Mordecai adapts the kua-tin rebreather Carl took from Loita for internal use. Mordecai, Edgar, Juice Box, Imani, Rosetta, Tipid, Carl, and the healers coordinate the procedure. They prepare to remove Louis's mechanical heart and lungs, replace them with Lunette's organs, activate them through Juice Box's Fleshmancer abilities, and complete the graft during the brief rapid-healing window created by Mordecai's Special Brew.

Tagg realizes something is wrong and threatens to kill Louis. Donut distracts him in warlord chat with increasingly personal taunts while the surgeons finish preparing. Tagg finally declares that he is done with the situation, and Louis's heart immediately stops. Bucket Boy pulls the mechanical heart and lungs free, Donut pours in Mordecai's Special Brew, and the team implants Lunette's organs. Juice Box activates them while Mordecai installs the rebreather and uses a Water Breathing scroll to establish functioning gills. The graft closes successfully, Louis revives, and his new gills remain after the temporary spell effect ends.

The discarded mechanical organs still contain Tagg. Mongo finds them, chews them apart, and spits them back onto the floor. The system credits Mongo with killing Warlord Epitome Tagg, declares the Dream defeated, and awards all Dream assets to the Princess Posse. With only two factions remaining and about 32 minutes before Emberus's deadline, Carl immediately calls for Sledge.

With 21 minutes left before Emberus destroys the ninth floor, Sledge begins casting Zerzura. The five-minute spell successfully includes both Larracos and Shanty Town, allowing the city and its eligible inhabitants to transfer to the Court of the Ascendency on the twelfth floor. The transfer rules divide the survivors sharply. Larracos's NPC population, the changelings, the Semeru dwarves, and others who came from the sixth floor will move with the city. Hired dungeon mercenaries such as Sledge will disappear back into whatever system handles them, while offworld mercenaries will be removed from the dungeon. The surviving strippers, sluggalos, and some former crawlers remain with Carl's group instead.

Carl takes stock of the cost of Faction Wars. More than 50,000 former crawlers returned to fight beside them, but only about 28,000 survive. Of the 32,500 active crawlers who entered the ninth floor, only 20,221 remain. Although that is a record number reaching the tenth floor, the losses are still enormous. Many survivors plan to take deals on the next floor, including crawlers who have decided they have fought enough.

The surviving enemy mercenaries are also preparing to leave. Looking at Corporal Pillbox and the other former enemies, Carl realizes he could use the Ring of Divine Suffering to mark and kill them for massive stat gains. Li Na's condition makes the cost of that path unmistakable. Carl chooses not to become what the Ring encourages him to be. He takes the Ring from his inventory and has Donut swallow it, deliberately giving up the opportunity to exploit the remaining mercenaries.

Milk then reveals a farewell gift organized by crawlers who intend to take deals. She taught them to transfer skills and spells into pages using permanent ink. Carl's Book of Voodoo has been divided into two volumes, with the new personal volume titled Carl's Book of Boom. Donut receives a corresponding book called A Banquet Fit for a Princess. Each departing crawler contributed three transfers: one personal entry for Carl, one for Donut, and one available to others through the original Book of Voodoo. The donors permanently lose the transferred abilities, while Carl and Donut can consume their pages for temporary access. The departing crawlers also leave equipment for later distribution.

The crawlers and returning veterans shower Carl and Donut with flowers and streamers. Milk says the former crawlers cannot transfer their skills because they already gave what they could, and some gave everything. Because the embargo remains in force, the surviving former crawlers will return to Homecoming Queen rather than truly going home.

As Zerzura nears completion, Carl says goodbye to Sledge, Milk, Ferdinand, and others. Juice Box tells Carl that she and Justice Light are not taking the ordinary transfer route and will reach the twelfth floor another way. The city vanishes, leaving only the dungeon infrastructure behind. The system then announces that both Warlords Ferdinand and Juice Box have left the realm and forfeited their posts. Team Retribution is defeated, and the Princess Posse officially wins Faction Wars.

With eight minutes left before Emberus's destruction deadline, Carl launches Samantha toward the god waiting in the volcano. Her job is to answer his questions and keep him occupied for as long as possible. Prepotente confirms that Emberus sees her and then enters a stairwell. Larracos is already gone, leaving a vast pit and several stairwells to the tenth floor. Crawlers pour into them while Carl, Donut, Katia's companions, and a small number of allies remain behind.

The departures expose several unresolved states. Florin stays with Lucia because he doubts she will really take a deal. Li Na enters a stairwell without speaking. Louis refuses to leave before saying goodbye to Katia and says Juice Box left him divorce papers. Carl also hears what sounds like Eris laughing from within the river in his mind, even though he had hoped destroying the Ring of Divine Suffering would remove that influence.

Victory arrives and explains that political upheaval has made her acting Prime Minister of the Syndicate. Fopsy was passed over because of uncertainty surrounding his relationship with the Dream. Victory says the office gives her little practical power because the council is gridlocked. When Katia wakes, Eileithyia enters the realm through Huanxin Jinx's sponsorship. The goddess's presence grants female party members a massive melee bonus while reducing Carl's damage against female opponents.

Huanxin, speaking through Eileithyia, reports chaos on the twelfth floor after Larracos's arrival, including deaths caused by the city's landing and undead Children of Inpewt now under Odette's control. She also says the Maestro is claiming the royal crown while the fate of his sister remains uncertain. Victory counters with news that a mantis colony system has gone dark and its star appears to have gone nova.

Katia must choose among three boons before Eileithyia can take her. Before she chooses, Donut executes the plan she and Katia prepared. Donut casts her enhanced Laundry Day and violently strips Huanxin out of Eileithyia's divine soul armor. Huanxin lands inside a prepared circle of Words of Power that prevents magical escape. Because Katia has not yet selected a boon, the summoned goddess remains frozen and unable to intervene.

Donut uses several advantages at once. The Eileithyia party boon greatly amplifies her attacks against Huanxin, her Claw skill has risen dramatically, and the Apothecary's benefactor gift called the Scorpion's Bite lets her mount Katia's repeating crossbow on her back. Donut also uses Monologue, a charisma-based natural benefit gained after exceeding 300 in a boosted stat, to terrify Huanxin. Mordecai enters with a nonmagical crossbow bolt containing some of his mother's ashes. He says Huanxin, Odette, and Chaco were responsible for his brother's death, with Huanxin bearing most of the blame. He loads the memorial bolt into Donut's crossbow, and Donut fires it through Huanxin's head, killing the CEO.

Victory confirms that the exploit was legal: a sponsored god can become vulnerable to this separation while frozen by an unresolved choice. She then leaves as acting Prime Minister. Katia says goodbye to her friends and chooses pregnancy because dungeon rules will remove a pregnant human crawler from the game. Her goal is to reach the children being held above the dungeon and protect them. Eileithyia is startled to sense the isolated children only after Katia points them out and agrees that Katia can reach a place the goddess herself cannot.

Eileithyia restores Katia to fully human form before completing the boon. The transformation reveals the physical losses Katia's altered body had concealed: her entire right arm, left leg, right leg below the knee, and one ear are gone. Bautista brings the cybernetic replacements Katia had prepared, finishing the work she left in the crafting room. Because the child's father must also be human, Katia asks Louis, and Eileithyia confirms that his new organs do not make him nonhuman. Louis agrees.

Eileithyia makes Katia pregnant with a boy. The system marks Katia Ineligible, and after one final goodbye she disappears from the dungeon. Eileithyia fades as well, and the system announces that the Scavenger's Daughter has closed her eyes and its temporary benefit ends.

Samantha tells Carl that Emberus is no longer touching her, so Carl drops the xistera and recalls her. She returns almost unrecognizably burned and says Emberus was going to eat her until she convinced him to throw her into the volcano. The system warns that the ninth floor will be destroyed in three minutes. The group gathers the last items Katia left behind and begins entering the stairwell.

Bautista stops Carl before leaving. He admits that fear, jealousy, and repeated family losses nearly drove him to do something terrible, but says he would never hurt Carl. He also warns that the Kimaris figure Carl possesses summons the demon for the remainder of the current floor rather than for a brief duration. Samantha recognizes Kimaris as an old friend and suddenly recovers a memory that he gave her the potion that allowed her to become pregnant when she otherwise could not. The recovered memory also triggers anger toward Kimaris's mother, though Samantha does not explain the full history.

Mordecai remains outside for a final moment, drinking and reflecting on the day's losses. He tells Carl and Donut that although he lost a great deal, he believes he gained more, and he thanks Donut for arranging Huanxin Jinx's death. Donut tells Carl that she will miss Katia but that the dungeon will not break her. Carl and Donut then enter the stairwell together, leaving the empty battlefield behind as Emberus destroys the floor.

A final perspective reveals that Justice Light has deliberately remained behind. Juice Box entered the Nothing believing Justice would follow her, but he lied because his trap had to be triggered from the ninth-floor side. Porthus and the Apothecary know his plan. Justice activates a Legendary Trap built around the permanent portal created from the broken winding box of the Gate of the Feral Gods.

The trap drops a captured bijou fairy trap and its thousands of cross-plane threads into the portal along with a demon trap containing thousands of evicted demons capable of opening a route back to Sheol. The linked forces pull multiple planes together exactly as Justice intended. He dies as Emberus's fire reaches him, but the trap succeeds.

The system announces that the Bijou and Demon traps have deactivated, the Nothing has broken, and its contents are draining simultaneously into the Halls of the Ascendency, Sheol, and Scolopendra's Lair. Scolopendra begins to stir. The system warns guests in the Scolopendra Club to evacuate, reveals that the nominal sixteenth floor is actually an empty room with a single ordinary mirror, and notes that reaching it requires passing through the active seventeenth-floor Backstage Death Maze. The final system message announces that Scolopendra has awakened.