Literature / The Butcher's Masquerade

After Carl's exploits at the end of the last floor, the Gate of the Feral Gods is taken from him, but due to help from his new lawyer, he is given collateral and a promise that he will get it back on the ninth floor. Once again, Carl leaves a meeting with a liaison alive.

Now he just has to survive the hundreds of hunters gunning for him.

The sixth floor is the Hunting Grounds, a vast jungle where tourists from outside the dungeon are allowed to come in and hunt the crawlers for loot. Carl attacks them in their own city early and spends the entire floor whittling them down to size. He even ends up in a personal vendetta with Vrah, the lead hunter, after he kills her sister.

At the end of the floor, hunters and crawlers will be drawn together in a single party, where they will keep the peace under threat of divine retribution.

That party is called the Butcher's Masquerade.

Dungeon Crawler Carl: The Butcher's Masquerade is the fifth book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman. It covers the sixth floor of the Dungeon. The sequel is The Eye Of The Bedlam Bride.

This novel provides examples of:

• Actually Pretty Funny: After Carl stabs the shitty reporter in the neck with the magic pen, the room is flooded with gnoll security guards. When Carl says, "Come on, you have to admit, that was pretty awesome.", one of the guards bursts into laughter and has to be shushed.
• Always Identical Twins: Ifechi, Florin's dead girlfriend, had an identical twin sister. The showrunners use her as the final boss of the floor, making the crawlers briefly think that they resurrected a dead crawler.
• Bullying a Dragon: Smooth move, Naga reporter guy. Threaten notoriously non-compliant Crawler Carl while he's sitting inches away from you holding a magic wand.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: "I’m supposed to be teleported off to some random place. What’re the odds that ‘random’ means right into your lap?"
• Fixing the Game: The gnoll security guard who vets Carl for his first Crawl-Con appearance asks him to throw the drawing contest for his granddaughter, in return for some favors. Carl asks the other judges, who don't give a shit, and they oblige.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Miriam is caught in a trap. During a fight with a reverse vampire and vampire hunter named Viscount Fog, there was a sort of counterspell cascade that left Pony and the vampire hunter both paralyzed and with only one hit point. Fog died at nightfall, and Miriam was stuck because Pony had been holding her when he was paralyzed and she couldn't extricate herself without risking him dying. Worse, the debuff cascade had caused Pony's Ring of Divine Suffering to fire, giving Miriam (the only Crawler or Hunter in range) the Mark, so he'd never be able to heal until she was dead. On top of that, she's now the source of the vampire infection running rampant through the Hunting Grounds and her death is the only way to stop it by disinfecting all of the infected animals and players (the plan had to transfer the curse to Fog and then kill him, solving the problem). With no other option, Miriam asks Carl to kill her in order to save Pony.
  Carl: Miriam, I am not going to kill you. But I will stand watch with you. I’ll keep you safe and Prepotente safe until the sun rises.
• Hypocritical Humor: Carl tells Katia to be careful about gathering former Daughters to her party and the Guild. She points out that he's the one setting up a base of operations a few miles away from Hunter central.
• Internal Reveal: We learned Beatrice was alive in the epilogue of Gate of the Feral Gods. Here, Carl and Donut learn it from Odette.
• Like a Son to Me: Prepotente was one of Miriam's goats before he got a Legendary Biscuit that turned him intelligent, like happened to Donut. Her affection for him has only grown stronger in the Dungeon.
  “My beautiful boy,” Miriam whispered as she turned to dust. “My beautiful boy.”
• Loophole Abuse: Turns out that there's no rule saying that crawlers can't own a spot in faction wars. After multiple parties drop out, Carl uses an out-of-dungeon fangroup to buy a spot so that the crawlers will be able to participate as equals.
• Mad Bomber: Carl, natch. Mordecai told him to take the melee upgrade to his class. Instead, he took Agent Provocateur, a bomb class that gives a boost to intelligence.
• More Expendable Than You: Carl plans to break the peace at the Butcher's Masquerade, which will drag him into the Nothing, in order to start the final slaughter of the hunters. Signet, who has just realized that she is an NPC in an artificial world, does it instead.
• Morton's Fork: Without really intending to do so, Carl forced the male Mantis, Edict, into a nightmare scenario. Carl knew that Vahl, as a future brood queen, would opt to pass the Enthusiastic Double Gonorrhea on to Edict rather than remove her genitalia, so offered the man a choice: we'll protect you in exchange for all your gear (he was the Hive's merchant). Unfortunately, the gear was already contracted out and giving it to Carl would destroy Edict's family, so he passed it along to a contact immediately, leaving him nothing to bargain with. The alternative, mating with Vahl, would also destroy his family, because Mantis matings are carefully contracted and it would be seen as a disgusting betrayal for him to mate with Vahl. So he takes a third option.
• Nice to the Waiter: Carl decides to throw the drawing contest to a guard's granddaughter, because 1) he doesn't give a shit about the cruel galaxy and their appreciation of the monstrous games and 2) hey, maybe it'll help. Given that his second appearance sees him drugged by the mercs who guide him to the stage so he'll go way off book, he's not wrong.
• On Three: Carl tells Donut he'll put in her nipple ring on three. We cut away after "one". A few chapters later, she still hasn't forgiven him for not doing it on three.
• Properly Paranoid: The Hunters are reasonably concerned about Carl, and can you blame them? Vrah finds a way to summon Emberus so that she can get the town guards to worship him and thus prevent Carl from staging another attack on Zockau. A number of Hunters do likewise.
• Refuge in Audacity: What's the first thing Carl does? Teleport into the town the Hunters aren't allowed to leave and cause slaughter and mayhem while they're all drunk off their asses. He kills hundreds of NPCs, ruins the front of the Desperado Club, trapping any Hunters who were partying in there, and gets thirty four Hunter kills. And then he survives. Part of the success of his gambit is due to Miriam and Potente being there, too, trying much the same thing. Potente was casting debuffs with Miriam supporting him, but the only one that worked was the one that got the Hunters all monstrously more drunk than they intended.
• Rule of Drama: The final boss of Signet's quest is Imogen, her half-sister, the high elf queen and the final boss of the floor. Carl immediately realizes there's no way that the dungeon showrunners are going to let some no-name side program get the kill on the final boss, so he works to keep Signet from springing her ambush early. The System AI drags her in anyway so it can watch the fireworks.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: After Carl wins the confrontation with two sets of Hunters who all want him dead, in which he's thrown into the situation with no ability to prepare himself, and gives Vahl Enthusiastic Double Gonorrhea then removes her ability to remove it... A lot of Hunters decide they don't much want to try and trap Carl that way again.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Carl is starting to be troubled by all the experiences he has had, and it manifests as flashbacks to specific events and a roaring sound like a creek or river when it's not specific.
• Stealth Pun: Big Tina's backstory is that she was once an Ursine girl who was cursed for learning to dance. A "dancing bear" is an expression referring to something that's amazing, but not for being good. "It's not amazing how well the bear dances, but that it dances at all."
• Took a Level in Jerkass: In contrast to the thinking NPCs, who Carl pities, he's far more willing to torture and casually kill the Hunters, because they chose to be here, whereas the NPCs are slaves like himself. This is despite the fact that he recognizes that many of them are low level employees of great powers who don't themselves necessarily have that much choice in the matter, since they live in Crapsack Universe.
• Villainous Incest: Honestly, exactly what you would expect from these Syndicate fucks. Circe sponsored the god Diawat so she could fuck her own daughter to cure her of Enthusiastic Double Gonorrhea.
• Wham Line: "I certainly would never have smuggled all those Valtay secret agent guys to Zev and the Borant Emancipation Front if I’d known this was going to happen."
• What the Hell, Hero?: Carl goes above and beyond by immediately teleporting into Zockau, the capital city full of Hunters. Donut and Mordecai both rip him apart for it. But it works.