Portraits revealed through your current reading position.
Underwear-clad human mechanic turned the dungeon's most feared saboteur, now a warlord with a spider in his chest.
By the time the crawl's eighth floor is being chewed over in school reports, Carl has become the single most-discussed crawler in the galaxy — the man who blew up a hunters' capital, bombed his way through the sixth floor, and turned the show's own rules into weapons. Quasar, his attorney, sums up the whole of the previous floor with brutal economy: "Carl fucked shit up. He fucked up a little in the end and now has a spider stuck in his chest."
That floor was the card floor, and Carl's run through it was chaos with a plan inside it. Stranded in the replica of Cuba, he assembled a monstrous deck — a seal, a crab called Raul, a giant terrifying cat, a donkey-snake, and the fused saint Lazarus — alongside Alpha Carl, a card that was simply himself with better hair and a cooler voice. When the sadistic Quan Ch stole his stairwell key, Carl killed him for it and somehow walked away without a player-killer skull. He inherited a flamethrower and a pet meatball from the dying Tserendolgor, and by the floor's end he was wearing Shi Maria — The Eye of the Bedlam Bride — permanently inked into his chest, a demigod spider nobody, including the viewing public, knows what to do with.
He goes into the ninth floor as a co-warlord of The Princess Posse, one of ten teams in Faction Wars, having personally engineered the vote that stripped the rich of their protections. That means the orc Prince Stalwart, the banker Operatic, and Epitome Tagg of The Dream can all now be killed — and everyone from Quasar down expects a shitshow. Quasar, asked straight out by his niece whether representing Carl has put him in danger, admits he thinks everyone is.
A wiry, hard-used human man in his mid-thirties, unshaven, cropped dark hair, perpetually dressed in little more than boxer shorts and scavenged gear, and now bearing an enormous spider inked across his chest — a tattoo whose eye seems to look back.
Co-warlord of the Princess Posse and the crawl's most notorious crawler, entering Faction Wars as both the audience's favourite and its richest target.
Also appears in books you've already read — spoiler-safe to their endings: