Character · Book 3, The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook

Carl

The narrator. Twenty-seven, ex–Coast Guard, a marine technician in Seattle, six foot three; on the night the world's buildings vanish he is outside in boxer shorts, a leather jacket and his ex-girlfriend's pink Crocs, coaxing her cat out of a tree, which is why he enters the dungeon without pants and soon without shoes. Crawler #4,122. He fights bare-fisted and barefoot, discovers a gift for improvised explosives, and gets angrier at the people running the show than at anything in it.

Segment appearances

Arc

The engineer

Book 3 is the floor where Carl's class finally has a workshop. He starts it with an opening-line achievement, a leaderboard rank and a bounty (ch. 1), and the AI's answer to Borant's veto hands him a level-three personal space, crafting tables and a training room (ch. 2, ch. 3). Everything after is built: a Gangway Chock from a thinned breastplate and door wedges from weight benches (ch. 5), fifteen tons of robot scrap (ch. 6), Jelly Bomb landmines lowered onto a track with a fishing pole (ch. 10), Banger Spheres for the xistera (ch. 16), an Ugly-Ass Backpack that turns Katia into a ton and a quarter of armour (ch. 13), a train bomb on a pole trigger (ch. 27), a five-legged crane (ch. 31). Strength 41 in chapter 2; Powerful Strike 13 by chapter 9; level 41 at the end (ch. 34). The Cookbook, chosen on a glint of light from nine prizes (ch. 7), is the reason: read in toilet stalls, its recipes disguised as his own discoveries (ch. 8, ch. 10, ch. 13), its earlier authors becoming company (ch. 13, ch. 15).

The dispatcher

The floor's second half is Carl as a switchboard. He fist-bumps every crawler he meets into his chat (ch. 14, ch. 19), broadcasts the four ways down (ch. 15), warns Bautista off Terminus a minute too late (ch. 17), and when the trains stop he collects seven hundred souvenir hats from strangers in twenty minutes — 'There is hope for us. Not a lot. But it's there' (ch. 25) — and sends six singing portal carts to the pit (ch. 27). 'You can't save them all' is Mordecai's line and Carl argues with it for thirty chapters (ch. 15, ch. 18, ch. 21, ch. 24); fourteen hundred people at the end of the line say who won (ch. 28). The cost is in the same ledger: Growler Gary killed fourteen times for his hands (ch. 26), a mantaur dismembered as a vessel (ch. 33), a train sent into the abyss with two NPCs who chose to ride it (ch. 34).

The god-baiter

The Grull gauntlet's cumulative counter is the book's fuse: 10.5% on Gore-Gore, a ten-second timer and a drop kick onto the third rail (ch. 11); then, having asked Mordecai the rules, a summoning on purpose into a portal — and a hand around his numb foot (ch. 32). The Death Challenge that follows is the Maestro's debut as a god and Carl's survival at fifty to one, on an invisibility potion, Mordecai's Special Brew, and four friends who came through the wall (ch. 33; the odds, epilogue). 'Glurp, glurp, motherfucker.'

What he carries out

His father's motorcycle on a carousel and the day of the belt (ch. 7); the Grand Canyon and his mother's hand on his wrist (ch. 15); Frank Q's ring and the girl who wore it (ch. 19); Mordecai's slap and 'Don't touch me ever again' (ch. 30); Brandy's whistle and 'how much I needed other people' (ch. 34). And his signed entry in the 25th edition, written for whoever finds the book next: 'They will not break me. Fuck them all.' (ch. 34). Number three on the leaderboard with 400,000 gold (ch. 25), and a new PR agent who takes away the snacks (epilogue).