Carl and Donut locate Shi Maria’s web-choked territory. To avoid fighting through the webs, they have Samantha convince the spider to meet them at the edge of the road. Shi Maria appears, a terrifying massive spider whose in-person appearance far exceeds the drawings of her Carl has studied. The system identifies her as the Bedlam Bride, a Level 140 City Boss with celestial blood, and warns of her permanent insanity and blindness abilities. A quick “Size Up” reveals she also has the “Cockroach” skill, which can save her from a fatal blow.

Samantha, covered with leaves and spider-webs, presumably ejected from Shi Maria’s belly, greets Carl and Donut and introduces the spider as “MaeMae.” She then details a grandiose plan in which Shi Maria will give her a new body, join their adventures, have a torrid affair with Louis, and eventually help find both Samantha’s and Shi Maria’s lost husbands. Shi Maria communicates only through clicks and hisses, which Samantha professes to understand.

To test Shi Maria’s intentions, Carl produces the golem body meant for Samantha. When Samantha asks Shi Maria to perform the transfer spell, the spider indicates through clicks that she needs special supplies and cannot do it now. After Samantha grows angry, Shi Maria stages a dramatic breakdown, bursting into tears and collapsing. Her map indicator turns white, signifying she is non-hostile. Samantha explains that Carl hurt the spider’s feelings by not calling her “stunning.”

Carl confronts Shi Maria, who finally speaks in a clear voice. She says she lacks the proper magic but knows a Master Pulpmancer in Larracos (the city on the upcoming ninth floor and the site of the Faction Wars) who could perform the transfer. Realizing this is Shi Maria’s ploy to get off the floor, Carl offers a deal: He will take her to Larracos as a totem card in exchange for her help. Shi Maria agrees, promising to aid them and reveal how to undo the card magic once the city is reached. She allows Carl to injure her just enough to be captured, and the Bedlam Bride quest begins.

Now possessing Shi Maria as a totem card, Carl warns Donut not to trust her. As they travel north, they grind on monsters and acquire two new cards from a creature that Mongo kills: A snare card called “Damnation” and a special effect card called “Glow-Up.” While they rest in a safe room, Carl grows worried about Katia, who has gone silent after investigating the Desperado Club. He learns from Bautista that Katia found a secret merchant and is “out of sorts” (322). Imani later clarifies that Katia found a drug den and took Glory Bound, a substance that puts a user in a coma to relive a memory, and she has 10 more hours remaining unconscious.

The daily update from Cascadia details the rules for the next phases. In phase two, squads will be teleported to a new area and have 48 hours to find a key. In phase three, key-holders can proceed to the exit, but keyless squads will be teleported to a key-holder’s exit path, forcing a confrontation to steal the key and escape the floor.

Carl and Donut enter the mock-battle arena to test their new deck. Donut is upset after learning that Empress D’Nadia, her patron, has sold her sponsorship to a waste-management company. After several practice battles, Carl and Donut unlock a “Secret Challenge Mode” against a deck-wielding opponent named Der Schachmeister, a young boy who specializes in debuffs (336). The boy first uses a mystic card to lock Donut’s hand, then after summoning his wolf totems, force-discards the powerful Shi Maria card. His two wolf totems attack, overwhelming and killing Raul the land crab, Donut’s only summoned creature. 

Before the second wolf can be stopped, it strikes Donut, causing them to fail the simulation. Carl concludes their strategy is too slow; in future fights, he and Mongo must immediately attack the enemy deckmaster. He and Donut discuss the unreliability of their totems and decide they need to adjust their deck, possibly by trading a card with Katia.

Their first battle takes place in a simulated 1980s mall. They summon Uzi Jesus and Shi Maria, who immediately attack one another until Shi Maria skewers and kills Jesus. Their opponent is “Rude-Dolph the Blood-Nosed Slay-Deer” (332), a grotesque reindeer-like puppet master who is invulnerable until his eight reindeer minions are destroyed.

Shi Maria opens her fifth eye during the fight, and Carl feels a disturbing mental pull from it. The affected reindeer turn on each other, which Carl attributes to the eye’s influence. After the puppets are dead, Shi Maria easily dispatches Rude-Dolph. The fight ends just as they summon Geraldo, who is disgusted to find Shi Maria feasting on the reindeer’s corpse.

Carl and Donut arrive at the Desperado Club, where they find Katia weak and ill, surrounded by their friends. An antidote for a drug she took has induced severe vomiting. Mordecai explains via chat that Katia is addicted to four different substances, and while cures exist, her stats are now scrambled. Despite the protests of Bautista and others, Carl insists they proceed immediately with their plan to kill Astrid, the club’s fairy security chief, fearing they will lose access to the club in the next phase.

Katia agrees, and after receiving buffs from Imani to remain functional, she and Carl prepare their ambush. To lure Astrid out, Carl brings Samantha into the club, where she begins drinking and causing a scene with the badger bartender, Charles. Carl then slips into a secret corridor to set up the trap.

In a secret corridor, Carl places motion-detecting claymore mines packed with iron BBs—a fairy’s weakness—to kill Astrid. He also sets teleport traps to neutralize any guards she might summon. The plan is for Samantha’s disruption to force Astrid to travel from her office to the bar via a secret passage, leading her directly into the ambush, with Katia waiting nearby to finish the job.

The plan immediately fails. A club-wide alarm sounds for a “containment breach,” and Astrid flies past Carl, but she uses the main public stairs, completely bypassing the trapped corridor. Moments before, Carl had been forced to subdue a drunk and hostile crawler named Emir Akbas, who had attacked him on the dance floor.

Carl learns that Samantha accidentally released Minge, a powerful feral demon, from the alternate dimension of the Nothing, triggering the club-wide alarm. The club descends into chaos as Minge—a corpulent, multi-limbed pink form covered with sores, slaughters the guards. Minge screams for Samantha, calling her “Psamathe,” the doll-head’s name when she was a minor deity. Minge seeks Samantha for revenge as Samantha killed her sister. 

Determined to complete her mission, Katia decides to ambush Astrid amidst the pandemonium. Carl is inadvertently knocked into the kitchen, where he comes face-to-face with Astrid. She reveals she has unleashed “vorpals”—deputized celestial guards—from a sealed room to combat the demon. Before she can say more, she reveals her husband is the demigod the Night Wyrm and begs Carl to tell him she acted to protect their family. 

Katia’s troll totem bursts in, distracting Astrid, but Astrid kills it almost instantly with a blood-boiling spell. A second totem, a skull-headed crow, enters and proves resistant to Astrid’s magic. Katia, who has slipped in invisibly during the distraction, grabs the fairy in her shifted metallic form. Carl rips off Astrid’s wings, on a tip from Rosetta’s cookbook about fairies being most vulnerable in that area. The crow then gouges out the fairy’s eyes, and Katia’s spike kills the helpless Astrid, completing the quest.

Katia secures Astrid’s body. The quest-giver, the Night Wyrm, confirms the kill, congratulating Carl on a job well-done. Carl is shocked at the Night Wyrm’s upbeat tone, now that he knows Astrid was the wife of the demigod. Carl uses spider automatons to distract Minge, allowing them and other survivors to escape to the club’s top floor. There, they find the male strippers, including Damascus Steel and Anaconda, weeping over Astrid’s death.

Damascus reveals another shocking truth: Astrid was his mother, the Night Wyrm is his father, and they are a family of non-generated NPCs trapped in the dungeon. He states his father wanted her dead and will now have everything, though the asset-motive is Carl’s own later interpretation. Fearing for their lives under new management, he begs Carl to hire the strippers as mercenaries for his team. A manager facilitates the transaction, and the dancers are sent to the guild’s barracks. As Damascus and Anaconda leave to confront their father, Katia receives the orchid from her quest box, the key to freeing her from the Crown of the Sepsis Whore. The vorpals are heard below, destroying Minge.

With the club temporarily closed, Carl and Katia wait to exit. Carl theorizes that Astrid’s family was trapped in the dungeon as indentured servants and that she used her position to create a safe haven for her sons and their friends at the club. Her husband, the Night Wyrm, then had her murdered to seize control of her wealth. Carl regrets Astrid’s killing and expresses his rage at the game that has trapped them all in unwanted roles.

As they prepare to leave, Donut informs Carl via chat that she used the consumable Combo card to merge two problem cards, stacked utility buffs on the result, then used the Glow-Up card to make the change permanent—yielding two new totems. She also received a new mythic totem from Katia. As Carl and the others step outside, they learn that Faction Wars participants who had been trapped on the club’s flooded lower level are now being ejected directly into the shark-infested waters outside.

Carl and Donut appear on Odette’s show for an interview before phase two begins. Odette reveals that Empress D’Nadia attempted to use “emergency action items” to have Carl, Donut, and all NPCs removed from the Faction Wars, but the system rejected her proposals (411). The conversation turns to the need for each team to have an “adjutant,” a third-party referee.

Odette then announces that cannot be their adjutant because she is entering the dungeon herself. She will be sponsoring the goddess Nekhebit as part of the Celestial Ascendency game. Carl is horrified, realizing Odette has preempted Huanxin’s plan and that his deal to save Katia may be void. Odette presents three other potential adjutants. Quasar, in the sidelines, shakes his head against the candidates Ripper and Wonton and gives an enthusiastic thumbs-up for Baroness Victory; Carl selects Baroness Victory, an orc attorney formerly of the Skull Empire.

As the show concludes, a last-minute rule change is announced: only squad leaders will enter the phase two choosing chamber initially. As the leader of their squad, Donut is teleported away alone to face her first solo deck battle, leaving Carl on set. Immediately, Zev is also teleported away due to a security alert involving a destroyed spy ship. Odette reveals the ship had already been detected and was going to be destroyed regardless; they simply timed it to create a private moment to speak.

Odette confesses her deep, long-standing guilt over the deaths of her family and friends in the dungeon, particularly her role in the death of Mordecai’s brother. She explains her entire career has been a penance, an attempt to atone by helping Mordecai. She warns Carl that Huanxin is driven purely by revenge and cannot be trusted. Odette says her plan will most likely kill her and Huanxin both, and that her broader goal is to shut down the crawl responsibly so future collections are humane and the current suffering ends. As her time runs out, the broadcast shows Donut’s opponent being instantly killed by Mongo, ending her solo fight. Carl is then transferred to join her.