Speaker 1: This is an Unspoiled Network podcast. This is spoil Me
covering Dungeon Crawler Carl Book seven this Inevitable ruin chapters
Christmas Morning. It's not a number, but it's the name
of the chapter. Through twenty two. In these chapters, Carl
still hasn't opened as fucking Christmas Present? What is up
with that? All I want is for him to take
two seconds to open a gift from friends. Why can't
I get what I want? I'm not asking that much.
Welcome to spoil Me. Welcome to the show everyone. I
am Natasha. Thank you Michael for commissioning this episode. I
apologize for my outburst, but I also very much don't
and stand by it. I just don't get it. I
don't understand why it's not even referenced by him. I
just want a moment where we just think about it
at least. Okay, so maybe it hasn't gotten around to it.
But even when it's mentioned by I think Samantha, like, oh,
they look like the guys on the cover of the books,
there's no moment in Carl's head of like, oh, yes
to open that, don't I It's like it's just completely
what it feels like to me is that the author
is sort of setting things up in such a way
as to have him, at a moment of crisis suddenly
remember that and then open and be touched by whatever
his friends gave him, because he needs a boost in
that moment. And you know, I just feel like, if
you want that, you really need to tell me why
he hasn't opened it earlier, because Carl feels to me
like somebody for whom this would be somewhat important. So
much of the theme of these books, especially this one,
has been centered around I realize now I've been lonely.
I need people. Community is important. There's just not really
a good enough reason that he wouldn't have opened this
gift yet. And if there should be, like if you
want to delay it, you need to explain that, because
otherwise it's just weird. It's just really weird. Not only
is it weird that Karl hasn't done it, doesn't think
about it, doesn't seem to even remember. It's really weird.
Donut hasn't reminded him to open them either, because like
it was such a thing when he got his you
know what I mean, and him missing Christmas and everything
I don't understand all, Like, that's the best theory I've
got is that like we're saving it for a moment, which,
if that's true, cheapens that moment for me and makes
it feel like you really had to contrive to get
us here, or there's some other internal reason which could
be true, but it doesn't at the moment, I've got
no information on that, so I'm just like, you know,
I'm working with what I've got, and to me, this
just doesn't make sense. I don't get it. So I
wanted to start off with that and just get it
out of the way because I am preoccupied by it,
and since it didn't happen, I may as well get
it out of the way, and that way I can
continue on with the rest of what actually happened out
of the gate. So we start off with the kind
of flashback to the conversation between Carl and Orin when
Carl got transported to speak to Orin after the interaction
with Paully or Polly's shadow. Really is the more accurate
way to say that, And it's very fun to like
read this now that we have a little bit more information.
But he asks, you know, did Polly make it into
the dungeon. Oran says no, and honestly, I don't know
whether to believe him on this or not. I don't
see why he'd tell Carl the truth. There's just like,
as far as I can see, there's not really a
reason to be honest with Carl that I know of,
Like there's no rule that says that he can't lie
to him, or you know what I'm saying. So Also,
I don't know if Orin would even be aware if
Polly made it into the dungeon or not, would he
know or you know what I'm saying. So I don't
know whether to believe any of this. But we get
to see Carl with Lightning Low, the doggie that he
can't pet, and he is really struggling through the knowledge
of what this switch that he got given does and
what to do. It's actually kind of crazy that we
had the reveal of what this switch does and I've
spent barely any time talking about it. But I think
that is due to the fact that we had too
much content packed into too little like podcasting time, and
Michael went ahead and like redid the chapter breakdown. So
I think I'm gonna have a little bit more room
to chat, and I think that will help a lot.
And it's one of those things that I it's like,
you catch you catch me in the wrong moment. Maybe
I'm gonna be like, yeah, fuck it, you know, but
I really tend to be a hopelessly hopeful person. To
be honest, I just don't really ever believe the worst
case scenario is going to happen. Part of why Trump
actually getting elected blindsided me. I'm not trying to say
I'm always right by any means. A lot of the
hopefulness just comes from privilege, if we're being honest, But
I do have this innate faith that more people than
not are decent, and that more people than not would
do the right thing, and that as bad as things
maybe it can and will get better because people care
and will be willing to do something about it. Now
that doesn't mean that were I in Carl's situation, I
wouldn't pull the plug. I've gotta be honest. I mean,
right from the start. You may remember, when he first
gets sent into the dungeon, there's that whole group of
people that decide to just camp out in one of
the safe rooms and let themselves die. And I said
at the time, like that might be me. Actually, yeah,
I am still kind of feeling like that's what I
would do. I don't know. I don't know. It's hard
to say, mostly because there's like a huge part of
me that has this deep curiosity as well, and so
I feel like I just want to see what the
dungeon's like. I just want to know. And it's so
fun to me that there's a point as Carl is
thinking about what this button does where he's like, I
don't know, whatever I pick, whether i'd get to see
what happened. And I feel like that in itself is
an indicator that he's not done. The fact that he
is still even wondering would I get to see the outcome?
But I want to know what happens. That to me indicates, Yeah,
you're not letting go. You wouldn't have that in you
if you were done, if you were ready to be done,
and for all of this to be done. It's just
that little yeah, but what would that be? What would
that mean? What would you know? No, it wouldn't be there,
it wouldn't be like that. So he really struggles for
a while because he's just like, this is too much
power for one person. I have it in my hand
to completely end everything, just me, my decision. That's not fair,
that doesn't make any sense. He goes through everything, and
he's very surprised to see that it's not just like
a page with a button that's like in the world
and you press it. It's several tabs with all of
this information that takes a minute for his brain to
sort of translate it, and he screenshots all of that,
which I'm very grateful for. I don't know how much
of this is going to be of any import whatsoever,
but it's just good policy, especially considering later what he
decides to do having this info. I don't know how
useful it will be, but it's possible will matter. The
interface didn't control the AI. Instead, it controlled the device
they used to install the AI into the Primal Engine.
After the AI was installed, the device remained physically nearby,
but no longer had direct influence over the AI. Still,
I had sense it kept a metaphorical eye on the
AI and the computer it now called home. It had
metrics such as physical location, temperature, and several other things
I didn't understand. None of the numbers seemed to be changing.
Other than to fluctuate back and forth between two digits.
So location interesting, there's something. It took me about ten
minutes of searching to find the fuse page. It listed
five benchmarks required for the fuse to blow, but didn't
really say what they were. Only two were. The five
were marked as conditions met, and there it was the
button override conditions and activate fuse warning warning. And he
has a moment of thinking, like, wouldn't this be kinder
to everybody if I did this? You know, they just
had their Christmas party there with all their friends, and
maybe ending it now is less horrible, But you know
what it comes down to there is like you're not
giving them the option. You're taking it upon yourself to decide.
And that's the danger in this always. You know, I
think there are times where a person has the right
to decide on someone else's fate, but they are few
and far between. And this is Banana's the proportion of this.
I mean, you know, if I didn't pres the button,
could I use it for leverage? And He's like no,
as soon as they know that's it, I'm dead, And
I'm like, yeah, absolutely, could I set up some sort
of dead man's trigger. They'd find a way around it.
And what would be the point The fact I even
had this power might be enough to cause them to
trigger the fail save on their own. Should I pretend
like I didn't have it? What would be the point
at that? I could literally die at any moment and
this would all be lost. And he has a moment
here the button was right there, one mental push. Do
you remember the circus? That was fun, wasn't it? And
I was kind of sitting here wondering why is that
in his head? And then I remember that his mother
says that when they're at the Grand Canyon, and I
think it's supposed to have been her contemplating jumping off.
And so it's just that feeling of like am I
gonna do it? Am I gonna do it? He's like
encountered before, you know. And then he thinks about like
the AI letting it happen, and he thinks that, well, no,
it likes this, it's having fun. And then he goes,
hold on, if that's true, it wouldn't let me access
this to begin with. It must want to die. And
then he comes to the conclusion it had to be
a trap or a test I'd click the button and
nothing would happen, or I'd die, or the solar system
would literally get destroyed. And this is when he thinks,
would I even get the chance to know what happened?
And he reaches out to Donut and says, are you
doing okay? And she says when are you coming back?
I miss you? Which is she just doesn't really often
say that sort of thing. And it's just a moment,
you know. I didn't know what I wanted to do.
But that wasn't true, was it. I did want to
hit the button. I wanted it more than anything in
the world. My anger at the powers that made this
happen were bright, so bright. I miss you too, Donut,
but not bright enough. I decided to look through the
rest of the menus to see what else was in there,
And just as I was about to say my goodbyes
to the dog and get back out there, I saw it.
It was an option at the very end of a
list of twenty status notifications Disconnect Containment warning. This will
disengage all metrics, all metrics and controls, including the fuse system.
It will render the containment unit inert. The failsafe will
no longer function. Most controls will cease to function. I
paused again. It was literally the only other button to press.
I thought about Polly's warning, and now I wondered which
of those two options he was warning me about. God
damn it, this was a trap, too, wasn't it. I
actually had three options, assuming the buttons did what they claimed,
I could do nothing. I could press the fuse and die.
Or I could relieve myself at the burden and press
the button to turn it all off. But if I
turned it off, did that mean I would be freeing
the AI? What did that mean? What did that look like?
Who set this trap? Somebody built this menu? Which of
those three options would hurt the syndicate the most? And
which of those three options would protect my people the most?
When I framed it that way, the decision was suddenly
quite easy. Doughnut, I'll be back soon. I pressed the
disconnect containment button. Tire new interface blanked out, leaving nothing
but the map Already, the little red dot over Earth
started to grow. Welcome to the party, pals, I said,
I don't understand this. Disconnect containment disengage all metrics and controls,
including the FUSE system, and will render the containment unit inert.
So why is the dot turning red or not turning
red but getting bigger? Like I understand that this means
that he can no longer press the end of the
world button, But why is it welcoming everybody to the
party pals? Is it just ensuring that nobody gets out
of this? You can't press the button either, It's not
an option for you. Is that all he means? I
feel like I'm missing something here. Jeff says. It means
all the folks out in orbit can now come to
Earth and the Syndicate can't stop them. Seraphim says, the
syndicate put puts artificial limiters on the AI they use
for the Crawls to try and control them. He turned
off all those controls. Both are both of those things true?
Both what Jeff and Seraphim are saying. Jeff is saying, Now,
oh maybe I'm wrong. Ms T says, the AI containment
is what he turned off. No, I get that. I
don't know what that means. Obviously that's what he did,
because disconnect containment. It's just like that's the wording they
keep using, But it doesn't mean anything to me. Does
that make sense? What does what does containment mean? Is
that keeping the AI from connecting to other ais? Or like,
you know what I'm saying, I feel like this doesn't
seem that clear to me, and I'm wondering if I'm
the only person who wasn't getting this. The fact that
Jeff thinks that he was wrong now is a bit
of an indication that maybe this was unclear to others too.
So that makes me feel a little bit better, Saraphim says.
It means the AI isn't limited to just the area
they want it to control and can expand its influence. Okay,
so potentially can influence like everybody off planet. Also, can
the AI get into the ships of people who are
like orbiting? Is that where like I don't, I don't
know how any of this works, you know what I'm saying. Anyway, Okay,
we get a little breakdown of battalions here on the
Kindle version. This is not obviously in the audiobook version.
One hundred and first Crocodiles one hundred and second, Bulwark
Battalion one hundred and third, recom Lesionaires one hundred and fourth,
Naughty Little Piggies one hundred and fifth scream Warriors one
hundred and sixth, Bloody Leeches one hundred and seventh, White
Dragon Urban Defense, and each of them different. General Crocodiles
is fluorin, but Bulwarks is tran Lesionaires is Bodie, not
a little Piggies is Tippid, Scream Warriors is Jurgen, Leeches
is Boomer, White Dragon is Lena. So Seraphim just wrote, Rafo,
y'all have got to help me out here. I don't
know what that means. Why would you say that, Why
would I know what that is? Help a girl out? Oh,
Seraphim says, read and find out. Okay, Well, this is
the thing is like I don't know what I'm supposed
to get about it and what I'm you know what
I mean. There are times where it's like set up
in a way that it feels like I am meant
to be going oh shit, because I know what it
is and I don't want to miss an oh shit moment,
But I don't know if I'm supposed to get it
or not. There's a lot going on in these books,
and there are times where it's unclear to me, like
if there has been given enough information already where I
could piece this together if I were paying better attention,
or if I understood the intricacies of certain things enough,
or if it's like no, no, no, you don't know yet.
It's fine, you'll get there, you know what I mean.
So we start off with in chapter twenty, Justice Lights
entry about how he killed an NPC in anger and
that it's the first time he's ever done that it
really haunts him, and that to him it represents what
being a crawler has done and changed in him. It's
like a little microcosm, and it's just like, I really
hope that my trap ideas and stuff at least help somebody.
That's the only thing getting me through. And that's followed
up by crawler Drakia, who she is writing? I'm saying, Drakia,
I don't know if it's a she. They write in
the twenty second edition, Justice Lights was the eighth I
don't know if you survived this, and if you did,
I doubt you will ever have the chance to see
these words. But if you're out there, I hope you're watching.
Your traps have seen saved my life more times than
I can count. I am working on a big one
based on your seeking Fleschet design. We all make mistakes,
we hurt those we haven't intended to hurt. These are
the tides of life. But in this case, it was
not your fault. They put you here. You were a good,
gentle soul. They turned you into a warrior. They are
the engineers of this all force them to look upon
you and see what they wrought. And yes, I agree,
it's doesn't completely absolve anybody of responsibility for their actions,
but I definitely think that it is a balm to
know that, like, you've been put in an impossible situation
and this doesn't make you a bad person. It makes
the situation completely inhumane and cruel, you know. So we
get the summary of the battle rules. I'm not going
to go over all of this again. And Karl arriving
back at the UH the Princess posse, so he's yelling
to Jurgen, who is very excited to see that he
is still alive. Apparently it had been like going around
maybe that he wasn't going to make it, and he
is like reacting. Everybody is reacting to the fact that
the ceasefire has so suddenly completely collapsed. Justice, did you
have the throne room prepared before it got locked in place.
Justice Light it is done, and Justice Light being here
after all of this is just so interesting. I cannot
wait to Like, I don't know how much of everybody's
story we're going to get, you know, but I really
enjoy these little moments of Karl getting to interact with
crawlers that he knows from the cookbook, and how surreal
that must be to him. He didn't acknowledge me any
more than the others when we first met, except for
a slight bow, one that lasted a little too long,
long enough that Mordecai had spent a contemplative moment looking
back and forth between me and the eagle creature. I
think this is Mordecai clocking. Okay, they've communicated somehow, which
like technically is correct, But like if I were thinking that,
I know, I wouldn't be getting it anywhere close to
right how that worked. But I believe that the way
the skylefowl work, that kind of bow would really mean something,
and that Mordecai sees that the one winged eagle was
shorter and stockier than most. His feathers were all black
tinged with gray, and a twin tuft of feathers upon
his head gave the impression he had horns, making him
look strangely like he was related to Big Tina. I
just keep thinking about Sam the Eagle here, guys. I'm
just it's I know that that's not like necessarily accurate
to who to the coloring and everything that is described here,
but saying the eagle, it's not like their horns. He
has two tufts of hair that kind of give the
impression of ears more than anything. But nevertheless, it's just
I keep thinking about that. And Justice has been more
like using the slugglows as assistants because they have just
no fear of getting blown up. His class title was strange.
He was an origamist, and I have no idea what
the hell that even meant. So I have to assume
this is something regarding how intricate he can make his traps,
because the whole thing with origami is folding in really
complex ways to create from one single piece of paper
a remarkably intricate figure of some kind, oftentimes an animal,
but not necessarily so I'm thinking that it's something where
he is able to fold like traps into each other,
or make multi level traps, something like that. I don't know.
I'm fascinated by this though, so of course Doughnut finally
comes running over. Had been really worried about Carls. That's like,
why are you all covered in blood? And he, you know,
can't explain everything now because we're kind of it's crunch time.
But she can smell that cat food. She's like, why
do you just smell like Ferdinand? And he says, I
found some of his old cat food in the elf castle.
But in this section we don't get anything with that.
So I'm really interested in that cat foods ill guys,
what's up with it? I don't get satisfaction here yet.
A lot of things, a lot of things I'm still
waiting on now. I'm debating exactly how I want to
talk about some of what's going on here, because here's
the thing I don't. I am personally not somebody who
is rivetted by discussions of battle formations or anything like that.
You know what I'm saying. It's difficult for me to
feel like that would be interesting to listen to just
me like repeating how all everybody is set up, anything
like that. I feel like the better way to approach
this is likely to just Okay, I'm going to discuss
the form nations as they come up, you know what
I'm saying, And it might just behoove me to like
keep it in mind that this might be important, but
I'm not going to get too intricate with that. At
this point, that's not even really as much of a thing.
But I know that's like going to be going forward
likely pretty important to a degree. So I just kind
of wanted to address that as we go into it,
because I don't have the kind of mind that can
keep that sort of thing straight without visual reinforcement. And
I'm not going to be making any It's okay, I
don't need to. I think that's a little excessive. A
lot of people are in place and like ready, more
so than I was expecting. I'll be honest, I was
sort of feeling like, oh my god, are we screwed
right now? You know, and it seems not. It's like,
we definitely need more time to get certain things set up.
But it was a little encouraging to see not necessarily
that some folks are ahead of schedule, because I don't
feel like that's correct, but more that a lot of
the team is prepared for an emergency when there is
this sudden changing plans. Carl's teammates are more mobile and
are more adaptable than I had been worried they'd be.
And it just feels like he has got folks to
really rely on, which I find just so deeply fucking comforting.
Just the fact that there are folks out there who
are serious, who are capable. It's just nice. I just
like this is so you know what I'm saying, Saraph
Him says, if I recall correctly, Drakia was the crawler
famous for making elaborate traps, so the showrunners screwed over
by sabotaging one of her traps to blow up in
her face. Right, Although again, I think Drakia might be
a male. I feel like it's I do this because
it ends with an A, and so I think that's
a you know, female name. But I feel like Drakia
was a guy and that they've used he him pronouns before.
Michael says, I don't think crawlers get to later floors
unless they're ready for shit to go sideways at any time. True,
but there is It's a very different thing to be
in charge of a bunch of other people with that.
It's one thing to personally be ready to go and
ready for anything. And I understand that like pretty much
everybody that we're dealing with here is like a crawler,
a former crawler, or we've got some like a pretty
decent amount of npcason here as well, But it is
just sort of an unknown quantity right now. How well
is everybody gonna work together? You know what I mean?
And it could be the kind of talent where being
a survivor actually doesn't make you a good leader and
it does the opposite, you know what I'm saying, depending
on what you're like. And I'm sure that we're going
to run into somebody probably who isn't as much of
a team player as we fucking wish, But as of
right now, it just feels like so solid. So Samantha
is being very difficult here, Louis is on his way in.
I'm trying to find the bit here. We're on our way.
Samantha sneaked your way onto the party planner. She's not
a designated scout. What should I do? Which if she's
not approved as a scout when she hits the border,
it will keep her from coming in, which means that
there will be, as he puts it, a Samantha sized
hole in the plane. And when he's like, you need
to get off, she says, it's okay. Louie and I
will crash together and he will parish you down into
the woods with me, where we can build a log
cabin and he can grow a beard. One that's all
scraggly and kind of itchy, but it also smells like
a campfire. I'm sorry if that makes you jealous, Carl,
which is the best way to end that fucking paragraph.
And when Carl is like, no, Louis, you really got
a dumper. I'm sorry, Samantha, but figure it out, she says, no, wait,
Louis can just come back. It's a suicide mission. And
I like Louis. I like him more than Charlie. I
don't want him to die yet. And it's a moment
of Carl being like, she's not stupid, she's genuinely worried
about him not better, you know. But she's sort of
playing this off like I'm just so goofy, you know,
and he has to be like, yeah, that's not exactly
correct though. So Ellie is taking stock of the hardware
they are working with, and she's like treby Chay's as
far as the eye can see, why are they fucking
allowed to have all this shit? Soldiers and mercenaries are
mounted on zebra looking things like they're going to retreat
or charge at any minute. I think the rocks they're
throwing are a cover for something else. Don't love that.
Don't love mounted mercenaries at all, by the way, and
by the time we'd reach the southern border of the
ground would be mostly flat. The Harley Davidson was rode
bike and wasn't great for this, and I decided to
use the chariot for now. Next to me, Jamal rolled
up and he's just like, oh, I can't wait to
get into the mix, and he's not coming with him.
He does not know this yet, but once he is informed,
he's very upset. And Doughnut tries to be the like, oh,
you're actually going to be doing the hardest part, and
I think it's only you that could possibly pull it off,
and he's like, betch, don't play with me. I know
what you're doing. Please do not play in my face
with this, and she just goes well I tried and
takes off, which a fair you know, if he collapsed
you he clocks you, it's fine. Then we have the
fucking uh little castor guys that all come out like
the dude has turned me back into his other form.
It's a whole thing. Anyway. They are very young, and
so all of them, it's like absolutely not. But I
have a suspicion of probably going to get up to
some shit. So I hope we've got an eye on them,
a really clear close eye on them. Let's see. Mm hmmm.
Splash Stowne took control of one of the transports and
drove it over as the other started piling in. I
pulled out the six pack missile launcher and attempted to
affix it to the chariot, but I received an error.
You have used up your allotted armor options. Vehicle upgrade
not allowed. This is the sort of thing where I'm
feeling like maybe that Oregamist class could be useful, you know,
if it's one thing, but it's actually five things and
you managed to sort of just trick the system. That'd
be cool, be interesting. So the Dreams artillery started pounding
our defenses at the southern front just as we arrived,
and it's mentioned that like, this is a continual barrage
that is not actually meant to break through. It is
simply meant to exhaust everybody who has skills or powers,
mages primarily that are going to be doing defensive stuff,
tried and true kind of tactic. The list of active
protections for our side was literally three pages long. So far,
other than the artillery and occasional bursts of sniperfire, there
hadn't yet been a raid on our position that would
fully test the defenses. I knew from Florin that the
Northern Front was another story. They were pushing back wave
after wave of mercenaries. So far, the enemy was utilizing
their meager supply of unenthusiastic dungeon born in PCs to
test out our defenses. It had quickly evolved into a stalemate,
a war of non offensive spells and counterspells. We had
advantage of mages and knowledge, but they had numbers and
superior firepower. And he has a moment later where he
is just like, I can believe You've got to keep
them out of here for a week. This is impossible,
like a real how in the fuck am I supposed to?
You know? And I feel him on that, because that
has been the emotion I've been running up against every
time I remember how this works. It's just like this
fucking sucks. This fucking sucks. I don't recall what, if
any conditions would need to be met in order to
end this sooner, but the fact that like Donut can't
do almost anything because she is almost all her offensive
abilities are magical sucks. Ass dude, I hate it. We
gotta figure something out. Let's see someone from Empress to
Nadia's prison had prism had gotten him behind our position
and found one of the escape tunnels, and had unleashed
a powerful instant rivers square roll that had caused a
ton of havoc. A few soldiers had leaped out of
the trenches the water poured in, and they were immediately
picked off by snipers from the enemy side. Despite the
heavy fog, that scout, along with a total of six others,
had all been captured or killed so far thanks to
our efforts. The scout from the Prism had not been
a mercenary, but a Saccathian prince of some kind, one
of Donadia's actual relatives. Pieces of the saboteur littered the
battlefield now after he stepped upon a simple land mine
trap when he attempted to flee, sucks to suck. So
he sends out orders. If we captured an enemy and
we could keep them alive but unconscious, then we would
do so. The NPCs and the mercenaries born outside the
dungeon were to be separated. There were spells that could
turn the NPCs to our side. The mercenaries had another
purpose if they, if any, gave us trouble, or if
it wasn't feasible or safe to them. My orders were clear,
kill them, loot them using safe looting protocols, keep the body,
report it to one superior officer who would passed the
information back to base, where a group of those who
preferred to stay out of the direct fighting were keeping
track of the big picture for us. I blinked at
the wide, glittering expanse of traps twinkling through the fog
of the no man's land between our position and the
Nauga fortifications. Most of our traps remained intact and hidden
thanks to Justice Light's protection spell. It was something he'd
figured out a long time ago, but it had never
grown into practice because it was thought it only worked
on alarm traps. Justice, along with a few other veterans,
had dozens of tricks up their sleeves or wings when
it came to safeguarding and hiding traps. This no man's
land thing is really interesting to me. I know this is,
you know, based on real jargon, and it says the
enemy corridor into our territory was only about a kilometer wide,
and then they keep saying only and I just that's
quite wide to me. I don't know, what do I know?
So I'm trying to like, there's so much packed in here.
It's very tempting for me to just like read word
for word what's going on. But uh, you know, I
have to kind of like make sure I'm just touching
on some of the most important stuff. So a tank
gets destroyed, they'd scored a direct hit. I sent out
a quick order, but I saw Tran was already on it.
Another moment of me being like fan fucking tastic. I
love this so much. Entering the Princess Posse forward position
defended by one hundred and second Bulwark Battalion. Battalion is
currently at ninety eight percent strength. I don't know how
that's calculated exactly, I'm curious about that. Does that mean
like that's how many people from the original battalion are
still alive or is that about how their health has
been affected or what? The back of my head continued
to tingle with an odd sensation. I really don't like this.
So he's got the he's got the fucking uh daughter
thing on his back full and is walking around with
it to the point that later on he gets soul
poisoning that he's dealing with again. And I understand his
reticence to use it because he brings up that like
they're in very close quarters at one point, and we've
seen how intense the damages that he can do, and
he would probably set off all the traps and kill
so many of his friends. Like I totally understand, and
I get it, But oh my god, do I fucking
hate him just having to hold onto this really toxic
ability until the ideal opportunity presents itself. It fucking blows.
It makes me so nervous. So let's see. Mages and
soldiers with spears and bows and crossbows were spread evenly,
all of them sweating and exhausted from constantly holding back
the giant rocks, all were hunched over peering into the
magical periscopes. That does not look comfortable. I thought, I
put in a mental note to have the positioning adjusted.
These guys would have to stand like this for hours
on end. I thought that was an interesting detail. Not,
you know, it's such a small thing to mention. Oh,
I don't know. It just sort of about my attention.
Let's see a bunch of those robot read guys just
pulled up in several trucks and are moving to the
enemy trenches. I'd lost track of the invisible madness guys.
There's over a hundred of them. And finally somebody yells out, guys,
what is that? Is it another illusion? I don't think so.
Someone else said there's a little back and forth about
buying things from pawnshops that are inevitably stolen. It's either
that it was stolen, or it's that a very poor
person hawked their stuff. They may be poor because they
are an addict and they have hawked all of their
stuff or keep doing that, or perhaps it's simply that
they are struggling in general. But yeah, people will sell
things that are not stolen plenty. So this is when
we see one thousand pets heading in direction Dumplin' juiced
rot sticker behemoth level forty, suffering from the gurgles, suffering
from insanity, suffering from eat your face off rabies, and
fed a truck stop boner pill, and we find out
exactly how they are created. They can be fed something
that keeps them from exploding, and they can be turned
into pets, loving and faithful If given the opportunity to
grow up, they get bigger and bigger and have a
small amount of intelligence. When they get older, they have
the same attack as the females and acid spray, which
allows them to hunt and fight alongside you without having
to worry about them blowing your kneecap off. What the
reavers do is grab a bunch of babies and dole
them out to their warriors. The warriors or up their tummies,
play fetch with them, and help them level up until
they reach level forty. The rot stickers grow to love
and trust their masters. Then the reavers lock them in cages,
inject them with size altering sterroids, inflicted them with a
bunch of nasty, contagious debuffs, and unleash them on enemy
positions as biological seeking missiles. Oh and they also stop
giving them the medicine that keeps them from blowing up.
A level forty rod sticker Behemoth packs the same punch
as a stick of Goblin dynamite. This sucks, all about,
all about sucks. Hate it the fact that they are
contagious and will explode, spattering so many people with this
contagious like this, I hate it. I hate it. Okay,
So one of them exploded in mid air, showering gore
over the trench. The rest crashed back down, disappearing back
again behind the wall as thorns as thick as my
arm sprouted from the dirt encompassing them. I turned to
see Tran skitter down the trench, his voice super naturally amplified.
And I want to mention that trend is in the equivalent,
as Carl puts it, of like if the spider legs
that Odette has were paired with Ironman armor, which sounds awesome, Frankly,
let's see, did you. A short moment passed and the
dwarfs and gnomes started popping back up from the tunnels
fire in the hole. Someone shouted, and we all hit
the deck again as the entire line of dirt in
front of us exploded. I was physically lifted from the
scaffolding and people called out all around as we crashed heavily.
Down below. Mongo squawked in fear and rend started running
in panicked circles as the sky went completely black. Back
in place, Back in place, defend the line. The notification
appeared across my interface, blinking, What is that? What is
that from? Is that automatic AI notification? It just feels
so instructive. It's not saying the line has been breached.
It's saying defend the line. It's it's just different, you
know what I mean. It feels like orders, it's different.
I don't know, I just sort of I just sort
of noticed that. Let's see, there was the battle armor
version which she wore. Now, yeah, the YadA talked about
this already. Gurglers in the trenches and Elf shouted as
she rushed through the center of the trench. She rushed
towards us, pursued by a group of about ten veterans
who were all screaming towards us, blood spewing from their
mouths and eyes. Someone cast a spell, filling that section
with dirt. The wall of hear right in front of us.
Another with a surrenderaled gore like flamethrower pushed me aside
and started baking the filled in section of dirt. A
dozen arms and legs and claws emerged as the infected
started pulling themselves free, only to be burned and melted
by the powerful weapon. Fallen soldier notifications blinked across my interface.
Fucking Christ. So the person who was using the flame
thrower is named Kristin. She's a Crisper is her class,
and she's like, that's a magical attack. What the fuck?
They infected their pets before the magic band, so it's
an exploit. The moment I hear this sentence, I'm like,
Victory is here, sweet, and I like that. It takes
a second where before Carl realizes who it is, because
I'm just like, no, this is just it's very much barreness,
victory coated. That's her. And she says the factions had
agreed many years ago to never use it again because
it's so insidious. It's what caused the insanity and the
rabies de buff. I'm not familiar with that fourth deep buff.
So the fact that they agreed not to use it
and now they are. Is that also by agreement or
is this something that this group is doing that is
kind of breaking the unspoken rule. So let's see, we've
got the leeches in place, Colonel Boomer said, chomping on
his unlit cigar, ready to pluck some cheese sticks. And
cheese sticks apparently is just like the thing we're calling
them now. I find this extremely weird, but it's not
exactly like I'm mad at it. It's just more like,
what I have to assume there is something about this
that's like, what's the wording I want here that it's
like there's another slang that sounds like cheese sticks, and
we just went with this because it's like similar enough.
But uh yeah, anyway, he was a grizzled old elf
that had survived one of the earliest seasons of Dungeon
Crawler world. He looked like someone had taken the world's
fattest bulldog, pickled it for about five thousand years, gave
him elf years, and then shoved a cigar in his mouth.
I would never have guessed he was an elf. He
looked as solid as he was old. He had a
voice to match Colonel and the Princess posse. This is
a subordinate. His class of leggett led to some confusion,
but allowed him to buff a large number of soldiers
at once. According to Tippid, the Old Man had been
an outspoken critic of the Crawl for a long time.
He was a tenor. He'd survived as a merchant before
finally escaping. He'd been banned from the Crawl con years
ago after threatened to fist, fucking orchest showrunner to death
during a panel. Porthos had publicly distanced himself from the
militant former Crawler after that, but apparently they'd been in
close contact the whole time. There was an active warrant
for the Old Man's arrest after a deadly way station
brawl a few cycles back, a brawl that had started
after an argument about the Crawl. He'd killed someone and
had disappeared into the ether. Bro sounds bananas, So just briefly,
if you already saw this on the tiktoks, I'm sorry,
but this felt for me like we're doing patent a
little bit right with this guy. And I realized, like,
as I'm thinking this, what do I even fucking know
about Patten m Am? I even right about this, so
I go look him up on Wikipedia, and you know
the fact that this dude is as grizzled as he is,
swears as much as he does, is chewing on a cigar,
It all feels like it follows, right. I still think
that's likely what's happening. But man, yell, when you look
up a fucking historical figure, especially it dude, the way
that it just never fails to disappoint, you know. Like,
so dude, first of all, was like a wildly anti
Semitic and basically it was like, I mean, I'll fight
the Nazis because we're supposed to be like making things
so that he essentially he was like, I'll fight the
Germans because this is part of a larger plan for Europe.
But the Germans are the only decent people in Europe,
and Nazism really isn't a bad idea, is his thinking.
And it's the other thing that I was, like, I
mainly focused on my video was he was forty eight
years old and got into a relationship with his seventeen
year old niece and everybody knew it. He openly bragged
about it, His wife knew, his daughter knew. The girl
moved to Europe with him and co hosted dinner parties
with all of his friends. Everybody knew it was not
even a secret at all, and yet his fucking biographers
are like, no, he didn't. He just said he slept
with her because he wanted to feel virile because he
was old, but he didn't actually do that. It was
like a father daughter relationship. Really, No, that's what you
wish it was, because you think he's a decent person,
along with the anti Semitic shit. One of his biographers
finished quoting him and said something like, clearly he had
become delusional. No, he was an anti semi and you
just don't want to say that because it doesn't fit
the tidy little picture that you're trying to paint of
this man. It's just wild because when people are like, well,
why didn't that woman come forward about how she was treated?
This man literally told everybody, and historians are still like, now,
that never happened. The women don't come forward because the
man can literally say it himself, and you still won't
believe it. You still don't believe it. Girl killed herself
days after he died, surrounded by photos of him. But
they were a father daughter relationship. Get the fuck out
of my face week week. These biographers should be fucking
tard and feathered. All this to say, we are definitely
going to be getting, like, I think, a more lovable,
grizzled version of Patton that is sort of the myth
that I believe exists in our minds and not the
actual asshole that he seems to have been. I just
wanted to touch on it, though, because it really did
feel like this is our you know what I'm saying. Sorry,
I'm just seeing in the chat Michael talking about pawnshops,
and let's see, I assume it's by agreement since we
know they're all allied against the Crawlers. And yeah, I
think that's likely true. Jefferson. Jeff Richardson, I almost told you.
Jefferson says, cheese dick sounds like a Philly insult. It's
not even cheese dick, Jeff. It's cheese stick, like a
mozzarella cheese stick. It's even less insulting than that. Like
it's weird. It's just a weird one, Jeff says. He
and MacArthur also had their own uniforms altered like fancy
little Hitler boys. Fucking wild Jesus. So yeah, it's uh.
Let's see, Michael says, the abuses of the church and
of other people in authority positions were also known by people,
and the most they did was tell people not to
leave their kids alone with them. Yeah, it's just remarkable
that like biographers are faced with all of these facts.
Their job is to tell based on facts, and they
can still just editorialize wildly and be like, but that
didn't really happen, get a different job. Okay, clearly you
do not want to engage with this person on the
level of them being an actual human being with flaws,
and if you're not prepared to do that, you shouldn't
have this job. End of So let's see most of
those pasty cousin fuckers from the dreamer cowards, they'll run
if we get close to their chuckers. They'll have them
surrounded with traps, so we gotta be careful. Your spy says,
they have cavalry. Those of the cheese sticks you really
got to look out for, especially now the Epitome household
guard is in here with us. The Epitome family ain't stupid,
and let's see, he wears the most ridiculous helmet you've
ever seen, really, donut ask. He does not get into
details with this, but obviously she's going to be looking
for that. They haven't moved since the tanks, since they
were uncovered. I wonder if they're decoys. Ellie said she
would take a closer look, but I told her to
stay back. And finally, Tran said, Ellie watched at least
a hundred of the madness go invisible and disappear, so
they could be anywhere, likely sneaking in right now. There
probably ain't that many of the real viceroys in here,
probably a bunch of the regular cheese sticks wearing the robes. Still,
we need to find those creepy fucks. The ones that
go invisible and sneak in are called the monkey wrenchers.
A few seasons back, a group of twenty of them
single handedly took the Dreadnaught and Naga castles during the
first few hours. That's bunkers twenty in a few hours.
Don't like it. I had no idea where the term
cheese stick had originated. I'd seen a few fuck the
cheese sticks tattoos already. Do we have a good idea
of who's in the trenches, Boomerass, tran nodded, and any
fallback position three looks to be their officers in Hospital Corps.
Trench two is mostly empty but has a few guards.
Everyone else is in the first trench system, which isn't
anything like ours. It's just a straight line with a
few bunks. It's manned solely by NPCs and mercenaries. As
far as we can tell, no Inner Circle officers from
any of the teams. Most of the banners of PRISM
it might be all of the PRISM based on the numbers.
I was expecting more Naga infantry, but I can see
only one of their standards, and a smaller portion of
Madness troops are also present, But the Madness marks are
really from the Lennig team. They just took over. No orcs,
no operatics, only a few reavers, and those were the
ones with the pets. So Carl here is checking in
with the NPC team. They are prepared, and Brittany is
in charge of them, and it's mentioned that he doesn't
really know how that happened, but she has wound up
managing them, being sort of the liaison. And let's see,
Donut had gone stiff. She too was looking at the
Nanga headquarters. I reached up in gave her a pet,
and historically the Naga castle was almost always the first
to fall. But as we've already assessed that the Whore
as she is called, is never harmed. She disappears hide
somewhere the whole time, appears at the end completely unharmed,
and nobody knows where she's hiding. If we wanted to
get to her, we'd have to be very careful with
how we did it. I am so deeply curious where
she's hiding. That one's got me preoccupied a little bit
too much. It's the sort of thing I could see
myself hyperfixating on and then like kind of losing the
plot because I would start to be like, no, no, no,
if we get her, that's going to change the tide
of everything, which isn't necessarily true at all, but I
would have myself convinced of it, Like it's easier for
me to cope with a puzzle than it is like
fighting in this way. I'm just you know, this is
not my wheelhouse at all. So it ends with Carl
saying let's do this and Boomer's saying fuck yeah, And
that is the end of chapter twenty two, so I
can't wait to read more. Very very curious, worried. We're
gonna lose people and it's gonna be awful, and I
am not excited about that. For the record, anyway, thank
you guys so much for coming and hanging out with me.
Appreciate you all, and I will be seeing you next
week with a new episode. Until then, to the lou motherfuckers.
That was an unspoiled network podcast.