The Pineapple Cabaret

Akuma answers with his health draining under the shield. Too many surviving crawlers forced the AI to pull NPCs from emergency backup, so the floor is thick with mobs that know what they are, and no part of the dungeon is meant to outlive the season. Two forgotten former crawlers, the skink Herot and Menerva, were handed the seventeenth floor and used it as cover for a pocket dimension built as a refuge for NPCs. It has been overrun since the war mages left, only five of them remain, and no one who worships a god may enter. Akuma finally admits he engineered Carl's two-team kill count so the System would pit him against friends, and Carl breaks his nose.

First appearances (8)

• Herot (Character) — Skink · Former crawler · Cookbook author
• Menerva (Character) — Former crawler · Cabaret co-builder
• The Cabaret Requirements (Lore) — No god-worshippers · Ascendency risk
• The Deep Reserves (Lore) — Emergency NPC stock · Running dry
• The Ogre Imperium (Lore) — Past-season power · Leftovers in the Cabaret
• The Framework (Lore) — The dungeon's reusable shell
• The Worn Path Method (Lore) — Herot's process · Waking the NPCs
• The Seventeenth Floor (Place) — Never reached · The Cabaret's front door

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