After Carl kills Dismember, the dead war mage’s Fleshers immediately turn into “Bereft Minions” and swarm, but Carl, Donut, Katia, and Levi keep the train door blocked until the ride ends. They escape at Mauve Line Station 281 before the doors seal again, and Levi celebrates Dismember’s death while Carl suspects the named trains may each hide their own war mage. Zev then contacts Carl and Donut to book them for a studio segment on Planet Beautiful, and Donut eagerly accepts when she learns it involves beauty pageants and pet shows.

Because Carl wants his Protective Shell available before attempting the Nightmare train, the group stays at Station 281 and uses the saferoom to regroup. Carl visits the crafting interface, uses a free table coupon to acquire an armorer’s table, and upgrades his sapper’s table to level three. By comparing the engineering and armorer systems, Carl confirms he can turn shaped scrap into true equippable armor, which matters because Katia can only absorb mass from items the system recognizes as equipment.

While reading crawler notes in his cookbook, Carl learns more about older sapper workarounds and becomes emotionally affected by the hatred and grief left behind by previous crawlers. He then applies that knowledge to Katia’s abilities by building an ugly but functional open-top backpack designed to count its contents as part of the equipped item. After carefully loading it with dense metal rods and balls and having Katia transform around a support stand, Carl proves that equipping the backpack lets Katia absorb over a ton of extra mass, dramatically increasing her size, armor, and strength while creating new problems with balance, dexterity, speed of equipping, and train-car space.

Later, the group watches the recap show. The footage suggests that multiple named trains contain silver-haired war mages with different attack styles, confirms other crawlers are making dramatic progress, and shows Quan Ch using his Celestial Quest jacket to fly and destroy a train. Carl and Donut also see Elle fighting effectively with Meadow Lark’s survivors, and Carl notices Lucia Mar has already found a stairwell chamber, which is alarming because the stairwells will not open until shortly before level collapse.

After the show, the dungeon announces delays caused by broken trains clogging the system and says every crawler now has a sponsor. Carl receives a Bronze Benefactor Box from the Valtay Corporation containing a permanent neural enhancer that installs a third-party interface upgrade: the ability to identify and analyze subspace portals. Despite distrusting Valtay, Carl swallows the pill, discovers he can now inspect dungeon doorways, and realizes he can even view the area beyond them, giving him a potentially powerful new scouting tool.