The Dungeon

Named and explained in the first three chapters: eighteen floors under the surface, the first three a tutorial designed to drown crawlers in loot and kill them, floors collapsing on a timer (ch. 1–ch. 3); just under 13 million entering, and under 10 million left when it seals (ch. 4). The first floor is a condensed Seattle in a grid of squares (ch. 15); the second is cinderblock and grubs (ch. 30); the third onward, everyone says, is where it gets strange. Zev's parting hint (ch. 44): floors three, six, nine, twelve, fifteen and eighteen exist at once and are one linked setting.

Book 2 adds the shape of the whole: floors three and six are one volcano-world (Over City, Hunting Grounds), the fourth and fifth are random (ch. 3), and its capital sprawls on the ninth (ch. 18); the eighteenth is a billionaires' retreat and the fifteenth is Sheol (ch. 3, ch. 24); the tenth has rules of its own (ch. 15, ch. 24); a Divine Guardian guards a fire gate on the twelfth (ch. 7). Stairwells now hide behind quests (ch. 12), and the door at the bottom says 'Mind the gap' (ch. 25).

The fourth floor has a rulebook read off a sign and a system that announces its own self-destruct (ch. 2, ch. 31). Mexx-6000 explains the wiring: Borant runs a cheap dual-layer planetary zone to sea level with no admin bubble — 'spit and duct tape' (ch. 20); Zev adds that the pocket system never switched on because Hinter refused the cores (ch. 25). Floors 12 and 15 are sketched: gods who never leave the twelfth, Sheol Bricks lousy on the fifteenth (ch. 2, ch. 14). The fifth is chosen by wheel: Air, the Dirigible Gnomes' Wasteland Fortress (epilogue).

The fifth floor explained by announcement: 1,172 bubbles, four quadrants, four castles, all four to fall (ch. 1); Mordecai wonders if the bubbles average out player levels (ch. 2); a Lacuna between them (ch. 30). Elevation: the tomb's top is nine kilometres above its sea level and ninety-two below the planet's surface (ch. 8). Mordecai's map of the ninth floor (ch. 24), Priestly's of Larracos (ch. 33), and a partial map of the sixth on a ghost's corpse (ch. 33). The announcement for the sixth: class specialisation, a guild system, and a record number of hunters (ch. 33).

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).

An eighth floor that is a recording of the surface (ch. 1).

The ninth floor is a war on a plain the size of a country with a real city in its middle, and the dungeon behaves like one: no offensive magic for a week, gates a kilometre wide, a suppression field, and the AI running a temple fight by hand (ch. 14, ch. 53).

Akuma's account: the dungeon is a framework, a physical object moved from planet to planet, installed on Earth third from last (ch. 38); 'Nothing inside the dungeon will be allowed to survive past this season' (ch. 38).