The scale problem starts here. Every floor has to be stranger and bigger than the last one, and book four is where the escalation proves it can keep going without collapsing into noise.
New environments, worse enemies, more systems to exploit. Carl is getting genuinely good at gaming the rules by this point, which changes the texture of the series. In book one he survived. Here he plans.
Read September 2025, by which point the run was getting hard to put down.
