“Nice. This space is quite invigorating,” Prepotente said as he, Donut, Imani, Elle, Rosetta, and I sat down in the corner of the pet stables. “I have a pet stables upgrade as well, but not the advanced one. This room is significantly bigger. When we combine, it will go up to level 5, I believe. That will add the Stablemaster benefit, giving us three more mercenary slots.” He paused. “Then again, perhaps not if so many guild members leave.”

“My blood bar only has an hour left,” Imani said, her voice clipped and irritated. “So we should do this quickly. The volunteers are gathering in Hungry Eyes. Louis is out there now and says it’s a huge crowd. Florin is going to start making the choices.”

Imani was angry with me regarding our strategy for the eleventh floor, which I’d just posted on my page in the Book of Voodoo. She’d left a three-paragraph tirade about how we were all going to die. Thankfully, Elle had come to my defense. Even Prepotente, who was usually very adverse to suicidal plans, seemed to be eager to attempt it. Imani was now threatening to take a deal because we were all going to die and she wished she could take the Pineapple Cabaret exit.

I had responded, I hope you do take a deal. Nobody would blame you. You deserve the rest. I hope everybody does at this point. I know our chances are next to nothing that this will work.

She had simply replied, Goddamnit, Carl. This is insane.

But even Imani knew I had no other choice. My Emberus issue was coming due, and with the announcement that the eleventh floor was going to happen so quickly, my hand was being forced.

We’d spent some time discussing the potential trap that the Pineapple Cabaret was, and even though we’d already sent Li Na, we decided it would be best that only volunteers who didn’t worship a god and had remained human get to go. Rosetta and Tipid both warned about magical races that might have some serious issues if they did manage to escape. Absolutely no fairies or other flying classes could be allowed to go. Louis couldn’t go because his gill surgery required magic to work. Chris, Donut, and Florin were all out as well, as we simply didn’t know how their races might function outside the dungeon. Florin would probably be okay, but I had some serious concerns about Donut. And there was a good chance Chris, as a rock creature, would simply drop dead the moment he stepped out of an enhancement zone.

Donut had asked some alarming questions about the enhancement zone they’d used when she’d done her deal interview with my new wife, and Mordecai’s response was less than reassuring. Chris had also been forced to use this so-called modified zero zone. As had Louis, Elle, and so many others.

So, despite everything, we decided that we were going to warn everyone about what might potentially happen on the eleventh floor, allowing everyone to decide for themselves whether or not they wanted to continue. And if people didn’t want to participate, we were urging them to take a deal at either the end of the tenth floor or the beginning of the eleventh.

So far, most of the responses had been horrified anger at the plan.

Donut was currently not speaking to me, either. The strategy involved me leaving the party temporarily for the eleventh floor. We currently had Mordecai working on the implications of that when it came to the setup of the safe room. He had to shuffle ownership of a lot of things around and buy upgrades with our rapidly dwindling funds.

Now, as we gathered to talk in the stables, I watched Rend and Mongo rush back and forth across the room, playing, while Gonk snorted indignantly.

We’d actually already had the level 5 stables, but we’d lost it when Li Na left. Zhang’s space was the bare minimum one. That was about to get much worse.

We’d chosen to have the meeting here in the pet stables because, according to Rosetta, this was a secondary guild add-on room, and as such, there was an existing bug that gods didn’t see what we did in this area.

It wasn’t that good of a benefit. If I attempted to leave the faith, it wouldn’t work. If I did something permanent, such as remove a god-given gift, they would notice the moment I stepped from the room. And the viewers could still see us. But if we openly discussed some god quests in here—such as Samantha’s pronouncement that she’d had something to do with the death of Geyrun on the previous floor—the things we said wouldn’t be overheard by the deities.

Samantha was still in “her” room with Grigori. I just couldn’t wait to hear all about that once he came out.

“Where’s Linus?” Donut asked Elle.

“Bautista is babysitting him for me,” Elle said. “He’s already out there handing out the tea Bautista showed him how to make.”

We were doing the Linus-goodbye-party thing now because once the race started, he wouldn’t be allowed in town between the sixth and seventh heats. It had been Linus’s idea to do it in the same place where all the crawlers were gathering to get picked as volunteers for the assault on the Pineapple Cabaret, which was the commons of Hungry Eyes. Tran and Zhang had chased off all the NPCs and set up a few tables, and it was turning into a large party, even for those who didn’t want to participate in the Cabaret escape plan.

“I’m not going to lie,” Elle said. “I’m going to miss some of the things that little pervert says.”

“Blood bar,” Imani repeated. “Can we get on with this please?”

“Okay, guys,” I said. “Here’s the situation. Two races left, heat six and heat seven. We’re starting with four teams each and ending with just one, so the plan is to try to keep as many NPCs alive as possible for this sixth heat and get as many crawlers as we can off the playing board before the seventh heat starts to minimize as many crawler-on-crawler races as we can. We have about two hundred people going to the Pineapple Cabaret, and according to Mordecai’s math, we need about fifteen hundred people to take deals on top of that to minimize crawler-on-crawler races.”

Elle snorted. “Good luck with that. Have you seen the chatter?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

We were fighting a losing battle. By this point everybody knew that the deals were much better right at the beginning of the eleventh floor as opposed to the end of the tenth. The fact that the whole dungeon was imploding and that none of this would probably matter didn’t seem to be sitting well with a lot of the survivors.

I continued. “For those of us who are staying, and assuming we actually survive this final heat, it sounds like we will be going straight to the eleventh floor, and it will start immediately. The announcement stated the whole thing is scheduled to last about three hours.”

“Aren’t these things supposed to last like weeks and weeks?” Elle asked.

“Yes,” replied Rosetta, “it’s an actual rule. But it’s a Syndicate rule for the showrunners designing these floors, not a rule hard-coded into the programming. The AI is following the game rules explicitly, but it’s ignoring most if not all the Syndicate guidelines. They are two different things.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “We will go to the eleventh, and the parade will start. It ends in some sort of arena. There we will face another floor boss, and then that will be it. For those of you coming, should you wish to do this with me, the plan is to simply survive. But for me, I have an Emberus problem. I need to make certain Hellik is dead before this eleventh floor ends or I get a smite, which is why I need to . . .”

Donut scoffed angrily

“. . . leave the party with Donut to make sure she doesn’t get hurt during this process. We have two hours left before the sixth heat starts, and we have a lot to do. But before we do that, there’s still a lot of information we don’t know, which is why we’re here right now.”

I turned to Rosetta. “Tell us everything you know about the Scavenger storyline.”

“Yes,” Donut muttered, “let’s all waste time learning about dungeon lore that’s not going to matter because we’ll all be dead in a few hours.”

Rosetta rubbed her tattooed leg absently.

“Okay. The myth, at least the dungeon myth, is much like the Scolopendra myth, meaning there are multiple versions of this story. I suspect the dungeon just picks whichever version suits it best if it ever comes up. But the main gist is that before the current pantheon existed, there were older, wilder gods. When the new gods came and expelled the old ones, one was banished to Sheol, some were banished to the Nothing, and some were outright murdered. In the myth, if some of the gods put up too much of a fight, the new gods shifted their focus to their worshippers. If all the worshippers were dead or converted, the god faded away. You saw how that works on the eighth floor when you had the Thorn room challenge.”

Penny the pig let out a loud snort. She was sitting there in the corner of the barn, watching Mongo warily as the dinosaur played with Rend, probably jealous Mongo was taking all the attention away from her new friend.

A small wave of guilt washed over me.

Rosetta continued. “The all-tree is an actual tree in the dungeon, but it’s also a metaphor for existence itself. The tree gave fruit to the old gods, including Nekhebit, who is now also called the Scavenger Mother of Mothers. In the old times, she was a life and protector deity, though she was depicted as a vulture, a scavenger. She who cleaned up after the others. She supposedly wasn’t allowed to have children, but she did anyway. She had three kids, including Apito, who in turn got impregnated via either the all-tree or she made herself pregnant. Take your pick. Nekhebit was the last of the old gods to fall, and she was defeated by her daughter, Apito, absorbing the last of the vulture goddess’s worshippers.”

“Wait,” I said. “Apito is Nekhebit’s daughter? If Nekhebit is the Scavenger, then the Scavenger’s Daughter is Apito? I thought it had something to do with Scolopendra. And what about the war mages? How does Samantha’s sand-ooze daughter play into this because that’s pretty much what Akuma said they were looking for.”

Rosetta shook her head. “No. Nekhebit is a scavenger, but she’s not the Scavenger. Nekhebit had three children. A son, a daughter, and a centipede.”

“A centipede?” Donut asked. “She gave birth to a centipede? How does that work?”

“Christ,” Elle said. “This bullshit is giving me a headache. So the vulture lady had three babies. One was Apito, whose own children kicked all the old folks out and started their own party. One was a centipede who turned into a hotel for rich people and who occasionally spews world-ending magic spells and is now hanging out at the bottom of the dungeon. Who is the last guy?”

“This is where the myths start to diverge,” Rosetta said. “Sometimes Scolopendra is the Scavenger, so the Scavenger’s Daughter is the result of a Scolopendra union with someone else. Sometimes this mysterious son is considered the Scavenger. He exists in the empty plane, cleaning up the souls that escape. He, in turn, impregnates someone, and their daughter is the Scavenger’s Daughter. Sometimes he’s the first mortal, which doesn’t make sense because he comes later, but that’s what the myths say. Sometimes all three—Apito, Scolopendra, and the son are called a divine trinity. There’s just one of them, but they’ve been split. It doesn’t really matter, or maybe it does. But what’s important is that this child, the Scavenger’s Daughter, is considered one with the same power that Apito had. An entity that has the power to erase the current pantheon and start again. But this one is even more powerful. She can take the powers of gods and use them for herself.”

Donut gasped. “Just like that Spock guy when he was on that show with the cheerleader!”

I snorted a laugh. I couldn’t help it.

“You’re not allowed to laugh at my observations, Carl. I’m not speaking to you, remember?”

“That’s not what I’m laughing at, Donut. I’m laughing at the implication that the sand ooze is some sort of super mob. What does that make Samantha? She either has to be Apito, Scolopendra, or the unwitting mother in this scenario. This is so ridiculous. We fought that thing. That’s no god killer.”

Rosetta shrugged. “Just so, that’s the myth. It’s like this in all cultures. As civilizations grow, they observe phenomena they don’t understand. While the scientific minds strive to comprehend the universe, others, less educated and louder, reverse engineer ridiculous stories to explain the phenomenon, and that’s how religions are born. This is why my culture had stories of an ocean goddess with sapient menstrual blood when in reality it was a red algae bloom that evolved the ability to move onto land. They took all those ‘ridiculous’ stories and compiled them and fed them into the storylines for the dungeon.”

I remembered the caprids and how they’d reacted when they learned the gods were leaking.

“No, I understand,” I said. “I’m not questioning that. We just fought a giant talking dick. I’m talking about us trusting that the war mages know what they’re talking about when they say Samantha’s kid is this thing.”

Rosetta nodded. “We don’t know how they know this. Or how they found it in the first place.”

And that was the problem, wasn’t it? So much of this was left up to faith. In a world where anything was possible, phrases such as “This doesn’t make any goddamn sense” stopped having any meaning.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Thank you.” I turned to Prepotente, who’d been leaned forward, fascinated by Rosetta’s explanation. “I am hoping to see that memorial crystal you have.”