The end of the world
It's a cold night in Seattle. Carl, a 27-year-old Coast Guard veteran who now fixes boat electrics for a living, steps outside in his boxer shorts and his ex-girlfriend Beatrice's too-small pink Crocs to chase her cat. A Persian show cat named Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk. Because that is the cat's full name. Because of course it is.
Then every building on Earth collapses. Every house. Every hospital. Every school. Simultaneously. If you were inside, you died. Seven point nine billion people. Gone. In a sentence. Dinniman doesn't ease you into this. He doesn't give you a countdown. He gives you a guy chasing a cat in his underwear and then he kills almost everyone on the planet.
The Borant Corporation — a Kua-tin alien megacorp the size of a small government — purchased Earth's mining rights. Legally. Under galactic law, humanity had 50 years to travel through space and file a protest with an alien bureaucracy. Nobody told humanity. Nobody was required to. The paperwork was technically available.
The destruction is a mining operation. The entertainment is a bonus.
The staircase
Survivors who find glowing staircases can descend into an 18-level dungeon. The dungeon is broadcast as "Dungeon Crawler World" to quintillions of alien viewers across the Syndicate. You fight your way down. You level up. You collect loot. You die horribly on live television. About 13 million humans make it into the stairs. Carl and the cat are two of them.
The first thing Carl gets is a heads-up display. Like a video game. Stats, inventory, minimap, the works. The second thing Carl gets is told that Princess Donut is now his official pet. Donut has not consented to this arrangement. Donut will never consent to any arrangement that positions her below anyone, in anything, ever.
Floor 1: The tutorial from hell
The dungeon is a massive underground corridor system. The safe rooms are themed after Earth businesses: Taco Bell, Waffle House, the DMV. The DMV safe room is exactly as soul-crushing as you'd expect. The System AI running the dungeon has a sense of humor, and it will become very important.
Carl feeds Donut an Enhanced Pet Biscuit. It is the most important biscuit in the series. Donut transforms from a regular cat into a sapient, talking, spell-casting crawler with the highest Charisma stat in the dungeon. She immediately demands recognition, renames the party "The Royal Court of Princess Donut," and becomes the most compelling character in the series.
Carl does not get a say in any of this. Carl never gets a say. This is a running theme.
The AI shows its hand
The System AI introduces itself through achievement notifications. Other dungeons, other planets, the AI is professional. Here, on Earth, with Carl, something is different. The AI gives Carl the "Podophilia" achievement for being barefoot. It calls itself "daddy." It gives him an Enchanted Pedicure Kit of the Sylph as a combat weapon that enhances barefoot fighting.
This is funny. This is also, maybe, the first sign that the AI is not behaving normally. Every foot joke is a data point. You don't know that yet. You think it's a gag. It isn't.
Floor 2: Things start dying
Floor 2 expands into neighborhoods with NPCs, shops, and quests. The galactic broadcast starts airing highlights. Carl and Donut are getting famous.
They find survivors from the Meadow Lark retirement community, including Imani, a caregiver. One resident with dementia pees in a hallway. The dungeon responds by spawning a massively overpowered Rage Elemental as a "hygiene violation" punishment. This is insane. This is also the dungeon's rules. Carl kills it through creative loophole abuse and the clip goes viral. Billions of aliens watch a half-naked man outsmart a monster triggered by urination. Carl's celebrity career begins exactly the way you'd expect.
Floor 2 ends with the Borough Boss, a rolling sphere of tusklings called the Ball of Swine. Carl wedges it against the ceiling with a portable fortress item and it bursts. That is the boss fight: a man with no shoes versus a giant ball of pigs, won with a speedbump.
Mongo
In a pet reward room, Donut picks a baby velociraptor from a cage. She names him Mongo. He is 7 inches tall and always hungry: he eats the first thing he sees.
But right now he's 7 inches tall and he just ate a shoe.