> Spoiler warning: This article describes major events through The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook, including Hekla's death.
Hekla, sometimes identified by her Amazonian race or Shieldmaiden class, was an Icelandic crawler, the leader of Brynhild's Daughters, and one of the highest-ranked contestants during the early floors of Dungeon Crawler World. She built a large, all-female organization around a powerful repeating crossbow and became a recognizable broadcast figure before meeting Carl and Princess Donut. Her disciplined public image concealed an increasingly utilitarian approach to leadership. On the Fourth Floor, she combined a genuine mass-rescue operation with a concealed attack on Katia Grim, provoking the confrontation in which Katia accidentally killed her.
Hekla's career is defined by that contradiction. She gathered and protected women who might otherwise have been isolated, shared information across separated groups, and helped rescue a trainload of endangered crawlers. At the same time, she organized the Daughters around her own weapon, allowed subordinates to be used as pieces in a private scheme, and treated Katia's trust as a tactical resource. Her death therefore removed both a dangerous rival and the central support of a community that many crawlers depended upon.
Life before the collapse and entry into the dungeon
Hekla lived in Iceland before the collapse. Reykjavík's close social circles connected her to two future Daughters before the crawl began: she had served as Eva Sigrid's psychiatrist, while Eva knew Katia socially through the university. This pre-existing relationship helps explain Eva's position near Hekla's side and her later role as the leader's enforcer. The novels do not establish that Hekla had the same professional or therapeutic relationship with Katia.
Hekla entered the dungeon with her husband while the two were arguing. A retrospective broadcast shown after her death reveals that a walking cactus poisoned him soon afterward. Hekla left while he called for her to return, then later found his body being eaten by rats. When one of the rats attacked, she killed it by driving one of her husband's exposed rib bones into its eye. The System rewarded her with a legendary “Grrl Power” box for being the first woman to kill a mob using a dead man's body. Carl later infers that this box supplied the crossbow that became the foundation of her build, but the broadcast does not explicitly show her opening the box.
The abandonment of her husband followed Hekla into her public life. During a Third Floor appearance on Danger Zone with Ripper Wonton, an audience member asked why she had left him. Visibly unsettled, Hekla answered that he had left her with no choice because remaining with him would have killed them both. Asked whether she regretted the decision, she said that she did. The exchange presents the earliest known example of her survival calculus: Hekla could make a decision she considered necessary, survive because of it, and still acknowledge its personal cost.
Rise of Brynhild's Daughters
By the end of the First Floor, recap programming was already following Hekla and an expanding crowd of female fighters. The group called itself Brynhild's Daughters. Hekla fought with a crossbow while the System reinforced a Nordic shieldmaiden image through themed loot, including a glittering and impractical-looking breastplate. Donut immediately admired her and suggested joining the group. Hekla's reputation was therefore established for Carl's party through the crawl's broadcasts before they ever spoke to her.
The transition to the Third Floor temporarily broke Hekla's organization apart. Because the women had not entered the dungeon together and had gathered only afterward, they returned to their original game guides and emerged in different places. Hekla entered character creation alone. She selected the Amazonian race and the Shieldmaiden class, an earth class suited to the martial identity already being built around her. The transformation made her roughly a foot taller and much broader than before, turning an already fit blonde woman into a visibly strength-oriented fighter with the build of a professional bodybuilder.
Hekla rebuilt quickly. Within days, much of her group had reunited and defeated an owlbear borough boss. She reached level 25 shortly after Lucia Mar, making her only the second crawler known to reach that mark at the time. Her automatic magical crossbow gave her exceptional ranged damage, and Carl compared its rate of destruction to a ranged chainsaw. At the close of the Third Floor she held second place on the crawler leaderboard at level 28, behind Lucia Mar, with a bounty of 500,000 gold.
Her media appearances added to that authority. On Danger Zone, Hekla remained reserved through most of the off-world political discussion and stayed composed when an attack disrupted the production. She laughed at Donut's dismantling of another guest and watched Carl closely after his public condemnation of the crawl's ruling powers. Her low-key manner contrasted with Donut's theatricality, but it did not make Hekla politically passive. She used the appearance to place Katia in contact with Carl and Donut, beginning a relationship that benefited both the stranded crawler and Hekla's longer-term ambitions.
Katia and the interest in Donut
Katia became separated from the Daughters during the Third Floor transition. When Hekla learned that Katia was near Carl's party, she asked them to find her, admit her temporarily to their party, help her gain levels, and keep her out of excessive danger. Katia arrived at only level nine with little control over her Doppelganger body, but she spoke of Hekla with gratitude and said Hekla had saved her life. Hekla's request materially improved Katia's prospects: training with Carl, Donut, and Mordecai helped Katia understand her mass-based transformations and finish the floor at level 21.
Hekla's intervention was not purely protective. Between floors, Odette privately warned Carl that Hekla had become preoccupied with recruiting Donut. According to Odette's monitoring of Hekla's conversations with her former game guide, Hekla considered Carl unstable and did not want him in the Daughters. Donut, however, would bring both her own formidable abilities and access to Mordecai, because the manager was part of Donut's party arrangement. Odette did not accuse Katia of knowingly participating in the plan, and Carl continued to distinguish Katia's actions from Hekla's intentions.
On the Fourth Floor, Hekla maintained influence through Katia even while the latter remained with the Royal Court. Katia relayed Hekla's observations about train routes, monsters, and possible bugs in the Iron Tangle. Hekla also interpreted Donut's player-killer coupons for Katia and encouraged suspicion that Donut might be hiding a coupon bearing Katia's name. At the same time, she cultivated Donut's admiration through gestures such as naming a combat maneuver the “Donut Kick.” The contact had practical value, but it also allowed Hekla to gather information and preserve an emotional claim on both women.
The Vermillion Line rescue
Hekla reunited with Katia in person when approximately thirty Daughters entered the Royal Palace of Princess Donut. Hekla had reached level 33, while most of her followers averaged around level 25. Their numbers gave the organization a broad selection of spells and skills, but shared experience had left ordinary members well below their leader. Eva stood at Hekla's side with thirteen player-killer skulls, whereas no other visible Daughter, including Hekla, carried one. Carl interpreted this as evidence that Eva performed violent work from which Hekla kept herself publicly separated.
Hekla thanked Carl for protecting and training Katia, but she had also arrived with an urgent proposal. More than a thousand crawlers, including Li Jun's group, were trapped around Station 101 while mobs converged on the station. The Daughters had captured a Vermillion Line subway train after Hekla killed its engineer and took the route map. Eva had acquired a second engine and attached it to the rear so the train could reverse after collecting the stranded survivors. The railway remained choked with ghouls, however, and the subway's small debris guard could not safely clear them at speed.
Katia proposed transforming herself into a reinforced plow and attaching her body to the train's front. Hekla accepted the plan and sought Carl's engineering help. Although Carl initially regarded the idea as proof that Hekla considered Katia disposable, Katia insisted that it was her own design and that the rescue mattered to her. She also valued the fact that Hekla had brought the entire organization to recover her. Carl negotiated for Katia to remain in his party during the operation, helped insulate her from the third rail, and joined Donut, Hekla, Eva, and the Wisteria Fairy healer Silfa in the lead engine.
The rescue was real, not merely a pretext. Eva drove; Hekla ordered greater speed; Hekla and Donut shot the ghouls caught on Katia's spikes; and the train broke through the masses moving toward Station 101. Hekla supplied route information and warned that the main horde near the station was much larger than the groups they had already crossed. Her team and Carl's party reached the trapped population in time for the crawlers to board. Whatever private scheme Hekla carried into the mission, her planning and resources helped save a large number of people.
Attack on Katia and death
During the worst fighting, Katia's health began falling far faster than the impacts and electrical shocks explained. Silfa first withheld healing until Hekla approved it and later hid in the engineer's apartment after Eva ordered her to stop healing Katia. Donut's special glasses revealed the direct cause: Hekla had mixed invisible Dirty Little Phased Bolts among her ordinary shots and fired two into Katia's transformed body.
The bolts concealed both themselves and their entry wounds. Each inflicted Temporary Amnesia and Suffering Bleed; the first could reduce a victim to ten percent health, and the second to one percent. If the victim then died, the System attributed death to another cause and denied the shooter experience, credit, and the player-killer skull that normally exposed a crawler killing. Carl ordered Katia to shed her plow form, physically found and removed the hidden bolts, and stabilized her. Donut immediately attacked Hekla when she understood that the shots had been deliberate.
Hekla stopped the first exchange and dismissed most of the Daughters from the engine cab. She admitted that she had made a mistake but tried to treat the event as a failed risk that should not interfere with their immediate survival. She never offered Katia a full explanation. Eva said that they wanted Katia's apparent death to provoke Carl's famous temper and claimed they had not truly intended to kill her. This claim is difficult to reconcile with ammunition explicitly designed to hide a crawler's responsibility for a death.
The broader purpose is reconstructed rather than confessed. Odette had already established Hekla's desire to acquire Donut and Mordecai while excluding Carl. Carl concluded that Katia was intended as bait, Silfa as the apparent cause of Katia's death, and his retaliatory violence as the justification for killing him. Donut would then be isolated and pressured toward the Daughters. Silfa confirmed that Hekla had positioned Silfa's biological daughters outside with orders to kill Carl first if anything went wrong, but the exact sequence Hekla intended after that point remains unstated.
The confrontation became lethal because Eva continued to belittle Katia after Hekla ordered her to stop. Eva revealed that Katia had been used to trigger Carl, mocked private wounds from Katia's pre-collapse life, and ordered her to return to the Daughters. Katia activated Rush against Eva. The ability carried her slightly off line, causing her to miss Eva and drive Hekla into the train's interior wall instead. Hekla, then the second-ranked crawler in the game, died instantly. Katia received Hekla's 500,000-gold bounty, a distinctive golden player-killer skull, and enough experience to rise from level 24 to level 37. She repeatedly maintained that the killing was accidental.
Equipment and combat organization
Hekla's signature weapon was the Enchanted Repeating Crossbow of the Scavenger Mother of Mothers, a unique, female-only weapon associated with the vulture goddess Nekhebit. Its buffet enchantment supplied unlimited basic ammunition, while still permitting specialized bolts. The wielder's combined strength and level increased its base damage more efficiently than an ordinary crossbow, and the weapon granted additional dexterity and strength. It also inflicted Birth Defect on monsters that generated or birthed other monsters.
Its most consequential property shaped the Daughters themselves: for every woman in the wielder's party, up to thirty, both damage and firing speed increased by twenty-five percent. Hekla's large female party was therefore not only a social organization or protective alliance. Its membership directly amplified her primary weapon. The crossbow encouraged a command structure in which expanding the group made Hekla disproportionately stronger, even when shared experience left individual members behind.
After Hekla's death, Katia successfully looted the crossbow. It was less powerful in Katia's smaller party, confirming how closely Hekla's combat dominance depended upon the Daughters' composition. Hekla also carried short curved blades for close combat and could use a physical shield effect. When an Enraged condition activated during the ghoul assault, she fought wildly with the blades and even severed one of Eva's hands amid the confusion.
Collapse of the Daughters and public legacy
Hekla's death exposed how much of Brynhild's Daughters depended on one person. The party system automatically promoted Eva, but members immediately began leaving because they did not trust her. The survivors lost access to Hekla's personal space and were left with an unbalanced collection of healers and mages, limited equipment, and no effective replacement for the damage supplied by the crossbow. Silfa's fear that the group had become “nothing” without Hekla was exaggerated but reflected a real organizational failure: Hekla had made herself indispensable rather than building a command structure that could survive her.
The immediate violence also deepened the damage. Donut used Second Chance and Clockwork Triplicate on Hekla's corpse to drive the attacking Daughters out of the engine cab while Katia secured the Vermillion key and crossbow. This desecration horrified Hekla's followers and ensured that the rescue ended with mutual distrust instead of reconciliation. Eva survived, inherited nominal leadership, and blamed Katia for the death even though Katia had been aiming at Eva.
Dungeon programming reshaped the event for its audience. A recap special traced Hekla's entry, rise, and recruitment of the Daughters, then presented Katia's final Rush as a deliberate act of revenge rather than an accidental strike aimed at Eva. That broadcast preserved Hekla as a fallen champion while simplifying the concealed bolts, manipulation, and confusion that produced her death. For Donut and Katia, the private consequences were different. Donut's admiration collapsed when she recognized that Hekla's affection for Katia was conditional, while Katia's return to the Daughters became impossible. Hekla's final scheme thus accomplished the opposite of its apparent purpose: Katia remained permanently with Carl and Donut, and the organization Hekla had assembled fractured around the absence of its leader.