A note from Crawler Porthus opens the chapter, with Porthus lamenting how incomplete the cookbook still is and declaring that he has accepted a hundred seasons of servitude so he can keep fighting the forces behind the dungeon. In the present, with a little over five hours left before level collapse, Carl buries the gate's winding box near the stairwell while Langley leaves to join other crawler alliances on the next floor. Carl reviews the gate instructions from Ghazi's papers and discusses the plan he had publicly presented: send Juice Box through a portal to the ninth floor so a feral god will appear there and devastate Prince Stalwart's faction position. Zev then reports that more legal attempts to block Carl's move have failed and relays Borant's warning not to damage sponsor interests, which only confirms to Carl that the corporations understand the financial stakes.

Before Carl can carry out that public plan, distant god-summoning chaos spills into his quadrant. Gideon warns that battling deities have popped another bubble and released a new threat, and soon a feral minor demon named Slit arrives, screaming for Samantha. Carl receives an enormously expensive emergency platinum benefactor box from the Open Intellect Pacifist Action Network and opens it to find a special xistera attachment designed to throw Samantha's doll head vast distances. Ignoring Mordecai's warning that taking Samantha outside will summon another deity, Carl uses Samantha as bait: when Slit attacks, Carl slots Samantha into the attachment and hurls her more than fifty kilometers away. Slit chases after her, another deity immediately manifests, tears Slit apart, and disappears, proving the sponsor box was a lifesaving intervention. Samantha returns furious and reveals that the Nothing is full of demons from the same harem who also hate her.

After safe rooms close, Carl, Donut, Mongo, and Juice Box wait beside the buried gate while Juice Box uses her shifting forms to teach Carl monster weaknesses. Maggie My, still hiding as the Scree worm inside Chris, is secretly approaching through the sand to sabotage the device. Carl stalls her by bluffing about a phase potion that will let him ignore lava rock attacks, and Maggie admits a goat-like liaison promised help with her daughter if she stopped Carl. When Chris finally bursts from the sand and throws the winding box, Carl reveals he has been waiting for that moment: he uses the phase potion to reach directly into Chris's lava-rock head and pull out the worm. Maggie immediately burrows into Carl's body instead, but Carl drinks a powerful healing potion before she reaches his brain. Maggie violently erupts from Carl's neck, poisoned and dying, and Mongo finishes her by chewing her up. Donut heals both Carl and Chris, and Carl tells Imani that Chris survived and can travel with them.

Carl then explains the deeper deception. The box and watch Maggie attacked were fakes that Katia secretly fabricated; the real gate pieces were swapped earlier. Because of that, Carl abandons the one-time feral-god strike and decides to keep the real gate for future use. He sends Juice Box ahead to Larracos on the ninth floor, ordering her to hide, warn the changeling survivors about what they truly are, and prepare them for Carl's eventual arrival. Juice Box leaves after extracting another promise that Carl will protect her people and Louis, whom she shockingly says she plans to marry.

With twenty-one minutes left, Katia opens the real gate underwater into Larracos's faction market and sends through timed charges, chum, sharks, pain-amplifier jellies, and floodwater. Zev, dropping her usual composure, explains that Carl has not merely damaged a battlefield position: he has drowned markets, killed irreplaceable NPC workers and merchants, cut off sponsor access to gear and food, and thrown the entire faction-war economy into chaos. Carl accepts the moral cost as part of a larger war against the dungeon's system. Katia escapes, Chris joins Carl's party, and the group heads for the stairs. Now the number one-ranked crawler, Carl realizes the destruction will likely force more hunters and faction representatives onto the sixth floor to acquire equipment directly. He enters the stairwell with Donut and Mongo after publicly swearing that every hunter who comes onto the sixth floor after them will die.