Brandon An is a human crawler and former maintenance worker at the Meadow Lark eldercare facility near Wenatchee, Washington. He enters the dungeon with his brother Chris, two care workers, and a group of residents whose mobility and memory problems make ordinary escape plans inadequate. Brandon helps turn salvaged equipment into defenses and transport for the group. After surviving the first two floors alongside Carl and Princess Donut, he dies on the third floor while covering the residents' retreat from Shade Gremlins.
The Meadow Lark survivors
Brandon and Chris are working overtime on a faulty oven when a fire forces the Meadow Lark night staff to evacuate the building. Brandon later tells Carl that approximately 250 residents have been taken outside into freezing weather. Police and firefighters arrive to help, but a dungeon entrance opens in the street among the evacuees before they can be moved to a nearby school. Some people fall into the entrance and disappear from Brandon's view. When Agatha pushes her shopping cart onto its stairs, they become a ramp, allowing staff to move residents who could not have descended a conventional stairwell.
Brandon initially treats the entrance as a source of warmth, pushing residents partway in while the group decides what to do. The entrance then prevents him from leaving. Chris grasps Brandon's hand and is trapped as well, despite remaining outside the hole. With the entrance's deadline approaching, they and the residents have to descend. Roughly twenty police, firefighters, and other responders accompany the group, although many of those helpers later die. Some enter a borough-boss chamber and do not return; others are killed while searching for a less dangerous stairway. By the time Carl meets the survivors, Brandon, Chris, Yolanda Martinez, and Imani C. are the only workers or rescuers still with the residents. Agatha remains nearby but is separate from their party.
Carl first encounters evidence of Brandon before meeting him. A dead Chilly Goat's interface credits “Brandon An” with the kill and Chris Andrews 2 with an assist. On meeting Brandon, Carl sees crawler number 12,330,671, a level-six human with a bronze star beside his name. Brandon wears a winter jacket and carries an enormous hammer with a metallic, seemingly magical head. Chris is also level six. Carl recognizes the two as brothers even though their displayed surnames differ.
Thirty-eight people, including the four staff members and Agatha, remain near the boss entrance when Carl arrives. Brandon explains why they have not simply fled. The residents have benefited from the dungeon's healing: they no longer need many of the medicines they left behind. Healing has not restored lost memories or cognitive function, however, nor made frail people strong enough to travel and fight independently. Some can reach a nearby safe room, but it has a capacity of only thirty and is occupied by people from a Waffle House. Chris has been helping the more mobile residents get there while the rest remain near the stairway.
Brandon hopes to bring the residents to the third floor, where new race and class choices might give them a better chance. He knows the plan may fail. The boss blocks the most obvious stairs, and people sent to search for another route have died. Nevertheless, he tells Carl he cannot leave the residents. His account of an earlier attack also shows the group's painful limits: Imani had to kill residents who could not be moved away from approaching monsters. Brandon's reluctance to describe that incident does not keep him from explaining the practical danger that remains.
The Speedbump and the first-floor descent
Carl proposes fighting the borough boss so the Meadow Lark group can use the stairs. Brandon contributes the skills he and Chris brought from maintenance work. Over several hours they help Carl build a portable, low defensive structure from goblin workshop tables, weight equipment, bolts, and other salvaged parts. Brandon names the improvised redoubt the Speedbump. The sections are built to fit together quickly after the team enters the boss arena; Brandon and Imani carry heavy wall pieces, while Chris helps secure the assembled structure. The workers' ability to use the goblin tools and make stable joints gives Carl's idea a usable physical form.
The opponent is the Ball of Swine, a fast-rolling borough boss that fills much of its circular track. Carl's group aims to wedge it between the Speedbump and the tunnel ceiling, stopping its momentum while the crawlers attack from underneath. Brandon suggests embedding Carl's enchanted shuriken in the structure's leading surface after recognizing how repeated strikes could compound their damage. The group also makes spike strips from the fragile stars. When Agatha enters the arena against the others' wishes, her presence leaves too little room inside the redoubt for its final central support. The roof sags under the boss's weight, but the group breaks the ball apart and fights the individual Tusklings released from it.
Brandon retrieves his hammer during the fight. Its blows glitter with lightning, and he crushes the last surviving Tuskling Dominatrix beneath it. The victory opens the stairway and raises Brandon and Chris from level six to level eight. Brandon emerges shaken by the violence, but he and the other workers immediately return to moving the residents. Carl and Donut go ahead to find a safe path on the next floor. Before they part, Brandon thanks them and asks Carl to look for Agatha, who has disappeared. His concern includes her even though she repeatedly disrupted the group's plans.
Keeping the residents together
On the second floor, Brandon and his companions bring residents into a safe room before the first floor collapses. Only six people from the Waffle House join them; the other twenty-four choose to remain. Brandon reports that they were singing when he last saw them. He decides the residents should move to the third floor early because most cannot train effectively where they are. The staff will go with them, even though Brandon and the other fighters would benefit from more time to gain levels. He tells Carl that separation is a greater risk than arriving early.
Moving the group requires more than a clear corridor. With the second-floor deadline nearing, Brandon designs a trainlike transport from wood, salvaged wheelchair wheels, and seats. Imani's temporary magical chain links ten small cars and the harnesses worn by Chris and Imani, who pull the passengers. Brandon adds ramps for boarding. The arrangement carries thirty-nine people, including residents using their own chairs and others who normally rely on walkers. It is maneuverable in the halls but too wide for safe-room doors, forcing the team to assemble and stage it outside. Brandon also joins Chris and Yolanda in clearing a separate neighborhood boss, gaining experience and salvaged wood for the transport.
Carl and Donut guide the train toward the stairs, clearing Grubs along the route. Brandon thanks Carl for accepting danger on behalf of people outside his own party. During the journey, a resident named Jack urinates against a dungeon wall despite warnings; the contact summons a powerful elemental. Yolanda kills Jack too late to prevent its arrival. The train jolts, Randall falls, and Carl races to rescue injured residents while the others usher passengers into a safe room. Brandon takes Mrs. McGibbons from Carl at the door and helps her drink a healing potion. He is angry that Jack's action has endangered people who depended on the transport, but he continues caring for the injured after the immediate threat passes.
The elemental then blocks the route to the stairs. Brandon and Chris help Carl construct a launcher for wheeled explosives. Carl paints “Mother of All Bombs” on it; Brandon objects that the machine launches several bombs rather than being one enormous bomb and calls it the Bomb Chicken. His input is more than a naming joke. He corrects Carl's proposed weight distribution so the bomb carts will remain stable when launched from a moving vehicle. Carl's first launched device runs as intended, and he credits Brandon's advice. The bombs help the group manage the elemental long enough to reach and defeat it.
By the time the Meadow Lark survivors arrive at the newly cleared stairwell, their first train is gone. Brandon, Chris, and Imani have made a rougher replacement from chopper wheels and wood: three cartlike “people buckets” carrying thirty-six residents. Chris and Imani push the larger carts, while Brandon pushes six people in a smaller one. Carl's party remains behind temporarily, and Brandon offers to have them come down with the group. The exchange marks the end of their close cooperation on the second floor.
Third-floor choices and Chris
Brandon keeps in contact with Carl after the groups separate. His third-floor message reports that race selection is slow for the residents. According to Brandon, remaining human would leave many in their former condition, while people with cognitive impairments face particularly difficult choices. He stays human; Chris and Imani change races. Residents who reach the third floor without killing or damaging anything receive valuable pacifist rewards, leaving the group with more magical equipment than Brandon expected. He thanks Carl again for helping them reach that point.
Brandon also influences Elle McGibbons's transformation. Elle later tells Carl that Brandon urged her to choose Frost Maiden because its benefits could help the group; she connects the choice to information Carl had passed to Brandon about a manager benefit. This is a decision made for a resident who had been unable to fight and travel independently when Carl first met her. Elle's account shows Brandon still involved in the residents' future after their successful descent, though she makes clear that the race choice itself is hers.
Chris's choice of an igneous rock race changes the brothers' relationship. Imani later tells Carl that Chris becomes much stronger and begins pressing to spend his time hunting. He wants to seek out Carl and Donut, whom he believes are nearby, while Brandon favors training close to the stairwell so the group can escape when necessary. The brothers argue repeatedly. Chris leaves with several men, and contact with the Meadow Lark party breaks down. Brandon can see that Chris remains alive, but his messages cannot reach him. He thinks Chris may have blocked him, without knowing why delivery has failed.
Brandon's final message to Carl gives the disagreement a personal weight beyond the route dispute. He regrets something he said to Chris and asks Carl to tell him that he is sorry, that Chris was right about an unspecified matter, and that he loves him. He remembers smaller conflicts over risks, food, and childhood possessions while realizing he has never plainly told his brother what matters most. The precise cause of their last argument is not established by Brandon's message. His request is for reconciliation he can no longer make himself.
Death and remembrance
Near the end of the third floor, a mass of Shade Gremlins threatens the remaining Meadow Lark survivors. Brandon tells Carl that he and a resident named Henry are holding them back while Imani, Elle, and the others escape. With roughly ten minutes left before the floor collapses and the stairwell about twenty minutes away, Brandon knows he cannot reach it. He sends his message to Carl and to Imani and Elle in case one of them can pass it on. When Carl receives it after the fourth floor opens, the interface places it under messages from deceased crawlers and confirms Brandon's death.
Imani later tells Carl that Henry died alongside Brandon while protecting the group's escape. Elle links the Gremlin outbreak to Henry's encounter with a succubus. These accounts explain the crisis without changing the narrower confirmed account of Brandon's last act: he remained behind with Henry as the others fled. At that later meeting, Elle says twenty members of the Meadow Lark group survive, while Imani confirms that Chris is still alive but has not answered them.
Carl saves Brandon's final message in his scratchpad and rereads the part addressed to Chris. He had known Brandon for only a short time, but calls him a friend and is angered by how little public notice his death is likely to receive. Brandon's fate also makes the success of the earlier rescues less simple: the workers and residents made it beyond the floors Carl helped them cross, yet keeping them together still demanded further sacrifices. His inventions had repeatedly made movement possible; in his final encounter, he secures time for that movement by staying behind.