Carl and Donut leave Big Tina whimpering in the clearing and approach the fallen hunter she has mauled. The hunter, identified as Hunter Iota of the Crafter Alliance, has already healed himself to full health, but one leg has been torn off and the nearby raptors are licking up his blood. Carl recognizes that Iota is one of the crafters who had been loosely involved in hunting other crawlers, and he pins Iota down to question him despite Donut urging Carl to kill him immediately.

Under threat and pain, Iota explains that the hunters had recently received good news: after lawsuits tied to the regime change and the dangerous floor conditions, a court had ruled that participating hunters could leave the crawl if they wanted. Iota says everyone had been celebrating in the saferoom bar when a new notification arrived nullifying that judgment under an older law. According to Iota, the crawl AI overrode the ruling and declared that the hunters were still trapped until the floor ended.

Iota then shares rumors about the system behind the crawl. He says the Mantises supposedly sold Borant a used amusement-park AI instead of a fresh one, and that this AI is already "going primal" much earlier than normal. In Iota’s account, a primal AI stops obeying outside authorities, starts making its own rules, and is usually tolerated because shutting it down would cost the powerful too much money. He says the wealthy council members can protect themselves, the viewers will enjoy the chaos, and the people most likely to suffer are crawlers and working participants like him.

Carl presses for more, and Iota argues that the AI clearly likes drama and is willing to bend outcomes for entertainment. As evidence, Iota points out that he was supposedly teleported to a random location after being ejected from a saferoom, yet he ended up directly in front of Carl while drunk, wounded, and unable to keep secrets. Carl realizes that the AI may be actively arranging events rather than merely enforcing altered rules.

Once Iota has said what he knows, he stops resisting. He admits he is not really a fighter but an accountant and broker for the other crafters, and he accepts that Carl is going to kill him. Carl does exactly that, crushing Iota’s chest before he can finish speaking. The kill grants Carl Intelligence-based stat points, and the Ring of Divine Suffering levels up so that it now awards four stat points per kill.