The Butcher's Masquerade (Dungeon Crawler Carl, #5)

by Matt Dinniman

Carl: What did you get? Donut: I’LL TELL YOU BUT ONLY IF YOU PROMISE NOT TO GET MAD. KATIA SAYS YOU’RE GOING TO BE MAD. Carl: Donut. What did you pick? Donut: I’M A BARD! ISN’T IT GREAT! IT’S NOT A NECROBARD LIKE THEY OFFERED ME BEFORE, BUT IT’S BETTER. I’M A LEGENDARY DIVA. THAT’S WHAT THE CLASS IS CALLED. LEGENDARY DIVA. I SING! Carl: You sing.

Carl: She has to sing? Have you heard her sing yet? Mordecai: Everyone has heard her singing. Carl: Oh god.

We’re in a hurry, so we need to get past the first date finger bang jitters and move straight to the part where we argue about me smoking too much.

“When a crawler hits the tenth floor, he gains a teeny, tiny bit of autonomy over his fate. He’s officially a citizen of the Syndicate. The moment anybody becomes a citizen, the Syndicate bends them over and fucks them. I can’t stop you from getting fucked. But I am the condom. You guys have condoms on your world? Of course you do. Everybody has condoms. Your ass is gonna hurt no matter what, but at least you won’t have tryptic genital mites after.”

“Don’t do anything stupid.” “I won’t,” I lied.

Reward: Your reward is advice. Fatherly advice. Don’t be a little bitch. There’s your reward.

Donut: BOMO IS OUR FRIEND. WE DON’T BLOW UP OUR FRIENDS, CARL. Carl: He actually seemed kinda excited at the idea.

“You shouldn’t do that,” Mordecai said after a moment. “People out there have long memories.” “Good,” I said. “I don’t want them to ever forget.”

“You said there was one additional item you wanted,” Orren said. “I just can’t wait to hear what this one is.”

Im not a fan of how much we do this "wait and see what carl is up to" routine in this book

“He is quite pale, isn’t he?” Donut said. “His skin is the shade of Miss Beatrice’s thighs in December.”

Trust me on this. You don’t want Enthusiastic Double Gonorrhea.

Girls never insult each other like that.” “Girls are worse than boys, but they usually don’t do it to your face. And you insult me all the time, Donut.” “I’m not insulting you, Carl. It’s called constructive criticism. It’s different.”

“You’re not my person anymore,” Donut added. “Carl is. He’s always been.”

We saw a crawler bend over to pick up a mushroom only to get skewered by a spike that popped out of the fungus, piercing him right in the eye. He dropped dead, and his skin started boiling. “That’s the skewer belle,” Mordecai said. “If you see one, make sure you grab it for me. But always pick it by the stem. Don’t touch the top.” “Christ, Mordecai,” I said.

Thanks to the nature of her, uh, original purpose, she could open and close her mouth really wide.

When one values coin above life, you should target the coin, for it hurts them more.

“There’s a beaver god in the Nothing,” Samantha said. She’d rolled up between us. “Capa or something. He’s a fuck. Another god, Hehaka, uses him as a hat. He doesn’t like that much, but he can’t do anything about it. He’s always crying.”

Donut: OH, HONEY. YOU USED TO BE A SEX DOLL. I’M QUITE CERTAIN YOU CAN HANDLE ALL MANNER OF INDIGNITY. Samantha: DON’T SLUT SHAME ME. I’M GOING TO KILL YOUR MOTHER.

You killed them. You killed them all for your daddy. The AI made a deep, throaty groan for like five seconds straight, an uncomfortably long time.

“Fireball is an outdoor spell, Donut.”

“AnD SO The lioN fEll iN lOVe WiTh The LaMB.” I’m actually quite fond of the Twilight novels. Plus, I would never stoop so low as to disparage the work of an over-imaginative and obviously undersexed artist who managed to become a brazilianaire from barely-disguised erotica targeted at adolescent girls.

This apotropaic talisman looks like something a goth teenaged girl would shoplift from a Hot Topic. A girl who dreams about one day meeting a hundred-year-old predator and making him fall in love with her. Remember, it’s not a crime if he’s handsome or rich or looks like a teenager.

I’m pretty sure this fairy tale was devised by Big Therapy in order to keep themselves in work.

“Oh my god, Carl,” Donut said. “This is just like the plot to Footloose! They’re stealing storylines now!” “I don’t remember the part where the girl turns into a murderous dinosaur after her dad tells her she can’t dance,” I said. “Maybe that was in part two.”

Quest Update. The Recital. Surprise, motherfuckers. Strap yourselves in. You don’t know the half of it. It’s about to get bumpy.

Trauma does that, I thought. It’s an explosion with your heart at the center. It changes everything all at once.

Hope is crucial, but it can also be poison if it is blind.

But that doesn’t mean we still can’t have hope. I dream of a fire that spreads across the sky like the Winter Nebula. A fire that reaches the beginning and the end, and even though this fire exists only in my mind—for now—the warmth of it is enough to sustain me, even on the coldest of nights.

“It seems in a universe so large, one shouldn’t have to live somewhere inhospitable. It seems like it would be easy to find a place to live in peace.” “It does seem like it should be that way, doesn’t it?”

And it’s not just Ferdinand. This is typical of the entire species. Cats don’t ask for permission. They never apologize. They’re soulless murderers. All of them.

You’re wearing a mask right now, Donut, and you don’t know how to remove it. That’s okay. You don’t need to. Not yet. That mask is protecting you.” “I don’t like it,” she said.

Up ahead, a line of my friends entered the stairs. A surge of pride filled my chest. We’d all been bloodied today, but we were still standing tall. Unbroken.