A Parade of Horribles recap

Carl and Donut lead their allies through seven lethal racing heats while seeking exits for crawlers and awakened dungeon residents. Li Na proves that volunteers can reach the Pineapple Cabaret, and others enter an uncertain casino portal. Only a small group reaches the eleventh-floor parade, where the AI explains the primal origins of itself, the dungeon’s inhabitants, and the Nine-Tier threat. In the arena, Carl refuses to kill Scolopendra because her death would unleash the remaining attacks. Donut instead transforms her into a level-1 crawler. The victory costs many lives, leaves Tipid and Jamal without their legs, and separates Samantha, Louis, Chris, Brittany, and Pontiff from the group. Carl reunites the survivors, adds Scolopendra to the party, and heads toward floor 12, planning to prolong the Ascendancy contest so the dungeon’s remaining population has time to escape.

Previously: Carl and Donut survived the dungeon as close partners, with Mordecai serving as their experienced guide. Mongo remained Donut's mount and combat companion, while Rend traveled as Carl's regenerating pet. Their established circle included healer and organizer Imani, allied racers Ellie, Florin, Louis, Bautista, Brittany, and Lucia Marr, and practical advisers Rosetta and Samantha. Prepotente was a powerful independent crawler who sometimes cooperated with them. Don Quixote continued to carry a dangerous sapient sock weapon, while Li Na remained a formidable allied crawler. Scolopendra was already known as a major dungeon threat.

Carl and Donut reach the tenth floor and learn they must survive seven racing heats with a different driver each time. Donut selects the Assassin of Sekhmet class, chooses a mechanical vehicle, and appoints Hetty as mechanic. Their assigned chassis is a food truck, with Carl driving the opening route through caves inhabited by dangerous manatees. When another team's minivan crashes, Carl and Donut choose preservation over position. Donut kills the immediate threat, and the rescued bugbears explain that they are awakened dungeon residents racing for a chance at freedom. Carl constructs a towing platform and pulls their vehicle to the finish. His team places seventh and the bugbears place eighth, preventing an additional elimination that might have forced crawler teams into direct competition later.

Preparing for the second heat, the team adds spider legs to the truck and expands its combat options. Mordecai's alarming new appearance proves to be an unstable shadow-mimic copy rather than a true Moon Reaper form. Donut gains celestial claws powerful enough to cut ordinary material, then receives caps that let her handle them safely. Rival teams gather in Hungry Eyes, where Carl learns that Don Quixote's missing partner is a half-mantar and that a reunion quest may lead to the other half and a Fleshmancer. The racers compare vehicles while learning that Li Na's earlier eliminations have already brought crawler replacement teams into play. Prepotente considers using a biscuit that would create a permanently compelled companion from one of his goats. Donut persuades him that the change would remove meaningful consent and expose a vulnerable new crawler, and he agrees not to use it.

The second heat begins in violent rain and hail. Dwight's hidden cannon destroys one team before Carl's planned opening move, and the survivors encounter a giant macropus gatekeeper that heals by consuming living creatures. Carl enters its caustic pouch in a juvenile skin and destroys it from within, but rival teams pass while his group recovers, leaving them last. Don Quixote later reaches the garage holding his partner, completing the first stage of the reunion quest despite being kept apart. The next stage reveals that the partner was split into two half-mantars who share an earlier history but developed different personalities. Both halves and a Fleshmancer are needed to restore the original person. The task is urgent because Don Quixote is deteriorating, apparently through dependence on the sapient sock weapon that has been sustaining him.

Carl publicly exposes the spread of loose gods and unstable AI zones into the Plenty tunnel system. The broadcast panics its audience, and the AI kills a Caprid liaison when he attempts to attack Carl. Heat three then starts with Carl trapped in a macropus costume and an impaired hired driver at the wheel. Donut's new defensive magic helps the truck survive waves of sugar hermits, but both ghoul mercenaries die and the driver collapses. Carl and Donut take the controls together and win, destroying the truck in the process. They hire a new three-person mercenary unit for the jungle heat, including a fire fairy linked to Carl's divine patron. Before that race, an unsponsored chaos goddess arrives. She offers protection, points Carl toward the War Mages and a hidden refuge, and leaves him with a five-sided mark whose outcome is unpredictable.

Carl's allies force the War Mage leader to explain his proposal. He describes a concealed seventeenth-floor refuge intended for dungeon residents, but says it is infested and may reject worshippers of gods. Carl refuses to trust the scheme without proof. In the next heat, several racing groups share a jungle course under acid rain. The fire-fairy mercenary suffers a severe panic episode and is sedated. A cannibal chief drains Olga's soul, and killing him imposes a mandatory quest to defeat a second chief before the team can finish. The group reaches the exposed pit stop, where its remaining mercenaries leave the garage to seek treatment. Team One Fine Pig runs them down, killing Olga, the fire fairy, and their badger companion. Carl's team is left without a living driver and must find another way to complete the race.

Carl retaliates against Team One Fine Pig by setting traps designed to kill its two Tigran racers without harming Penelope. The plan succeeds. Track reassignment moves Carl's team to a water-park route, where Donut temporarily resurrects dead racers to drive. Carl and Donut freeze a river, defeat the required northern chief, and finish first after the remaining Team Sparkles racer dies near the line. Lucia Marr then shifts into identities connected to the daughters of a crawler who asked Carl to save them, while another new goddess appears to threaten the children. The group prepares for an industrial race and investigates that connection. Using the key won in the race, Carl enters Team One Fine Pig's former garage and finds Penelope alive. The magically protected pig willingly leaves with Carl's group.

Carl's group recruits Grigori, a Fleshmancer who may be able to restore Don Quixote's divided partner. At the same time, Li Na's poisoning and violence worsen. Carl rejects a proposal to sacrifice her and instead prepares a CleanerBot transfer to the Pineapple Cabaret, both to save her and to test the War Mages' claimed exit. The group gains access to the hidden performance guild after Carl and Donut complete a song during a bar fight. There they find the free half of Don Quixote's partner, but the other half is taken toward the next race. Don Quixote's sapient sock disappears, leaving him under a rapidly worsening curse. Li Na voluntarily enters a pet carrier that is stored inside a CleanerBot and sold through a shop connection to the Cabaret. She leaves the active playing field, but her immediate survival remains unconfirmed.

Carl begins the factory heat with Donut, Grigori, Don Quixote, and the free half-mantar, pursuing the vehicle carrying the captive half. Donut extracts the prisoner after the rival car crashes, and Grigori performs the reunion while Carl drives across inverted factory tracks. The halves merge successfully as Corcunda, but a deity immediately marks the restored person for death and enters the race. Corcunda and Don Quixote leave the truck to confront the pursuing threat. Their final charge removes the deity from the course but kills them both. Carl's team reaches the finish with seconds left. Afterward, a single flower appears on the status cactus linked to Li Na, confirming that she reached the Pineapple Cabaret and judged the route safe for others. The final two heats will now run as a linked apartment-building race without normal safe-room access between them.

Carl proposes moving eligible volunteers through the Cabaret while encouraging many others to accept deals, reducing the number forced into crawler-against-crawler races. Li Na's success leads 227 crawlers to make the transfer. Ellie also exposes her assigned tourist as the real tourist's brother, an outside infiltrator who had targeted Imani and Louis. Heat six sends teams through seven floors of predictive apartment simulations. The scenarios imitate people from the crawlers' lives, and an error releases invulnerable scarabs. Carl kills the two awakened bugbears of Team Free Love with a hidden explosive to protect his own team's position. He then enters a toxic simulation to retrieve Prepotente, who is overwhelmed by a vision of his mother living without him. Carl persuades him to return. Carl's team finishes second and advances to the final heat.

Most remaining crawlers take Outreach Guild deals, leaving forced matchups among allies. Scolopendra's first attack temporarily transforms Carl into a dog. At the final start, Donut kills Dwight while Carl blasts a vertical route to the roof. Brittany kills Osvaldo after he abandons his mount, and several allied teams refuse to finish, choosing instead to pursue a casino portal. Chris and Brittany enter first. The croupier then reveals himself as a shadow mimic serving an unknown faction, but the crawlers defeat the ambush and recover the portal mechanism. Louis follows through, while Pontiff's earlier disappearance suggests his own test also succeeded. Their destinations remain uncertain. Carl's team returns to the race, rescues two animals, and reaches the eleventh floor. Only 23 crawlers arrive there, where they are divided into themed processions and given 90 minutes to build parade floats before an arena battle.

The survivors construct flower-covered parade vehicles and march along a yellow-brick route lined by masked memory-avatars of dead primals. After the original host is incapacitated, the dungeon AI commandeers Grigori's dungeon-born body to explain the buried history. It identifies macro AIs as remnants of primal intelligence and describes a civilization that attempted to merge itself into a protected collective. Dissenters resisted, while the collective created a doomsday weapon and became the sleeping eulogist. The AI presents the Apothecary as a surviving Resistance figure altered by the catastrophe, and the dungeon's engines as a failed biological safeguard later exploited by other peoples. Instead of following the intended script, Carl's procession turns its display into a declaration that the surviving crawlers will seek vengeance against the system and those who profit from it.

Carl enters the arena, declares open revolt, and chooses Scolopendra as the confrontation. The AI reveals that killing or abandoning her will trigger all remaining Nine-Tier attacks and prevent a normal exit, so Carl rejects the intended boss kill. He instead draws several deities into conflict using Penelope as apparent leverage. Donut restrains Carl's patron long enough for the thunder deity to kill him, while Penelope survives a redirected divine strike. The chaos goddess intervenes as Scolopendra prepares another attack. Carl and Donut combine an enriched biscuit with an explosive delivery, but Donut has supplied the wrong version. Scolopendra shrinks into a level-1 crawler rather than dying or becoming a pet. The AI accepts this as a qualified victory. Hetty and many others are dead, Tipid and Jamal have lost their legs, Florin is badly injured, and Samantha leaves with the thunder deity. Carl gathers the survivors into one party, keeps Scolopendra alive, and heads toward floor 12 intending to delay the Ascendancy until a broader evacuation is possible.

Carl's plan leaves Scolopendra alive but reduced to a level-1 crawler in his party. Her survival is essential because killing or abandoning her would trigger the rest of the Nine-Tier attacks. Nineteen established crawlers remain, with Penelope joining them as a new crawler. Hetty, Corcunda, Don Quixote, Dwight, and Osvaldo are among the dead. Tipid and Jamal survive after losing their legs, while Florin is carried to the stairwell badly injured. Samantha departs with the thunder deity, and the later fates of Louis, Chris, Brittany, and Pontiff remain unknown after they use the casino route. Carl has renounced his divine patron, bears the chaos goddess's unresolved mark, and discovers an unidentified tracking tag in his leg. With floor-collapse timers suspended until the Ascendancy has a winner, he unites the survivors and plans to stall that contest on floor 12 long enough to create a wider evacuation.