Daniel Bautista, usually called Bautista, is an Earth crawler, a Tigran swashbuckler, and a long-serving member of the coalition around Carl, Princess Donut, and Katia Grim. He first encounters Carl and Donut on the Third Floor after the deaths of nearly all his relatives. On the Iron Tangle, he becomes an important source of route information and helps coordinate hundreds of separated crawlers. He later joins Katia's party, begins a relationship with her, fights through the Hunting Grounds and Faction Wars, and remains alive at the close of the Ninth Floor.
Bautista's combat identity combines conventional swordsmanship with an unusual collection of stuffed Jaxbrin figures whose tags summon temporary creatures. Although this power gives him a conspicuous battlefield role, much of his importance comes from less visible work: sharing information, maintaining contact between groups, supporting injured teammates, and remaining with Katia through successive crises. His fear of losing another family informs both his loyalty and his disagreements with her.
Third Floor
Carl encounters traces of Bautista before meeting him. A group of crawlers with the Bautista surname is killed by former circus lemurs; three identifiable victims are Grace, Nica, and Lea. Later, Carl finds the corpse of the Divider, a level-17 neighborhood boss that Daniel Bautista has already killed. The enormous punctures in the boss establish that Bautista is capable of defeating major enemies even before he becomes part of Carl's network.
When the two men meet, Bautista is level 18. He has selected the Tigran race and the swashbuckler class. His new body is a muscular, orange-and-white tiger humanoid with a tail, humanlike hands, and a hybrid feline head. The change is not merely cosmetic to him. Bautista is religious, and the extermination of his family has left him questioning whether God will recognize him in a body he regrets choosing.
Bautista explains that five of his sisters and cousins died together in the lemur attack. A surviving cousin escaped with him but died the following day after losing the will to continue. Bautista identifies himself as the last survivor of a family that had included four siblings and fifteen cousins. Carl's report that he and Donut killed the responsible lemurs gives Bautista a small measure of closure but does not resolve his grief. His later protectiveness toward Katia is rooted in this first catastrophe.
At the time of the meeting, Bautista has a quest to kill Miss Quill and gain access to the Desperado Club. Carl and Donut inadvertently kill her before he can complete it. Searching her apartment, Bautista takes more than a thousand tagged stuffed figures. These initially resemble ordinary collectibles, but removing a tag summons the creature represented by the toy. The failed quest therefore gives him the equipment that becomes the defining feature of his build.
Bautista also contributes to the escape from the magical disaster triggered around Remex. He passes along a stairwell location and later arrives with another group at that exit. After directing the others toward safety, he descends. His conduct establishes the pattern he follows on later floors: he cooperates with people outside his immediate party and treats survival information as something to distribute rather than hoard.
Coordination in the Iron Tangle
On the Fourth Floor, Bautista becomes one of Carl's most useful remote contacts. He relays a message from Imani, warns that some crawlers in the Desperado Club are discussing hunting leaderboard players for bounties, and explains the numbering rule that identifies Desperado Club and Club Vanquisher locations at transfer stations. Carl explicitly credits Bautista with showing him the value of crowdsourced information. That lesson helps shape the wider chat network used to understand the Iron Tangle.
Bautista's own group becomes trapped in a succession of large-scale hazards. Approximately four hundred crawlers gather on a train, only for a station mimic to swallow the first people who enter its upper area. Bautista reports the attack while the survivors fight the mimic's tongue and spawned mouth creatures. At the next potential exit, he discovers that the Kravyad is a multi-armed snake-woman NPC rather than a conventional boss. When she tries to hypnotize the crawlers, he stops the spell with his last purple Voca Nye. He then allows a former police negotiator to speak with her because her survival is necessary to keep the employee portal open.
As the Tangle deteriorates, Bautista tracks groups stranded near the abyss and identifies routes by which they might converge. His reports allow Carl, Donut, and Katia to design a rescue using rapid-response carts fitted with portals. Bautista and Katia both identify weaknesses in the first version of the plan, including broken tracks and the risk of derailment. He also supplies practical observations about the wider tunnels near the abyss, which help the group refine the two-cart strategy.
Reaching the selected Mindaro line costs Bautista's force almost fifty lives. Some short-range fliers are pulled into the abyss, while other crawlers die when a gangway collapses. The second rescue cart then fails to arrive because it catches the first cart and is displaced. Carl, Donut, and Katia travel down the line themselves and find Bautista at level 28 with roughly six hundred survivors. Bautista warns that the station mimic regenerates severed pieces, resists magic and blunt attacks, and would require an exceptionally large explosion to destroy. Katia instead suggests using an alternate portal, and Carl's supply of hats makes it possible for the group to bypass the mimic.
During the operation, Bautista reveals that the creatures summoned by his toys can earn him experience, although the system awards it inconsistently. He is reluctant to explain the toys to other crawlers and lets most observers assume that he is casting a spell. He later shows Carl a Stuffed Grulke Infantry Figure and explains the tag mechanic. When the rescue succeeds, he embraces Carl and Katia and thanks them. The exchange also marks the beginning of a closer connection between Bautista and Katia.
Bautista continues to relay conditions during the final collapse. His group withdraws from crowded stairwell stations before the Krakaren assault, becomes trapped between powerful mantaurs and attacking monsters, and finally divides among several smaller, defensible stations. After Carl and Donut detonate the soul crystals, Bautista reports that the generator has exploded and that his people can advance to the stairwells. His group survives the floor because it combines Carl's large-scale intervention with Bautista's local command and willingness to move when new information arrives.
Katia's party and the Fifth Floor
The Fifth Floor initially scatters Bautista into a subterranean region resembling an ant colony. He uses his summoned figures rapidly while exploring and eventually clears all four castles in his quadrant. Most of the crawlers sharing his bubble die, however, adding another severe loss to his history. Near the end of the floor, Katia tells Carl and Donut that Bautista and several of his friends have agreed to join the large party she is forming with Louis, Firas, Gwen, Florin, and others. She says she has spoken with Bautista since the Iron Tangle rescue and recognizes that he is lost and needs the group as much as she does.
This decision changes Bautista from a recurring contact into a regular member of the allied network. It also places him beside Katia as she establishes an identity outside Carl and Donut's party. Their shared experience is not presented as an instant cure for either character's grief. Instead, their partnership develops amid training, collective planning, and repeated losses.
The Hunting Grounds
On the Sixth Floor, Bautista operates as part of Katia's coordinated field team. Recap footage shows him, Katia, Florin, Elle, Imani, and their allies assaulting a druid settlement while pursuing Eva. When the settlement's residents are freed from Eva's charm, the team avoids an unnecessary fight. Carl observes that the group moves together with the familiarity of a unit that has trained for years.
Bautista's summon collection remains central to his tactics. His sponsor provides a refresher kit that lets him replace the tags on surviving figures twice, and additional loot boxes replenish the collection. By the middle of the floor he has about five hundred figures left. Variants can behave differently even when their item descriptions appear identical, so he sorts them by details such as color and stitching. Some summons are harmless or specialized, while others immediately attack and require a tame spell. His figures are used for decoys as well as direct combat; a black cat summon disguised with a crown and sunglasses helps impersonate Donut during a saferoom ruse.
He does not rely exclusively on the collection. Following Carl's advice, Bautista trains with his sword alongside Tran, another swashbuckler. The two receive a teamwork bonus when fighting together. This preparation matters because Bautista cannot assume that sponsors will keep supplying a consumable power. During the Butcher's Masquerade, he fights through the ballroom with chained-saw-armed summons around him and later helps move unconscious crawlers toward the stairwell.
Bautista and Katia's romantic relationship is openly acknowledged before the Masquerade. His nervousness when Donut discovers it contrasts with his confidence in battle, while Katia's habitual physical closeness to him makes the relationship visible to the rest of the group. At the Masquerade, Bautista and Florin restrain Katia when Eva provokes her. Once Carl intervenes, Bautista signals that he is watching Katia and can keep the confrontation from escalating. His role is protective without being unquestioningly obedient: he supports her, but he also challenges actions that he believes will get her killed.
Eighth Floor crises
After the Seventh Floor is skipped, Bautista begins the Eighth Floor in Katia's core squad with Louis, Britney, and Tran. He helps Tran adapt to the loss of his legs and participates in the group's practice of gathering for a shared meal whenever possible. These scenes reveal part of Bautista's life before the collapse: he and his family owned a tea shop. The tea he prepares becomes popular with his allies, particularly Imani and Elle, and provides one of the few domestic routines the crawlers can preserve.
The floor also intensifies Bautista's concern for Katia. He distrusts the bargain associated with Eileithyia and the Crown of the Sepsis Whore, especially the prospect that Katia might become a celestial attendant under the control of powers connected to the crawl. When Katia uses drugs obtained through the Desperado Club and arrives sick, disoriented, and burdened with debuffs, Bautista tries to stop her from immediately participating in the operation to assassinate Astrid. Katia pushes him away, and he leaves rather than watch what he believes is a suicidal decision. The dispute shows that affection does not give him control over her choices and that fear can turn his protectiveness into anger.
The floor repeatedly weaponizes that fear. A hydra confrontation uses memory-ghost versions of members of Bautista's family as part of the enemy. Later, he joins the operation against Amayon and Ysalte. During the resulting card battle, he tears tags from figures in rapid succession, filling the battlefield with armored grulkes, trolls, dragons, and other summoned creatures. After Tran and Imani become trapped in a collapsing building, Bautista uses a shape-changing ring to assume a large four-armed form and helps Britney and Elle remove rubble. His summons continue fighting across the remaining structure while the group works to free the trapped crawlers.
Faction Wars and the close of the Ninth Floor
On the Ninth Floor, Bautista remains closely attached to Katia but also serves the broader Princess Posse war effort. He is present when former crawlers begin Katia's dangerous treatment for her dependence, pacing and biting a claw while she prepares to undergo it. Once open fighting begins, he deploys with Katia and Florin. Their force helps stop enemy armor and then moves to preserve a western corridor through which Carl's position can retreat toward Shanty Town. He subsequently joins the planned assault on the naga stronghold and later appears among the selected fighters summoned to Carl near an enemy castle.
His conflict with Katia becomes more explicit as her planned departure approaches. Bautista wants her to use the orchid that will begin her exit arrangement before another operation can kill her. Katia refuses because the coalition still needs her. She explains that his opposition comes from the loss of his family: he does not want another person he loves to die. The disagreement is therefore both personal and strategic. Bautista is not attempting to undermine the coalition, but his tolerance for Katia's risks has reached its limit.
Bautista remains operational through the final battles. Inside the Reaver castle, he sends stuffed creatures into its shifting honeycomb passages and reports their positions while Katia reconstructs the route. He survives the castle's destruction with scorched fur, helps transport the unconscious Louis afterward, and returns for Katia's final ceremony. When Katia becomes human again, the terms of her arrangement require the father of her child to be human, excluding Bautista because of his Tigran body. Louis agrees to fill that role. Bautista nevertheless completes cybernetic components Katia had designed for herself and brings them to her before the transformation is finalized.
Before leaving, Bautista admits to Carl that fear and anger had nearly driven him to do something terrible. He connects that impulse to the repeated loss of his family and to his shame that the dungeon no longer considers him human. He also assures Carl that he would not harm someone he regards as a brother. His final practical act is to warn Carl about the extraordinary duration of a Kimaris summon after consulting the guide to his stuffed figures. Bautista then enters the stairwell. At the end of the Ninth Floor, he is alive, separated from Katia's chosen path, and still part of the surviving crawler alliance.