Splash Zone: Man, I don’t know if this is going to work. The croupier guy is a complete dick. He stabbed Gluteus for no reason! They got rid of the Nothing spots on all the games and replaced it with things like “You get your ass curb stomped” and something called the “Dirty Tea Bag.”

Carl: Shit. Okay. Make your way back to the base. And keep an eye on Dong.

Splash Zone: Wait. You didn’t ask for him? He said you asked for him to go to the bar. I think he’s on his way to you.

Goddamnit. Yuto the Oni was onstage. I knew we were up soon. We didn’t want Dong here for this because this Porky guy supposedly hated him. I did see Prepotente still by the DJ stand, and I saw something else I wasn’t expecting. Dwight the unicorn had just wandered in. He had a Shit-Faced debuff over him.

This was the first time I’d seen the unicorn outside of the vine. He looked pretty much like I’d expected, though he was a little shorter than I’d thought. But he was a sparkling white horse. His rainbow horn glittered brightly in the dark light of the bar.

The drunk unicorn pushed a few gremlins out of the way and made his way to the DJ booth. He gave Prepotente a shove that sent the goat sprawling.

Carl: You better get here, too, then. We’ll need you to watch him. Some stuff is about to go down.

Splash Zone: I’ll be there in a bit. I asked for an audience with Hamed, the new leader guy, to see if he could help me find my wife, and the guards said he’d see me. So me and Gluteus, and Doctor Bones are gonna go talk to him. I’ll send Bucket Boy your way.

Carl: Okay. Be safe. Keep me updated.

I moved to get Prepotente away from the idiot unicorn before a fight broke out, but I was interrupted by another message.

Mordecai: Believe it or not, the test actually worked. But Samantha also can’t die, and she’s not the most reliable test subject, so we tested it again on some sluggalos. It works, but there’re a few wrinkles. We have some solutions that I’m working on right now.

Rosetta: None of this means this next part will work. We can’t even test the shop-interface part because of that standing purchase order with the cleaner bots. It requires us to trust that war mage wasn’t lying.

I waved at Imani and pointed at Prepotente, who was sputtering and getting up. The DJ was shouting at Dwight, who was now sitting on the floor like a dog and sobbing. Imani got up and moved quickly to get herself between the unicorn and the goat.

The swirl tattoo on my palm itched.

Carl: Oh, I’m sure he was lying. But not about the Cabaret itself. The fact that purchase order is even there suggests part of it is true, and don’t forget Eris also said this will work. If we can talk Li Na into doing this, I’ll make sure she knows the full story and is prepared. This isn’t something we can force on her. She’s too strong, and she’s too smart for us to trick her into doing it, and I wouldn’t want to do it that way anyway. This will keep her alive, keep Zhang alive, and keep her from killing more crawlers. It’ll also let us test Herot’s theory. I think she’ll go for it.

Mordecai: Kid, this is so far off the codex, we don’t even know if the system will allow her to do this. And if it does, it’s possible she could still die when your floor collapses.

Carl: I know.

Imani dragged Prepotente to the table and made him sit down. He was shouting and looking at Dwight, who remained on the floor sobbing, surrounded by bewildered gremlins. The Minister of Blood-Letting was patting him on the shoulder. Prepotente was clearly ready to get up and attack the unicorn, but he quickly calmed after seeing the looks of everyone at the table. They all had their eyes on me.

“It’s a go,” I said.

I could feel it. A wave of relief swept over everyone. It was like a dark curtain had been pulled away from everything. Tran clasped his hands together and bowed deeply.

This was a ridiculous, probably-not-going-to-work plan. But that was okay. It was something, and that’s what we’d been missing.

Ever since the previous floor, several crawlers had been complaining that the Cleaner Bot upgrade was no longer available in the personal space shop due to “overwhelming demand.”

We’d just figured it was because of Faction Wars, with all the warlords buying them up. That was part of it. As it stood, the cleaner bot that Architect Houston the viceroy had had in his surgical theater—the white one I’d looted—was an old model. It was literally the last available one in the store.

That was because Herot had a standing order to purchase every cleaner bot that showed up.

Menerva was apparently on the seventeenth floor in charge of the NPCs who were building and occupying the Backstage Death Maze. This was where the AI had plucked Growler Gary from when he’d used his body as an avatar. It was also why Gary’s level had been so elevated. They were training, getting stronger and stronger in preparation for the impossible eventuality that crawlers would make it that far.

This whole seventeenth floor was just something built into the dungeon, invisible to the showrunners who were just happy to have a box ticked. It had been going like this for hundreds and hundreds of seasons, completely ignored.

Herot, however, was not backstage. He was trapped on the other side of the portal. He was in the Pineapple Cabaret itself, the secret dimension they’d built to hide the NPCs and keep them safe. He had limited powers to control that world, but he did have a shop interface.

Honestly, I didn’t know how all this worked when the AI could literally create stuff with a virtual snap of his fingers, but we’d seen these sort of artificial shortages before, like with the food after the flooding of Larracos.

That Cabaret place was currently overrun. Akuma had been a little . . . fuzzy . . . on who the bad guys were. He mentioned something called the Ogre Imperium, which was a long-forgotten plotline that had gotten binned because the ogres were made too intelligent and they had immediately figured out that they were trapped in a dungeon. And there was a shadow mimic infestation, which was just as bad. But there was something more, too.

The war mages wanted our help to clear the place out.

We had two options. The casino plan and the cleaner bot plan. It sounded like the casino plan was a bust, so we were going with the cleaner bot option. This plan was complicated, but Rosetta and Mordecai had been on it since we first heard the idea, and they were now semi-confident it was feasible. But only if Akuma was telling the truth about Herot.

Li Na was dying of poison. Her Left to Fester debuff would not go away, and in fact, it would get worse because one’s health automatically topped up when they moved to the next floor. That would stop if she managed to get to the Pineapple Cabaret.

However, the war mages also claimed there was a possible exit from the Pineapple Cabaret to the Earth’s surface. That would, in theory, cure her Left to Fester. Maybe.

There was so much here left to chance. So much built on faith, and if Akuma hadn’t dropped that name Herot . . . if Eris hadn’t said it might work, I wouldn’t have believed any of it.

If we did this now with Li Na, like now-now before the next race even started, we’d have a good idea if it would work before we tried it with several crawlers at once, which we’d have to do after this fifth heat.

We just needed to talk Li Na into going along with it.