The Eye of the Bedlam Bride

The Eye of the Bedlam Bride
Matt Dinniman
Dungeon Crawler Carl #6

The Eye of the Bedlam Bride Summary

Starts with Donut giving a recap of the last book. Prologue where we go back in time to when Odette was Mordecai’s manager. She manipulated his team to make Chaco (The dude Mordecai now hates), kill Mordecai’s brother. She did this to ensure her crawler (Mordecai) made it down a floor and she could get out of her deal and make a bunch of money.

Carl and Donut start the 8th floor in Havana, Cuba. It is a “memory recording” so it shows what real people were doing right before Christmas in this spot on Earth, except no one can interact with them since they are just recordings. The theme for this floor is card battles, like pokemon or magic. They open loot boxes and Carl gets a patch for his jacket that gives him the ability to store up power and then release it all in a single punch, but is warned he needs to use this ability whenever he fills up the power bar or bad stuff will happen.

Carl and Donut explore and fight some mobs before meeting Paz, Anton, and Sister Ines. They all used to be at a prison in this area. Donut insults Sister Ines a bunch because she is a cat girl havan brown, which are multiple things Donut does not like. They end up working together to “flag” mobs, allowing them to become cards for the card game. Samantha messages to say she was eaten by a massive spider, Shi Maria. Carl is able to learn about her from the book about Bahamas mythology, and learns she is a demi-god also known as the Bedlam Bride and is able to drive people insane.

The group enters a town and is locked in and forced to fight a bunch of Ghommids, undead ghost things. They meet a boss named Asojano who talks to them cordially, and asks them to rebuild his shrine to cure the entire village of Ghommids and make them normal people again. Carl and Donut do some practice card battles to learn how the system works. You must have 6 “totem” (Creature) cards in your deck, and there are other types of cards that can buff and debuff creatures and opposing card masters. They go on a show hosted by a former owner of the Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook, Rosetta. We learn some dark parts of Carl’s past. His mother tried to poison his father when he was a teenager then hung herself, but Carl’s father lived and abandoned him. He eventually got found by authorities living alone and was sent to an orphanage then a troubled kids camp until he turned 18 and joined the coast guard.

Rosetta shows an image that Carl knows is fake and says stuff to give him clues about how to use information in the Cookbook, but the interview gets shut down by Harbinger, one of the Caprid goat people. They all go to fix the shrine for Asojano, but then a whole host of other gods show up and things go wrong. Anton and Paz worship a god named Ogun who demands they fix his. Katia messages saying they have to fix Yemaya’s shrine to save her from the Crown of the Sepsis Whore (The thing that means only her or Donut can live through the next floor). Carl has Bomo do that while another god charms Anton. Bomo succeeds and Carl flags Asojano for the card deck. Ogun shows up and kills Anton and does something that means Paz will die soon. Paz reveals to Carl the Sister Ines was the prisoner, they were guards. She killed her whole convent of nuns and her class allows her to charm people so they want to help her. Paz is at peace with dying but then Sister Ines flags him and adds him to her deck, horrifying Carl.

Two more goddesses show up, Yemaya and Eileithyia. Eileithyia is sponsored by Huanxin Jinx, a rich person who always plays in the ascendancy games of the crawl, and also happens to hate Audette (Due to the stuff that happened in the prologue). She gives Carl a quest so she can talk to him and secret and tells him make Audette their adjutant for the ninth floor and she will help Katya skip the ninth floor and make sure the crawlers are actually able to kill people in faction wars.

Carl enters Club Vanquisher to heal a slugpox debuff he received, and meets with the system AI in secret, who talks candidly to him. Later, Katia tells everyone about her Orchid of Eileithyia's Grace, which is why Carl had to rebuild that shrine. It will allow her to skip to the 12th floor and act as a servant of Eileithyia in the meantime. To use it she has to complete an assassination for the Guild of Suffering and kill Astrid, the assistant manager of the Desperado Club. Carl is the only one who can help her since he is also part of the Guild.

Carl and Donut go to a faction wars meeting, which is interrupted by Juicebox (the changeling NPC) killing some of the attendees. They can’t actually die but it stops the voting. Carl tries to get a tenth faction added consisting of Juicebox and the NPC’s he teleported there with the Gate of the Feral Gods. Back in the dungeon Carl and Katia plan the Astrid assassination, and add Uzi Jesus and crab named Raul to their deck. They finally catch up to Samantha but before they attack Shi Maria she talks openly to Carl and tells him her plan. She knows they are allowed to bring a single card with them to the next floor and will allow them to flag her if they take her. She is very cunning and Carl is worried but she is powerful and will be useful so he agrees.

Katia ends up in a drug stupor and Carl learns she is addicted to several of the dungeon’s drugs and needs time to heal, but they have to proceed with their assassination plan anyway. It works and they kill Astrid but a bunch of stuff goes wrong in the process with demons being released and Samantha causing chaos, causing the Desperado Club to be closed. Before she dies Carl learns Astrid is an aware NPC and was almost done with her contract. Her husband is the Night Wyrm, leader of the Guild of Suffering (the one who gave Katia the assassination target). Carl also talks to Damascus Steel and Anaconda, two strippers who were part of Astrid’s family and they go to get revenge. Carl hires the rest of the strippers as mercenaries to fight in faction wars.

Carl and Donut go on Odette’s show but she can not be their adjutant because she is sponsoring a deity, they get an adjutant that should be fair. Odette tells Carl in private that she wants to shut the crawl down. Carl and Donut get sent to Miami for phase 2, except it glitches and grabs a big chunk of Ohio and drops it on Miami.

In this section they have to fight 10 card battles to get tokens and unlock the final boss, who will give a key to open the exit stairwell to the next floor. Their deck consists of Shi Maria, Raul, Geraldo (A monk seal), Lazarus-a-bang-bang (Combo of uzi Jesus and Asojano), Skyler Spinach (A ghommid that can split in two when it dies), and Jola (A big cat thing given by Katia). They win the fights, but Carl accidentally starts a world wide spread of zombies. The final fight features a memory where Carl sees a step-mom he never knew he had finally killed his father with an intentional overdose. He also learns he had a half-brother named Asher he never knew about. They have a hard fight against a Hydra consisting of people they used to know but end up winning and receive a key. Donut tells Carl that Beatrice knew about his half-brother but never told him.

They receive two new totems, Alpha Male Carl and Leveled-Up Frank. The whole gang throws a christmas party and during the recap episode they learn that the System AI has gone rogue and can do what it wants now, although the showrunners pretend everything is normal. Carl goes off on his own based on a sponsor box and meets someone who predicted the memory recording and recites a speech. This is a Residual, but before he shares anything sensitive Orren the Liaison teleports Carl away to prevent anything from happening.

It is now phase 3 of the floor, and many crawlers did not get keys to the stairwell. They are able to battle each other for keys though, creating a lot of crawler vs. crawler combat. Quan Ch, Imani, and Tserendolgor are all in Cuba now also. The crabs and monk seals had a big war and a bunch of them died. Carl’s zombie plague has spread to Cuba and there are a ton of zombies. Because of all the death it starts a demon invasion event, and demons are able to inhabit zombies or low health bodies and need to grab a living soul to return to their home. This causes a whole lot of chaos. Also if you teleport a demon inhabiting a body, it frees the demon into its true form.

Sister Ines is charming a city boss and a bunch of zombies and normal mobs around her. Carl uses Samantha to try to teleport her away and kill her for her key, but Samantha teleports the city boss and all the mobs around also, right when Quan shows up. Chaotic battle and Quan uses a strategy of deck swapping, force plays, and flee cards to get both keys from Carl and Sister Ines. Carl warns Ren that Quan is coming and then uses Samantha and teleporters to do some hijinx. Donut stays far away but Carl teleports in some of their totems and they kill Quan, but he kills a member of Ren’s team first. Ren and her remaining teammate don’t have a key and decide to blow themselves up instead. They give Carl all their loot, plus he gets the celestial cloak and a ton of weapons and cash from Quan.

The damage from the fight rendered the stairway unusable and destroyed the corresponding key. This happens elsewhere meaning not many Crawlers will be able to leave. Then a massive demon, Amayon, inhabits the city boss from earlier. Carl and Prepotente come up with a plan to get people out. The demon lord will try to suck everyone upwards, if they get all the crawlers directly under the stair ways they should be able to sneak through without keys.

We get a flashback and learn that in Club Vanquisher Carl did not actually get a healer for his slugpox but instead got a ring that stopped it. He then trapped his mercenaries in a room where they can not die and infected them all, generating hundreds of slug npc’s. He lets them all out to distract the demons.Donut tries to cast a spell to make a bunch of demons fight each other but a bunch of slugs do a Leroy Jenkins and Elle uses a huge war spell, killing a ton of demons and getting levels.

They then head to a building by the big demon Amayon (They need to free him from the city boss for Carl’s stair plan to work). They find and kill Sister Ines, but this summons her bard patron, the god Ysalte. They have to do a weird card fight against the demon and Ysalte, and during the fight Ysalte summons the Paz card, who uses Katia’s arrow to kill Ysalte. Once they free the demon from her control Carl is forced to make Raul the crab ejaculate into the ocean to increase the npc count to power Amayon’s spell, then uses a spell he got from his got Emerus to summon fire under Amayon to make him more powerful. Everything barely works and the demon cooperates and none of their party die. However right before the card battle ended Donut used a combo spell on Shi Maria and the totem card Alpha Male Carl, but Shi Maria killed Alpha Male Carl right then, forcing her to be combined with actual Carl. She controls his body and inventory, hurts some of his friends, then does a magic tattoo to put herself into his body via an eye tattoo on his chest.

Everyone is ok and Carl does an emergency faction wars proposal to let the fans vote on everything, which the AI approves. The fans vote to remove protections, meaning crawlers can actually kill the other participants. They use the demon trick and head through the stairs to the ninth floor and faction wars.

Epilogue is set in space around Earth. Agatha is more than she seems. Princess Formidable wants to pull the “failsafe” (blowing up the sun), but gets outvoted because all the rich and powerful people in the universe are trapped here. Donut earlier got a new sponsor, Long Haul Biological Waste Management Solutions, and they are here. But it turns out to be a retrofitted ship now holding 50,000 former crawlers ready to help Carl and Donut kill everyone. THE END.