Character · Book 4, The Gate of the Feral Gods

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 bomber, the pilot, the acolyte

Book 4 gives Carl fifteen days, a bowl of sand, and a floor built to make him run out of time. He opens it third on the leaderboard with a bounty doubled to 800,000 (ch. 1), and the AI's mood toward him is the floor's weather: the fourth floor's achievements shower him with a Legendary Deity's Box and Pawna's Tears, the best loot he has had (ch. 2); days later every gnome corpse reads 'Bitch Boy Carl' because a gerbil missed him, and he steps on one to end a siege — 'Good boy' (ch. 13). He builds the Royal Chariot with Katia in two hours (ch. 4), rockets that reach a mile (ch. 9), depth charges, chum bombs, burn gel, a disco ball, and learns to fly a biplane off the edge of a house (ch. 30).

The trickster

The air castle falls to a con: a duct-taped 'hostage' who is Katia, a resurrected head, a vial of Mountain Dew and a forged watch, and then twelve rockets from the ground and eight from a hijacked balloon (ch. 11, ch. 12). He kills a goose in a garbage disposal with one second left (ch. 16). He punches a mage for a box (ch. 21), hangs upside down over a living floor with a bag of fire (ch. 22), stops an eighty-two-level city boss dead with a shield spell and cuts her brain in half with a landscaping tool (ch. 27). He is buried alive twice and drowned once.

The first step

Watching a gnome girl sob into a changeling's arms, he decides to do the thing he had dismissed as too risky (ch. 17). In a shielded trailer, with Coolie's notes as his manual, he leaves a self-destructing toy beside Loita with a fingernail as a shim under its panel (ch. 19) and talks her off the couch; she dies, and his note in the 25th edition reads 'One.' (ch. 18). A Syndicate liaison applauds and cannot prove it; Carl refuses a Legendary box rather than name the Cookbook (ch. 19). Five days vanish. Donut drops a friend and the enemy in his head into a tomb rather than let him kill them (ch. 14), sends two men to their deaths for a cable (ch. 29), worships a god to throw him at Quan Ch, and tears Quan's arm off on the ground (ch. 31). He uses the Gate to save fifteen hundred people, and then — with a decoy in the sand and the real box on the sea floor — floods the faction market of Larracos with sharks and seawater, killing tens of thousands of NPCs he tells himself are better off (ch. 34). He ends the floor number one, an acolyte of Emberus with two god-quests and sun tattoos on his hands, in a patch jacket, holding a ring up to the sky: 'One by one, I will break you. I will break you all.'