The Butcher's Masquerade

On the sixth floor, Carl immediately learns the Syndicate is terrified of how much damage he can do with the Gate of the Feral Gods. Orren pressures him to give it up, but Carl stalls long enough to get legal help. Quasar, a sharp and profane lawyer, prevents the gate from being quietly deleted and negotiates a compromise: the artifact is held until the ninth floor, and Carl gets mercenary collateral, including Bomo and the Sledge, plus replacement teleportation tools. As the Hunting Grounds are explained, Carl commits to a sabotage-heavy Agent Provocateur build, while Princess Donut embraces a bard class that is powerful in theory and chaotic in practice.

Before the hunt even officially begins, Carl decides to go on offense. He attacks Zockau, the hunter-held capital, using invisibility, traps, missiles, and explosives to kill hunters and cripple their infrastructure. The raid succeeds tactically but leaves him badly wounded, and he is rescued by Miriam Dom, Prepotente, and Bianca Del Ciao. In the aftermath, Carl learns he killed dozens of hunters and many noncombatants, rises in level, and gains a new ring tied to divine suffering that is powerful but psychologically dangerous. At the same time, media attention tightens around him and Donut, with Zev and Odette pushing them toward public appearances.

Carl and Donut establish themselves around Point Mongo, an ursine town Donut effectively claims after a confrontation with its mayor. The floor keeps widening in strange directions. Donut struggles with bard magic because she cannot sing properly, Mongo runs off to mate with a raptor pack led by Kiwi, and Donut suffers a panic spiral that finally forces Carl to promise he will not leave her behind on the ninth floor. That emotional promise becomes one of the book's core anchors. Soon after, Tsarina Signet approaches Carl as both ally and political force. She is building a coalition against the Naiad Confederacy and the High Elves, and Carl joins her long enough to learn more about the floor's factions, the hunters' territorial plans, and the way enemies are cheating with outside information.

Parallel to the floor fighting, Carl is repeatedly dragged into off-dungeon spectacle. Odette reveals that Beatrice is alive and had been removed from Earth to prevent Borant from exploiting her. Donut chooses to face an on-air reunion instead of being ambushed by it later. The reunion does not repair anything; instead, Donut finally tells Beatrice the hurt she caused, claims Carl as her true person, and closes that chapter of her life. Corporate politics then shift again when Valtay takes control over Borant, while Lexis secretly warns Carl and Donut that the Butcher's Masquerade is being arranged as a trap for top crawlers.

Back on the floor, Carl keeps escalating. Lucia Mar emerges as a terrifyingly unstable crawler who lays traps, shifts between personas, and later becomes tangled with evidence that children may somehow be trapped inside her mind. Carl also spends time at CrawlCon under heavy surveillance, where panels, interviews, and hostile reporters show how widely his actions are reverberating. He weaponizes one panel into a tactical discussion about killing Vrah and the mantis hunters, returns to the floor into an ambush, and turns mantises, nebulars, and Lucia against each other. He wounds Vrah with a disease arrow, then tries to exploit the last male mantis, Edict, only to watch that trapped accountant-engineer his own death rather than accept cultural ruin.

The book's other major thread grows out of Big Tina, a rogue dinosaur attacking ursine settlements. Carl and Donut learn Tina was once a little girl whose secret ballet recital was destroyed by her community's cruelty just before Scolopendra's catastrophe transformed many ursines into dinosaurs. Sponsor gifts begin pointing Carl toward anti-vampire tools, and he discovers why when Miriam Dom begs for help. Carl finds Miriam trapped beside a frozen, fragile Prepotente. She explains that she is the prime vampire behind a spreading outbreak, that Prepotente's failed attempt to transfer her curse made things worse, and that her death at sunrise will cure recent infections and free him. Carl cannot bring himself to execute her directly, but he stays, secretly marks her with his own ring, and lets her die on her own terms. Her death cures vampirism but triggers a new disaster: Big Tina's massacres have produced Odious Creepers and a floor-wide world quest that turns the forest into a death trap.

Carl and his allies scramble to respond. Donut charms Kiwi, Tina's mother, bringing the raptor pack into uneasy alliance. Prepotente opens Miriam's posthumous gifts, gets a Creeper-killing herbicide setup, and launches his own grief-driven vendetta from Bianca's back. Carl and Mordecai refine that solution into wider anti-Creeper tactics, eventually using a stolen trebuchet to deliver herbicide at range. But the quest still fails, and the punishment is catastrophic: a blood-bar system limits saferoom access, and Gehenna Bramble begins consuming the map, forcing nearly everyone toward Queen Imogen's southeastern castle. Around the same time, Donut recognizes that Imogen's familiar is Ferdinand, a return that hits her hard enough that Carl briefly considers abandoning the floor early, only to be talked down by Donut and the rest of the group.

Carl enters the Butcher's Masquerade knowing it is a trap. He studies the castle, plans changeling infiltration routes, and works with Signet, Bomo, Sledge, and others on layered backup strategies. Inside, Queen Imogen explains the central restriction: the Masquerade is protected by Apito's peace seal, and anyone who breaks it will be cast into the Nothing. Carl pivots from initiating violence to surviving until the seal breaks some other way. Donut charms Ferdinand during the festivities, stages a spectacular pet-show performance with Mongo and later Big Tina, and keeps the room's attention long enough for covert pieces to move into place. But Samantha ruins the stealth version of the control-room plan, Diwata infiltrates the castle through Circe Took's sponsorship, and outside the ballroom mantises, elves, changelings, and crawlers are already fighting.

The turning point comes when Signet, unexpectedly brought into the Masquerade by Apito herself, realizes the night will never end cleanly. After Donut's staged performance has charmed much of the room and Carl's allies are positioned as best they can be, Signet sacrifices herself beside Imogen. Her death breaks the peace seal, removes the judges, and throws the ballroom into immediate war. Carl marks Vrah, smoke floods the chamber, velociraptors and mantis nymphs pour in, Samantha returns through the ceiling, and the long-prepared ambush finally detonates. During the chaos Donut uses a hidden reversal potion on Kiwi, restoring her to ursine form and revealing her to Tina as the mother she has been seeking, which completes Tina's quest at the exact moment Sledge's countdown ends.

Instead of a clean escape, the AI turns the collapse into a four-team cage match among crawlers, hunters, Queen Imogen's forces, and Diwata. Carl redirects everyone toward the most dangerous priorities. Donut uses stacked boosts to raise Laundry Day high enough to strip Diwata away from Circe Took; once the god is peeled off, Circe is torn apart by her own children. Carl kills the last hunter, Zabit, by triggering Zabit's own hidden traps. The surviving crawlers then grind Queen Imogen down through coordinated physical attacks until the system declares victory and completes The Vengeance of the Daughter.

The aftermath is brutal. Many allies are dead or mutilated, Lucia escapes, and Eva is still barely alive somewhere in the ruins. Donut is so shocked she can barely feel her grief, and Carl helps her understand that numbness is only temporary armor. Then the survivors get one rare piece of good news: the seemingly dead Popov brothers have split into child forms and are automatically removed from the crawl, meaning they survived by becoming ineligible. Carl and Donut are named co-warlords of the Princess Posse for Faction Wars, Carl uses the moment to publicly attack sponsor protections, and Prepotente pushes the battered survivors onward.

In the epilogue, Prepotente reaches the next floor, deduces a structural flaw in the Great Race, and shatters the entire seventh floor before it can properly begin, sending everyone straight onward. Carl and Donut survive but, under pressure, Donut accidentally chooses Florida instead of the Bahamas as their eighth-floor starting region. Meanwhile, Katia finally catches Eva and kills her. Eva's dying act is one last cruelty: she binds Donut's lost Crown of the Sepsis Whore to Katia, ensuring that the conflict waiting on the ninth floor is now personal as well as political.