Bautista

Bautista, whose first name is Daniel, is a crawler, Swashbuckler, and recurring Princess Posse ally whose collection of summonable stuffed creatures makes him a versatile fighter and scout. The destruction of his family initially leaves him questioning both his survival and his chosen Tigran body, but his bonds with the other crawlers—especially Katia—gradually give his endurance a communal and religious purpose.

Biography

The Circus and the Iron Tangle

Bautista meets Carl and Donut after they inadvertently kill Miss Quill, the target of his quest. He is less concerned about the lost reward than about learning what happened to his relatives at the circus. Once Carl confirms their deaths and the punishment of the lemurs responsible, Bautista explains that he has lost his siblings, cousins, and the last relative who escaped with him. Grief has made him wonder why he continues and whether God will recognize him in the nonhuman race he chose, yet he answers that despair by declaring a debt to Carl and offering future help. Soon afterward he guides another group to a stairwell, then becomes a useful long-distance contact: he relays information between scattered crawlers, warns Carl about bounty hunters, and shares the station pattern that identifies Desperado Club entrances. (Chapters 71, 73, and 80)

That role becomes critical when Bautista gathers roughly four hundred crawlers and finds their route blocked by a station mimic and the Kravyad-controlled employee portal. He reports the dangers, spends his last purple Voca Nye to neutralize the Kravyad’s hypnosis, and leads the survivors toward the abyss after the NPC’s accidental death closes the portal. Working with Carl from opposite ends of the railway, he identifies the stranded groups, tests weaknesses in the rescue plan, and fights his way to the Mindaro line despite losing nearly fifty people. Carl and Katia ultimately retrieve his remaining group, but Bautista’s contribution is more than passive rescue: his local observations make the train plan possible, and he continues trying to raise his underleveled teammates rather than abandoning them after reaching safety. (Chapters 92–103)

The Gate of the Feral Gods

On the next floor, Bautista clears all four castles in his quadrant, although most of the crawlers trapped in his bubble die. He does not openly discuss the effect of those losses and gives Carl only restrained updates, but he continues moving his survivors toward safety when a raging god forces an early descent. Katia, who has remained in contact with him since the Iron Tangle rescue, recognizes that he is still lost and invites him and several friends into the larger group she is building. Accepting places Bautista in a durable team with other bereaved crawlers and shifts him from the leader of an isolated remnant toward one of Katia’s regular partners. (Chapters 129, 137, and 142)

The Hunting Grounds and the Masquerade

Bautista joins Katia, Imani, Elle, and the others in their pursuit of Eva, operating as part of a coordinated field team rather than on his own. When Lucia Mar and hostile hunters threaten the group at Zockau, one of his stuffed mousers—tamed, disguised with a crown and sunglasses, and carried by a clockwork duplicate—serves as a false Donut and helps trigger Lucia’s teleport trap without exposing the real cat. By this point Bautista has also begun training his Swashbuckler sword work with Tran, reducing his dependence on a finite supply of summons. His growing closeness with Katia becomes an acknowledged romantic relationship, and his relief when Carl accepts it shows how much he values continued trust within the group. (Chapters 165, 179–180, and 201)

During the Butcher’s Masquerade, Bautista combines that personal loyalty with disciplined support work. He helps restrain Katia when Eva provokes her, quietly takes responsibility for watching her afterward, and contributes stuffed Slate Butterflies to the plan for disabling a light without overt magic. When the Masquerade collapses into battle, he helps drag unconscious crawlers to the stairwell instead of pursuing loot or personal kills. These choices establish him as one of the people the wider alliance can rely on during extraction as well as combat. (Chapters 209, 214, and 219)

The Eighth Floor and Bedlam

Bautista’s relationship with Katia becomes both a source of stability and a source of fear. He sits with her through the disclosure of the Sepsis Whore crown’s boons, questions why sponsor Huanxin Jinx is investing so heavily in her, and reacts to the assassination requirement with visible fear but determination. When Katia later emerges sick and debilitated after using a narcotic blitz stick, he tries to stop Carl from pressing her immediately into another dangerous operation. Katia rejects his attempt to hold her down, and Bautista leaves rather than watch, exposing the limit of his protective instinct: his fear of another loss can make him controlling precisely when Katia insists on making her own choices. (Chapters 239–240, 248, and 251)

He nevertheless remains beside Katia and her squad through the floor’s card battles. As a deckmaster he fights alongside Carl and Li Jun, flooding the battlefield with summoned creatures against high-level demons; when the structure begins to collapse, he uses a shape-changing ring to assume a large four-armed form and helps tear through rubble toward trapped allies. The same summons that give him massed combat power also provide utility outside direct fighting, and he continues sharing information about wounded teammates and helping the guild coordinate. (Chapters 228, 232, 286, 288, and 291)

Faction Wars at Larracos

During the Faction Wars preparations, Bautista stays close to Katia through dangerous medical work and field operations. His anxiety intensifies as her planned escape through Eileithyia approaches: he argues that she should use the orchid before another battle can kill her and fears that, if the plan fails, Carl might be forced to choose Donut’s survival over Katia’s. Even while they argue, Bautista continues accepting operational responsibilities. He distracts a Dagda cleric so Li Jun and Zhang can secure an infiltration route, supplies Eclipse Pyxie summons for the staged attack on Club Vanquisher, and later scouts the Reaver castle’s shifting corridors by sending stuffed creatures ahead while reporting their positions to Katia. (Chapters 315, 349, 352–353, and 385)

When Emberus forces the group to trigger Katia’s departure earlier than planned, Bautista initially panics because they have not prepared. He then withdraws to the crafting room and completes the prosthetic limbs Katia had built in anticipation of becoming human again. Returning with them, he tells her that he knew her plan, affirms his love, and apologizes for making her doubt him. He helps fit the prosthetics after Eileithyia restores Katia’s original human body, allowing her to leave with some immediate mobility before the goddess removes her from the dungeon. His response does not erase his fear or grief, but it turns his impulse to prevent Katia’s choice into practical support for the choice she has made. (Chapters 389 and 391)

The Parade of Horribles

After Katia’s departure, Bautista remains with Louis, Britney, and the surviving alliance during the race floor. His family’s former tea business becomes newly important: he teaches Linus to prepare tea, serves his blends around the guild, and watches an unwanted outside brand form around his name. When the Pineapple Cabaret offers a possible escape, he asks Louis and Britney for consent to leave their party and chooses the uncertain transfer over continuing deeper into the dungeon, hoping eventually to reach India and check on Katia. At the farewell he reconciles with Louis’ role in Katia’s pregnancy through humor and calls the other crawlers his family. Serving them tea—including blends that grant constitution bonuses—lets him express the belief that honoring friends and community honors God, and he says that this new peace has answered his old fear that he would not be recognized after death. (Chapters 456, 464, and 466)

Appearance and personality

Bautista’s Tigran form is a muscular, roughly six-foot humanoid tiger with dense orange, white, and black fur, a shaggy tail, catlike slit pupils, and a largely human nose, mouth, hands, and build. He initially goes shirtless and carries a curved sword that glows orange. His appearance is conspicuous even among crawlers, and he privately regrets choosing it because he worries the transformation has separated him from his former identity and faith. (Chapter 71)

He is restrained about grief and often communicates distress through pacing, lowered posture, or terse messages rather than confession. With friends he can be dryly funny, affectionate, and generous, but fear of further bereavement makes him intensely protective and sometimes overbearing toward Katia. His faith is not merely stated belief: by the supplied endpoint, he interprets hospitality, friendship, and service as sacred obligations and finds peace by treating the crawler alliance as the community he thought he had lost. (Chapters 129, 239–240, 251, 349, and 466)

Skills, class, and abilities

Bautista is a Swashbuckler whose conventional fighting style centers on a curved sword, but much of his tactical reach comes from Jaxbrin stuffed creatures and later from an item-derived alternate form. The corpus establishes his class and a few explicit level checkpoints, but not a complete chronological advancement record; intermediate level gains and formal class development remain unshown.

Swashbuckler combat

Bautista begins practicing his sword more deliberately after Carl warns him that sponsor goodwill and a finite stock of summons are unreliable foundations for survival. He trains with Tran, another Swashbuckler, and the two receive a teamwork bonus when they fight together. The supplied chapters do not explain their exact fencing skills, activation conditions, or bonus values, so Bautista’s demonstrated class mastery is best understood through his continuing front-line participation rather than inferred mechanics. (Chapters 71, 103, and 180)

Jaxbrin stuffed summons

Bautista loots more than a thousand tagged stuffed creatures from Miss Quill’s apartment. Removing a tag teleports the corresponding real creature to him rather than creating a temporary copy; he can remove the tag while the toy is still in inventory, shortening the deployment by about two seconds. The summons can scout, distract, disable, or overwhelm depending on the creature. Bautista uses a purple Voca Nye to stop the Kravyad’s hypnosis, mousers for deception, nonviolent Slate Butterflies to drain nearby light sources, Eclipse Pyxies for a staged demon attack, and mixed groups of frogs, trolls, dragons, and other monsters as a massed battle force. He can direct groups as a unit and track deployed summons well enough to map the Reaver castle’s shifting passages. (Chapters 93, 103, 180, 201, 209, 288, 353, and 385)

The collection has important limits. Some creatures do not consistently obey; a green Slizzer variant attacks Bautista, and hostile mousers require a taming spell. Size, temperament, and concealed variants may not be apparent until a tag is pulled, making unfamiliar figures risky to deploy. A summoned creature that survives can be returned to toy form and retagged with sponsor-supplied materials, but Bautista says this reuse works only twice. Kills by his creatures grant inconsistent experience, sometimes reduced or absent and occasionally unusually large, for reasons he does not understand. Jaxbrin sponsorship replenishes part of his collection, but it also makes his most distinctive ability dependent on consumable creatures and an outside supplier. (Chapters 101, 103, 180, and 201)

Shape-changing ring

A ring acquired after the skipped seventh floor lets Bautista change shape. Its demonstrated use turns his Tigran body into a large, four-armed creature, giving him the additional reach and apparent strength needed to help rip through collapsed masonry. The corpus does not establish the ring’s name, duration, cooldown, complete form list, or whether it grants abilities beyond the physical properties of the selected body, so the transformation is an equipment-derived capability rather than an innate Tigran power. (Chapters 223 and 291)

Crafting, scouting, and hospitality

Bautista applies his summons as expendable forward scouts and contributes directly to planning by reporting routes, enemy behavior, and failures while separated from the main group. He also shows practical crafting ability when he finishes Katia’s prepared cybernetic limbs under severe time pressure. His tea-making comes from the family shop he operated before the collapse; by the race floor he can infuse blends with dungeon ingredients so they function as potions, including one that grants a vehicle or mount a 25 percent constitution bonus. The potion classification means drinkers must still account for their own potion timers. (Chapters 80, 92–101, 385, 391, and 466)

Relationships

• Katia: Katia recruits Bautista while both are grieving, and their partnership develops into a romantic relationship. His terror of losing her produces genuine care as well as attempts to overrule her, but he ultimately supports her chosen escape, completes her prosthetics, and hopes to find her again outside the dungeon.
• Carl: Bautista initially owes Carl a debt for avenging his family, then becomes his remote informant, rescue partner, and operational ally. Their trust survives disagreements over how hard to push Katia and expands into mutual recognition as members of the same chosen family.
• Tran: Tran is a fellow Swashbuckler and training partner. Bautista also monitors his recovery after the loss of his legs and continues serving with him through the later floors.
• Louis: Louis is Bautista’s squadmate and friend. Katia’s choice of Louis as the human father of her child creates an awkward emotional strain, but Bautista eventually jokes about it, calls Louis his brother, and accepts his role.
• Britney: Britney fights alongside Bautista in Katia’s squad and the race team. He seeks both her and Louis’s consent before leaving their party for the Pineapple Cabaret.
• Imani and Elle: Bautista works with both women across multiple floors, from pursuit and extraction missions to the Princess Posse’s later wars. Shared meals and his tea become part of the community they maintain between battles.

Items

• Jaxbrin stuffed figures: Bautista’s finite collection of tagged true summons, replenished in part through sponsorship, commercial samples, and loot boxes. The toys vary in behavior and can sometimes be retagged after surviving a deployment.
• Shape-changing ring: An unnamed ring that allows Bautista to assume at least one large, four-armed form.
• Curved sword: A glowing orange blade carried for his Swashbuckler combat; the corpus does not provide its name or detailed properties.