Top Ten List
Bought wholesale by a single sponsor — which tells Carl the purchase was never about crawlers at all.
Story so far
The top ten becomes visible as a bloc in this chapter rather than as a ranking. When The Apothecary signs on as Carl and Princess Donut's third and final sponsor, Donut immediately works out that the same sponsor has also taken Prepotente, Miriam Dom, Lucia Mar, Katia, both of the two-headed crawlers, Elle and Imani — most of the list, in one stroke.
Donut's reaction is proprietary outrage: she does not like sharing a sponsor with all the other top tens, and insists there will not be enough money left to give them all prizes. Carl's is colder. The fact that a single entity went through and bought most of the top ten reads to him as bullshit political posturing that has nothing to do with him — a message aimed at other powers, with the crawlers as the stationery. It only makes sense if the buyer's funds are effectively bottomless, which is exactly what he suspects of Krakaren and The Plenty.
Role
The ranked elite of the crawl, treated here as a single purchasable bloc in someone else's political theatre.
Relationships
Sources — 3 recorded facts, by chapter
- The dungeon's ranked leaderboard of crawlers, unchanged from the previous floor after specialization.
- The dungeon's leaderboard, reproduced in full on a hunter's colored-pencil kill list.
- Bought wholesale by a single sponsor — which tells Carl the purchase was never about crawlers at all.