The ninth-floor Faction War was the contest for control of Larracos during the Earth crawl. Nine attacking teams occupied territories around the city, while Team Retribution, formed by the floor's non-player characters, defended it. The contest brought wealthy outside combatants, crawlers, former crawlers, hired soldiers, and dungeon residents into the same battlefield. Carl and Princess Donut entered as the warlords of the Princess Posse, a tenth team whose presence and alliance with the defenders disrupted the expected contest. The war ended when the Princess Posse won and Larracos, together with its surrounding Shanty Town, was moved to the twelfth floor. The events are depicted chiefly in This Inevitable Ruin.
A contest altered before the fighting
Faction Wars existed before Carl's group reached the ninth floor. Its attacking teams prepared armies and supplies while crawlers descended through earlier floors. An encounter with the Maestro established the Skull Clan's expectation of victory and Donut's dangerous connection to the Blood Sultanate: wearing its crown placed her in that ruling family, with consequences for leaving the ninth floor. Later, the Princess Posse used its supporters' funds to buy a place in the war. Carl and Donut thereby became warlords rather than spectators who merely had to survive the fighting. Their group also brought the high elf castle and a contingent that included changelings from the sixth floor.
The defenders were an equally consequential addition. The NPCs' rebellion gave them their own team, headquartered in Larracos, with the changeling Juice Box among its leaders. The arrangement made the city and its inhabitants a participant in the contest, not simply terrain that the attackers could seize. Carl's side had reason to cooperate with the defenders: both faced armies assembled by outside powers, and neither could safely assume the war's protections would preserve its soldiers. Nevertheless, the rules would eventually permit only one team to win, even if the two remained allied.
When Carl and Donut arrived, a sixty-hour ceasefire covered Larracos. Ten teams were active. The nine attackers held wedge-shaped territories around the central city, and Team Retribution held the center. Eight of the teams announced a truce called the Bloc and declared war on both the Princess Posse and Team Retribution. Donut promptly accepted the defenders' truce offer. This gave her army allied status in the city and spared it the expulsion that would otherwise follow the ceasefire. She and Ferdinand briefly competed to name the alliance; its later status display called it the Good Guys Alliance.
Rules and terrain
The contest ran through four phases: the Ceasefire, a 180-hour Ramp-Up, Open Hostilities, and the Peeling of Larracos. The final phase began once the number of teams had been reduced to four. Until then, attacking teams could not simply take the central castle. During the Peeling, Team Retribution could win by holding the city for a week. An attacker could win by occupying its throne room for six hours. Control of that room also conferred control of the city's defenses, although an attacker faced a half-hour delay before those defenses activated. Alliances could coordinate assaults, but they could not share the final victory.
An attacking army could also be eliminated by the death of its warlord or warlords, or by the capture and six-hour occupation of its principal throne room. Defeated troops might be absorbed into another army. This turned every stronghold and commander into a strategic vulnerability, even when a team still had soldiers in the field. The stairwells to the next floor were another constraint: they would open only after a winner was declared, or when thirty hours remained before floor collapse. For crawlers who did not enlist, avoiding the battle was not a guarantee of safety. Teams could find them outside Larracos and compel them to serve as conscripts.
The battlefield's shape affected the Posse's plans. Larracos sat at the hub of the surrounding territories. The Bone Clan occupied a naturally defensible northern position with a prebuilt castle, while the Posse held spot three. Carl and Donut also acquired Shanty Town, the ring immediately outside the city. Its unusually extensive position gave Team Retribution an additional perimeter protected by an allied army. The Posse placed troops and built defenses there while establishing a separate headquarters and assigning officers. Its warlord interface tracked soldiers, holdings, other teams, and diplomatic messages; the team also had Baroness Victory as an adjutant who could explain rulings and advise on strategy without fighting for it.
The arrival of more than fifty thousand former crawlers transformed the Posse's manpower. Their decision to return to a dungeon where they had once survived gave Carl's side experienced volunteers, but it also exposed them to permanent losses. They served beside the current crawlers and the other contingents that had joined or been hired by the team. Recruitment mattered immediately because an unattached crawler could otherwise be taken by an enemy army. It also made the Posse different from the traditional attacking factions: its warlords were themselves crawlers, and many of its reinforcements had lived through previous crawls.
Collapse of the opening balance
The first reduction in team count came during the ceasefire. Commander Stockade of the Democratic Sortion died after an adjudication involving forbidden information gathering. The system treated his death as a voluntary defeat and awarded the team's assets to the Madness. The episode demonstrated that the war could remove a faction through rulings and a warlord's death before the main open battle. It also showed how the disposition of a defeated team's land and resources could strengthen a surviving rival without a conventional siege.
During the Ramp-Up, the Princess Posse gained ground at the Prism Kingdom's expense. Mongo killed Empress D'Nadia, and the system declared the Prism defeated, transferring its assets to the Posse. Holding the prize was a separate problem: the captured territory did not adjoin the Posse's own land, and its throne room remained open to attack. The Operatic Collective then fell after the death of its Hortense leadership unit; its assets went to the Bone Clan. The Blood Sultanate was eliminated when the Sepsis Whore died. Donut and Katia's status as surviving members of that royal line shaped the transfer of its assets to the Posse. By the approach of Open Hostilities, these outcomes had replaced the simple opening lineup with larger, uneven territories.
The original Bloc did not remain intact. Later status reports put the Bone Clan and the Dream outside it, leaving the Madness and the Reavers together against the Good Guys Alliance. Shortly before Open Hostilities, the surviving teams were the Bone Clan, Princess Posse, Dream, Madness, Reavers, and Team Retribution. Their positions reflected earlier captures: the Bone Clan held two spots, the Posse two, the Dream two, and the Madness two, while the Reavers held one and the defenders remained in Larracos. Battlefield alliances remained useful for coordinating fire and movement, but the impending final phase still threatened to make the Posse and Team Retribution rivals.
Open Hostilities and the four-team threshold
Carl's plan for Open Hostilities, Operation: Ruin, joined four simultaneous offensives with a further action devised by Donut. The coordinated attack sought to keep the remaining outside factions from concentrating on a single Posse position. It required communication among officers, allied NPCs, and mobile reserves. The Dream opened with magical artillery against Posse positions, while Reaver missiles targeted the airship carrying Carl and his companions. Louis kept the craft moving, and Bonnie shot down the missiles that reached it. The opening made clear that the former truce did not amount to a single enemy command: the factions attacked from different territories with different weapons and priorities.
The attack on the Bone Clan exposed another threat. War Mage Rebellion members killed War Chief Stalwart, although the rebellion was not then an active Faction War team. The rule system still had to allocate the fallen faction's holdings. Meanwhile, Carl's force fought the Madness, whose magic and army posed a distinct obstacle to the campaign. Carl killed its leader, Architect Houston. The system credited the Posse with the Madness's defeat and awarded it the team's assets. That elimination met the condition for the Peeling of Larracos. The change opened the city at precisely the moment its defenders were being attacked from within.
The War Mage Rebellion and the struggle for Larracos
The War Mage Rebellion gained standing as a team when the Peeling began. A ruling that had kept it out of Larracos until that phase no longer protected the city. War mages seized Team Retribution's throne room, triggering a six-hour countdown to their victory and a shorter countdown to activation of the city's defense towers. Their attack put the NPCs and the Posse under a shared immediate threat, even though only one of those allies could ultimately win. Juice Box appealed for help as the city's defenders came under pressure. The new faction's emergence also complicated the apparent team count: the rebellion had not been one of the original nine attackers.
Agatha was named a co-warlord of the rebellion alongside Akuma. The war mages used generated fighters in Larracos, and their occupation of the throne room threatened to turn the city's own defenses against anyone trying to retake it. Carl and the others also had to contend with a river of lava moving toward Shanty Town, the fallout from the fighting outside the city, and the difficulty of bringing scattered troops back to the central castle. Donut used an enhanced version of You're Not Done Yet against a field of corpses as allied and enemy forces converged. These overlapping emergencies prevented a straightforward assault on the occupied throne room.
The rebellion's hold did not last. Agatha was removed as co-warlord after abandoning her post, and Akuma later left the realm. The system then declared the War Mage Rebellion defeated. Before that declaration, its troops vacated Team Retribution's throne room; the Posse briefly occupied it, but the room reverted to the defenders when the Posse's occupant left. The Reavers subsequently fell, with their assets going to the Posse. The Dream was the last opposing outside faction to be eliminated. Its defeat left only the Princess Posse and Team Retribution, making the incompatibility of their victory conditions unavoidable.
Victory and evacuation
The end of the war was tied to an imminent disaster on the ninth floor. With Emberus about to destroy it, Carl's group needed the stairwells to open while also protecting the inhabitants of Larracos. The Sledge cast Zerzura to move Larracos and the adjoining Shanty Town to the twelfth floor. The transfer carried the NPC population and the changelings away from the battlefield. It also removed Juice Box and Ferdinand, Team Retribution's two warlords, from the ninth-floor realm. Under the current rules, their departure counted as abandonment of their posts. The system declared Team Retribution defeated and the Princess Posse the winner.
Victory came at a severe cost. More than fifty thousand former crawlers had entered the floor to aid the Posse; about twenty-eight thousand survived. Of roughly thirty-two thousand five hundred current crawlers who reached the ninth floor, 20,221 remained near its end. Carl understood that many of those survivors would take exit deals rather than continue down the dungeon. The result therefore meant more than possession of a throne room: the Posse had opened a route onward for thousands of crawlers and secured the removal of Larracos's population, while the deaths among its allies remained part of the price of winning.