After Li Jun leaves, Carl, Donut, and Katia agree to keep trying to save more crawlers even though none of them has a good solution yet. The ghouls that had been moving toward station 101 are now converging on station 36, where Li Jun and more than a thousand survivors are trying to hold defensible stairwell chokepoints alongside Team Meadow Lark. At the same time, hundreds of crawlers are piling up at the Abyss, and Carl concludes the rail system likely spirals toward a single central pit. Because only hats or colored-line keys let people escape through the portals, and because the collapsing interior gangways make the Nightmare Express route impractical, the team decides their only current plan is to drive the battered Vermillion car all the way to the end of the line and distribute hats unless they find a better option within a day.

At station 75, the group disconnects the front engine and sends Li Jun on with it. Eva is nowhere to be seen, and the remaining members of Brynhild's Daughters fade into the crowd, which convinces Carl the party is effectively finished. Carl keeps Katia out of sight while he asks the gathered crawlers for hats and portal keys, expecting selfishness after Hekla's death. Instead, the crawlers coordinate and donate more than 700 hats and 15 keys in about twenty minutes. Donut immediately calculates how much gold the stash could be worth, but for Carl the larger effect is emotional: the response proves there is still some solidarity and hope among the crawlers.

Once the train leaves, Carl, Donut, Katia, and Mongo explore station 75. The station contains a small maintenance yard with flatbed cars, then opens into a cavernous industrial zone full of dead ghouls, gnolls, and hobgoblins, suggesting a large battle already happened there. Most useful loot is gone, but they find intact buildings including a gnoll armory, a hobgoblin repair shop, and a saferoom bar called the Downward Dog, where a drunken shade gnoll bartender is asleep. Inside their personal space, Carl realizes Katia now feels like a permanent part of the team. After showering, Carl and Donut find they received little of value beyond standard boxes and Carl's absurd clothing-hoarder achievement, while Katia opens a string of important rewards: a neck tattoo that gives her club access, a Find Crawler skill potion from a player-killer box, a 500,000-gold legendary bounty reward, and an enchanted wrestling belt that boosts her strength, constitution, and body-checking power through the Avalanche benefit.

Carl notes that Katia has become one of the dungeon's strongest crawlers, even if she is still masking the shock of killing Hekla. The team discusses using their new gold on saferoom upgrades and table purchases once Mordecai returns. Then the recap show airs as a tribute to Hekla, showing her entrance into the dungeon with her husband, her abandonment of him after he was poisoned, and her first mob kill using one of his rib bones, which likely led to the crossbow that later defined her power. The program also revisits Katia and Eva's early partnership and reveals that Eva left Katia behind on the third floor before reconnecting with Hekla, confirming Eva's betrayal started long before the current floor. The recap ends by framing Katia's killing of Hekla as deliberate rage, and the updated leaderboard places Carl at number three, Donut at number four, and Katia at number eight.

After a daily announcement that slows blister ghouls but makes stage-three DT victims faster, Zev teleports in under an admin-protection warning. She explains she still has to wear the bulky protective suit because a promised system change after the third floor never happened, then congratulates the team and announces that Odette has permanently added Katia and Mongo to the interview contract. When Carl jokes about Katia needing to be more "zippy," he realizes Zev is too strained to respond normally. Zev finally admits the real reason she came: Loita, Hekla's former representative and a politically connected Bloom, is trying to take over Carl's account by claiming Katia's old party connection. Zev also hints that something serious has gone wrong back home for non-party members, warns that the team's chats will become public tomorrow for paying viewers, and leaves before Carl can get more answers.