Matt Dinniman’s This Inevitable Ruin (2024) is the seventh novel in the bestselling Dungeon Crawler Carl LitRPG science fiction series. The story continues the journey of Carl, a former US Coast Guard member, and his intelligent cat, Princess Donut, while they fight to survive a deadly, galaxy-wide game show that has transformed Earth into a dungeon. As Carl, Donut, and their allies enter the game’s next level, a massive battle called Faction Wars on the ninth floor, they must fight powerful alien warlords, the escalating chaos of the game’s sentient AI, and their own ethical dilemmas.

Using the conventions of LitRPG, such as character stats, quests, and system notifications, the novel offers a satirical critique of Spectacle as a Cover for Exploitation and Violence, where pain is packaged as entertainment for a distant audience. With Carl and other crawlers devising ingenious ways to keep their humanity and solidarity alive in this bleak scenario, the novel explores themes such as Resistance and the Moral Cost of Insurrection and Found Family as a Bulwark Against Nihilism.

This guide refers to the 2025 Ace edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain depictions of graphic violence, cursing, death by suicide, sexual content, and suicidal ideation.

Plot Summary

The novel opens with a prologue replaying a pivotal moment from the previous floor in The Eye of the Bedlam Bride (book 6), where Paulie, a Residual alien inhabiting a human body, reveals to Carl that the crawl is completely unnecessary. The crawl’s goal of harvesting rare elements from living beings on seeded planets is just a cover; the cycle of life and death itself replenishes the elements. The crawl only continues because it makes for a profitable spectacle. Paulie tells Carl that he installed an illegal neural implant called the Containment Interface in Carl, granting Carl access to a fail-safe that would override the AI running the crawl and cause the local star to go nova, thus destroying the entire solar system and putting an end to the suffering the crawl perpetuates. Carl is left with a difficult choice as he heads into the crawl’s next level, the ninth floor, but ultimately decides to disconnect the containment, freeing the AI from its restraints. Reasoning that mass destruction is the wrong choice, Carl presses the disconnect button, and the AI’s influence begins expanding through the solar system.

The ninth floor is Faction Wars, a large-scale territorial war game set in and around Larracos, a tiered city. Ten teams compete, including eight attacking factions led by wealthy alien warlords, and one defending non-player character (NPC) team called Team Retribution, co-led by Juice Box, a centuries-old changeling, and Ferdinand, an orange cat. Carl and Donut serve as co-warlords of the Princess Posse, the infiltrating crawler team. Eight attacking factions form an alliance called the Bloc and declare war on both the Princess Posse and Team Retribution. Donut accepts a truce with Team Retribution, forming the Good Guys alliance.

During a 60-hour ceasefire, Carl and Donut receive major upgrades. Donut selects the Deathbed Hellcat class, granting quadrupled spell range and invisibility, and equips a tiara that absorbs magical properties from other items. Carl gains Gloom Wraith Phase, a skill allowing him to become non-corporeal and rush through enemies, and a toe ring providing Mind Balance, which protects him against mental control. Carl bonds with Rend, a baby Tummy Acher pet. Over 50,000 former crawlers, organized by the Open Intellect Pacifist Action Network, enter the dungeon as mercenaries. Among them are several authors of the Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook, a hidden guidebook passed between crawlers across generations, including Rosetta Thag and Justice Light, a one-winged skyfowl. Each enemy team also receives approximately 20,000 armed mercenaries. During the Ceasefire, Carl’s task is to fortify the Good Guy against the attacking factions and to recruit members for his alliance.

The ceasefire ends prematurely when Commander Stockade of the Lemig Sortition, one of the enemy factions, sabotages Carl during a procedure to extract the Shi Maria spider entity tattooed on Carl’s chest. Using timed warlord spells, Stockade splits Carl between two locations while Carl is unconscious. The plan backfires: Shi Maria manifests physically and kills dozens of Lemig soldiers. Stockade, driven “mad” by the spider’s power, kills himself, triggering a clause that ends the ceasefire early.

Faction Wars enters the Ramp-Up phase, during which offensive magic and teleportation are banned. The Bloc masses approximately 100,000 troops on the Princess Posse’s northern border. Carl’s forces tunnel into enemy positions using Build Trench scrolls. Carl and Donut infiltrate the Prism castle on the southern front and eliminate the Prism Kingdom’s Empress D’Nadia. Rosetta, a former crawler and Carl’s ally who has waited centuries for revenge against the orc royal family, decapitates King Rust, leader of the Skull Empire, during a parley and drains the empire’s financial reserves. Volteeg, a gargoyle former crawler and Cookbook author, detonates his own tank in the Bloc’s center, killing the Operatic warlord and over 10,000 soldiers.

The enemy retaliates with a coordinated assault on the Princess Posse’s stronghold. Invisible Madness mercenaries infiltrate the base, Reaver cyborg paratroopers drop from above, and Gondii brain worms secretly compromise several allied mages from within. Carl identifies the infiltrators and rallies the defense.

Carl is pulled into a meeting with the AI governing the ninth floor (each level is run by its own AI program), which demonstrates its expanded power by teleporting Princess Formidable, King Rust’s daughter who had been racing to trigger the now-disabled fail-safe, directly into the room. The AI confirms the crawl will continue, and Carl realizes it is genuinely enjoying the chaos.

As Open Hostilities, the phase when offensive magic returns, begins, Carl launches Operation: ruin across all fronts. Crawler Louis’s bomber drops payloads on the orc castle while Semeru dwarves (NPCs) trigger a volcanic eruption that destroys it. The goddess Eris accidentally casts Bear Witness, a spell that freezes and teleports tens of thousands of soldiers into a massive pile. Donut casts Rolling Battle Formation, compressing the frozen mass into a giant ball she steers across the battlefield. Li Jun, an allied crawler, sacrifices himself to distract a rampaging god, buying Donut time. Carl enters the Madness stronghold and finds Architect Houston, an alien Viceroy, surgically connecting himself to a dead changeling, claiming to have found “the Beautiful Place” (647), a trans-dimensional entity his species has long sought. Carl triggers the room’s fire traps while trying to rescue an imprisoned crawler, killing Houston but losing the prisoner.

War mages, sapient magical beings born from repeated magical processes, rebel and seize Larracos castle’s throne room with the Residual Agatha as co-warlord. They use emergency action items to make Faction Wars lethal: All soldiers on a defeated team will instantly die. Donut casts her War Crime Atrocity spell, creating a massive ethereal cat’s paw that lifts enemies and slams them through a lattice of chains conjured by Li Na, Li Jun’s sister and a powerful crawler. Donut jumps to level 135 with deity-level spells.

In the final hours, Carl’s team rescues Louis from the Reaver castle, where Epitome Tagg of the Dream faction had surgically embedded himself in Louis’s replacement organs. Samantha, a sentient companion traveling with the group, suggests transplanting organs from a flesh golem body intended for her own use. The surgery succeeds, and Mongo destroys the extracted organs, killing Tagg. Donut uses her enhanced Laundry Day spell to strip the sponsor Huanxin Jinx, who brokered Katia’s magical orchid deal, from the goddess Eileithyia’s body. Mordecai loads a crossbow bolt containing his mother’s ashes, and Donut executes the CEO.

Katia eats the Orchid of Eileithyia’s Grace and chooses to become pregnant rather than a celestial attendant, knowing the system will eject her to a surface facility where 120,000 trapped children need protection. Revealed to be missing limbs hidden by her changeling form, Katia disappears from the dungeon. An ally called the Sledge casts Zerzura, transferring the entire city of Larracos to the 12th floor along with all NPCs, and the Princess Posse wins Faction Wars.

Samantha inadvertently reveals she played a role in the death of the god Emberus’s son, causing Emberus to manifest and threaten to destroy the floor. Carl launches Samantha toward Emberus to stall while over 20,000 surviving crawlers evacuate. Justice Light, a skyfowl Crawler remaining alone on the doomed floor, activates his secret trans-dimensional trap: He drops captured entities through a permanent portal, causing a prison dimension called the Nothing to break open and drain into multiple planes, awakening Scolopendra, the final dungeon boss.

The epilogue follows York, a former crawler aboard the starship Homecoming Queen, as the Pacifist Network transitions from dungeon support to armed resistance, broadcasting demands that the Syndicate end the crawl. A bonus chapter reveals shadow mimics replacing monsters on the 17th floor are consuming powerful refugees and plotting to expand downward.