Merchant Crab

The blade swung toward Balthazar, too fast for him to dodge.

The crab saw his life flash before his eyes.

It was mostly water, sunbathing, and pastries.

It hadn’t been a bad life, all things considered.

And thankfully for him, that life wasn’t over yet.

The blade passed cleanly over the top of his new hat with a loud metallic whoosh before slamming into the opposite wall.

Balthazar remained frozen, staring at the blade stuck on the stone next to him.

“Thou hast escaped the reaper’s blade!” Sir Bartholomew exclaimed.

Balthazar slowly straightened himself, standing as tall as he could on his legs and stretching his eyestalks up as he looked at the spot the blade had passed a moment before.

“It was too high to hit me,” he said. “It was made for a human’s height.”

He looked at the mechanism. A human-sized explorer would have lost their head, but Balthazar, being only as tall as the waist-level of an adult human, barely had to lower himself to stay clear of the swinging trajectory.

“I’m starting to think these ruins weren’t built for crabs.”

“Indeed! A clear design flaw on their part!”

Balthazar continued down the corridor and soon the sound of gears grinding came from below. He stopped.

“What now?”

A section of stone dropped away, revealing a square hole right under his carapace.

Balthazar tilted his eyestalks down. His eight legs perfectly encircled the edges of the hole, which was deep enough that he couldn't see the bottom.

He looked at the width of the trap and then at himself before carefully stepping to the side.

“I was never going to fall into that. Too narrow.”

Sir Bartholomew spoke up, sounding almost offended.

“Perhaps the ancient architects did not account for thy impressive girth!”

“Clearly they should have,” the crab said, shaking his shell.

“Indeed, noble host!”

“Crab superiority,” Balthazar said as he continued past the poor attempt at a pitfall.

“Quite!” said the barnacle.

A few more steps brought him to another damp dead end.

Balthazar stared at the wall.

“You’ve got to be kidding me. After all this, I get a dead end?”

There was nowhere else to go. Just a smooth stone wall.

Beside it sat a pile of old sacks. Some had split open, spilling dark, unidentifiable chunks of long-rotten food across the floor.

Another skeleton rested beside them.

Balthazar looked closer at it and then the sacks. A letter sat neatly on top of one.

He sighed. “Of course.”

He picked it up. The paper was damp and stained, but the writing was still legible.

We have reached a dead end.

There is nowhere else to go.

We searched every wall and every corner, but found nothing.

After twenty minutes, we had an enlightenment.

We looked up.

Balthazar stopped reading and slowly raised his eyestalks.

The ceiling was much higher in that section of the corridor, and all the way at the top there was a passage.

“Oh, for crust’s sake…”

“A path hidden above!” exclaimed the narrating barnacle. “A secret route revealed to those who possess the wisdom to gaze toward the heavens!”

“How did it take them twenty minutes to think of looking up?” the crab said, waving the piece of paper up and down in exasperation.

“You did not think of looking up either,” Bartholomew observed.

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“Well, I… I only got here a minute ago! I was going to look up after reading the letter!”

“Of course you were, noble host!”

There was no actual staircase or corridor to the passage above. It was simply an opening in the wall, several paces above the floor.

The stone beneath it was completely smooth. No handholds. No ledges. Nothing a crab could climb.

Balthazar read the rest of the letter.

Fortunately, we had climbing gear.

“Well, I don’t!” said Balthazar.

We have to abandon most of our food supplies. We are one man down, and there’s too much weight to climb with.

Balthazar looked at the sacks.

“So they left all their food behind.”

“Makes sense. To lighten their burden.”

“There was enough here to feed a small village! What kind of explorers were they?!”

“The well-prepared kind, it would appear!”

The crab rolled his eyestalks before going back to the letter.

At the bottom of the page was another message.

P.S.: Thompson fell.

He failed to secure the rope around his waist properly.

We returned to confirm he was dead.

Balthazar lowered the paper and looked at the skeleton beside the sacks. Then stared at the piece of paper again and frowned.

“Who the hell sees their friend fall to his death and worries about writing a P.S. on a little note left to nobody in particular?!” the crab blurted out while waving the letter angrily.

Not even Sir Bartholomew had anything to say this time.

Balthazar tossed the letter back onto the sacks and looked at the skeleton with a disapproving glare.

“Did Thompson have a strong opinion on punctuation or something?”

The merchant sighed and shook his shell.

“Never mind. I’ve got a bigger problem to worry about now.”

He looked up at the smooth wall. There was no way he could climb that.

Crabs were excellent swimmers. They were very skilled at digging. They were also quite good at scuttling sideways.

Climbing perfectly smooth vertical walls… not so much.

Balthazar looked down at his claws and then at the wall. After a moment his eyestalks twisted back to look at the corridor he had come from.

“Wait.”

Bartholomew perked up. “Has inspiration struck?”

“Maybe.”

Balthazar hurried back.

𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

“Where are we going?”

“The webs.”

“Thou hast devised a strategy involving the vile arachnid residue?”

“Yes.”

“I must confess, I am intrigued!”

Balthazar reached the previous corridor.

The strands of cobweb he’d torn away earlier were still scattered across the floor.

He gathered them together. There was more than he’d realized.

Several thick strands had clung to the wall and ceiling, and Balthazar carefully pulled them free. He rolled them together until he had a sticky, tangled bundle in one claw.

“That looks thoroughly unpleasant,” Sir Bartholomew observed.

“Trust me, it is,” the crab replied, making a disgusted face.

“And thou intendest to use it?”

“I intend to try.”

Balthazar returned to the dead end and looked up at the smooth stone wall.

The opening was still there, unsurprisingly.

“If this stuff is so sticky, maybe it will give me enough grip to climb this wall.”

“Once more, the brilliant merchant prepares to defy the very laws of nature!”

“I’m trying to climb a wall.”

“A monumental undertaking!”

Balthazar ignored him and held the ball of web in front of himself with both pincers.

The system responded to his request.

[Imbuing activated: Silk Web absorbed]

Balthazar waited. Normally, the next part happened quickly.

Material was chosen, material was consumed, temporary effect was applied.

But something felt different.

The process didn’t immediately consume the web. Instead, it seemed to dig deeper.

The sticky strands trembled in his claw. A strange warmth spread through them.

Balthazar’s eyestalks narrowed.

“Weird…”

And then the usual system message appeared.

[Imbuing - Silk Web]

[Duration: 2 minutes]

[Effect: The tips of your appendages produce a silky and extremely sticky substance. You also feel quite uncomfortable to anyone you touch.]

“Ew…” murmured the crab.

The ball of web was gone and he now stared at the tips of his claws, a shimmering, stringy layer of white covering their chitin.

Tentatively, Balthazar brought his right pincer closer to the stone wall.

It stuck to it like glue.

“No way that worked.”

He patted his explorer’s hat down with the back of his left pincer to make sure it wouldn’t fall off his shell before bringing that claw to the wall too, slightly higher, and the same thing happened again—it stuck to the stone like apple pie filling clinging to the roof of his mouth.

With some difficulty, the merchant pulled the first claw off the wall and moved higher up on the wall.

His body was stretched up in front of the wall. Balthazar looked down and tried to put one of his eight legs on the wall too. The same sticky film coated the tip of it and made the appendage stick to the smooth stone effortlessly.

Next thing Balthazar knew, his entire body was vertical and he was stuck to the wall with both pincers and all of his eight legs.

“This is so strange!” he exclaimed.

But he knew two minutes were not a long time, so it was time to scuttle upward.

“Spider-Crab, Spider-Crab, does whatever a spider can!” Sir Bartholomew sang loudly.

“Shut up, Bartholomew!” the merchant yelled as he awkwardly ran up the wall, doing his best not to look down and panic even more.

“Look out! Here comes the Spider-Crab!”

After about a minute of stumbling up the wall, the crab and barnacle reached the ledge above and Balthazar threw himself over it, panting.

“I hope I never have to do that again! I hate heights!”

As he was still trying to regain his breath and the imbuing effect began to fade from his claws, an unexpected system message appeared in front of him.

[Imbuing skill has evolved!]