Card and deck progression is the central combat system of the eighth floor of the World Dungeon. Squads collect T’Ghee cards while exploring their assigned territories, assemble a deck around six summonable totems, and then use that deck against enemy deckmasters. The first part of the floor gives crawlers time to capture creatures, gather supporting cards, and practice. The assault that follows tests the resulting decks in battles whose stakes include keys, territory, and the survival of the squad. Princess Donut serves as the deckmaster for Carl’s squad, placing the immediate decisions about summoning and card use in her hands while Carl and the other members protect her and fight alongside the totems.
Acquiring cards before the assault
The squad’s early encounters in Cuba establish that a monster does not automatically become a totem when killed. Capturing one requires a team flag and direct contact with the target. Sister Ines tells Carl that attaching a flag to a crossbow bolt failed: the person planting it had to be holding the flag. Carl helps her team capture Yago, a monk seal, and the resulting card belongs to Team Sister Ines. Even though Carl physically receives it, the card cannot be collected or traded before activation by that team’s squad leader. Ownership therefore follows the squad represented on the flag, rather than the identity of the crawler who landed the blow.
Carl and Donut’s own early acquisitions are uneven. They obtain Geraldo, another monk seal, but at first Donut cannot summon him in a normal fight. The rules have not yet been announced. Other kills yield support cards instead of creatures. After one fight, their team receives two Time Extend cards and a Stout card; Sister Ines’s group receives similar utilities and a single-use Flee card. Time Extend doubles a summoned totem’s duration, while Stout raises its health during combat. Flee can remove an entire squad from a fight, though its destination is initially uncertain. These drops show why building a deck requires more than finding six powerful monsters: a squad also needs ways to keep its summons active, interfere with enemy cards, and escape a battle it cannot win.
Capturing a creature can itself conflict with the safer choice in a fight. Carl flags Skylar Spinach, a rare ghommid splitter, while retreating into a temple. The card records a sixty-second summoning duration and the monster’s ability to divide after a fatal blow. Its unusual durability makes it attractive despite Donut’s dislike of its appearance and name. Later, Carl and Donut target Raul, a crab with potentially useful magic, but his fear and the time needed to prepare spells make his practical value uncertain until tested. Rarity, level, and listed powers do not reveal how promptly a totem will obey or how well it will work with the rest of the squad.
The search for Shi Maria pushes that problem further. Carl first considers flagging the dangerous spiderlike demigoddess while trying to rescue Samantha. He then decides against forcing a fight merely to gain a card. Shi Maria ultimately allows herself to be made into one for reasons of her own. The capture gives the team a formidable summon, yet her independent motives and frightening abilities make her much less predictable than a simple entry on a card would suggest. The deck gains power through an arrangement with a being whose interests do not necessarily match those of its owners.
Rules of an active deck
The floor’s formal announcement defines five categories. Totem cards summon monsters. Utility cards affect friendly summoned totems, snare cards affect enemy totems, mystic cards act more like direct magic upon squads or decks, and special cards have varied effects, often with a single use. A squad needs six active totems and may activate a deck with only six cards in all; there is no stated fixed ceiling on additional support cards. Loading the deck with too many non-totems, however, increases the chance that the opening hand contains no summon at all. The freedom to add cards therefore creates a practical limit imposed by drawing odds.
Deck combat occurs in real time. The leader draws four random cards at its start, and a used card is replaced from the deck at a rate of one every ten seconds. The leader can discard a card, but that opportunity refreshes only every thirty seconds. A summoned creature stays for the duration printed on its card. If it survives, its card usually returns to the deck after the timer expires; if it is killed, it is unavailable for the rest of that combat. Injuries and debuffs do not disappear merely because a surviving totem is summoned again during the same fight. A battle that runs long can therefore exhaust a seemingly strong lineup.
The deckmaster’s own restrictions make composition a question of squad survival. During deck combat, the leader loses access to ordinary spellcasting and the inventory interface, although melee attacks and items already physically at hand remain possible. Ordinary totems generally cannot attack the opposing leader directly while enemy totems are present. That protection has exceptions and does not prevent attacks by the rest of a squad. Donut needs Carl, Mongo, and her allies to keep pressure away from her while she selects cards. Once the deck’s cards have all been played or discarded, her ordinary spells and inventory become available again. If a leader dies, command of the deck passes to another squad member.
The announcement also makes the later phase more dangerous than the preliminary hunts. In the first part of the floor, local monsters do not carry decks, so a leader can choose whether to deploy one. When an opponent has enough cards to make a deck, deck combat becomes compulsory. The system explicitly encourages squads to kill one another for their collections. The rules turn every hostile encounter with another equipped squad into a possible transfer of cards as well as a fight for life.
Testing and assembling Donut’s deck
Saferooms acquire mock battle arenas after the announcement. A squad can enter with an incomplete deck and test its totems against generated enemies. The simulation is limited: the generated monsters cannot directly harm the crawlers, but the environment can, and a consumable card spent there is still gone for good. Donut and Carl enter with only Geraldo as a totem and five cards total. They begin with the easiest opponent because they do not yet know whether the seal will follow orders. Practice has a cost in gold, so repeated experiments compete with other resources the team needs on the floor.
After more captures, Carl and Donut choose an eighteen-card deck for a medium-difficulty trial. Their six totems are Geraldo, Asojano, Skylar Spinach, Uzi Jesus, Raul, and Shi Maria. Six utilities provide duration, strength, mana, and speed effects, together with a consumable Combo card. The three snares are Hobble, Hole in the Bag, and Damnation. The Thief and Force Discard supply mystic effects; Flee fills the final special slot. Carl wants the practice deck to resemble the one they might carry into an unexpected real fight, even though snares and some mystic cards cannot help against a simulated opponent without cards. He cannot assume that the team will have time to rebuild its deck before every encounter.
The eighteen-card choice reflects a discussion among crawlers about opening-hand odds. Six totems in a much larger deck might leave Donut without a summon when a fight begins. Carl hears an estimate that eighteen cards give almost an eighty-percent chance of drawing at least one totem among four opening cards, but he does not verify that figure. The important decision is the balance: include enough support for a sustained battle without burying the creatures that must occupy the field. The team can adjust the deck before known fights, but its ready configuration must also survive surprise combat.
Practice against an opponent with its own deck reveals a weakness the initial card list conceals. A rival built around durable mud creatures and snares neutralizes Shi Maria with Damnation, which sends her to the discard pile when her summoning time ends. Raul and Asojano are then frozen and killed by other snares. With Donut’s totems gone, a mud creature reaches the squad and the team loses the mock fight. Carl sees that the opponent’s cards reinforce one another while his own deck is a mixture of powerful but poorly coordinated summons. The defeat makes snare defense, speed, and reliable commands more urgent than acquiring another high-level creature for its own sake.
Another mock fight ends almost immediately when Carl kills the opposing deckmaster with a thrown explosive before the enemy can use the cards. The tactic demonstrates a different way to defeat a deck: the rest of the squad can act decisively while its leader handles summoning. Carl still returns to training, because a quick kill cannot be relied upon against every opponent. He identifies Geraldo, Skylar, and sometimes Shi Maria as fast enough to act early. Raul takes time to cast, and Asojano and Uzi Jesus do not offer the same immediate discipline. The team’s improvement depends on learning each totem’s behavior, not simply drawing the right colored card.
Changes during the assault
Once the assault begins, defeated enemy deckmasters become sources of new cards. Carl kills one opponent before the man draws and sees twenty cards appear with the corpse, including a Flee card and three totems. The captured cards are not automatically upgrades. Examining a totem’s face reveals only part of its behavior, and trying a new one would require displacing a member of Donut’s six-totem active lineup. Carl and Donut keep their known creatures rather than immediately replacing one with a rare skunk ape whose actual performance they cannot yet assess.
The squad does alter its lineup as experience accumulates. Donut uses a Combo card to fuse Uzi Jesus and Asojano into Lazarus-A-Bang-Bang, whose attacks combine features of both. The fusion is a dramatic gain in power, but it changes two familiar summons into one new creature with its own behavior. Katia also transfers Jola, an enormous Yule Cat, after finding the card troublesome. Jola’s size and occasional refusal to fight make him awkward in some spaces, yet his health and direct physical force prove valuable. Against a nightgaunt deckmaster that neglects to summon protective totems, Jola can attack the opposing leader and kill him. The encounter illustrates both sides of deck building: a powerful totem can end a fight, while a leader who fails to put a defender into play may lose before the rest of the deck matters.
Support cards become more consequential as opponents grow stronger. The Thief removes a card from an enemy’s hand and places it with Donut, giving her both an immediate denial and a possible new option. Damnation can prevent a surviving totem from returning to its deck. Hole in the Bag drains a totem’s mana without being consumed. A card called Glow-Up offers permanent alteration of another card to reflect its current modified state; Carl recognizes that pairing it with a duration buff could preserve an otherwise temporary improvement. Each of these effects changes a different resource: access to a card, the ability to resummon, the power to cast, or the lasting strength of a deck. Their value depends on timing and on the particular creature or opponent targeted.
The battle with Judge Lucian shows how the enemy can exploit the same system. A Cripple snare weakens Jola as the cat is summoned. The judge’s totems include an imitation of Carl, using his appearance and family associations to unsettle him. After the fight, the opposing deck also contains a version of the dead crawler Frank Q. Carl warns the other crawlers that such cards are not the people they resemble. The psychological pressure is part of the encounter, but it does not change the practical need to interrupt the enemy’s draws and protect Donut. Among the recovered cards are a one-use Steal Totem, further Cripple snares, and Temporary Shield, which can stop a single snare aimed at a friendly totem.
Defeating the keymaster yields a Champion Pack with room for two reserve totems. Donut can now carry eight, although only six can remain active in the deck. The extra slots expand the squad’s choices between fights without changing the opening-hand requirement or granting two more summons at once. A reserve creature can answer a particular opponent or replace a poor fit, but selecting the active six is still necessary before combat.
Later deck battles expose increasingly specific combinations. Quan uses a mystic card that reveals opposing hands, then follows with Force Play to trigger Sister Ines’s Flee card against her will. Her squad leaves the fight and loses its key. The episode turns an escape card, valuable when chosen deliberately, into a liability when an opponent can see and control the hand. It also makes clear that decks do not progress through raw strength alone: information about a rival’s cards and control over when they are played can decide an objective before the strongest totems finish fighting.
In the floor’s final crisis, Donut plays Midnight Express, temporarily transferring deckmaster control to Carl. For three minutes he handles the cards while she regains access to her spells and inventory. Carl draws Raul and summons him for a task tied to the crisis around Amayon, showing that the team’s earlier investment in an awkward, slow-preparing totem has a use beyond conventional combat. By then the deck includes other late changes, including a permanent fusion made with Glow-Up and a card based on Alpha Male Carl. The progression that began with a single monk seal ends with a flexible but morally fraught collection of beings and effects whose usefulness cannot be measured by level alone.
The question of what a card represents becomes unavoidable with Paz. After his death, Sister Ines summons a card version of him, and he expresses distress at being called back. Near the end of the floor, Carl’s group obtains the upgraded Paz Lo card. Donut considers carrying it onward in hope of freeing him, but Carl recalls Paz’s plea and decides against continuing to use him. Donut tears the card. Their choice closes one line of deck progression by refusing an apparently valuable totem: retaining a stronger collection is not worth ignoring the suffering of the person represented by it.