Character · Book 7, This Inevitable Ruin

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

• Prologue — Prologue
• Chapter 1 — Porthus; Welcome to Faction Wars
• Chapter 2 — Hosers and achievements
• Chapter 3 — The Tiara of a Thousand Lights
• Chapter 4 — Gloom Wraith Phase
• Chapter 5 — Dante; Sir Rendlegore
• Chapter 6 — Party Planner
• Chapter 7 — Donut Holes; the Semeru dwarf
• Chapter 8 — Larracos, City of Dreams
• Chapter 9 — Juice Box's war room
• Chapter 10 — Hamed's club; the small wedding
• Chapter 11 — Tipid; fifty thousand
• Chapter 12 — The base camp; Tina
• Chapter 13 — The FUPA; a suicide bomber
• Chapter 14 — The flag room and the Ramp-Up
• Chapter 15 — The Rolling Battle Formation Ball
• Chapter 16 — Everly; Glory Bound
• Chapter 17 — Eleven hours
• Chapter 18 — The minor quorum; code red
• Chapter 19 — The ruling; the ceasefire ends
• Chapter 20 — Christmas Morning; the Ramp-Up
• Chapter 21 — The southern trenches; rot stickers
• Chapter 22 — Colonel Boomer
• Chapter 23 — Killing in the Name
• Chapter 24 — No Man's Land
• Chapter 25 — Empress, you have visitors
• Chapter 26 — Milk; the Empress marked
• Chapter 27 — Gavrilo Princip
• Chapter 28 — Toyotomi; Agatha is looking for Carl
• Chapter 29 — The Bamboozle
• Chapter 30 — Comrades
• Chapter 31 — Drop troopers; Tripper
• Chapter 32 — King Rust arrives
• Chapter 33 — Parlay
• Chapter 34 — The king's message; Rosetta's whip
• Chapter 35 — Volteeg; the dwarves' tunnel
• Chapter 36 — Orren's zero zone
• Chapter 37 — Growler Gary, and Princess Formidable's four choices
• Chapter 38 — Relationship advice
• Chapter 39 — Alliances break; Operation Snake Pit
• Chapter 40 — Little Günter; a dragon chain
• Chapter 41 — The production facility; Aryl goes dark
• Chapter 42 — The warlord council; Princess Vinata
• Chapter 43 — Odette hosts; 'It's coming'
• Chapter 44 — The Beautiful Place; Blood Hunter
• Chapter 45 — Prepotente's rant
• Chapter 46 — Operation Snake Pit: the line of succession
• Chapter 47 — Tattoos, and a flower offered
• Chapter 48 — Colonel Prepotente
• Chapter 49 — Bijou, Theia and Khepri
• Chapter 50 — The Temple of the Dagda
• Chapter 51 — Dark Purpose
• Chapter 52 — The Temple of Khepri
• Chapter 53 — Super Heavyweight Temple Battle Grudge Match Extravaganza
• Chapter 54 — The Waffle Maker; Hellik's message
• Chapter 55 — Head Banger; Milk
• Chapter 56 — Justice Light; the Nest
• Chapter 57 — Thirty-two boxes; the last prisoner
• Chapter 58 — Sultan Rishi the Usurper
• Chapter 59 — Operation Ruin
• Chapter 60 — Meatus; the King's Point erupts
• Chapter 61 — The War Mage Rebellion
• Chapter 62 — A non-team entity
• Chapter 63 — Into the Madness
• Chapter 64 — The crystal shows itself
• Chapter 65 — Bear Witness
• Chapter 66 — Rolling Battle Formation
• Chapter 67 — Hey, Dickless
• Chapter 68 — The Grease Monkey
• Chapter 69 — Interlude — Several days earlier; Interlude — Rosetta; Zarogoths
• Chapter 70 — City of Broken Dreams
• Chapter 71 — Donkey Kong
• Chapter 72 — Diah
• Chapter 73 — An act of fiendish cruelty
• Chapter 74 — Bijanbi
• Chapter 75 — Stayfast Ink
• Chapter 76 — The Oak Fell
• Chapter 77 — Not yet
• Chapter 78 — The Scavenger's daughter is with us now
• Chapter 79 — Tart
• Chapter 80 — Inside the dragon
• Chapter 81 — Executive Order 11905
• Chapter 82 — Ursensus
• Chapter 83 — Psamathe confesses
• Chapter 84 — And then there were two
• Chapter 85 — Zerzura
• Chapter 86 — We just need to kill you
• Chapter 87 — The Nothing has been broken
• Epilogue — Epilogue: Don't Come in Last

Arc

The button, and the other button

Book 7 opens twice on Christmas morning. In the prologue a homeless man who is a Residual, with the AI slowing time over a cup of coffee, hands Carl a bootleg interface with the mantids' 'fuse' on it — a failsafe that would send the star nova and kill everyone, the AI included (ch. 0). In the Christmas Morning interlude he sits beside a sleeping dog in a Florida gas station with the page open, wants to press it 'more than anything', decides the AI is not in pain but having fun, and presses the only other button: Disconnect Containment. The red dot over Earth begins to grow (ch. 20). He tells no one until an orc king describes his daughter's plan to trip the failsafe by hand, and then only Donut, by chat: 'Call it a hunch' (ch. 34). Orren's team learns it from five words — 'Welcome to the party, pals.' (ch. 36); Orren, who begs discretion, calls him the one who let this happen, and Carl does not answer whether he would rather have died (ch. 39).

Warlord

The ninth floor makes him a warlord of a team that fifty thousand former crawlers have come back into the dungeon to fight for — 'This is for you. This is what you built' (ch. 11, ch. 12). He plans with veterans who are better at war than he is and learns, slowly, to let them: he hands the southern front to Boomer (ch. 25), Larracos to Rosetta, and is told by Boomer over a private band and by three women and Splash Zone with crossed arms to stop running everyone else's operation (ch. 63). What is his is the personal war: the Prism's empress marked with the Ring of Divine Suffering and killed while three of his eyes burn white and Donut asks him to step back from the edge (ch. 26); the Sultana's temple stormed with a thermobaric bomb in a cannon barrel of a room, his own body turned inside out and held together only by ninety seconds of a god's immortality (ch. 52–ch. 54); the Madness castle entered with a stripper, a slug and a shark, and Architect Houston kept alive with a healing potion so the dead man's switch will not fire (ch. 67, ch. 68).

The river

The spider in his chest tries to cast through him and fails against Mind Balance, rising a level with every attempt (ch. 14); Katia's dream potion binds him into her mind and, in the backsplash, into everyone's (ch. 16, ch. 69); a god named Hapanzi traps Shi Maria in her own worst memory and hands him the key (ch. 17, ch. 19). Under the Madness's psionic barrage, feet stuck in an All Tree root, he hears the river for what it is — souls, always down, always loud — and a dwarf's voice tells him he is family now; Mind Balance reaches 16 and 'the realm of gods' (ch. 65). A goddess bites his ear, snaps his pinkie and says he is already married (ch. 76); a lawyer, at the end, tells him who to (epilogue). The ring he swore he needed a little longer he holds up to Donut's nose and lets her swallow, having refused to farm three hundred stats from a few thousand mercenaries: 'Fuck you all' (ch. 85). Eris's laugh stays in the river anyway (ch. 86).

What he refuses, and what he does

'No. Not like that. Never like that' — he puts away a Conscription potion rather than use it on Prepotente (ch. 48), and then smashes a hell-kissed one on Lucia Mar's head to stop her killing Donut (ch. 71), sits beside her with the Ring of Divine Suffering on his finger, and cancels the mark when a child's voice named Diah asks him to wait (ch. 72). He learns from Zev that 120,000 children are bound to her (ch. 73). He drops an inventory folder called Shit Just Hit on a theatre and turns a city's towers on everyone in it because Donut is alone (ch. 71). He nukes a castle with the bombs in an unconscious friend's pockets (ch. 80) and is nearly assassinated mid-sentence by the Syndicate's prime minister, whom the AI stops for him (ch. 81). He holds Louis's ribs open while a naiad's heart goes in (ch. 84), throws Samantha at a god to buy Katia's ceremony its minutes (ch. 86), and walks into the stairwell with Donut on his shoulder, level 81 to her 135 (ch. 77, ch. 87). In the zero zone he tells Quasar he could live in a room where nobody is dying, and declines every deal (epilogue).