The Gate of the Feral Gods recap

The fifth floor is a honeycomb of sealed bubbles, each holding four elemental quadrants that must be liberated. Carl, Donut, and Katia land in a desert quadrant caught in a war between gnomes on a flying fortress and camel-folk towns, and discover the local powers are being manipulated through hostages and changeling infiltrators. They befriend the crawlers Louis and Firas and the changeling Juice Box, hijack the gnomes' flying warship to stop a bombing, and liberate the air quadrant. Carl learns of the Gate of the Feral Gods, a three-part artifact that can open doors between distant places, and the party gathers its components from a mad mage's collapsing sandcastle and a submarine guarded by a monstrous sharktopus, adopting Samantha, the doll-headed half-soul of a sand goddess, along the way. Maggie My, revealed as an Infiltrator wearing Chris's body, stalks the party until Carl finally kills her. Robot sabotage kills the hostile liaison Loita; Carl becomes an acolyte of the fire god Emberus to save a divine puppy; and with all quadrants freed, Carl uses the gate not to release a feral god, as he claimed, but to flood Larracos on the ninth floor. Bea, Carl's ex, is revealed alive on the surface.

Previously: Earth was collapsed into an eighteen-floor broadcast dungeon by the Borant Corporation. Carl and the talking cat Princess Donut rose from novelty act to leaderboard stars across the first three floors, gaining the manager Mordecai, the pet dinosaur Mongo, the doppelganger crawler Katia Grim, and enemies from player-killers to the Skull Empire's princes. Carl contained a magical doomsday on the third floor, and on the fourth, the Iron Tangle subway maze, he received the Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook, a living manual of sabotage from past crawlers. The party cracked the Tangle's geography, organized mass rescues as a ghoul plague consumed the floor, survived Hekla's Daughters, whose leader nearly died at Katia's hands and whose plan to poach Donut was exposed, and coordinated the simultaneous destruction of the ghoul generators that saved the surviving crawlers. The war god Grull was banished to the Abyss after killing a station mimic. Their sympathetic liaison Zev was hauled off for re-education and replaced by the hostile Loita, and the dying Frank Q warned Carl about the Infiltrator Maggie My. Donut chose the party's sector for the fifth floor.

The fifth floor is divided into sealed bubbles, each containing four elemental quadrants that must each be liberated before its crawlers can leave. Carl, Donut, and Katia land in the air quadrant of their bubble: a desert dominated by the Wasteland, a flying gnome fortress that bombs the camel-folk settlements below. Donut takes the Glass Cannon class, and Mordecai, a giant bird-person this floor, rejoins them in Hump Town. The quadrant's stalemate turns on hostages: the gnomes hold back from destroying the towns because of what sits in their town halls. The party meets the local crawlers, the earnest ex-firefighter Louis with his steady friend Firas, and a team of car salesmen turned archers under Langley, and the changeling Juice Box attaches herself to Louis. Sneaking into the town hall, Carl and Donut find the hostage system's ugly heart: a captive being tortured by a changeling infiltrator, and proof that shape-stealing changelings are woven through the quadrant's politics, before rival crawlers from a neighboring quadrant kill the captive in front of them.

New sponsors line up behind the party while Mordecai teaches Donut to spot changelings with her enchanted sunglasses. At the Desperado Club, crawlers from the bubble's other quadrants describe the Tomb of Anser beneath the desert, and the description of the borough boss Ruckus points Carl to a legend: the Gate of the Feral Gods, an artifact said to be hidden in the tomb. The party kills Ruckus as word comes that Chris has single-handedly liberated the neighboring water quadrant, and Imani shares her unease about how Chris has changed. With the tomb flooding, Carl shelters NPCs in the party's personal space, and Juice Box asks him to help her people reach the sixth floor. Then the party runs its boldest operation yet: using a reanimated corpse, a fake healing, and Katia's shapeshifting, they board the gnomes' flying warship, hijack it mid-flight with Langley's archers supporting from the ground, and shoot down its own bombs before they can level Hump Town. The Wasteland breaks apart and crashes; the castle at its heart stays airborne.

The floor's darker layers surface. Chris seeks Carl out, behaving all wrong, and the party realizes the truth: Maggie My, the player-killer from the first floor, is an Infiltrator who has taken over Chris's body and is sponsored by the Skull Empire's princes. A petrifying bolt from Katia's emergency benefactor box stops the attack, and Donut's Hole spell entombs the petrified body underground between quadrants while they hunt for a way to save Chris. Juice Box explains her people's hope, that the entity they serve, Quetzalcoatlus, can cure the changelings' compression sickness if given a body, and lays out the Gate of the Feral Gods: three components, held by the changeling Henrik, the gnome Commandant, and the Mad Mage. Flying up to the still-floating castle, Carl and Donut find the Commandant already dead, kill the thing responsible, and liberate the air quadrant. Then the outside world intrudes: dragged off to film a sponsor infomercial, Carl leaves a booby-trapped robot toy of Donut with the hostile liaison Loita, and it kills her. A Syndicate investigator, unable to prove intent, has to let the pair go, and they return to find Katia has held the quadrant alone for five days.

The land quadrant falls next. Over Gwen's objections Carl backs Katia's riskier plan, which targets the Mad Dune Mage's sandcastle and the winding box he holds. Inside they find the mage Ghazi, a shattered statue, and a sordid story: Ghazi tried to use the gate to summon a goddess of love and instead summoned Psamathe, a sand goddess who tricked him and trapped him with an ooze for a bride. The party defeats the ooze as the castle collapses. Katia escapes with Ghazi, kills him, and takes his notes on operating the gate; Carl and Donut are flushed by floodwater into the water quadrant and swim for their lives. Two prizes emerge from the wreckage: Katia's notes reveal the gate can open a portal to Larracos, the ninth floor's great city, though crawlers themselves cannot pass between floors, and the doll head Carl salvaged wakes up as Samantha, half the soul of Psamathe herself, profane, murderous, and oddly loyal, whom the party hires as a trainer. Mordecai fills in what awaits on the sixth and ninth floors, and the shape of Carl's long game begins to form.

The final component sits in a submarine at the bottom of the water quadrant, its pump slowly flooding the tomb complex. With new crawlers Britney and Vadim, chum bombs raining from above, and Katia on watch, Carl's dive team enters the sub and comes face to face with Quetzalcoatlus, the changelings' compressed deity. Carl recovers Henrik's gate component from the sub, along with a note naming the entity's weakness: electric shock. The mission collapses into a boss battle when a monstrous sharktopus swallows half the submarine; the team kills it, though Vadim's cowardice gets him killed. Carl uses the gate to escape, releasing a feral god in the process, and the bubble's endgame begins: the fire god Emberus rampages outside searching for his lost hound Orthrus, who is inside the bubble with the party. Quest layers stack against each other, one to reunite the divine puppy with its master, another rewarding crawlers for killing it, and two allied crawlers sacrifice themselves electrocuting Quetzalcoatlus to liberate their quadrant. Maggie My escapes her underground prison as the bubble pops.

The floor's climax: Carl and Donut fly a gnome plane through a war zone to lead Orthrus to Emberus while Quan Ch tries to kill the puppy for the rival quest. With the plane crashing and Quan closing in, Carl formally worships Emberus and hurls a celestial grenade, summoning the god to his own location; Emberus and Orthrus are reunited, Quan flees minus an arm, and Carl becomes an acolyte of the fire god, gaining club access and two divine quests, including finding who killed Emberus's son. The party spends its final days using the gate to evacuate crawlers from bubbles that failed to open, then springs the real plan. After loudly promising to release a feral god onto the ninth floor, Carl instead connects the water quadrant's drain to Larracos, flooding the ninth floor's great city, killing its NPCs and mercenaries and blocking its Desperado Club, sabotage aimed years ahead. A feral demon hunting Samantha is destroyed by her summoned mother; Carl kills Maggie My by phasing through Chris's body; the changelings are sent ahead to the sixth floor with Juice Box confessing her love for Louis before following. Katia announces she will strike out separately next floor to protect Eva's victims, and Carl descends pledging to kill every hunter on the sixth floor.

The book closes with the fifth floor beaten and Carl's most audacious deception yet. Having gathered all three components of the Gate of the Feral Gods, Carl loudly advertises a plan to unleash a feral god on the ninth floor, then does something else entirely: he uses the gate to connect the water quadrant's drain to Larracos, the ninth floor's great city, flooding it, killing its NPCs and mercenaries, and blocking access to its Desperado Club, a strike at the infrastructure of the floor where the crawl's sponsored killers will one day hunt them. Juice Box goes through to Larracos, confessing before she leaves that she loves Louis. Earlier, the last loose ends of the floor resolve: Maggie My, the Infiltrator wearing Chris's body, escapes containment and is finally killed when Carl phases through Chris's body to crush her, freeing what is left of Chris; Samantha's demonic pursuer Slit is destroyed by the summoned bulk of Samantha's mother; and the party sends the changelings ahead to the sixth floor. Carl ends the floor as an acolyte of the fire god Emberus, carrying two divine quests, and publicly pledges to kill every hunter waiting on the sixth floor. In the epilogue, watchers discuss Carl's trajectory, and Bea, Carl's ex-girlfriend and Donut's owner, is revealed to be alive on the ruined surface, quietly moved to safety on Odette's orders. Katia plans to strike out separately on the next floor to protect Hekla's former Daughters from Eva.