An entry from Carl’s Book of Boom opens the chapter. Mehmet Or, a former Istanbul bowling alley owner and crawler Carl once helped on the eighth floor, confesses that fear drove him to take a deal because he still hopes his daughters Azra and Yaz survived somewhere outside the crawl. Mehmet asks Carl for forgiveness, begs Carl to find the girls if he cannot save the deal-takers, and leaves behind the spell Gutter Bumper.

Back in Satan’s Water Park, Carl and Donut continue racing downhill in the truck with a clockwork version of Olga at the wheel. They stay on the correct half-pipe route while enemies attack from all sides, including axe-wielding gingers on inner tubes, splatter penguins, pixie demons, and zipper shrews. Carl drops explosives behind them, and Satan’s massive movements shake the whole park badly enough to wreck a distant roller coaster, showing how unstable the course is.

Florin messages Carl with an update from farther ahead on the track. Florin plans to backtrack and use Denial of Service missiles against Team Sparkles during a loop, hoping to slow the unicorn team, and he reports that the Lady Dominators are still somewhere behind him but ahead of Carl. Carl and Donut also know Team Free Love is the only surviving team from their own heat behind them, while Lucia Prime’s violent personality has returned and is now driving for Team Sparkles.

As the truck nears ground level, Carl prepares a replacement driver because the clockwork Olga is about to time out. Donut casts Second Chance on Joel, the dead Bactrian camel from One Fine Pig’s garage, and orders Joel to watch until he can take over. After crashing through brambles into the lower park, Donut has Olga activate the truck’s spider legs, raising the vehicle so Carl can attempt a shortcut.

Carl explains that the next section contains a major trap: racers who pass through the central path-selection area trigger a floor collapse and get dumped into a long underground gauntlet full of demons and a borough boss, losing about an hour before resurfacing. Florin deliberately let that trap trigger earlier, but Carl plans to bypass it completely by driving up the wall and skittering along the park’s edge toward the lazy river entrance. Just as the maneuver begins, the driver-side door opens, the clockwork Olga falls out of the truck, and the trapdoor opens beneath her, dropping her into the darkness Carl was trying to avoid.