Alucarda is a small dryad settlement on the sixth floor of Dungeon Crawler World. Carl and Princess Donut reach it during the hunting season depicted in The Butcher's Masquerade, looking for a saferoom before Carl is taken to an off-dungeon appearance. By then, Lucia Mar has killed the village's mayor and taken control of the place. Donut's encounter with Lucia, followed by Carl's clash with hunters waiting for his return, leaves most of Alucarda dead or destroyed. The episode turns an apparently useful refuge into a contested point between crawlers and hunters.
A settlement already occupied
Carl and Donut approach Alucarda from the north after crossing a river and traveling through the forest. They have chosen this settlement over a nearer village because it lies in the direction they intend to travel. The village is modest even by the standards of the floor: bamboo-like buildings stand among treehouses, with a temple at its center and a single funeral bell guard at its edge. Carl notices a sweet smell of flowers and rain. Nothing in that first view reveals the violence inside, although the name Alucarda is already assigned when the party enters. Donut complains that she will not get to name the place herself.
Their immediate concern is shelter. Zev warns that Carl's scheduled transfer is imminent and urges both crawlers into a saferoom. At the same time, Carl's viewer count surges. Donut cannot see the expected markers on the local map; Carl suspects a protective spell and tells her to move. Their destination is The Aloe Mana, a pub whose door leads to a true saferoom. A tree-like dryad with a monkey in his branches stands outside. Inside, Carl can see a food-service room with a bopca but no apparent customers. This is the refuge Carl expects Donut to use while he is away.
Carl asks the dryad about the mayor. The dryad says the previous mayor, R'aggah, has died and that Lucia Mar now rules the town with two indiscriminately violent beasts. Carl is transferred away before he can act on the warning. He has left Donut and Samantha at the saferoom entrance with Lucia nearby. The timing matters: the scheduled transfer separates the partners at the precise moment the village's danger becomes clear, and Carl cannot return simply by choosing to leave his appearance.
Lucia's control of the village
Carl later sees a broadcast account of what happened before his arrival and during his absence. It begins with Lucia entering Alucarda in her skeletal fighting form. She tears the tree-like mayor apart while her two rottweilers, Cici and Gustavo 3, menace the dryads. Gustavo's attack on a monkey and Cici's assault on a tree creature establish that the dogs are a danger to the inhabitants as well as to rival crawlers. The mayor whom Carl hoped might provide information has already been killed by the time he asks for him.
Lucia tours the village's pubs and saferooms, eating and drinking in them while placing teleport-triggering spells near their entrances. She eventually waits in a raised treehouse pub with a view of both approaches to town. That building is distinct from The Aloe Mana: it has a guildhall door, but fighting is possible inside it. Lucia's position lets her watch Carl and Donut enter from the north without being seen. The broadcast shows that she has also concealed combatant markers on the map, explaining Donut's empty display and the later failure of Carl's mapping spell. The absence of markers is a tactical condition created by the occupation, not evidence that the town is empty.
Lucia intends to catch Donut with her dogs. She uses a teleport trap to exchange places with the cat just as Carl disappears. Donut lands between Cici and Gustavo; Lucia appears at the entrance to The Aloe Mana. Donut evades the dogs, wounds Cici as she leaps over it, and casts a wall of fire across the square. Lucia searches for Carl with dispelling potions because she has not understood that his disappearance was an external transfer. Donut, seeking another route to safety, climbs toward the treehouse pub. The buildings and doors of Alucarda determine each move: the first true saferoom has become the site of Lucia's trap, while the elevated pub offers a guildhall entrance that Donut might reach.
Samantha disrupts another trap before Donut enters the treehouse pub. Lucia throws the doll head at Donut, but Samantha reaches the doorway first and triggers the teleport effect. She appears near the dogs and is caught by Gustavo, whose attacks cannot destroy her. Lucia and Donut then collide inside the treehouse pub. Donut tries for the guildhall door and is caught by a snare, leaving her fixed to the floor while fire spreads through the wooden building. She attacks Lucia with magic, injuring her, but cannot simply run out while the snare's timer remains active.
Lucia briefly stops pressing the fight and demands milk from the frightened ursine proprietor, even as the pub burns. She speaks as though someone else is directing her, and Donut later says that Lucia named a youth assistant called Alexandro during a portion omitted from the broadcast. Her pause does not make the situation safe. Cici enters the burning room, and Lucia orders the dog to kill Donut. The proprietor flees toward the back while the fire consumes the structure around them.
Donut escapes by combining several effects. She produces multiple images of herself, conceals her real body, and opens a hole beneath her feet. Cici attacks an apparent Donut and then puts its head through the opening in pursuit of the real one below. Donut closes the hole, killing the dog. She takes its head and returns to the original saferoom while Lucia remains with Cici's body in the collapsing pub. The death of Cici becomes the immediate cause of Lucia's later rage against Donut and, by extension, the settlement. Gustavo and Lucia survive the encounter.
Hunters at the saferoom
Carl's return is delayed by his off-dungeon commitments. While he is away, Donut and Mordecai seek a way to survive Lucia's presence. They send Bomo with word of her location to hunters in Zockau. The move does not give the crawlers control over those hunters; it brings additional armed parties into the same town. The hunters include nebular priests and mantis warriors associated with Vrah. Vrah herself waits away from the group at a place where she expects Lucia's teleportation to deliver valuable targets.
Lucia's spells make the saferoom entrances dangerous even though direct violence inside a true saferoom is restricted. Carl later reasons that she can place a spell whose destination is outside the protected room, then move someone from the room to a location where an attack is possible. This is why Donut cannot assume that reaching The Aloe Mana ends the threat. Lucia's transformations and escape options complicate the hunters' plan as well: she can send herself and others to preset locations and evade a fight that appears to have her cornered.
Carl arrives back at Alucarda pressed against the saferoom door, then immediately drinks an invisibility potion. The dryad who warned him is dead outside. A mantis lands where he had been standing, and the nebular priests fire spells toward the doorway. Carl is injured despite activating magical protection. He triggers traps in the area and throws an alarm device as he flees toward the temple. His return has become an ambush involving hunters, Lucia's traps, and Donut's attempt to leave the room without exposing herself.
The counterplan uses Donut's clockwork copies of Sledge and a disguised creature supplied through Bautista's stuffed-animal ability. One copy sets off a teleport trap and appears among the hunters. Another carries the false Donut into Lucia's reach. Lucia teleports herself, the decoy, and a dog to her preset destination, leaving the real Donut out of that particular attack. Vrah strikes at the apparent cat there; the disguise is destroyed, while Lucia escapes. The sequence draws Lucia away from the saferoom without requiring Donut to confront her directly again.
The battle around the temple
Carl uses the temple's exterior for height and a view over the village. He attempts to locate combatants with Ping but receives an error while the map remains suppressed. From above, he sees mantises and nebular priests arguing and fighting around the saferoom. A thrown explosive injures both sides; an alarm device unsettles the mantises. Carl then hits a flying mantis with a potion that sends her into a berserk attack on allies and opponents alike. Their apparent coalition breaks down into a battle among the hunters themselves.
During that fight, Carl uses his Ring of Divine Suffering to mark three nebular combatants who are about to die. He gains Intelligence points from their deaths even though a mantis delivers at least one of the killing blows. The episode also shows the limits of his control: the hunters keep fighting independently, and Carl does not eliminate Vrah with the ring. The village map finally fills with markers and the dead inhabitants' symbols, showing that the earlier concealment has ended. The sudden visibility does nothing to restore the people already lost.
Carl falls through the roof of the Temple of Diwata while descending from his vantage point. Inside he finds bodies, chiefly dryads and funeral bell guards, and the temple identifies itself as desecrated. He lands on and breaks its shrine. A later achievement explains that the temple's attendants have been murdered and its treasury looted, while a separate achievement treats Carl's destruction of the unprotected shrine as an offense to the god. Carl attributes the killings of the people inside to Lucia; his own breakage of the shrine is accidental. The temple is thus both evidence of the takeover and a source of consequences distinct from the street battle.
Outside, Vrah intercepts Carl near the saferoom. She has attached the severed heads of dead crawlers to her body, including Langley and Bogdon Ro. Donut emerges unseen and casts Second Chance on those heads. They bite Vrah's exposed neck, briefly creating the opening Carl needs to stab her with a disease-bearing arrow. Vrah's defensive shield throws the attackers back, and she flies away. The fight ends with Vrah alive, but the wounds and infection shape Carl's next move against the remaining mantis merchant in Zockau. That later bargain begins from the encounter in Alucarda, though it takes place elsewhere.
Carl and Donut retreat into The Aloe Mana and push a large wheeled bomb back out through its door. The explosion shakes even the protected room. It kills the remaining mantis warriors near the entrance and the living ursine whom Carl had seen fastened upside down in the street. It also destroys nearly all of the already devastated village. Carl checks the notifications and finds that neither Lucia nor Vrah died. His immediate purpose was to escape the hunters, but the blast makes any return to Alucarda as a functioning settlement impossible.
Ruin and departure
The aftermath clarifies the extent of the loss. Carl believes Lucia killed the village's other nonplayer inhabitants before he detonated the bomb. The later broadcast shows her killing its mayor and attacking residents, while Carl directly sees the dead dryad, the bodies in the temple, and the crucified ursine. He recognizes the latter as likely the proprietor of the treehouse pub who fled during Donut's fight. His bomb kills that survivor; it does not account for the earlier deaths. Keeping those causes separate is essential to what happens in Alucarda: Lucia's occupation devastates the community, the hunters turn the saferoom into a battlefield, and Carl's escape destroys what remains aboveground.
The Aloe Mana survives the explosion. When Carl opens the door again, he sees its damaged interior and observes that the bopca has not returned. He believes the pub is the only building still standing. He and Donut leave quickly because Lucia could return and other hunters may still be nearby. Alucarda has ceased to be the refuge they came looking for. It briefly gives them the protected door needed to reunite and survive, but its former mayor, temple congregation, and ordinary civic life are gone by the time they depart.