What happened next, happened so quickly, I didn’t even see it.

I blew the floors, creating a path all the way to the roof of the building. Up there on the roof, instead of a finish line, was a clustered group of portals to the eleventh floor.

The very moment the explosion went off, Osvaldo was away, flinging himself toward the exit. He’d used his Launch spell with the added benefit of his supernatural dexterity.

The new rules with the containments allowed someone to pass the finish line outside their vehicles or mounts if and only if their vehicle or mount had been destroyed.

And that was the flaw in Osvaldo’s plan. He was faster than us. He would be the first through the gate. But he first had to wait until poor Bruna was dead.

I blew the roof, and as expected, he was off. It happened so fast, it looked as if he’d gone invisible.

The moment I set off the explosion, rubble and smoke rained downs. These were a type of bomb I called poleaxes, and they were something I’d designed on the previous floor, though I never had the opportunity to use them. They were made specifically for this purpose. To breach through building floors without actually leveling the building. The whole idea had come from my quest to find focused explosives, something I hadn’t seen perfectly executed since that very first blast of the murder dozer on the first floor.

These charges were designed to blast up and down, but not laterally, in a cone. They would create rubble, but, as devised, they were supposed to minimize the debris, instead vaporizing everything. In my bomber’s studio, I’d created these things to create almost perfect ten-meter circles on the floor below them and an even larger hole above, depending on how far away the ceiling was.

When I’d dropped these things, we’d been, mostly, in a vertical line up and down the building. It wasn’t perfect, which was why I’d dropped several. The result was something akin to multiple shotgun-blast patterns in the ceiling, all the way up.

Either way, rubble did fall, but it was mostly smaller-sized pebbles and a whole lot of dust and smoke. In a half-second, I created a jagged, almost straight path all the way to the roof. The size of the holes was strangely proportional to the size we were now, so three times bigger than I was expecting, which was a pleasant surprise.

The moment the roof blew and Osvaldo disappeared, we fired three potion balls at Bruna, designed not to hurt the slaughter gnu but save her life. A liquid drop shield, an explosion blanket, and a smoke curtain to obscure her from sight.

Just as the liquid drop shield started to coalesce, smoke billowing, Donut landed atop the bewildered mount, and she cast her own shield. A moment later, she caused multiple trees to sprout all around the unattended gnu, further blocking the creature from sight. A few moments after that, a half dozen emergency gremlins sprouted all along the gnu’s back.

Osvaldo had left a grenade designed to kill poor Bruna. But the man wasn’t taking any chances, and it appeared she had already been poisoned as well. The explosion blanket had stopped the grenade, which was the first threat. Osvaldo had also dropped several poison dart bombs as he ascended. The deadly weapons dropped one after another on the line of shields, sparking and exploding.

One of the emergency gremlins was already in his toolbox, pulling out medicine. The gremlins were well equipped to help both mechanical and biological mounts, and they would work to keep Bruna alive.

High above, Osvaldo would have just attempted to jump through the portal. It wouldn’t work.

Karl: Who has eyes on him?

Donut: I have him. Don’t worry, Carl. It looks like the wall at the portal stunned him. He has bugs coming for him, too. Tracking, tracking.

Louis: Britney just jumped away!

Florin: Protect Louis! If she kills him and the car, she can get out the gate!

Britney: I’m not running, you idiot. Give me a second. Osvaldo is stunned from hitting the gate at speed.

Donut: BRITNEY, GET OUT OF THE WAY.

And then the notification came.

A champion has fallen. A bounty has been claimed.

Crawler Osvaldo has been killed by Crawler Britney Proskurina.

Team Three, Team Flamengo, has been eliminated due to the death of their last racer.

You are the sole remaining team in your heat.

A moment later, the corpse of Osvaldo hit the floor, followed by Britney, who landed directly atop the body, smashing it farther into the ground. Britney’s eyes glowed as the golden player-killer skull appeared over her.

I sighed, the sound more like a whimper. You stubborn idiot, I thought. Why did it have to come to this?

Above, pieces of the floor continued to rain down. The bugs, which had been stupefied by the explosion, started to reappear. They were comparatively much smaller now since we’d tripled in size. The bugs were now wolf-sized, as opposed to bear-sized, but there were a lot of them, and they would soon be on us.

Imani: I am casting a wide-area stun that’ll temporarily stop the bugs again. Those of you in single heats, you’re free to go. The rest of us, we’re meeting back in Hungry Eyes. Carl, you and Donut get through the gate. We got this.

Donut: WE’RE NOT LEAVING UNTIL WE MAKE SURE YOU’RE ALL SAFE.

Donut returned to the truck, bursting back in through the window.

“Did you see that? Britney moved just as fast as Osvaldo! What’s . . .” She stopped and made a disgusted sound. “Carl, your red rocket is out again! Put it back this instant!”

“I saw her,” I said, watching Britney, my paws up on the dash. The barbarian crawler casually sauntered back toward the gecko and Louis. “She has the memorial crystal from Ysalte now.”

Samantha was there next to me, watching, her voice suddenly serious. “She needs to get to the Basilica or the Vulgar Temple and place the gem in the plinth, and she’ll be back for good. I’ll be curious to see if that actually works.”

“What?” I asked. “What’s that?”

Multiple cars and mounts burst into the air, racing up toward the eleventh floor as stunned bugs rained down, crashing around us, slamming into the lobby. Above, a few giant humans and shells poked their heads out from their apartments, looking down at the destruction, unsure of what to do. One of them I saw was the giant Imani, tightly clutching Gucci the Maltese.

I started to growl and wag my tail before I realized what I was doing.

“Carl, stop that immediately!” Donut cried.

“You’re so adorable when you wag your tail like that,” Samantha said, sounding like her normal self. “All I’m saying is Britney needs to get to either the Halls of the Ascendency or Sheol if she wants to get that crazy Ysalte bitch out of her.”

I’d heard a little about the Basilica. It was the main temple and bottom floor of Club Vanquisher, but it was also part of the mechanics for the Ascendency battles. I’d never heard of this Vulgar Temple thing.

“Britney isn’t going anywhere unless we get her off this floor.” I started to pant with anxiety. As much as it pained me to say it, Jurgen was right. If Lucia died, the tens of thousands of children in her head would die. She had to be protected. We all knew that.

What would you do, Carl? What would you do if it was you and Donut? What would you do if she tried to kill you right now? Or Donut? Would you just let her?

“Shut up,” I tried to say out loud, but it came out as a growl.

None of that mattered. I watched as Louis and Britney’s gecko backed up and then returned toward their cul-de-sac. For a second, I was worried it wasn’t going to allow them to exit the track, but it let them just walk right back toward their garage.

Florin and Lucia were arguing. Lucia clearly wanted to go to the stairwell, but after a moment, they also started backing up.

Imani and Elle had a plan to blow the Cadillac sky-high and stop the Russian crawlers within if they’d refused to take a deal, but the car was still sitting there. I knew Imani had been working them hard, pleading with them. But I also knew two of the Russian guys had wanted to go to the Pineapple Cabaret, but a third one worshipped a god. The third one was ineligible to drive this heat. Because of that, they’d missed the cut.

But now that it was either this or facing certain death, we could at least attempt to save their lives.

We’d been talking about sending the players to that “holding area,” even if they worshipped a god or if they had incompatible anatomy for escape. Akuma was worried that if they went into the Cabaret, they would immediately institute a smite. That was still possible, but the more I thought about it and the more I talked to Rosetta about how this so-called holding area worked, the more I realized this in-between place itself could be a good alternative. Those who entered were put into stasis similar to the stasis one would get tossed in if one took a deal. According to Rosetta and Mordecai, it was a blink-and-it’s-over sort of thing. And then when I asked more about how someone like Herot could pull someone from stasis, Tipid replied that he’d spent a season on a site-prep crew. It worked almost like an inventory. The person designing the floor could select the stored individual off a menu and zap them in. It was a relatively simple procedure.

Tipid also reiterated that nobody else really looked at this catchall holding area after the season started because nobody ever went into it. The whole point of the Nothing in the first place was that it was built to catch problematic entities and to be used as a toss-and-forget system that would also act as a convenient pocket dimension within the dungeon’s lore. So many storylines and artifacts relied on the existence of the Nothing to function. The catchall storage area had become a redundant backup.

Hopefully Pontiff had made his way to the Cabaret. There were no guarantees he had, especially since he was an NPC, and it was quite possible Herot saw that and decided to just leave him sitting there.

I thought again of that message I’d received after Pontiff had jumped through. It was consistent with an NPC entering an off-limits area of the game, as opposed to what had happened with Splash Zone and the others. It implied it had worked.

Assuming Pontiff had gotten pulled in, he would have a message for Herot: There might be people coming who worshipped gods, so he had to be careful. It was okay to keep them in stasis for now. If that whole god thing was a lie, then it wouldn’t matter. If it wasn’t, then he could release them one by one as the gods lost their power during the Ascendency battles.

The best part was this would work regardless of whether we survived. The Ascendency game moved on with or without crawlers still in the game.

As for everyone else, like with the fairies and those with noncompatible races to survive outside the dungeon, they could still go to the Cabaret. They just couldn’t escape the dungeon when the opportunity arose.

. . . Or maybe they could with the rapid spread of the dungeon’s enhancement zones. We just didn’t know.

All of this required the dungeon itself to survive. And Herot. But Herot was a cookbook author, and as such, I trusted them.

Deep down, I knew this was all paper-thin reasoning. But the alternative was certain death, and most everyone knew that. More importantly, it was a desperate fuck you to those who were trying, once again, to get us to kill each other. That alone made it worth a try.

Chris’s truck started the beep, beep, beep as it backed, with Imani and Elle following.

The Russian Cadillac suddenly burst forward to the middle of the lobby and flipped up at a 90-degree angle, like a rocket about to launch.

They were making a run for the exit. Goddamnit. After all that, and they were trying to run?

“Carl!” Donut shouted.

It happened so fast.

The APV and Chris’s truck both fired spells at the car. Their shield sparked and then flickered. Prepotente hurled something, and the shield fuzzed out.

In that moment, as the shield was down, Donut cast Astral Paw. She smashed the car where it stood, crushing it like a tin can. The Cadillac simply ceased to exist.

From the moment Donut shouted to the moment the car was crushed was less than a full second.

Three new player-killer skulls formed over Donut before I even had the chance to think, Holy shit.