Place · Book 5, The Butcher's Masquerade

The Dungeon

The eighteen-floor structure that replaces the surface of the Earth at 2:23 in the morning, into which some thirteen million people descend: a maze of quadrant-sized squares, safe rooms, tutorial guilds and boss lairs, run as a broadcast for an interstellar audience and collapsing a floor at a time on a timer.

Segment appearances

Chapter 1 — The vice principal's office
Chapter 3 — Quasar
Chapter 4 — Golden Throat
Chapter 6 — Miriam, Pony and Bianca
Chapter 8 — The Night Wyrm's web
Chapter 9 — Just Wait Until Your Daddy Gets Home
Chapter 10 — No dinosaurs of any kind
Chapter 12 — No matter what
Chapter 16 — Clint and Holger
Chapter 18 — Ten minutes, Odette
Chapter 19 — Miss Beatrice
Chapter 20 — Viva la revolución
Chapter 21 — CrawlCon
Chapter 24 — The rock chucker
Chapter 30 — A Valtay landing vessel
Chapter 31 — The juvenile quickdraw
Chapter 32 — The Ultimate Training Room
Chapter 33 — Crawling Through the Ages
Chapter 35 — Ballroom Blitz
Chapter 36 — Swole
Chapter 37 — The rainbow bridge
Chapter 38 — Edict
Chapter 39 — Prepotente Town Number Four
Chapter 40 — Kapitan Whiskers
Chapter 41 — The Society for the Eradication of Cocker Spaniels
Chapter 42 — Warrants
Chapter 43 — The Midnight Epicure
Chapter 45 — The sorting yard
Chapter 47 — My beautiful boy
Chapter 48 — The Creeping Apocalypse
Chapter 54 — The blood bar
Chapter 56 — Zerzura
Chapter 57 — I Take it All Back
Chapter 65 — The Oak Mother's sacrament
Chapter 66 — The Sugar Cube
Chapter 76 — Cage Fight Extreme
Chapter 77 — The mask
Epilogue — Epilogue

Arc

The sixth floor is the first where the rich can die, and the book is the account of how many do: 360 hunters bumped to level 50 and released into a jungle (ch. 1), over a thousand by the third day (ch. 9), a quarter dead by the last week (ch. 56), seventy-five in the pit and none after (ch. 76). Its saferooms switch to tenth-floor rules (ch. 52); its towns are eaten by brambles; its seventh floor is destroyed in ten minutes (epilogue).