The Ascendency

Story so far

The Ascendency is the dungeon's true endgame, kicking off after the eleventh floor. Traditionally, the AI explains, it's a silly weeks-long game of musical chairs in which elite 'drivers' backstab each other for the throne — the winner earning bragging rights and a seat on the crawl council that sets Syndicate policy. But now the stakes are apocalyptic: within the dungeon's enhancement zone the deities are genuinely all-powerful — stronger even than the escaped AI, precisely because Prime Minister Victory and the Syndicate locked the AI out of the gods — and the winner becomes 'supreme motherfucker number one,' a true god.

Killing Scolopendra fast-tracked it: level timers and floor collapses are suspended galaxy-wide until a winner is crowned, after which the dungeon collapses in twelve hours. The contenders include the gods (Taranis, Eris, Odette as Nekhebit), the crawlers (Carl, Donut, Lucia Mar, and others), Residuals like Agatha, NPCs like Juice Box and Akuma, and the vengeful Outside Intelligences. Carl's plan is to enter and stall it — let no one win — until every crawler escapes via the eighteenth floor.

Appearance

A god-war 'game' fought across the twelfth-floor Ascendency fields — the cotton-buried city of Larracos and the Halls of the Ascendency.

Role

The dungeon's god-throne endgame, whose winner becomes supreme ruler and triggers the dungeon's final collapse.

Relationships

Earlier in this series

Also appears in books you've already read — spoiler-safe to their endings:

• The Gate of the Feral GodsBook 4
• The Eye of the Bedlam BrideBook 6
• This Inevitable RuinBook 7