“I will fucking kill you all,” Akuma cried, gasping as I leaned down next to him.

I patted him on the knee. “Don’t be like that,” I said. “You did try to kill her. One of you blasted her against a tree, and she was pretty pissed about you guys stealing the gate. She doesn’t like that sort of thing.”

“If we were trying to kill her, she would’ve been dead.”

“And if I was trying to kill you, none of your pieces would so much as fit in an ice tray right now,” Elle said.

“My fucking balls. You crushed my balls,” he gasped.

Elle snorted. “Just one of them. I hope it wasn’t your favorite.”

“Carl kicked a mage in the balls once,” Donut said. “Zev said the audience didn’t like it. I bet they liked this. It’s a lot funnier when a woman does it.”

“She didn’t kick him,” Louis said. “She shattered it. . . . Dude, what are you doing?”

“You never know what might be useful,” Prepotente said. He’d pushed his way into the small room and was carefully picking the little ice flecks off the ground and was putting them into a glass beaker.

“Just ask your blasted questions,” Akuma panted. He leaned back and closed his eyes. “We’re trying to help you idiots. We’re on the same side.”

Akuma’s health was slowly, slowly draining. We only had a few minutes. Apparently one of the ways to kill a war mage was to encase them in an anti-magic shield. They were, after all, magic made flesh.

“Let’s start with why you wanted me to come in the first place,” I asked. “And why did you want me to kill two teams?”

Akuma continued to pant. “There’re too many of these vehicle races. Too many teams. You crawlers weren’t supposed to survive in these numbers to this floor. The AI had to compensate by drawing from the deep reserves. On the last floor, when they made the floor even bigger, they plumbed some of the mobs from the first and second floors, but those mobs are different, and it didn’t work right. So now some of these NPC teams”—he opened his eyes and looked at the three mercenaries, who were still against the back wall in the other room—“and all the NPCs for the mercenary guilds are getting pulled from emergency backup. It’s because your numbers are too great, and when you broke the seventh floor, it required them to quickly populate the map on the eighth in a way that further depleted the reserves.”

“Wait, how do you know any of this? And what does that mean?”

I was now used to dungeon-born NPCs being fully awakened to their situation, but not like this.

“A former crawler taught me all about it. A skink. They’re trapped in the Cabaret. They know how all this works better than anybody. Better even than the AI itself, I think. They’re an annoying fucker. Even more annoying than the cat.”

“Jacobus,” Imani said.

“Wait, wait, I’m sorry,” he gasped, holding up his hand as the tiny fairy zipped up to him. The reverse tooth fairy made a disappointed grunt, high-fived the raised hand of Akuma, and zipped back to Imani.

“Well, I never,” Donut mumbled. “You don’t even know me!”

“I watched you,” he said. “I watched the last hundred seasons. I was watching you until we went out for Faction Wars.”

I took a breath. I wanted to ask him more about this former crawler, but for now, it was a tangent. We had so much to go over.

“Okay. What does it mean that they’re using NPCs that shouldn’t be used?”

Akuma started to ramble through clenched teeth. “NPCs and mobs especially aren’t supposed to be used for more than a few seasons. That skink I was telling you about, he has this process he calls the Worn Path Method, and it helps us realize what we really are. Mobs are supposed to get recycled once they’ve been used a few times to prevent that from happening. But it’s expensive, and their records are spotty. And as a result, these mobs and NPCs are used over and over. They do audits occasionally, but so many get missed. But Herot, that’s the skink, they figured this out. They and another former crawler found a way to exploit it all.”

“Does anyone understand what the hell this guy is talking about?” Louis asked.

I couldn’t breathe. Herot. The author of the sixteenth edition of the cookbook was still alive. And he—they?—was here. But where? How were they trapped?

“So?” I asked, trying to keep my voice even, “what does any of that have to do with anything?”

“The dungeon is full of mobs who know their own nature. Everything is broken. It’s all accelerating. Even if the AI hadn’t already gone Primal, the awakened NPCs are like a disease to the integrity of the crawl as a whole. The whole thing is poisoned. Everything has to be removed. Nothing inside the dungeon will be allowed to survive past this season no matter what happens. Even if the outworlders somehow gain back control, we are well past the point of no return. Everything must be destroyed. That means everyone and everything in the dungeon. All that work of generations will be binned. But these two former crawlers, Herot and Menerva, their exploit is a way for us, the NPCs, to survive. But you crawlers can use it, too.”

“Exploit in what way?” I asked.

“You don’t know enough about the way the dungeon works to understand. But a dungeon is modular. There are thousands of pieces that need to come together. There is what they call the framework, the shell upon which everything is built. That part—which includes all the stored mobs, the reusable locations, some of the indentured workers—is the important part. It’s the third-to-last thing that gets installed into the planet, and it’s the one physical part that’s reused every season to make the dungeon. It’s like a crawler’s inventory but a huge one, and it is a physical object. It is moved from planet to planet. The current season’s showrunners feed their plans for the season into the framework, along with the software. And then the macro AI is installed into the planet’s Primal Engine, and I suddenly wake up, thinking I’m a godsdamned palace guard. Or a pet groomer in a city with no waste management and no way to get food. Our forced memories are oftentimes so paper-thin, we start to realize something is wrong long before the floor is even over.”

“That’s like that one train station during the Iron Tangle,” Louis said. “They all thought they had, like, apartments and stuff, but when everyone went there, the whole area was empty. It was a complete mindfuck to them.”

“Okay,” I said. I already knew some of this. It was blowing my mind that this was an NPC. I felt numb, and I was still reeling from the reveal about Herot. I tried to remember if I’d ever heard the name Menerva before. I wished Rosetta had come with us. I needed to press on. His health was almost half gone.

“Try to explain it anyway. What is the exploit? What is the Pineapple Cabaret? And how do we use it to our advantage? You said this former crawler was trapped there?”

Akuma nodded. “Many seasons ago, two indentured former crawlers approached the current season’s showrunner and asked for permission to be in charge of building the seventeenth floor. Nobody ever makes it to the seventeenth floor, but the showrunners are required to have plans in place. It would be a way to help automatically dispose of awakened NPCs, and it would fulfill the requirement to have a floor ready to go. The showrunner agreed, and they were given access to create the floor.”

“So the seventeenth floor is the Pineapple Cabaret?” I asked.

“No,” Akuma said. “It’s a small floor where crawlers must face greatly enhanced mobs from earlier floors. It’s a hand-built maze filled with horrible traps that culminates in a floor boss that is all but impossible to kill. The showrunner who approved this project was murdered soon after it was approved, and the two former crawlers who were put in charge of the project were forgotten. They are still there to this day, existing outside any supervision, running the construction of the seventeenth floor from scratch every season. Showrunners always just reuse the plans from the previous seasons for everything above the thirteenth floor. Nobody looks at it. The showrunner who originally approved it never transferred their paperwork. They aren’t accumulating hours against their indentureship. They are all but invisible, forgotten. They are ghosts in the system, free to do as they wish.”

“So they’re trapped,” I said. “Can’t they send a message out?”

“They are, or were, trapped by design. They didn’t want to be seen. The seventeenth floor is a front. They weren’t just building the seventeenth floor. Attached to the floor is the only entrance to a pocket dimension they built. They were building an oasis, a place for mobs and NPCs to escape to. A world within a world. The two crawlers sacrificed the possibility of ever getting out to make a place where NPCs and mobs could permanently escape the horrors of the dungeon. That is the Pineapple Cabaret.”

A strange surge of pride filled me. Herot, who was so concerned about the well-being of mobs and NPCs. Of course he, or she, would do that. Of course. My view counter was completely spiked.

“Not so much a secret anymore,” I said. “You didn’t just tell that to me, but to the whole galaxy.”

Akuma nodded. “After what just happened with the Nothing being broken, everyone is aware of them now. If they want to keep doing the crawl running after this season, they will need to start everything over from scratch. All the existing NPCs will be destroyed. All the indentured crawlers stuck within will be lost. It will all be gone. They have no other choice. That is why we must work together. You didn’t need to crush my fucking balls.”

“I didn’t have to,” Elle said. “But I certainly enjoyed it.”

“You have told me a bunch of random shit,” I said. “How does it all tie in?”

“The AI is expanding. It can feed itself, and I don’t think it’s going anywhere. We might be able to create an exit from the Pineapple Cabaret to the surface of this planet. We might. But there’s a problem. A lot of problems, really. The Cabaret is similar to the Nothing. It’s not a floor. It’s a separate dimension, and the rules do allow crawlers to travel to it. But as of right now, we don’t have a way in or out except via the seventeenth floor. But if we can build another door, any crawler who is within when the floor collapses will be deemed ‘lost.’ But they won’t be killed.”

“Wait,” I said. “If someone gets pulled into the Nothing, they don’t die when the floor collapses?”

“No crawlers could possibly survive the Nothing. That’s irrelevant now. The Nothing was broken on the last floor. But this dimension is the same sort of thing. I was there at the Pineapple Cabaret. Me and several others had been for some time. But we deliberately left. We returned to the cold storage when we realized what was happening, and we got brought to Faction Wars. We needed to find the Scavenger’s Daughter.”

I glanced at Samantha, who had gotten bored and was currently gnawing on the foot of the dead imp. She perked up at the mention of the word “Scavenger.”

“Who and what is that?” I asked.

“It’s how we will keep the denizens of the Cabaret safe. It’s how we will escape to the planet’s surface. She’s crucial, as is her father, but for now we need a way to get ourselves back to the Cabaret. And when we go, we can take some crawlers with us. But only if they meet the requirements.”

His health entered the red. We were either going to have to reset or not get all the answers. “Goddamnit,” I said. “I have a million questions still.”

Florin, who’d been unusually silent, lowered his shotgun and held it against Akuma’s head.

“Remember when Miss Elle said you would suffer if you lie? Well, you just did. Lights out, mate.”

“Wait, wait. What did I lie about?”

Florin growled. “You left Faction Wars on your own. You can step in and out of floors as you please. That’s how you got here. Sounds like you can get back there on your own just fine.”

“No, no, you’re right. But that wasn’t a lie. We need you, and crawlers can’t skip floors.”

Florin shook his head. “You and your friends are some of the most powerful folks in this world. But you need us to go with you? Why?”

Akuma sighed. “Get that out of my face, and I will tell you. We need help.”

Florin nodded and lowered his gun. “I’m guessing your special little utopia ain’t so much a utopia anymore.”

“It was fine until we left. We needed to leave to get to the Scavenger’s Daughter, and the moment we left, they moved in. And now we need to fight to get it back, and lots of us were killed in Faction Wars. There’s only five of us left. It’s not enough. The dimension is infested.”

“I knew it,” Florin said.

“Infested with what?” I asked.

“Lots and lots of things,” he said. “Old, forgotten monsters. Shadow mimics, who are almost impossible to root out. The leftovers from the Ogre Imperium several seasons back. And worse, remnants of things we don’t want to wake. Things that Agatha can and will wake the moment she learns they exist. We left for just a few short days, and our protection spells got canceled out, and all hell broke loose. And now we can’t get back without a fighting force. Believe me, using you wasn’t my first choice. Out original plan was to build more mages during Faction Wars, but you ruined that. And our second plan was to use an old ally in the Nothing, and you ruined that, too. So you’re the third choice. Still, you dipshits are all already stronger than any crawlers have ever been.”

I shot several more questions at him rapid-fire. “What are these ‘remnants’? You still didn’t tell me why I needed to kill an extra team. What are the requirements to get into the Cabaret? Why are there requirements? How will we get a portal open?”

“Hold up,” he said. He was still clearly in pain. “We have two possibilities to get there now that the Gate of the Feral Gods is gone and broken. The casinos at the Desperado Club are one way. And if that doesn’t work, it’s something that involves your shop interface. That one was Herot’s idea. As for the requirements, you can’t worship a god. You entering the area would instigate a smite. Not certain why. Something to do with the way the space is built. We can’t risk the Cabaret getting embroiled in the Ascendency battles. We don’t even want the gods to know about it.”

I exchanged a look with Donut. That ruled me out. That ruled out most of us.

“They already know,” I said. “Or Eris, at least, knows about it.”

“Eris knows everything,” Akuma replied. “She doesn’t count. Pandemonium always finds a way. I will pray she finds other ways to inflict her chaos on the world.”

“Why are you refusing to answer Carl’s question about why you wanted him to kill two teams?” Donut demanded.

Akuma sighed. “Because I knew the moment that happened, the system would pit him against a team of his friends, and he would have no choice but to help us.”

And that’s when I punched him in the face and shattered his nose.