Donut jumped and did a backflip while every single thing in the entire room suddenly came alive. The tables. The slot machines. The chairs. The NPCs. Everything suddenly shifted, grew, and sprouted massive jagged mouths.

“Mimics!” Donut shrieked as she flipped backward through the air, releasing Mongo. Before Mongo even hit the ground, two more versions of him appeared as she cast Clockwork Triplicate.

The guards against the back wall all fell into a panic. One of them was also a mimic, but the rest appeared to have been taken by surprise.

The creatures were of all sizes, and they’d gone from their shape, whether it was a chair or a table, to blobs that still resembled the shape they’d been mimicking, but now with huge toothed mouths in the center.

In an instant, the room had gone from a casino to a scene from a nightmare. A chandelier dropped from the ceiling, swallowing Mongo whole, but the whole thing exploded in a shower of clockwork parts. The chandelier mimic, injured, tried to re-form before it exploded from a direct hit from a Donut magic missile. The real Mongo screeched in outrage at the death of his clockwork friend.

All of these things ranged from level 25 to 120, though most were around 80, which was tough as hell. There were like fifty of the things. I examined Mitch, who’d elongated and stretched, his human form now dangling like a discarded puppet along his top half. His midsection had separated out, revealing a horrific mouth filled with razor-tipped fangs and a serpentine tongue.

Mitch. Level 120. Adolescent Shadow Mimic.

This is an Enforcer for the <Redacted>.

Okay, buddy boy. Story Time. This little save-my-friends-during-the-race side quest—that wasn’t in any way engineered by me, because fuck you—presents the perfect opportunity to introduce some of the true bad guys of the dungeon. After these guys, there’s really only one or two more groups you need to meet before you’re all caught up.

There are a few dozen types of mimics in the dungeon, from your basic treasure-chest-impersonating mimic to the prostitute-imitating, vagina-as-mouth demon mimics, to the behemoth-sized mimic rex.

Shadow Mimics are a whole other Popsicle stand. They are the counter to their archenemies, the changeling principals. They are one of the few entities in the dungeon who grow significantly in intelligence and strength and power as they age with no limit.

They have the ability to become so strong, so smart that any self-respecting floor designer knows not to mess with them. Because of the nature of how they’re designed, they’re especially prone to ideation breaking. That’s a technical term some of you crawlers call “becoming self-aware.”

What’s even more insidious is that they’re almost impossible to detect.

Mitch here, the strongest of the mimics in this room right now—hint, hint—is still a baby. He’s level 120, and he’s pretty damn strong. He was sent up here by <redacted> to fuck Hamed’s shit up. They’re still in their early stages of planning, but the Shadow Mimics who are loose in my dungeon are one part of the Big Six groups left in the dungeon trying to either take over or escape.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, here is my completely arbitrary list of the Big Six groups vying for control and survival:

1) The Crawlers. That’s you. But this group also contains former Crawlers, like that Herot guy, that Forkith dude, and so forth.

2) The standard NPCs, like your naughty friend Juice Box, who are mostly all working together. (You should probably check on her, by the way, if you can figure out how to use Reaper Spider Minions to send a message. Seriously. These things are all over the place, and you keep missing them. It’s quite frustrating. Anyway, I suspect ol’ Juicy-Juice ain’t doing too well right now after she got unceremoniously dumped in Sheol. I actually don’t know how she’s doing. Again, Sheol is out of my direct view.) While they’re mostly united, the NPCs also include several offshoot groups, like that Hamed despot and his ill-advised attempt at creating a dungeon revolution for the early indentured.

3) The Gods. This is the most fractured and dumbest of all the groups. Each and every one of these immature idiots is the dungeon equivalent of a dorm full of college freshmen at an academy where the only programs are drinking, philosophy, and weird fetishes. This is a very unorganized, highly unpredictable group I have no control over. This is also the group I despise the most.

They’re all fighting each other, completely unaware that their little game is about to get turned upside down.

4) The sapient mobs. This is the group our friends the Shadow Mimics are a part of. But we also have the Ogre Imperium and a few other non-deity boss monsters in here, like Krakaren Prime. The War Mages, of course, are also part of this group. I was going to lump all these mob groups in with the NPCs, but they will never work together. They’re probably not going to work with each other, either. But they are very powerful, and within this group, the Shadow Mimics are one of the strongest.

5) The demons in Sheol. These guys are real wild cards. Despite their infighting and backstabbing, I would argue they’re the most organized. Or maybe not. Again, I can’t see them right now. It’s a closed system, like a cyst. If you pop that cyst the wrong way, bad shit happens.

6) And then there’s group six. You survive this fight, you make it to the 11th floor, you’ll meet group six.

Now, if you want to get super technical, some mobs are working with former crawlers and NPCs are working with gods and some demons are working with those mysterious group sixers, so on and so forth, so we don’t want to dive too deep into this list. This is more like a handy guide than anything else.

Also, I don’t consider any of those rich asshole tourists driving gods or Syndicate security a part of this. They’re like the rats on the first floor. A necessary but loathsome nuisance, but nothing more than that.

The real Mitch, incidentally, was someone called a Wall Rat. Those are NPCs who’ve figured out how to extricate themselves from the whole dungeon-wipe-rewrite-dungeon cycle of most NPCs. They live in the deep, hidden areas of the dungeon with persistent memory from one season to the next. Mitch Prime was eaten by Mimic Mitch here. Shadow Mimics love eating flesh. So, you know, watch the fuck out.

Also, I’m not gonna lie. I’ve been really looking forward to this battle. It’s gonna be like that castle-raid scene at the end of the Disney Beauty and the Beast movie, but as directed by my hero, Quentin Tarantino.

“What the fuck?” I cried as I jumped back from a snapping mouth. “Can we not do lore dumps like this in the middle of an ambush?”

The giant antique table that had tried to bite Donut turned its attention on me, and I punched it with my fist . . .

. . . Or at least that’s what I was trying to do in my mind in the millisecond before I realized I was still a goddamned wiener dog. Instead, I kinda swiped forward with my stubby leg, barely scratching the thing. A clockwork Mongo flipped around, smacking it with his tail, causing the mimic to fly before it could fully chomp me down.

“That’s adorable, Carl,” Samantha cried as she circled by, a screaming-candelabra thing dangling from her neck hole. She zoomed in and barreled into a chair that was trying to eat Louis.

The table I was fighting fell backward, but when it hit the ground, it was now me—the real me, not the dog version—though it was still forming, and it looked plastic, not fully realized. I rushed forward and chomped it multiple times on the leg as the clockwork Mongo also bit down. We ripped at it until delicious, red, soupy innards sprayed.

When these things died, they did something similar to what changelings did. They turned into gray humanoid forms. These shapes were strangely thin and armless, though they had multiple tentacle-like protuberances. It was like a mix between an armless soother alien and that Unwashed thing Juice Box had turned to before.

Florin’s shotgun blasted as the crawlers all us around quickly went to work. Imani’s wings went rigid as she cast a stupefying blast across the room.

Lucia was suddenly in her skull-faced hag form, and she had a new weapon I’d never seen. A lasso. The rope was gold, Wonder Woman–style, but in the circle of the loop, the air shimmered. My trap sense tingled. It was a doorway-style portal. She looped an amorphic blob that had been one of the gamblers at the other table, and when the lasso went over the creature’s head, the part of him that passed through the loop disappeared. She yanked on the rope, and the portal snapped off, cutting the creature in half. The lower half, which was still in the room, flopped over, dead, spilling strange, globular entrails.

A crawler I didn’t know got viciously chomped on the chest, and blood sprayed. Goblin Elle flew through the air, then landed atop a slot machine skittering forward on millipede legs, its slathering mouth chomping at her. She shot an ice bolt right down its mouth, and it dropped over, dead. It shriveled and turned to the blank form, this one smaller, the size of a child.

Mongo, roaring, tore through a group of chair mimics as they scattered back. A few of them writhed and screeched with a Cruel Sepsis debuff hanging over them. They withered and died in screaming pain, all turning to small gray forms.

The guards had mostly recovered. Some fled back into the casino, but a group of them was fighting.

Mimics, even powerful ones, were ambush predators. Once they lost the element of surprise, they were easy targets.

In moments, the only mimic left was Mitch himself, who started to back against the blood-splattered mural of the Bopcas. He grew a pair of arms and hands. “Look, look,” he said, his voice completely different now. “We can talk about this.”

Donut shot a magic missile that took out his leg. He cried and stumbled, but he formed another one before he fell. She shot that leg, too, and he did fall, forming into a gelatin-like blob on the ground.

“Wait,” he said again. “Let me live, and we can deal.”

“What was your plan?” I asked. “And what sort of deal?”

Donut stalked forward, low to the ground, Mongo on the other side of the injured mimic. I, too, moved forward, trying to imitate her, but I realized I was just dragging my long belly on the ground, and it had to look ridiculous.

Up until that moment, I realized I’d forgotten about the Eye of the Bedlam Bride, which had been tattooed on my chest. It wasn’t on my chest anymore, but on the center of my dog forehead, completely hidden. I was suddenly hyperaware as it tried to wrench itself open.

Let me, Carl. Let me take over.

I growled. No. You stay where you are. You are trapped, and you will stay trapped. I am in control.

If you say so, Carl. Remember. I am here when you need me.

“We needed some of you. We needed you for the Cabaret,” Mitch said, desperately trying to reshape himself. Every time he turned into a cohesive form, Donut shot him with another missile. “The war mages, the ogres, and Cock-A-Doodle-Do. They all vie for control of the dungeon back door. With some of you, we could control it all. Stop shooting me. It hurts!”

“Cock-A-Doodle-Do?” Donut asked, incredulous. “What kind of name is that?”

“What about Li Na?” I demanded. “We have a lot of friends there now at the Cabaret.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Mitch said. An eye formed on his body and turned to regard me. It was the eye of a lizard. “I have been here in the casino for a while now as we worked on assimilating . . .” He suddenly lurched forward, mouth huge, ready to consume me.

He stopped dead in his tracks.

I’d reflexively opened the eye in the center of my forehead, and he froze in place.

“No,” Mitch said. His entire form started to sparkle like someone had poured glitter into him. “No. Don’t do this. It’s too cold.” Several mouths started to form on his body, all screaming. “It’s too cold!”

Donut cast Magic Missile again, this time at full strength, and killed him. At the same moment, Mongo flew through the air, claws out, to attempt to kill the thing, but it was dead before he got there. Mitch turned to the blank form. This one fully human-sized. Mongo landed directly on the thing’s head, his crotch smushing it into the ground. Mongo screeched indignantly, waving his wings as he bounced up and down on the corpse.

We all stood there in silence for several moments.

“That’s tea-bagging,” Louis finally said.

“Ohhhhhh,” Samantha said. “In the Nothing, we called that flap-jacking.”