Carl’s team drops from the sixth floor to the fifth and finds that the apartment loops are growing stranger and more dangerous. A bathroom gate turns out to be the kitchen sink drain, forcing a retreat, and Carl’s Find Traps skill reveals a hidden freeze trap in the hallway that would have immobilized the truck. On the fourth floor, they enter a what-if version of Archie Mu’s apartment, where Mackenzie panics over her missing son Oliver and family photos suggest a life in which Archie was still present.

The gate on the fourth floor is hidden under Oliver’s bed. Pontiff times the truck’s rocket-assisted jump perfectly, and the team clears Gate Four. As Carl and Donut race out, they realize the shell scenario is destabilizing: Mackenzie becomes confused, notices something is wrong, and starts clawing at the stitches over her eyes while Oliver cries out in fear.

Donut uses Hole to drop the team into apartment 310 on the third floor, where they find an even more disturbing scene tied to Imani. A man convulses on the floor while several family members with crossed-out eyes stand nearby, and a shell version of Imani arrives carrying the dog Gucci. Carl warns Elle that her group is about to enter Imani’s family apartment, while Louis reports that on the upper floors a shell burst open into a swarm of beetles after being shot.

The gate in apartment 310 is set in the living-room window. As the truck climbs toward it, the shell version of Imani notices her family’s stitched eyes and retreats in horror. Then the family members freeze and transform into Ruptured Feast Hives, with massive beetles pouring from their eyes, mouths, and torn faces. Carl’s team clears Gate Five just as one of the beetles lands in front of them.

The AI then explains what has gone wrong. The apartments were built from looping shell simulations, and the broken shells were supposed to release invulnerable sacred scarab beetles that would ignore the racers and combine into a single giant floor boss. Instead, interference from the gods and a game-breaking error has canceled that boss and turned the released Sacred Feaster Scarab Beetles into permanently invulnerable, aggressive enemies. When the swarm comes after the truck, Carl realizes the danger is even worse than expected when the beetles spread wings and begin to fly.