Motif · Book 1, Dungeon Crawler Carl

Brindle grubs

The second floor's janitors: harmless worms that spawn on every corpse, eat their way to level three, pupate into human-sized acid-spitting hornets, and turn a quadrant into a trap for anyone who kills too much and stays too long.

Segment appearances

• Chapter 30 — Floor two
• Chapter 32 — The pedicure kit
• Chapter 33 — Plan Pied Piper
• Chapter 35 — Dragged out by a cat
• Chapter 36 — Zev
• Chapter 37 — The janitors
• Chapter 39 — The recap
• Chapter 40 — Bomb Chicken
• Chapter 41 — People buckets
• Chapter 42 — The Maestro's show
• Chapter 44 — What Donut overheard
• Chapter 45 — The kobold boss chamber
• Chapter 46 — The dungeon groans
• Chapter 47 — 124.8 trillion

Progression

Introduced as janitors that grow on what they eat (ch. 30); Carl starts smashing corpses. Mordecai explains the mechanism after a waist-high pile falls through his door (ch. 37): one to fifteen per corpse, 5,000 per quadrant, and Krakaren's cage of 750 was the trap. Level-three cow-tailed grubs, human-sized pupae with timers, and Brindled Vespas that spit acid (ch. 40, ch. 42) fill the rest of the floor. Borant halves the hornets and gives each grub a 50% chance to pupate (ch. 44); Donut and Mongo grind them by the dozen (ch. 47).