The Gate of the Feral Gods

Carl¹ and Katia³ engineer the Royal Chariot — a tracked, storable desert vehicle assembled from salvaged parts — and Carl¹ builds guided missiles at his sapper's table using reverse-engineered camel rocket propellant.

They test three missiles on Ruckus, a massive cyborg hawk borough boss that terrorizes the land quadrant with a twenty-five-foot spinning buzzsaw. The missiles blow off the bird's wing and send it crashing. They loot the buzzsaw for later use.

A notification announces that Chris Andrews⁹ — a quiet former ally Carl¹ hasn't seen since the third floor — has single-handedly liberated the water quadrant by storming a submarine. But the sub's pumps start flooding the necropolis below. Carl¹ recognizes this changes everything. The tomb is filling with water.

With hours before bombardment, Carl¹ executes his boldest con yet. Donut² resurrects Wynne's mangled corpse using her Second Chance spell while Katia³ simultaneously shapeshifts into the gnome's body, the chair beneath him, and the dromedarian escort — triple duty in one continuous mass.

They convince the gnome ambassador that Wynne needs healing aboard the Wasteland. Once lifted by diplomatic balloon, Langley's archers fire guided missiles at the escort planes. Carl¹ fires rockets at the fuel-air Knock-Knock bombs hanging beneath the fortress.

The chain reaction splits the Wasteland apart. The airship crashes in flaming pieces across the landscape while Carl,¹ Donut,² and Katia³ free-fall using Mordecai's⁴ horrific bouncing potion, slamming into the ground five times each like amorous rock buffaloes.

The system AI has nursed a fixation since Carl¹ stomped a frenzied gerbil on the second floor. Falling Wasteland debris scattered thousands of gerbil-filled ammo balls across the desert. When Carl¹ refuses to engage, the AI escalates — an 'acceleration event.'

Gerbils mass into a wave that crashes through Hump Town's damaged walls. The burrowing creatures overwhelm camel defenders. Donut's² Wall of Fire turns them into screaming, flaming projectiles that ignite camels on contact.

Only after Carl¹ relents and stomps dozens of gerbils barefoot does the onslaught cease. The AI grants a grudging achievement. The incident reveals a terrifying precedent: the system will bend its own rules to punish noncompliance with its whims, weaponizing the game environment against a single crawler.

The gnome castle is a regular suburban Texas house attached to a giant balloon. Carl¹ and Donut² fly up using the captured biplane's emergency balloons. Inside, they find Bonnie,¹³ the Commandant's young daughter, making lemonade beside her father's corpse — killed by his pet goose Denise, actually a feral minor deity.

The boss fight eliminates all magic and physical damage. The house is falling. Three minutes. Carl¹ discovers Denise is an 'environmental' — vulnerable only to objects already in the house. Ceramic mugs damage her.

The lemonade is a deliberate misdirection. With seconds left, Carl¹ shoves the goose's head into the kitchen garbage disposal and Donut² flips the switch. The house settles. The air quadrant falls. Carl¹ loots the Commandant's mysterious pocket watch.

Juice Box,⁸ the changeling prostitute, reveals the deeper story. Henrik¹⁵ and the changeling principals aren't cultists — they're trying to save their people from compression sickness, a degenerative disease causing horrific birth defects each generation.

They needed to touch the ghost Quetzalcoatlus for her plant-altering abilities. The Gate of the Feral Gods is a three-piece artifact: two pocket watches and a winding box. When assembled, it opens a one-way portal to any dialed destination.

But when the portal closes, it tears into the Nothing — a prison dimension for banished gods — and something feral escapes through. Carl¹ now holds Kane's watch. Henrik¹⁵ has the second. The Mad Dune Mage Ghazi possesses the winding box. A quest demands Carl¹ collect all three pieces.

Chris Andrews⁹ appears at the town gates — a seven-foot lava rock monster. But his personality is wrong: cold, detached, declaring family a weakness. Juice Box⁸ senses something sinister immediately. Carl¹ realizes this isn't Chris.⁹

Maggie My, the widow who'd been hunting Carl¹ since the first floor, chose the Infiltrator race — a brain parasite that hijacks living hosts. She's been puppeteering Chris⁹ for floors, carrying a celestial grenade from the Skull Empire designed to summon a pain god.

Katia³ shoots Chris⁹ with a special petrifying bolt from an emergency sponsor box. Rather than force Carl¹ to execute their friend, Donut² opens a magical hole beneath the frozen body and drops him into the flooded necropolis. Trapped, but alive. The problem merely deferred.

Admin Loita¹⁰ despises humans and threatens Donut² with Mongo's⁵ death. During a product-review taping aboard a submarine trailer, Carl¹ positions the latest robot Donut toy — whose explosive yield was passively enhanced on his sapper's table — beside Loita¹⁰ on a moisture-spraying couch.

When she stands, the heavy toy jumps to follow; its cheap back panel, weakened by residue from an earlier smoke bomb, dislodges and triggers the self-destruct sequence. Loita¹⁰ dies in the blast. Carl¹ and Donut² survive behind the trailer's forcefield.

A Syndicate liaison named Orren — himself a Valtay — detains them for five days. He suspects outside help but can't prove intent. The kua-tin government deems Carl¹ too profitable to dispose of. He walks free, but five irreplaceable days are gone.

Left in command, Katia³ rises to the moment. She flies the balloon-lifted house to the land quadrant after Louis⁶ suggests cutting free the stairwell-bearing top floor. She discovers the sandcastle's magical door activates when lightning strikes twin towers and electrifies its frame.

She fights scorpion men alongside Gwen⁷ — the tough Canadian fighter leading the land quadrant team — clashing over strategy but accomplishing what seemed impossible. She levels up three times to 41.

When Carl¹ and Donut² return, two quadrants are already cleared, the sand castle is cracked open, and everything is staged for the final assaults. Katia³ has proven to herself and everyone else that she doesn't need Carl¹ to survive. That quiet realization changes everything that follows.

During the lightning storm, Carl's¹ team enters the crystallized sandcastle. Every surface is glass — transformed when the mage Ghazi botched a summoning spell. He'd tried resurrecting a fictional character as his lover but instead married a sand ooze familiar of the minor deity Psamathe,¹⁴ which now consumes him daily.

Carl¹ punches Ghazi unconscious, steals the winding box, and sets the ooze's core on fire with homemade gel. The glass castle collapses, burying Carl¹ and Donut² alive. Outside, Gwen⁷ opens a drainage valve, and pressurized seawater blasts them through the necropolis and into the open ocean. Katia³ kills Ghazi during the escape. The land quadrant is liberated, but Carl¹ and Donut² are now adrift in shark-infested waters.

The ghost Quetzalcoatlus awakens Lusca — a building-sized octo-shark city boss — which drags their submarine to the ocean floor and swallows it whole. Live sports announcers begin narrating as a special event.

Inside the creature's mouth, Carl¹ deploys a berserking potion that triggers a feeding frenzy among thousands of juvenile octo-sharks, who devour each other. He fires his Protective Shell spell through the shark's maw, peeling back its upper jaw like a car hood popping on the highway.

Katia³ activates the looted giant buzzsaw, and their momentum carries them spinning through Lusca's exposed brain. They crash onto the ocean floor at fifteen hundred meters, alive but stranded, health ticking down from the crushing pressure with no way back up.

Carl¹ uses the Gate to teleport from the ocean floor, but the portal summons Orthrus — a kaiju-sized two-headed wolf puppy from the Nothing. The fire god Emberus appears, melting nearby bubbles while searching for his dead son's pet. Carl¹ and Donut² take the gnomish biplane into the air, healing the whimpering mountain-sized puppy while dodging its playful paw swats.

Quan Ch¹² — the dungeon's most selfish top-ten crawler — attacks, trying to kill the dog for the bounty. Carl¹ boards the wing, blinds Quan¹² with a disco ball smoke bomb, then tackles him midair and rips his entire arm off at the shoulder. Using the Skull Empire's own celestial grenade, Carl¹ summons Emberus directly. The god reunites with the puppy and both vanish.

The tomb raider crawlers sacrifice themselves connecting a lightning cable inside the flooded necropolis. Lightning electrocutes Quetzalcoatlus, and the subterranean quadrant falls. The bubble pops. Chris⁹ and Maggie emerge.

She tries to destroy the winding box, but Carl¹ drinks a phase-through-lava-rock potion — brewed from the mysterious yam his pacifist sponsors sent — and reaches directly into Chris's⁹ stone head. He grasps the squirming Infiltrator parasite and rips it free.

The worm burrows into Carl's¹ arm, racing toward his brain, but a double-healing potion expels it through his neck in a spray of blood. Mongo⁵ snatches the worm from midair and gleefully crunches it, ending Maggie My's months-long campaign of possession. Chris⁹ wakes, devastated but free.

With the bubble popped and three days remaining, Carl¹ coordinates the largest rescue in dungeon history. Crawlers from eligible bubbles gather at their Desperado Clubs, dial coordinates onto the Gate, and rush through portals to Carl's¹ world.

Each evacuated bubble receives a feral god when the portal closes — but inside an empty, sealed bubble, the monster is contained. Over 1,500 crawlers escape certain death across multiple phases. A few gods break free and clash in the lacuna between bubbles, but most dissipate or destroy each other.

Carl¹ sends Juice Box⁸ and the changeling refugees through a separate portal to the sixth floor, fulfilling his promise to protect her people. The operation succeeds beyond expectation, though hundreds of bubbles remain dark.

Over drinks at the Desperado, Katia³ tells Carl¹ she's leaving the party. Not from anger — from purpose. Eva, the treacherous former leader of the Daughters of Silence, is gathering scattered survivors and getting them killed. Katia³ intends to find the vulnerable women first. She's already recruited Louis,⁶ Firas, Gwen,⁷ Florin the crocodilian shotgunner, and Bautista.

Carl¹ hands her Eva's saber — the Left Fang of the Green Sultan — and tells her to return it to its owner. Donut² is devastated, but Carl¹ understands. Those five days proved Katia³ can lead on her own terms, with her own people, toward her own mission. The party of three becomes two, and the weight of that absence settles onto Carl's¹ shoulders like a new kind of armor.

Carl's¹ loudly-announced plan to drop a feral god on the Skull Empire's army was a feint. The real gate — carried by Katia³ — opens underwater near the submarine wreckage. Pressurized ocean, timed explosives, and frenzied concierge sharks blast through the portal and into the heart of Larracos, the sprawling city on the ninth floor.

The flood destroys faction markets, mercenary halls, and NPC supply shops. The factions lose their ability to purchase magical gear from crawlers. Borant approved the plan because it hurts their competitors, but Carl¹ just crippled the entire faction war economy.

He ascends to the number one spot on the leaderboard, stands at the stairwell entrance, and pledges to the watching universe that every hunter who enters the sixth floor will die.