<NEW YORK TIMES <BESTSELLER &bull; Carl and Princess Donut are ready to battle it out in the epic seventh book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series&mdash;now with bonus material exclusive to this print edition!

The ninth floor. Faction Wars. Nine armies enter, led by rich and powerful aliens from across the galaxy. The winning team must capture and hold the castle at the very center of the battlefield. Strategy, alliances, pitched battles, betrayal . . . It all makes for great fun and even greater television.

But thanks to Carl, Donut, and Katia, this season is different.

For the first time ever, the crawlers have their own army. The NPCs, who are normally used as nothing but cannon fodder, have become fully self-aware and have formed an unprecedented team of their own. And it&rsquo;s not just the crawlers who are at risk this Faction Wars. Any combatant who dies on the battlefield stays in the ground.

For Donut and Katia, the stakes are even higher. No matter who wins the war, only one of them will be allowed to leave this level. If they all want to survive, they&rsquo;re going to need a little help from a veteran or two.

This is it. This is what they&rsquo;ve been fighting toward. <This is war.<

Autorentext

Matt Dinniman is a writer, artist, and musician (well, he's a bass player) from Gig Harbor, WA. He is the author of several books, including the bestselling Dungeon Crawler Carl series.

Klappentext

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Carl and Princess Donut are ready to battle it out in the epic seventh book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series—now with bonus material exclusive to this print edition!

The ninth floor. Faction Wars. Nine armies enter, led by rich and powerful aliens from across the galaxy. The winning team must capture and hold the castle at the very center of the battlefield. Strategy, alliances, pitched battles, betrayal . . . It all makes for great fun and even greater television.

But thanks to Carl, Donut, and Katia, this season is different.

For the first time ever, the crawlers have their own army. The NPCs, who are normally used as nothing but cannon fodder, have become fully self-aware and have formed an unprecedented team of their own. And it’s not just the crawlers who are at risk this Faction Wars. Any combatant who dies on the battlefield stays in the ground.

For Donut and Katia, the stakes are even higher. No matter who wins the war, only one of them will be allowed to leave this level. If they all want to survive, they’re going to need a little help from a veteran or two.

This is it. This is what they’ve been fighting toward. This is war.

Leseprobe
1

Welcome, Crawler. Welcome to Faction Wars.
You are on the ninth floor.

Time to Level Collapse: 30 days or 90 hours after a winner is declared, whichever is sooner.

Views: 231 Septillion

Followers: 887 Quadrillion

Favorites: 420 Quadrillion

Leaderboard Rank: 1

Bounty: 6,000,000 gold

Congrats, Crawler. You have received a Platinum Venison Box.

Remaining Crawlers: 32,429

Warning: Due to the previous floor's rule set regarding looted items from the memory simulation, multiple items have been removed from your inventory. See the inventory tab for a list of items lost.

You have received dungeon mail via Liaison action. The Gate of the Feral Gods is now available and will be waiting for you in a dungeon mailbox.

Warning: The Ceasefire expires in 60 hours or until canceled. Upon expiration of the Ceasefire, only members of defending Team Retribution will be allowed to remain within the city of Larracos. This restriction will remain in effect until certain conditions are met. This restriction does not apply to the Shanty Town ring.

10 teams remain.

Entering Larracos, City of Dreams.

Quest Update! The Bedlam Bride.

The quest is to get the creepy spider to the city. You're in the city, you have the spider with you, sort of, but you haven't won the quest yet? How is that so?

Did you know that in some cultures, fares for travel aren't paid until the traveler safely arrives at their destination?

The spider is still sitting on the bus, so to speak. You just gotta open the doors and let her out, and you'll win the simple prize. What's the worst that could happen?

We appeared in a wet, stinking alleyway between two crumbling buildings. The blue dots of crawlers materialized all around us, appearing one by one as they zapped into existence in random places around the city.

Larracos. We had made it. The first thing I did was wave away the quest notification and search for the number of remaining crawlers. It'd gone down by over 1,300 people. Damnit. That was how many people had died in the time since we'd been pulled up into the sky and the floor collapsed. We'd been gone for just about four days. Most of those were probably people who hadn't survived getting pulled into the sky.

But we were alive. Holy shit. It had worked.

Imani wasn't with us, and I had a moment of panic, but she immediately jumped into my chat.

Imani: Carl, are you guys okay?

Carl: We are. We're here.

Imani: Thank god. When we started to spin there at the last minute-

Carl: Give me a few minutes to figure out where we are, and we'll find a safe room.

Donut sat next to me, sputtering. She'd landed face-first in a pile of mud, and she was completely covered. It had a familiar stink to it. The ocean from the fifth floor. We were in an area that had recently been drained. Very recently drained. The X of a corpse lay nearby, deeper in the alleyway. A concierge shark.

My book of voodoo started spamming notifications each time a new crawler came relatively close. I muted the notifications for now.

I looked up between the two buildings to see a crystal clear blue sky. I couldn't see anything else from our current position. I couldn't even tell how deep into the city we were, but if this part had recently been flooded, then we were likely in one of the lowest levels of the funnel-shaped city.

The buildings were made of stone blocks, and their walls were chipped and pitted. Even before the flooding, I had had the sense this was a poor area of town. A wooden door sat against one of the nondescript buildings, but this deep in the alley, I couldn't tell what sort of building this was. The door itself appeared to be bulging, possibly a result of recent water damage. A dozen meters to our left stood the exit to the alleyway leading to some sort of street. Just past that, a broken railing. A pair of dwarves rushed by in the distance, not pausing at the mouth of the alley.

There were blue dots everywhere on my map, but none in this alleyway.

I had a few chats waiting for me from before I'd appeared.

Florin: I got your note about Lucia. It looks like you made it, mate. I hope I didn't miss anything too exciting at the end of the last floor.

I grunted as I moved to the next one. It was from Quasar, my attorney.

Quasar: Hey, buddy. I'm negotiating with the liaisons, which really means I'm negotiating with the AI, trying to get a face-to-face meeting. We'll see if that happens. It's been a class-9 shit cyclone out here these last four days you've been gone. Lots and lots and lots of legal movement in the inner system, and in your system, that parking lot above the planet has devolved into a mini war zone. Warships threatening to blow things up. Syndicate security intervening. Most of this stuff is good, from your point of view at least. But some of it is going to itch like an infected ass tattoo, especially on the legal front. I'll leave the Faction Wars stuff alone for your adjutant to explain, but remember that contract with Sensation Entertainment, Incorporated? The one for the Vengeance of the Daughter storyline? Yeah. So…