Carl, accompanied by Donut and Samantha, sets off on his motorcycle to help Imani. A system-wide announcement clarifies the final rules for Phase 3 of this level: If a crawler holding a key uses a “Flee” card during a card battle, they will automatically lose a random key to their opponent. Furthermore, keys cannot be voluntarily given away except through this specific combat mechanic.

Shortly after they depart, a notification warns Carl that an enemy has used a powerful Eye in the Sky spell to pinpoint his exact location and level. In the group chat, Mordecai tells Carl that the Eye in the Sky is an extremely powerful spell, probably being used against their group by a hostile entity. Meanwhile, Imani tells Carl she can no longer spot Quan Ch, who has the power to fly.

Believing Imani will be unable to acquire a key on her own, Carl formulates a risky backup plan. He will force Imani to fight them and have Donut use a Flee card, giving Imani their key. He would then use his jacket’s Mysterious Bone Key benefit to open the exit door for himself and Donut, a last resort that would cost him both the jacket and one of his own bones.

As Carl nears Imani’s destination, he realizes the motorcycle’s noise is attracting mobs. Carl stops. In the distance, they hear the sound of monk seals singing. To investigate, Carl uses his xistera (a scoop-like box) to throw Samantha on a reconnaissance mission toward the coast. Instead of tumbling, Samantha soars into the air, glowing. Carl and Donut discuss her powers: Just like on the previous floor, Samantha’s “getting stronger the longer the floor is going” (515).

Samantha reports back with a bizarre scene: A massive sea snake lies on the shore, covered in the animated corpses of baby seals and crabs. Sister Ines is perched on the snake’s head, seemingly reciting poetry. This act appears to be a powerful charm, controlling a vast army of both living and undead sea creatures who have gathered around Sister Ines.

The AI suddenly announces that the ongoing “Chowder War” quest has failed and is being replaced by a new one: “Hell Comes to Crawler Town” (604). A system message announces a “Demon Eviction,” a chaotic event triggered by the massive number of deaths on the floor. Demons from the underworld, Sheol, will now begin randomly possessing the bodies of the recently deceased and other weakened creatures.

Mordecai warns that these possessed beings are intelligent and will attempt to drag crawlers down to Sheol, resulting in instant death for both the crawler and the demon’s host shell. He stresses that if Sister Ines is taken by a demon, her body and the key she holds will be destroyed. Racing against this new threat, Carl devises a plan. He instructs Samantha to race ahead and bite down on Sister Ines, which will allow him to use his xistera’s recall function to forcibly teleport Ines—attached to Samantha—to their location and initiate a card battle to secure her key. Carl’s ploy works, but just not in the way he expected.

Because of Samantha’s own growing powers, Carl’s recall spell teleports not just Sister Ines, but also the massive sea snake she was riding, and her entire charmed army of thousands of living and undead creatures directly to Carl and Donut’s location. The teleportation shatters Sister Ines’s control over the creatures, plunging the area into chaos. Seals and crabs resume their battle, corpses start turning into zombies, and zombies begin to be possessed by full-powered demons onto the beach several miles away.

The giant snake is identified as Madre de Aguas, a level 125 city boss, just as the world freezes for a broadcast from two announcers, Kevin and Magnificent Troy. The announcers will be providing a live commentary on a massive battle that the system terms a “Survival Royale Special Event” (615). Kevin and Troy say powerful demons are entering the fray, allyships forming, and an eighth combatant entering the battle: the crawler Quan Ch.

Reverting to the flashback from days earlier, the narrative follows Carl and Pater Coal as they head to Carl’s “alternative solution”—the Blessed Sun Enchantments shop in Club Vanquisher. The jeweler at the store fits a new jewel in Carl’s strength ring in exchange for an interest-free (with hidden conditions) loan of 990,000 gold from the Temple of Emberus. A description announces the refitted ring is now the “Enchanted Pauper’s Ring of the Steadfast Emberus” (535), comes with a debt, and has a “true nature” that can only be seen by a follower of Emberus. 

In the present, time unfreezes as Quan Ch launches a surprise attack from the air. The battle begins, but because Sister Ines designated them as enemies, Carl’s team continues to be frozen by a 10-second penalty. Quan immediately uses a “Peekaboo!” card to see his opponents’ hands. After Sister Ines summons her totem, Paz, Quan uses a consumable card called “Force Play” to force her to play the Flee card he saw in her hand.

Sister Ines is instantly ejected from the battle, forfeiting her key to whoever wins the fight. Freed from her charm, the enraged Madre de Aguas snake immediately attacks Carl, who defends himself with his Protective Shell. To avoid Quan’s strategy of controlling his opponents by “winning” their cards, Donut discards her own Flee card. However, Quan then casts a hand-swap card, replacing Donut’s three cards with three of his own—all Flee cards. Quan immediately uses a “Force Play” card, forcing Donut to play one of those Flee cards.

As a result of the Flee card, Carl and Donut lose the fight and are teleported away to a swampy forest. The system awards both their key and Sister Ines’s key to Quan. Now keyless, Carl contacts Tserendolgor’s (Ren’s) squad, who he learns are the crawlers waiting at the El Capitolio Nacional exit (Ren is a dog-woman crawler from previous books, and much disliked by Donut). Carl warns Ren’s squad that Quan has both keys and is headed their way.

Carl devises a new plan to get back into the fight. He lifts up Samantha to eye level and asks her to be honest about the extent of her powers. After making lewd jokes, Samantha finally reveals that she can fly and enhance spells. Carl asks for her help in teleporting him to Imani. Samantha agrees, though she Is unsure about her teleporting abilities. Carl places four of the two-part teleport-trap-carrying automatons inside Samantha’s head-body for transport. To keep her card deck active and enable her to summon totems, Donut initiates a separate, sustained card battle against a large group of nearby duendes.

After Ren confirms that Quan has arrived at the Capitol building—about 15 kilometers away—Carl throws Samantha toward their location. Once she arrives and deploys the trap anchors, Carl will be able to teleport himself into the battle and bring in Donut’s summoned totems remotely. Samantha arrives and announces on the group chat that she has ejected the traps from her head.

Carl steps into the remaining teleport-half and transfers successfully to the Capitol building just as the battle between Ren’s squad and Quan begins. A system-wide message announces that the Madre de Aguas snake has been possessed by a powerful demon prince from Sheol named Amayon. Carl also receives a quest update, instructing him to question Amayon about the murder of Geyrun (the son of Carl’s patron god, Emberus). 

Carl’s tactical loophole works: Because Donut is in a different battle, he can teleport her summoned totems to his location, allowing them to attack Quan directly without having to engage Quan’s own totems. Carl disables Quan’s shields with a sticky hob-lobber, Samantha attacks him, and Ren summons her own totem, a massive creature called Basquiat, the Mongolian Death Worm.

Quan plays a “Toss-Up!” card, which swaps control of all active totems between himself and Ren. Now hostile to Ren because of the swap, Ren’s death worm totem immediately kills her squadmate, Chuluuna. Donut’s totem, Lazarus, is also killed but splits into two new, more powerful golden versions: “Uzi Jesus” and “Lord of Blight.” 

Another of Donut’s totems, Jola the Yule Cat, uses a move announced as “Fashion Critic” to strip Quan of all his clothes and equipment, leaving him defenseless. Bullets rain down on Quan. Meanwhile Jola looks at Car in anger, since Carl took Quan’s magical cloak, which Jola wanted for himself. Carl asks Donut to end the battle. Donut informs him the battle is over anyway, as Shi Maria is devouring all the enemy corpses, preventing them from turning into zombies or demons. 

The totems, including Jola disappear, and the deck is reset, signaling the combat is over. Carl moves to the dying Quan and hands Quan a ring from his severed arm. The ring bears an inscription that makes it clear it was a gift from Quan’s daughter. Quan whispers that she would be ashamed of him, and dies. 

Since the system gives Donut the credit for killing Quan, she receives both his keys. Before she and Carl can rejoice, the system announces that they have only five minutes to exit via the crumbling stairwell at El Capitolio Nacional de Cuba. If the doorway collapses, the keys will disappear.

With the exit collapsing, there is no time for Donut to get there and transfer a key to Ren’s squad. Realizing their situation is hopeless, Ren gives up. She gives Carl all of her gear, cards, and her pet, a Tummy Acher named Garret, whom she kills and resets to level one before handing him over. Rena and Donut make their peace via chat, and Carl promises to Ren that he will make every game-maker pay for what they have done to the crawlers. The stairwell at El Capitolio becomes inaccessible, and the key associated with it dissipates.

Ren then uses a self-destruct wrist bracer to blow up the building, killing herself and her last team-member, Khulan. With Samantha’s help, Carl teleports Donut to his location, and they now possess the single remaining key for the church exit. Their relief is cut short when Sister Ines contacts them. She reveals that she has become empowered by the ongoing demon invasion and now controls the demons, including the Prince Amayon. She threatens to destroy the church doorway unless Carl surrenders to her at the FOCSA building.

Notes from the cookbooks of former crawlers Milk and Rosetta reveal that the only way for crawlers to move from one floor to another is the stairwells. This is an “unbreakable rule” (576).

In the present, Donut laments at the unfairness of the exits being destroyed, breaking the stairwells. Carl reflects that the current game has been designed to turn crawler-teams against each other, threatening to blow up stairwells in exchange for keys. They themselves have no option but to trudge to Ines at FOCSA. Just then, Carl receives a message from Imani that powerful demons have a ranged portal attack capable of dragging victims to hell. The attack has left several one-minute portals open to Sheol, dragging in all matter around them. 

Full-powered level 140 demons need two souls to return, while zombie-possessed demons only need one. Meanwhile, Sister Ines, the nun who partially controls Amayon, is trying to stop him from casting, but he is resisting her charm and casting the portal spell anyway despite her partial control. However, Amayon needs several souls to return as he is a very powerful demon.

A conversation in the group chat reveals that crawlers who touch these portals explode because their equipment is pulled through them, while their bodies are forbidden from traveling to a lower floor. This suggests a naked crawler might survive the encounter. Carl devises a plan and tells Imani to unleash an army of slug-like creatures, nicknamed “sluggalos,” which he created from infected mercenaries, to overwhelm the demons guarding a nearby church. 

After his artificer, Mordecai, provides a brief history of Sheol’s ruling family, Carl collaborates with another crawler, Prepotente, to develop a theory that could save the thousands of crawlers who failed to get a key to the next floor. 

Carl broadcasts his and Prepotente’s theory to his allies and the wider crawler community. If they can significantly empower Amayon, the demon’s escape portal will become a global event. This massive sky-portal could then be used to bypass the broken stairwell doors. He instructs crawlers without keys to dig tunnels underneath the indestructible stairwell chambers using Build Trench scrolls, so crawlers can position themselves below and be sucked upward into the portal alongside the chamber walls. To aid in demolition, he has Mordecai list powerful bombs for sale.

The System AI then formalizes the situation by issuing a new quest, “Where the Sidewalk Ends” (691). The quest confirms Amayon is a weakened demon prince and presents three options: Do nothing and let the portal cast in two hours sucking the Cuba region into the sky; free Amayon from his possessed form, resetting the timer and triggering a World Quest; or kill Amayon, which is noted as effectively impossible. Carl reveals to Donut that their mission is to kill Sister Ines, free Amayon, and buff him enough to make his portal save everyone. As Carl and Donut approach the demon, Amayon calls out a name, “Ysalte,” which Carl thinks he has heard before.