Ninety Minutes to Vengeance
The eleventh floor greets twenty-three surviving crawlers with a suspended leaderboard, a dead bounty system, Carl ranked second and Donut third behind an unnamed first, and a parade float staging area reclassified as a safe room. Quasar's three-minute meeting leaves Carl rattled: one deal is on offer, freedom after a single season's indenture, and Quasar advises trusting neither it nor the exit he has been told will appear at the start of the twelfth floor. Mordecai comes back as an animistic spirit, non-corporeal and able only to occupy objects, and talks Donut out of Comeback Kid and into Elite Gurkha Warrior. Chaco, voluntold by the AI as Grand Master, lays out the floor: ninety minutes to build a float procession from merged garages, five groups with one theme each, a three-kilometre route past judging stands, then an arena restocked with the tenth floor's dead and a floor boss whose death opens the stairwell. Carl's group draws Vengeance and is merged with Prepotente and Jurgen, and Rosetta arrives to correct the record on Odette's husband: the Crest financier Harry Tisch, the only reason the orc economy has not collapsed, and the first buyer for the rights to every television show Donut has ever mentioned on air.
First appearances (6)
- Harry Tisch (Character) — Crest financier · Odette's husband
- Ricken (Character) — Gremlin · Prepotente's garage crew
- Mordecai's Animistic Spirit Form (Creature) — Non-corporeal · occupies physical objects
- Comeback Kid & Soul-Struck Flesh Ripper (Classes) (Spell / Skill) — The eleventh-floor classes Donut turned down
- Elite Gurkha Warrior (Class) (Spell / Skill) — Donut's eleventh-floor class · warrior-melee with a Perpetual Tank subclass
- The Parade Float Procession (Notification) — The eleventh floor's format, announced by an unwilling Grand Master
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