Chapter 26 of 48 · Book 1, Dungeon Crawler Carl

Chapter 26 — Six and a half hours

Book: Dungeon Crawler Carl · Part: The First Floor · Previous: Chapter 25 — No gods here · Next: Chapter 27 — After the arena · Floor: Floor 1 — The Tutorial · Series: the series

Opening

» Time to Level Collapse: 6 hours 30 minutes.

Summary

Six and a half hours to collapse. The third episode, watched in the Taco Bell while its Bopca proprietor Sebastian, smitten by Donut's charisma of 41, brushes her hair, featured everyone but them; the number is 2,552,085. At the gate with Brandon, Chris, Yolanda, Imani and an uninvited Agatha, the courtyard walls sink, the blacklight and lasers come on, and the Ball of Swine is announced: thirty tuskling knights and their lady loves fused by an alcohol-fuelled orgy of war lust into a level-15 rolling sphere.

Spike strips of shuriken bolted between boards, a railroad-switch square of solid floor, and the Speedbump — a modular tortoise-shell of goblin tables and weight benches bolted together in forty seconds — built from Carl's memory of a Penske truck peeling open under a bridge. The ball wedges, the ceiling sags, they stab upward, and it pops: tuxedoed pig-men in evening gowns rain down and are slaughtered.

Characters

• The Ball of Swine — Introduced and burst.
• Brandon — Builds the Speedbump; his shuriken idea; the beautiful son of a bitch comes later.
• Chris — Speaks once, about MacGyver.
• Yolanda Martinez — Places the braces; is thrown by one.
• Imani — Stabs through the ceiling; weeps as she swings.
• Agatha — Sits where she is told, bleeding, screaming about her cart.
• Carl — The plan, the redoubt, the pop; kicks a courtesan to death, maybe crying.
• Princess Donut — Under his cloak, missiles point-blank; 'Why can’t it be ‘blood squeezed out of their human and feline bodies?’'

Locations

• The spiral — Walls rising and falling; the stairwell under a red forcefield.

Motifs

• The residents' train — The Speedbump.
• 'There will always be clues' — The peepholes, the ninety-degree bounce.
• The mobs are victims — 'They were weaponless, they were untrained, and they were slaughtered.'
• The A-Team and MacGyver — 'The real MacGyver with the hair and the stargate.'