The Butcher's Masquerade (Dungeon Crawler Carl, #5) by Matt Dinniman 
Series: Dungeon Crawler Carl #5
Published by Ace on February 28, 2022
Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 707
Format: eBook
Source: Netgalley
I received this book for free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
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Attention. Attention. The gates are down. The hunters are loose. Run, Run, Run.
A lush jungle teeming with danger. Savage dinosaurs seeking blood. A fallen princess intent on vengeance. A mysterious, end-of-floor celebration for the top crawlers, dubbed “The Butcher’s Masquerade.”
The sixth floor. The Hunting Grounds.
As the remaining crawlers battle for their lives, a new, terrible threat looms. Outside tourists are finally allowed to enter the game, and they are here and ready to hunt. Among them is Vrah, a famed and veteran hunter, intent on collecting the biggest trophy of her career.
But their prey is far from harmless, and this season they are fighting back.
Dungeon Crawler Carl and Princess Donut return in book five of the acclaimed litrpg series.
Ain’t nobody in the galaxy expecting what happens here!
Level 6 has been discussed quite a bit in the series so far. This level is call The Hunting Ground. In preparation for the Faction Wars on the 9th floor, all the factions send representatives to fight it out…actually it isn’t much of a fight as these faction members drink, party and buy up all the deadliest weapons in Zockau. They are waiting for the crawlers to work their way down. In the past, when the horn blows, they rush out and slaughter crawlers to take all the weapons, scrolls and potions that the crawlers have in their inventory. The idea is to then take all their loot to the Faction Wars to give their faction a leg up in the upcoming war. But this isn’t like every other dungeon crawl. Oh no. No one expected Carl when they signed up for the Hunting Grounds in Dungeon World: Earth.
This turns out like that 10-year-old kid who sits in his mom’s basement playing Call of Duty with all the invincibility protections on and just shooting everyone in his path, except this time a real army breaks down his front door and does some shooting of their own.
First, Carl used the Gate of the Feral Gods at the end of that story to send a mega-bomb down to the 6th level which kills or traps a lot of these hunters and by “hunter,” Carl finds most of them whining that they are just accountants (such of high level of accountants) who came to have fun and kill crawlers but not expecting to risk their own lives. It was just supposed to be a bit of fun but they didn’t realize that Carl would level the playing field and have their safeties turned off.
Carl and Donut go from town to town setting themselves up as the mayor so they can have a safe base of operations against the hunters who manage to get out, especially after the AI makes it impossible for those accountants to stay huddled in their safe rooms, in a die here or die out there proposition.
Carl ends up killing a member of the royal house of the preying mantis faction, and the most dangerous warriors in the upcoming Faction Wars. Vrah is their leader head and sister of the murdered royal, and she and her queen mother are looking to wear Carl’s head as a hat. No, literally, they wear the heads of their enemies as battle gear. Yuck!
Donut then takes the spotlight from Carl and ends up coming up against Lucia Mar and her two rottweilers who have been leading on the leader board for most of the crawl. This kid is a little cray-cray and that also opens the question of how a kid this young a crawler as all pregnant women and children are supposed to be in a facility on the surface.
We also meet a T-Rex named Big Tina and her gang of lady Mongos. They only reason they haven’t made Donut into a snack is the fact they are a little too interested in her boy much to Donut’s annoyance.
As the crawlers kill the Hunters, they receive a hand…yes, an actual hand (the right one, I believe) which they will be able to turn in for cool, fun prizes at something called the Butcher’s Masquerade, which is just the AI’s final attempt to get all the crawlers and hunters into the same room to see what fun happens.
Carl is also understanding that the hunters are getting assistance and a head’s up from outside forces and Carl decides to fight back with more bombs and a…lawyer? It’s just a game after all to the rest of the universe but Carl will do whatever he can to level the playing field for the crawlers.
There are a lot of things that go boom in this story and a pet talent contest to keep everything exciting.
I love that the author goes over the top to have fun with this series.
Favorite Scene:
I took a deep breath.
“Donut. I know I’m doing some dangerous stuff. That’s never going to change. But I’ll consult you from now on if I can. I promise. I’m not going to leave you.”
“You’ve already said that,” Donut said. She paused. “But what about the ninth floor?”
And there it was. Whatever Donut was hiding, it was only a symptom of the real problem.
Thanks to the Enchanted Crown of the Sepsis Whore, which she didn’t even have anymore, Donut wouldn’t be allowed to exit the ninth floor until every other member of the Blood Sultanate royal family was dead. I remembered the important part of the item’s description:
Placing this crown upon your head permanently places you within the royal line of succession for the Blood Sultanate on the ninth floor of the World Dungeon. Removing this item will not remove the status. Royal members of the Blood Sultanate will be required to slay the Sultan and all other members of the royal family before descending to the tenth floor.
That task–killing all the Nagas–was even more difficult than it appeared on the surface.
“We’ll deal with it when we get there.”
Donut just looked at me. We’d been here before, had this same conversation more than once, and this was always where we left it. We’ll deal with it when we get there. But that wasn’t good enough. Not anymore, and we both knew it.
That feeling, that ceaseless river within my mind, roared. The water is running. Something within me broke. A decision was made. I thought of my mother holding my hand as we stood at the edge of the Grand Canyon. I thought of my father in the car behind us, waiting. A tidal wave of potential energy. This was the same. This was the same exact moment. I didn’t know how I knew that, but it was.
You can do that, I thought. You can recognize these moments when they appear.
I took both of my hands, and I cupped Donut’s face. “You know how worried you are about Mongo?”
“Yes.”
“That’s how I feel about you.”
Donut blinked. “Really? Do you really mean that?” Her voice so full of genuine longing that it hurt my heart.
“I know I haven’t said this to you directly before, and I’m sorry that I haven’t. But I will not leave you behind on the ninth or any other floor. I promise you. Okay? We are a team, and nothing is going to break us up. No matter what.”
“No matter what?”
“No matter what.”
We held that way for several moments. Donut trembled, and I realized I was trembling, too. Anybody watching this from the outside wouldn’t understand what had just happened. That was okay. Some things weren’t meant for others to understand.
I watched her swallow a few times and start to compose herself. The moment had finally passed. I sighed and waited for it.
“I don’t know why you’re being so dramatic, Carl. We should be–“
She stopped midsentence, jumped up, and rocketed out the door. I saw the dot on the map a moment later. Mongo was out there. I got up and followed her outside. I watched as the dinosaur drunkenly stumbled past the guards. I jogged up as Donut clucked over him. “Are you okay?” Donut was asking. “What did she do to you? You don’t have any weird diseases now, do you? She looked like the type of dinosaur to have weird diseases.”
Mongo croaked once and then collapsed right there on the street. His health bar was still full.
Donut gasped with concern as I barked with laughter. Two funeral bells loomed over us, both looking down at the dinosaur.
I kneeled down and patted Mongo on the head. “If I still had cigarettes, I’d let you have one, buddy.”
Mongo made a peeping noise.
“That’s not funny, Carl,” Donut said.
She pulled out the pet carrier, and Mongo didn’t object as she pulled him away.
“At least their dots turned white,” Donut said a moment later, looking off toward the edge of town.
I followed her gaze. A few dozen of the lady Mongos stood there at the edge of the woods, looking toward us. Kiwi stood at the center. Her lighter feathers stood out against the dark green foliage. She lifted her head to the sky and let out an unk unk unk.
“Her dot is red for me,” I said.
“That’s odd,” Donut said.
I shrugged and felt myself smile. “You probably get extra points because you’re her mother-in-law now.”
