Item · debuts Book 8, Chapter 83 — “Blowing the Roof”

Poleaxes

Carl's focused breaching charge · built on Floor 9, first fired on Floor 10

Carl's answer to a long-running problem: an explosive that goes exactly where he points it. Built in his bomber's studio on the previous floor and never used there, a poleax is shaped to blast up and down in a cone and not laterally, so it opens a building rather than levelling it — a clean circle roughly ten metres across in the floor beneath it and a wider hole in the ceiling above, with most of the material vaporised instead of thrown. The whole idea traces back to his hunt for a genuinely focused explosive, something he had not seen done properly since the murder dozer's first blast on Floor 1. Dropped several at once in a rough vertical line, they cut a jagged shotgun-pattern shaft from the lobby to the roof of the race's finish building; because the crawlers had been tripled in size, the holes came out three times bigger than Carl designed them for, which he counts as a pleasant surprise. The debris is pebbles, dust and smoke rather than falling masonry, which is the point.

Book 8 appearances

Related entries

Browse

⚠ UNOFFICIAL FAN INDEX — Dungeon Crawler Carl and its characters belong to Matt Dinniman. This page is spoiler-sealed: nothing past its debut book appears here. Open the interactive index ▸