Story so far

After the alien Borant corporation demolished humanity's surface and herded the survivors into an eighteen-floor dungeon broadcast as galactic entertainment, ex-Coast Guardsman Carl and his pampered, talking cat Princess Donut clawed their way through the first four floors into the show's top ranks, gathering allies and a deepening hatred of their captors. Now, descending onto the fifth floor — "The Bubbles" — Carl arrives ranked third with an 800,000-gold bounty, only to learn the System has quietly doubled every future bounty against him as a "reward" for surviving the last floor in the top ten. Battling a blinding sandstorm, Carl, Donut, her velociraptor Mongo, and their doppelganger teammate Katia Grim trek to Hump Town, a Dromedarian brothel-village built atop the Necropolis of Anser, and reunite with their freed mentor Mordecai, now reborn as a clipped skyfowl cleric. The floor's rules land like a hammer: this world is a bubble-dome split into four quadrants — Land, Sea, Air, and Subterranean — each holding a castle with a single stairwell, and all four castles must fall before anyone's own stairwell will open. Carl is trapped in the Air Quadrant with only three dozen mostly underpowered crawlers to help storm the Dirigible Gnomes' fortress, which floats impossibly high against the dome's ceiling. With no way to fly, he's already scheming to build a balloon or shoot the castle down. Fifteen days remain until level collapse. Mordecai orders the party to open their loot boxes, eat, sleep, and prepare, warning that the three extra days Borant granted likely conceal a nasty surprise.