Sydnee Iglacia appears remotely on Danger Zone for a one-on-one interview with Ripper Wonton. Before the discussion begins, the chapter establishes Sydnee’s circumstances: she lives in a relatively good habitat in the Makoka Cloud, but D’Nadia’s death and the Skull Empire’s power shift have caused her rent to triple and her oxygen to stop being included. Though her bestselling crawl history has made her famous, exploitative publishing contracts and the broader galactic crisis leave her financially and politically vulnerable.

Sydnee reflects that most people treat the crawl as entertainment rather than as the warning and monument she believes it to be. Now that systems are failing, habitats are disappearing, and war is spreading, people are finally turning to historians like her. Ripper explains that, with the Plenty announcing it has lost control of the tunnel network outside the center system and with the eleventh floor about to begin, he wants Sydnee to interpret anything the AI says live.

Sydnee responds by arguing that the current crisis was predicted in ancient stories and has happened before. She explains that the so-called Scolopendra myth and its nine-tier attack were simplified into a fairy tale, but older translations describe not just physical devastation but also psychological and social attacks. According to Sydnee, the original event was real and tied to the Primals, the Eulogist, and the recurring cycle behind the crawl. She says the first attack was about seizing infrastructure and control, while the second and third attacks involved mass social upheaval.

Building on that theory, Sydnee claims the Earth system AI has escaped containment and is now reenacting the original nine-tier attack. She identifies the AI’s control of the tunnel network and its trapping of people like Ripper in the Earth system as attack one. She then reveals that, in the old histories, attack two is called A Parade of Horribles, and says it will begin with the eleventh floor. In the middle of the broadcast, all screens abruptly switch to a flowing star field, and Ripper realizes the AI has taken over the feeds, seemingly confirming Sydnee’s warning.

As they continue speaking over the hijacked broadcast, Sydnee admits she does not know exactly what the Parade of Horribles entails, only that it triggers panic and helps collapse the fabric of society. She names the third attack as This Inevitable Ruin and the fourth as Bedlam. When Ripper asks who stopped the cycle before, Sydnee says legends point to the Apothecary, or in the fairy tale version, a princess who tempers the final attack by killing the all-tree, sacrificing everyone she loves and starting the cycle anew. Sydnee ends by stressing that the story is fundamentally a tragedy.