Here is our full chapter-by-chapter and video breakdown of Dungeon Crawler Carl, Book 3: The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook.
So, whether you’ve already read it and want a refresher or just want a clear run-through of the story, this recap is designed to give you everything you need.
If you are looking for more Dungeon Crawler Carl Recaps, here is a list of all that we have put together so far:
- Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 1: Chapter-by-Chapter Recap
- Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 2: Chapter-by-Chapter Recap
Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 3 Recap [Video]
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Chapter 1
Carl and Princess Donut arrive on the fourth floor, called the Iron Tangle, and find themselves inside a moving subway car.
Donut picks a new class called Football Hooligan, which raises her constitution, gives her a skill called Guinness that doubles her strength when drunk, and includes the Mascot skill, which gives bonuses whenever Mongo kills mobs.
Katia is with them, and her constitution is now really high. Her Monster Truck class also gives her an active momentum bonus since the subway car is moving.
The crew begins to work their way forward through the subway cars, killing two Jikininki ghoul-type janitors along the way.
When they arrive at Station 81, a large group of demonic baby creatures swarms onto the platform. Once the subway is moving again, Carl kills all the ones that made it aboard by casting Protective Shell, which rockets backward through the cars and bulldozes everything into paste.
Chapter 2
They make it to Transfer Station 83, which is safe. Mordecai is there waiting, but he’s no longer an incubus and is now a creature called a Grulke, which is essentially a toad warrior.
The station has a saferoom, a mace and bashing weapons guild, and a general store run by a mole man named Limp Richard. Carl uses his Escape Plan skill on the station’s map sign and gets more information on the layout of the Iron Tangle, which has 435 stations in total, with stairwells located at Stations 12, 24, 36, 48, and 72.
There are currently just under 400,000 crawlers still alive, and they have ten days to get to a stairwell before the floor collapses.
Carl and Donut open their loot boxes. Carl’s include the Enchanted Necklace of the Haute Bourgeoisie, which can be upgraded by conquering larger settlements and currently gives a +5 bonus to dexterity, and a level-five Talon Strike skill, which increases the strength of Carl’s kicks and gives each kick a 2% chance to cast the instakill spell Eviscerate. Carl also receives coupons for a free personal space upgraded to level three, two tier-one environmental upgrades, two crafting table upgrades, and two table upgrades of his choice. Finally, Carl learns a spell called Bang Bro, which temporarily adds fire and electrical damage to any equipped item.
Donut gets a new tiara, the Enchanted Tiara of Mana Genita, which gives +3 to intelligence, better mob detection on the map, and automatic removal of hostility from Mana Genita worshippers. She also gets a new spell called Hole, which creates a temporary hole through any surface.
The group conjoins their three level-three personal spaces into a single level-five space and then spends their coupons on more upgrades, including a bed that gives them a full rest in two hours, an Enhanced Crafting Studio, and a Training Room.
Chapter 3
They settle into their new enormous personal space and watch the recap show which is mostly REDACTED for crawlers.
The leaderboard populates with Lucia Mar in first place, Hekla in second, Carl in sixth, and Donut in eighth.
The announcement also confirms that crawlers will not be allowed to go down early on this floor. The stairwells will only open six hours before the floor collapses.
Carl then opens a message that had been waiting in a locked folder: from Brandon, one of the crawlers he’d helped get to the third floor, though he sees Brandon is now marked as a deceased crawler. He asks Carl to find his brother Chris, who left the group after a fight and is still alive somewhere on the map but not accepting messages. He wants Chris to know he’s sorry, that he loves him.
Carl angrily goes to the training room and gets to work leveling up his Bare Knuckles skill.
Chapter 4
They head out to check Limp Richard’s general shop and only end up buying a large padded mallet. Carl eyes a dwarven Battery Fabricator that converts mana potions into usable batteries, but it is too expensive to buy at the moment.
They spend an hour on the platform killing mobs as they pass by on trains, but the experience is slow, so they decide to board a train themselves.
They jump on a train running on the Yellow Line, where they are attacked by a group of enemies.
Chapter 5
Carl uses a Gangway Chock, a massive metal wedge he made from a reshaped swordsman’s breastplate with his engineering bench, to block the gangway between cars and funnel the monsters through a chokepoint so they can be killed more easily.
They proceed down the train and find the fifth car has a locked door marked Tangle Employees Only.
They break inside and find an employee break room with a bar. Sitting at it is the Yellow Line Train Conductor, who drinks during every loop of the train. Reaching the end of the line at Station 435 somehow resets everything and erases most of his memory. He has also noticed that the only thing that does not reset after each loop is the gold he collects and keeps in his pocket.
Donut and Carl then visit the porter car, which ends up being a reward room that gives one prize to each crawler. Carl picks a bag that is filled with deadly Fire Ants, which set the entire car on fire. Donut and Carl leap off the train onto Banshee Platform 116 just before the doors close.
Chapter 6
The platform has multiple exits, including a tunnel leading to a boss room.
Zev checks in to let them know Katia is polling badly and wants them to try to make her more interesting to the audience. Carl tells Zev she is shy and overwhelmed like everyone else, but Zev makes it clear that fewer views mean fewer prizes and less sponsor money. Donut suggests that Katia grow a mohawk and create a catchphrase.
A Red Cornet mob appears and hits Carl and Donut with a debuff called Queasy, causing them to puke. Mordecai lets them know the only real way to prevent that attack from being an issue is to fight more Cornets until they build resistance to the Queasy debuff. They spend the next several hours grinding Cornets through the tunnels, while Mongo levels up to 14 and grows noticeably larger.
They find the boss room at the back of the tunnel system. Inside is a warehouse with a large cart and two giant Dwarven Industrial Automatons in sleep mode. Katia has heard from Hekla that another station had the same thing. Carl uses hobgoblin dynamite to blow up the robots and collects their parts, including two dwarven Battery Fabricators that are labeled as damaged in his inventory.
Daniel Bautista, the tiger-man crawler they briefly met at the end of the previous book, messages them from the Desperado Club. Imani needs to talk with Carl about Brandon and Chris and can meet him at the Desperado Club bar after the next recap. Bautista also warns Carl that some crawlers are actively hunting leaderboard targets for the bounties and gives him information about where to locate transfer stations and entrances to the Desperado Club.
At the end of the chapter, they notice Katia has changed into a black bodysuit and is now rocking a purple mohawk.
Chapter 7
Mongo hits level 15, grows to the height of a pony, and gains a new ability called Earthquake, a jump attack that knocks enemies down. They travel to Transfer Station 131, which has an entrance to the Desperado Club and a saferoom where they stop to eat and open their fan boxes.
Donut opens her fan box and gets two Superb Constitution Buff Potions, raising her constitution by four points. She also gets something called a Fragmenting Potion Ball and an Enchanted Mongoliensis Saddle made for cats, which boosts both Donut and Mongo while she is riding him. Mordecai reveals he upgraded the alchemy table and created two batches of Mordecai’s Special Brew for them, a potion that gives thirty seconds of near-immortality but prevents whoever consumes it from using other potions for ten hours afterward.
Carl’s fan boxes trigger a Prize Carousel hosted by Chaco, a level 66 winged wolf-man Song Bard who is listed as a dungeon admin instead of a normal NPC. Chaco recognizes Mordecai, and Mordecai attacks him. Mordecai is immediately given a seven-day timeout and disappears.
Carl’s carousel includes several strange prizes, including a Harley-Davidson motorcycle he recognizes as his father’s and a book with an anarchy symbol on the cover. Carl chooses the book, which is revealed to be a unique item called The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook. When Carl opens it, hidden text appears telling him the book found its way to him for one purpose: to help burn everything to the ground.
Chapter 8
Carl reads more of The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook in the bathroom. The book is invisible to viewers and showrunners, but not to the system AI. It contains potion recipes, explosive guides, trap information, monster weaknesses, dungeon shortcuts, secret societies, and notes from past crawlers.
A new sponsor tab appears in Carl’s interface. Bidding ends in fifteen hours, after which he will be able to exchange one-way messages with whoever sponsors him.
They head to the Desperado Club, where Clarabelle the Crocodilian offers them private security in the form of two level-35 rock monster bodyguards named Bomo and The Sledge. Clarabelle also mentions that Lucia Mar has been banned for life, and Elle McGibbons is already inside with her own guard.
Imani arrives. She is now a level 24 Obsidian Butterfly Fire Spiritualist with blue skin and massive translucent wings. She explains that Chris became more aggressive after changing his race into an Igneous, a rock creature similar to Bomo and The Sledge. Chris ended up leaving the group before his brother Brandon died trying to protect the others.
Carl then finds Donut, drunk on Dirty Shirleys, on the dance floor with low health, standing next to a dead human crawler whose throat she has slashed.
Chapter 9
Carl realizes the dead crawler is someone named Ji-Hoon and Donut’s Cockroach skill saved her from what would have been a fatal backstab.
Elle and Imani step in to protect them from the crowd. Elle kills another assassin by shooting an icicle through her eye. Astrid, the Desperado Club’s assistant manager, arrives, apologizes for the security failure, refunds Carl’s money, and grants them free security from now on. Carl also convinces her not to punish Bomo and The Sledge and asks to keep them as his guards whenever they are there.
Carl, Donut, Elle, and Imani sit down and go over the transit map. Imani notices that all of the checked-off transfer stations are prime numbers. They still do not fully understand the pattern, but they agree that Imani and Elle will keep talking to other teams while Carl and Donut try to get one of the train engineers out.
Carl and Donut stop at the Silk Road area of the Desperado Club to sell and buy supplies, including more explosives and smoke curtains.
They then head into the Desperado Club’s casino to cash in Signet’s chip from the third floor. Carl chooses to spend the 100,000-gold chip on the Wheel of Fortune, where he wins a Scroll of Upgrade that randomly upgrades one of his equipped items. It improves his Enchanted Toe Ring of the Splatter Skunk, which now gives more strength and +5 to the Powerful Strike skill.
Chapter 10
They return to base and find Hekla sitting on their couch drinking an Arby’s milkshake. It turns out to be Katia, who has used her Walk in Their Shoes skill to shapeshift into a partial copy of Hekla. She acquired the ability after spending her upgrade coupons on a Makeup Table that lets her save and superimpose faces from memory.
They give the gear looted from the assassin over to Katia, giving her extra strength, dexterity, and mass.
Carl continues to train his Bare Knuckles skill while Donut gets her Dodge to seven, which will allow her to enter the guild room they saw earlier. Carl also uses the Demolition Workshop for the first time, learning how to dismantle bombs, read schematics, and check decay rates. He uses ideas from the Anarchist’s Cookbook to create two modified landmines with hob-lobbers and hobgoblin dynamite, which the system labels Jelly Bombs.
Donut tries riding Mongo with the new saddle and gets thrown across the room twice before the saddle finally locks her in place.
They coordinate with Imani and Bautista to use Carl’s new Jelly Bombs to derail a train.
Chapter 11
The Jelly Bombs work and derail the incoming train.
An NPC named Gore-Gore, the Ochre Line Train Engineer, climbs out. He is a ManTauR with two torsos, two sets of arms, and a “Welcome to the Gun Show” shirt.
He explains that at the end of the line, the engineer car goes through intact without the engineer dying or losing his memories. He normally cannot leave the engine car while the train is intact, but the crash changes the rules and triggers a boss fight.
Gore-Gore is a level 40 neighborhood boss devoted to Grull, the war god, so every punch Carl lands has a small chance of summoning Grull himself. Luckily, that does not happen, and Carl kills Gore-Gore after a tough fight.
Afterward, Carl receives notice that he has his first sponsor: the Valtay Corporation.
Chapter 12
Carl loots Gore-Gore’s body and gets the Ochre Line Engineer’s Key, which triggers the full neighborhood map for the Ochre line, showing every stop, train position, conductor, and engineer.
Katia reveals Gore-Gore’s blade cut off four of her fingers, and when she healed, they did not grow back. She says she can rebuild them from other parts of herself, but part of her is permanently gone.
Donut also gets her first sponsor, Princess D’nadia of the Prism Kingdom, while Katia gets Princess Formidable of the Skull Empire. Mordecai warns Carl not to mention the Valtay Corporation out loud because Borant hates them and they may be connected to the assassination attempt.
Elle and Imani report that every five stops, monsters unload and receive addictive sedative vials with a Krakaren running the supply. Carl realizes the showrunners got the NPC monsters addicted so they would keep patrolling predictably, and derailing trains is now breaking that supply chain.
On the Dismemberment Limited train, they find Levi the 7th, a Troll-Hobgoblin Skellie Symbiote, already aboard. A quest triggers requiring them to keep Levi alive, or else every crawler on the train will become a mob called a Flesher.
Carl uses Donut’s Hole spell to grab the War Mage trying to kill them by the hair and pull his head through the opening. Donut snaps the spell shut, severing his head instantly and clearing the quest.
Chapter 13
Zev checks in to tell Carl and Donut that she has booked them on a show called Planet Beautiful. Carl agrees only after saying he will not read prepared lines.
They stop at Station 281 to sleep and train.
Carl gets a Bronze Benefactor Box from the Valtay Corporation containing Neural Enhancer #544, Variant 32c, which gives him the ability to identify and analyze subspace portals.
Carl tests the new ability on the coffee shop door and discovers he can now see through certain portals before entering, letting him view the other side ahead of time.
Carl builds Katia a custom metal backpack that lets her carry extra mass outside her inventory and use it for transformations. The system calls it the Ugly Ass Backpack With a Completely Useless Design that Only an Idiot Would Wear.
Chapter 14
They wait at Station 283 for the Nightmare Express. Donut trains Hole to level three and learns she can cast Clockwork Triplicate through it, letting Mongo clones appear on the other side of doors without line of sight.
Back at the Desperado Club, Carl fist-bumps every crawler he can to expand his chat network and encourages everyone else to do the same.
The Nightmare Express arrives: a coal-powered steam train with around forty cars, most filled with giant monsters. The only accessible cars are the caboose and a front passenger car, but the front door is exit-only, meaning they would normally have to board from the back and cross the roofs of dozens of monster cars.
Carl decides to board from the front by jumping onto the train as it comes in. The plan nearly kills him, but he survives and makes it to the engine cab.
Inside, they find the boiler close to exploding. Carl meets Fire Brandy, a level 75 Lesser Demon MILF non-combatant NPC who teaches him how to operate the train while she keeps the boiler running with the corpses of her dead babies, which are labeled as Sheol Bricks.
Carl finds the Steam Engineer’s Key on the dead engineer and realizes that his Protective Shell killed every monster on the train when he boarded. This shoots him up to level 32 and earns him three neighborhood boss boxes and a Platinum Big Daddy Box.
Chapter 15
The Nightmare Express reaches a massive switching station with dozens of tracks. Carl tries to follow the Recycle track, which leads to a giant glowing portal, but he can’t analyze it clearly from the train.
Carl gets off at Abyss Station 436, a bare station with only an industrial staircase leading upward. After climbing for nearly an hour, he reaches an iron catwalk overlooking the Abyss, a massive pit filled with glowing portals and burning crashed train cars.
Carl realizes the entire floor is a disposal system. The colored line passenger cars are all dumped into the Abyss, while the conductors and porters exit at the final station and the trains reform somewhere else without their passengers.
Carl analyzes the employee portal and sees it leads to a huge trainyard full of engine cars, zombie-like creatures, and dwarves.
Donut gets a sponsor gift from Princess D’nadia: unique magic-focusing goggles that turn her Magic Missiles into a laser and allow her to fire up to four at once.
Donut also hits level 30 and reaches 100 in Charisma, unlocking a new ability called Love Vampire. It allows Donut to target an enemy at a lower level than her who will take damage in her place.
Elle messages that she and Imani cleared a Krakaren boss but the next train never came, leaving them stranded.
Finally, Carl opens his Platinum Big Daddy Box and gets an enchanted toothbrush and Seize the Day Toothpaste, which gives a huge boss-damage buff for 30 hours.
Chapter 16
Carl wakes up to a message from Elle saying she and Imani found a secret tunnel out of the robot rooms and are following it now.
Donut realizes she now has enough mana to cast Minion Army, a spell she received back on the first floor. When cast on a group, it turns a small percentage of the enemies to her side. However, Donut is vulnerable for the five minutes it takes to cast, the spell has a five-hour cooldown, and there is only a 2% chance of turning any given mob.
They head out of the saferoom and into the transit station, where they find it packed with Babababoons, baboon-human hybrids created by crossing Earth baboons with Florida jail inmates. They are in stage two of drug withdrawal, which means they have lost the ability to speak or reason and will attack anything not suffering from the same condition.
Katia, Carl and Donut fight to clear the station of Babababoons before they can damage the train or block their exit.
Chapter 17
Now aboard the Nightmare Express, they go through the employee portal and find themselves at Station Repair Hub E, a massive underground trainyard filled with thousands of Festering Ghouls trapped behind a shaking fence.
A Grease Gremlin Train Technician named Widget drops onto the engine and explains that Carl can get out by taking the Tangerine Line to 89, then boarding the Escape Velocity train, which goes directly to stairwell stations.
Widget also reveals that the final stop, Station 433, is Terminus Station, and it is a trap. Six Station Mimics live there and eat the passengers who arrive. Carl immediately warns Bautista not to get off at Terminus Station.
Before Widget can continue helping them, a spider ghoul Donut previously killed reanimates, rips Widget’s head off, and eats him.
Carl then finds a Human Iron Tangle HR Associate named Madison, who still believes she is a real employee. Carl decides to bring her to Station 60, where she thinks the lower employee dormitories are located.
On the way, they question Madison, whose memories seem to fall apart under basic questions about her life.
Carl realizes the NPCs’ false memories are thin, and breaking them out of their routine may be the best way to get information.
Chapter 18
Carl’s warning to Bautista arrives too late. Bautista messages that he and 400 crawlers reached Terminus Station and encountered the city boss hidden there. It ate twenty crawlers in a single bite. Carl tells him to try the employee portal.
Madison explains that the Kravyad she manages alongside the Station Mimics are blue, six-armed, hypnotic creatures that keep conductors and porters addicted and compliant, then cycle them through the portals on schedule. Carl learns the employee portal at Station 435 only works if the Kravyad stays alive.
Elle then reports that the secret tunnel they traveled through from the robot room leads to a roller coaster system that dumps carts into the Abyss, where they are sent back to the trainyards. Carl realizes the entire floor is a self-contained drug and disposal loop: monsters get addicted, miss stops, turn into Festering Ghouls, and get dumped into the Abyss to be recycled.
Katia privately tells Carl she has developed the ability to create a third eye and has been training herself to watch behind her. She also gives Carl a PVP Coupon with his name on it that she found under the tracks.
Katia thinks Donut may still have a PVP coupon, but Carl checks with Imani and realizes Donut was actually getting rid of hers. The coupons are designed to create paranoia between crawlers, so Carl quietly keeps the one with his name on it and does not confront Donut.
They bring Madison to Station 60, where she still believes the employee housing is supposed to be, but it is completely empty. There are no families or apartments. Madison realizes her memories of her home and life are fake and refuses to leave. Carl says goodbye, and they get back on the Nightmare Express.
Chapter 19
They park the Nightmare Express at Station 41 and head to the Desperado Club. They learn that Imani and Elle’s crew have made it to Trainyard D and are hiding in the Iron Tangle administrative building.
Bautista confirms the Kravyad at Station 435 is actually an NPC, not a boss, but she is threatening to kill herself if crawlers get too close, which would close the portal.
At the Desperado Club, Carl meets Frank Q., who is drunk, with Maggie My nowhere in sight.
Frank explains that Maggie used an ability called Marked for Death on her daughter Yvette. The ability lets someone mark another crawler and gain a permanent stat boost if that crawler dies. Since Carl escaped, Yvette was left unable to be healed and ended up dying in the explosion caused by the trap Carl laid.
Frank gives Carl the ring that enabled the Marked for Death ability that killed his daughter. It is called the Enchanted Night Wyrm’s Ring of Divine Suffering. The skill lets Carl mark another crawler, and if that crawler dies, he gains a permanent stat boost.
Carl accepts the ring and puts it on.
Chapter 20
Carl and Donut teleport to a production trailer in a submarine on the ocean floor for their scheduled taping of the Planet Beautiful show.
Carl’s segment is supposed to be about human beauty pageants, but it is not even close to accurate. Carl refuses to read it, and the exhausted alien producer eventually lets him talk freely about Earth culture instead. Carl begins to tell the story of Unsinkable Sam, the World War II cat who survived multiple ship sinkings.
Meanwhile, Donut is in the next room narrating a segment about pet shows, though she is mostly just warning viewers about cocker spaniels, who she believes are evil.
After the taping, Donut brings up the PVP coupon. She tells Carl that she buried hers under the tracks and threw Katia’s away, confirming she was not hiding one to use against him.
Bautista then sends them a message that they accidentally killed the Kravyad while trying to paralyze her, closing the portal and stranding over 150 crawlers who are now heading toward the Abyss on foot.
Chapter 21
Back in their personal space, they find Brynhild’s Daughters, led by Hekla, and Eva Sigrid, Katia’s old friend from before the dungeon. Eva is now a four-armed, Half-Nagini, Half-Orc crawler with thirteen player-kill skulls.
Hekla says around a thousand crawlers are trapped at Station 101 on the Vermillion Line, with mobs closing in, and that she has a Vermillion subway train with a second engine attached, which means it can run in reverse. She wants Carl and Donut to help clear the track, reach the trapped crawlers, and bring them back out.
Katia proposes strapping herself to the front of the train and forming herself into a living cowcatcher, using her modified backpack and rubber armor to absorb the impact. Carl hates the plan but agrees to it.
The plan is for Carl and Donut to ride in the engine cab, Katia to ride on the front of the train, and Hekla’s team to ride on the back and outside as they plow through the ghoul herd.
Chapter 22
The train hits the ghoul herd at full speed, plowing through hundreds of Festering Ghouls while Katia scoops the bodies into her inventory from the front of the train.
At Station 72, Blister Ghouls start boarding, generated by a Ghoul Generator powered by soul crystals.
Elle messages that when too many Festering Ghouls converge, they merge into a province boss called a Frankenmonster. Carl realizes the entire floor is collapsing into boss fights at major stations, with different ghoul types gathering and spawning across the lines.
Just before Station 101, Donut’s new magical goggles allow her to see that Hekla secretly shot Katia with an invisible bolt that causes Temporary Amnesia and Suffering Bleed, making the victim appear to die from other causes without giving kill credit or a skull.
Carl pulls out the bolt, and Donut heals her after she goes unconscious.
They reach Station 101, where a crowd of trapped crawlers rushes toward the train while hundreds of enemies close in from behind.
Carl tells Donut to stay calm because they cannot afford a fight right now. Donut, enraged by Hekla’s betrayal of Katia, immediately blasts her in the face with a full-strength Magic Missile.
Chapter 23
Hekla survives Donut’s attack and Eva immediately lunges at Carl with her two sabers. Carl blocks one blade and shoves it into Eva’s stomach.
Carl kicks everyone out of the train except Hekla, Eva, and Katia while the other crawlers defend the platform escape.
Hekla admits the attack on Katia backfired but says they still need to work together and can deal with it later. Donut is furious, but Carl talks her down because there is no time for a fight.
Then Katia uses Rush, her once-a-day battering ram ability. She aims for Eva but misses, instead slamming into Hekla and splattering her against the train wall.
Katia becomes the first crawler this season to kill a top-ten player, earning a 500,000-gold bounty, and immediately jumps from level 24 to level 37.
Chapter 24
The system announces that a champion has fallen, and Brynhild’s Daughters flood in screaming.
Donut casts Second Chance on Hekla’s corpse, then uses Clockwork Triplicate to create three Hekla minions that push the daughters back long enough for Katia to loot her Vermillion key.
Carl throws the train into reverse and gets them moving.
He realizes Eva was Hekla’s fixer and that Eva ordered Silfa, their healer, to stop healing Katia. The plan was to let Katia die, enrage Carl, isolate Donut, and force her into joining Brynhild’s Daughters for access to Mordecai as a manager.
Katia loots Hekla’s crossbow: the Enchanted Repeating Crossbow of the Scavenger Mother of Mothers, a unique female-only weapon with infinite ammo that scales with the total number of female party members, which is why Hekla had formed such a large party of women with her.
Chapter 25
There are now just three days left before the floor collapses.
Carl has collected around 700 conductor hats and fifteen colored-line keys, both of which can get crawlers through the Abyss portals and off the floor. He, Donut, and Katia lead the large group in an attempt to save them all.
First, they stop at a saferoom bar called The Downward Dog, where they shower, sleep, and reset their buffs.
Katia opens her loot from killing Hekla. She gets the Find Crawler skill, and an Enchanted Wrestling Belt of the Great Gorgo, which boosts her strength and constitution and gives her the Avalanche benefit, multiplying the force of her moving mass.
Zev appears and says Odette added Katia to the contract, meaning Katia now has to do post-floor interviews too.
Zev then hints that something serious is happening back home, but she can’t talk about it. Before leaving, she warns them that their chats will also become public to paying subscribers starting tomorrow.
Chapter 26
Growler Gary, the gnoll bartender, is barely conscious. He says a woman, almost certainly Eva, came through, stole his alcohol, killed everything except him, and left.
Carl realizes Gary may be indestructible because he is needed for a quest. The Cookbook confirms that some NPCs cannot be killed if they are required to complete something. Carl tests it by having Mongo kill Gary and watching Gary regenerate.
Only gnolls can drive the carts Carl needs for his upcoming plan, and each cart requires two gnoll hands on separate consoles at all times. They need fourteen of Gary’s hands to activate the repair carts, so they kill him repeatedly to collect them. Gary eventually stops fighting back once Carl explains what they are doing and why.
They proceed to outfit the carts with giant portals on the front that send anything on the tracks into either a trainyard or the Abyss.
Carl’s plan is to send two carts down each trapped line. The first will send crashed trains and monsters into the Abyss. The second will follow later with its portal tuned to a station so it can scoop up stranded crawlers and deliver them safely.
Chapter 27
The rapid-response carts seem to be working, so Carl sends six carts with Abyss portals, staggered with carts carrying trainyard portals.
A separate explosion goes off in the distance from a group trying to destroy a Blister Ghoul generator.
Carl finds one of Eva’s dropped sabers in the engine car, then builds a train bomb, attaches it to the Vermillion engine, and rides it into the gore before jumping clear. The explosion seals the tunnel against more incoming mobs.
They use a portal cart to cork the remaining tunnel, then practice fighting stage-three monsters. Their corpses hatch into thousands of tiny Krakaren Crotch Dumplings, confirming it is a Krakaren nest.
Chapter 28
Bautista’s second cart never made it because of a timing mistake, and his crew ended up stranded. Carl loads everyone onto a rapid-response cart and heads down to find them.
Along the way, they teleport 800 crawlers to a stairwell station, the best Carl can do for them. Then, while passing Station 433, Katia spots something on the tracks: a wooden crossbeam with a stop sign. Carl realizes too late that it is a mimic. They hit it, and the portal sucks the entire Station Mimic city boss straight to Trainyard E.
The mimic is enormous, the size of a neighborhood block, and is already transforming into an Iron Tangle administrative building. Elle explains mimics can only be killed when more than 50% of their mass is separated at once. Otherwise, the pieces grow back. It is a city boss, and it is waiting for them. Carl decides not to fight it. The new plan is for everybody to go through the Abyss portal instead. He hands out conductor hats from his inventory so the more than 1,400 trapped crawlers do not have to fight their way through.
It works. More than 1,400 people make it to Trainyard E. When Carl and the group jump off the cart, the 600 crawlers behind them applaud. Bautista gives Carl a hug, then gives his hat to Donut and tells her it is for her. The crawlers line up and bow, dropping their hats in tribute to Donut, who thinks she can later sell them for gold.
Chapter 29
One day and sixteen hours remain. Carl and Katia head to a saferoom, teleporting a platform full of Krakaren babies into the Abyss along the way.
Bautista gives Carl a Stuffed Grulke Infantry Figure, one of Miss Quill’s beanie monsters from the last floor, which can turn into a real temporary fighter when activated.
Katia opens her sponsor box and gets two Shade Gnoll riot-control items: a massive shield that upgrades Rush into Crowd Blast, and a telescoping baton that improves her Cone of Knockback when used against groups.
Princess Formidable’s benefactor box for Katia contains a single crossbow bolt: the Bolt of Ophiotaurus, which can pause a deity’s invulnerability for fifteen seconds if shot directly into the eye.
The recap reveals a hidden stairwell at Station 433, the same place they accidentally sent the mimic. Carl realizes city bosses may be invisible on the map until killed, meaning the crawlers beyond the tracks might still have a way out.
Then a system announcement says liquids can no longer be stored in inventory unless they are inside containers. Katia had been storing huge amounts of blood from her time as a cowcatcher, so gallons of it instantly explode everywhere around her.
Carl notices none of it touches Katia, which he files away as a possible exploit.
Chapter 30
To help clean up the blood, they buy a cleaning bot for their personal space, then shower and sleep. When Mordecai returns, he notices Carl’s Ring of Divine Suffering and gets furious.
Mordecai explains the ring is a Faction Wars artifact that will mark Carl as a target for hunters who want it on the sixth floor. Carl agrees to deal with it on the next floor.
While they slept, Mordecai used the table upgrade coupons to buy a second alchemy table, a metalworking table, and a Bolt-Thrower’s Workshop, which could eventually let him mass-produce explosive crossbow bolts for Katia.
Katia spreads out the train map, and Mordecai realizes the rail diagram is not really a train map. It is the Syndicate logo.
Mordecai explains that the Syndicate formed after a scientist aboard a ship called the Escape Velocity discovered the wormhole system, and the named train lines trace the logo exactly, with the Abyss representing the galactic center.
Katia pushes the theory further, realizing the train lines are not flat. They wrap around in a chaotic three-dimensional pattern, possibly repeating the Syndicate logo from multiple angles.
She also realizes the floors below may be mirror inversions of the current floor, sharing the same physical space. The hidden chamber from the recap, with the stairwell and ladder, may be the gap between the two levels.
Carl asks Imani about the province boss and learns it is a massive fused ghoul creature filling an entire station. Mordecai mentions a previous fourth floor where puzzle sections flipped and rotated, which makes Carl suspect this floor may physically flip and dump everyone into the hidden chamber below.
Chapter 31
Carl confirms his theory and sends out a warning for everyone to abandon the stairwell stations immediately.
They move a rapid-response cart into the main chamber of Station 36, with Crawler Zhang using a shrinking wand to get it through the tunnels. They then hang it upside down from a makeshift crane and tune its portal to the Abyss.
The Iron Tangle announces that the Krakaren have betrayed them, the floor’s self-destruct has started, and escape tunnels at Stations 12, 24, 36, 48, 72, and 433 will open in eighteen hours, six hours before floor collapse.
When the hatches open, thousands of Krakaren flood in headfirst and drop straight through Carl’s portal into the Abyss. The plan works.
Carl’s group holds the chokepoints while Katia, Elle’s team, and Donut help keep the Krakaren back.
Chapter 32
Carl’s plan is to blow the soul crystals at Stations 12 and 72 simultaneously, but first they need to deal with the province boss.
The plan almost works, but the province boss grabs the cart before it can be pulled through. Then the portal flickers off, and Prepotente, the talking goat crawler, reveals he was already killing the boss by entrancing it into cardiac arrest.
Prepotente says that if they had waited two more hours, the province boss would have died, triggering a chain reaction of soul crystal explosions across the whole system. He is furious that Carl and Donut interrupted his plan.
Carl asks Mordecai how long the god Grull would last if summoned into a mantaur. Mordecai explains that Grull would last about five minutes in a level-40 mantaur vessel, and that once unsummoned, he can be immediately summoned into another vessel with no cooldown.
Carl changes the plan and attacks two mantaur guards, punching one until it starts summoning Grull. They drag it toward the Abyss portal, but as the mantaur transforming into Grull falls through, it wraps its hands around Carl’s foot and pulls him into the portal with it.
Chapter 33
Carl lands in Trainyard E next to the Mimic Rex, the giant level 90 city boss.
The dungeon freezes the fight and announces a Death Challenge: Grull, who is being controlled by his sponsor, Prince Maestro of the Skull Empire, versus the Mimic Rex.
Carl’s plan is to let Grull kill the mimic, then resummon him with another Mantaur into an Abyss portal before he can fully transform.
Grull appears as a four-story war god and splits the mimic in half while Carl gets repeatedly crushed and healed, using his invisibility potion and Mordecai’s Special Brew to survive.
Katia disguises herself as Carl to draw Grull away, while Elle nearly gets killed by Grull while distracting him.
Carl reaches the second mantaur, which Li Na has dismembered and kept alive with healing potions. Carl punches it until the Grull summoning starts again.
With one second left, they throw the mantaur into the portal cart, pulling Grull out of the trainyard before he can finish transforming again.
Chapter 34
Five hours remain. The Mimic Rex is dead, and Carl loots the Map of the Stars, which adds boss locations and descriptions to the neighborhood map.
Carl’s final plan is to send the Nightmare Express into the Abyss loaded with explosives to overload the soul crystal system and destroy the ghoul generators.
The plan works. The ghoul generators explode, and Bautista confirms the trapped crawlers are moving toward the stairwells.
They walk to Station 36, where the stairwell has already opened, but everyone has waited for Carl, Donut, and Katia before going down.
At the stairs, they find Agatha, the old woman with the pink flamingo cart from the first floor, still alive and now level 8. She heads down ahead of them.
Epilogue
Before the post-floor interview, they are met with Loita instead of Zev, who has been sent on a “personal reeducation retreat.” Donut is furious, and Carl realizes the dungeon is tightening information control, cutting off their usual Odette workaround.
During the interview, when Odette tries to mention Eva, Loita cuts the feed. Odette and Loita then get into a screaming match.
After the show, Carl, Donut, and Katia are transferred without warning to the fifth floor selection room, where a wheel determines their next quadrant: Land, Sea, Air, or Subterranean.
Donut spins the wheel, and it lands on Air. Their fifth-floor opponents will be the Dirigible Gnomes, and they will have to storm a sky castle called the Wasteland Fortress.
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