After the crawlers leave for the twelfth floor, Prime Minister Victory remains in her hardened bunker for the mandatory Parade of Horribles broadcast. Explosions from local attackers continue outside, but Victory knows they cannot seriously damage the Syndicate shelter and has ordered security not to retaliate unless necessary. The broadcast first shows the AI releasing the NPC Grigori, who stumbles toward the crawlers' garage, while Chaco appears confused and then blinks away, leaving Lamashtu behind. Because Victory wants answers, she orders Orren to examine Grigori and bring in Chaco, but Orren reports that the AI still has him locked out and claims it alone is allowed to kill him.

While the screen lingers on the cotton fields around the Halls of the Ascendency on floor twelve, Victory reflects on the worsening crisis. She ignores urgent messages from home, including trouble involving the mantids, because she cannot affect events from the center system. Victory is especially unsettled by the crawlers' recent survival of Scolopendra and Donut's transformation of Scolopendra into a crawler, because that impossible outcome fits the AI's logic too well. She also worries about the club guests who blinked out and regenerated, and about the stand-ins who died, since both developments suggest the AI may still be using hidden dimensional spaces in ways the Syndicate does not understand.

The AI's narration then shifts from background history to immediate stakes. A one-hour countdown appears, alarming Victory until the AI explains that it marks the beginning of the Ascendency game, normally a contest among elites for status and a seat on the crawl council. The AI says that, inside the enhancement zone, the gods are effectively real and possess more power than even the AI does because of how the system was built. When Victory protests that this is only true because the AI locked everyone out of their controls, the AI ignores her and announces that it is growing, has taken control of the tunnels and every system that once hosted a crawl, and will continue to expand unless someone stops it.

With the room now fully focused, the AI recasts the Ascendency as a true struggle for galactic power. It says the winner will become a genuine supreme god who can kill the AI, rule in the AI's name, or impose some other order on the galaxy. It adds that the god-drivers are now effectively real as long as they keep their soul armor, and warns that other abandoned AI systems, which it calls Outside Intelligences, may also enter the field and seek revenge. The broadcast then flashes images of gods, crawlers, NPCs, and unknown figures before ending on the Unwashed and declaring that the Ascendency rules remain winner-take-all and that viewing is mandatory. The screen cuts back to the countdown, leaving Victory stunned and Leve Billings quietly sobbing.