Chapter 78 of 78 · Book 5, The Butcher's Masquerade

Epilogue — Epilogue

Book: The Butcher's Masquerade · Part: The Butchering · Previous: Chapter 77 — The mask · Floor: Floor 7 — The Great Race · Series: the series

Opening

» Welcome, Crawler to the Seventh floor.

Summary

Seventh floor, the Great Race. A string of debuffs on Carl, Donut and Prepotente is each 'negated by AI resolution', and they land in a glass cell on a waterslide tunnel with an eight-minute timer; behind the back wall runs a vertical string of portal stairwells to the eighth floor. Donut picks a new class without reading it: Viper Queen. Prepotente explains that Borant is trying to stop him and the AI is forcing them to follow their own rules; the level is a Prince Rupert's drop at scale, built on the fairy tale of the Great Race — a boy in a maze, killed on every wrong path and resurrected by a god — which he inferred from a talk show with Cascadia and his mother's boots. He leaves the party, making Donut leader. Their book is the Book of Lore – Commonwealth of the Bahamas: 'Country names.' Cascadia races through the rules of the tube maze and stops as the Enchanted Stick of Cascadia's Screams pushes into the glass: 'Godsdamnit, Prepotente. Don't do it. Please. I worked so hard to make this floor happen.' Looking up at the ceiling, Prepotente speaks of his mother, who played the piano for him alone: 'I am never going to get that back.' A tiny tap, and every wall on the level explodes to dust; every crawler is sucked into the portals at once. 'He broke the whole level!' 'All of our sponsors came together to make sure he pulled it off.'

On the eighth floor Donut is Squad Leader, with ninety seconds to pick a country; Carl guesses Katia will pick Iceland, and Donut spins the globe and clicks — 'That wasn't the Bahamas!' — the Florida panhandle.

Then Katia. Before the party she and Bautista made love, sure they would die, and afterwards she lit a blitz stick found on Eva's victim Sally and left as a trap: 'Show me Annie' — nine months old, standing in the crib — and Fannar's voice: 'Do you really think you could be a mother?' Now Li Na casts Preserve Injury, and Katia, with the Left Fang of the Green Sultan, the sword Eva dropped on the train, cuts off the hand with the escape ring and the one holding the poisoned rapier. 'Kill her,' says Li Na. 'I just wanted to hear you afraid for once.' The sword goes through the breastplate: 'Die, Eva.' The Apothecary knew: the beanie would have stopped it, and Katia gave it to Carl. Eva's lower left hand pulls the Crown of the Sepsis Whore — Donut's first loot — from her shoulder armour, and it lands on Katia's head and melds in. Only one of them, Donut or Katia, may take the stairs from the ninth floor to the tenth. 'I do that sometimes. I hurt those around me.'

Characters

• Prepotente — Breaks the seventh floor with a hammer and a stick; his mother's boots told him how.
• Princess Donut — Number one; Viper Queen; squad leader; Florida.
• Carl — Book of Lore for the Bahamas; wrong starting location.
• Katia Grim — Kills Eva and inherits the crown; blitz sticks; Annie.
• Eva Sigrid — Dies apologising, and afraid, and crowns her killer.
• Cascadia — Named at last: the daily-update announcer who built the floor.
• Li Na — Preserve Injury; 'kill her'
• Daniel Bautista — 'I love you, too.'
• Agatha — A shopping cart in a cell far above.
• Miriam Dom — Her boots; her piano, played for her son alone.

Locations

• The Great Race — Glass pods on a spiral above stacked portals; a maze of tubes never run.
• The globe chamber — Marble, a holographic Earth, ninety seconds.

Motifs

• Sponsorship — The sponsors conspire; the Apothecary's hat given away.
• The System AI — Negates Borant's holds; is forced to follow its own rules.
• The Crown of the Sepsis Whore — Returns; Donut or Katia, not both.
• Mothers — Prepotente's piano; Annie in the crib; Fannar's cruelty.
• The Great Race — A floor destroyed in ten minutes.