Chapter 90: Book 1: Chapter 32 (Part 1 of 3)

I didn’t have time to be pissed at Dean. There were enemies to deal with. I had just enough time to swivel my head from side to side and absorb what I’d not been able to view when stuck in Action Mode.

A few metres behind me were two confused Capronids who had been attacking Anastasia. Their confusion was directly linked to her shrinking down to doll size and slipping away from them.

Shana remained on the periphery of the woodland to the east of this barren clearing. She had been firing arrows at the other two surviving goat-men. They were hunkered down behind the altar of the blood shrine which was on the western side of the wasteland dell.

I spotted Jackson to the north of my position at the hanging rack. He had managed to free three of the slaves tied up there and was working on the bindings of the fourth.

South of me was Sholmdir’s screeching monstrosity. Even in the fleeting second or two that I had been surveying the land the giant crawdad had scuttled forward and covered half the distance between us. Dean and Quix had been right, the damn thing was wicked fast.

I felt the cord of the tip of Anastasia’s whip wrap around my wrist. I pulled my hand to my chest sharply and tugged the diminutive woman, who clung onto the whip’s handle tightly, from the ground and she flew towards me. I caught her small body as it hurtled in my direction deftly and reaching my arm over my head deposited her in the hood of the dragonscale coif I had only just equipped. The coil of her whip unwrapped itself as she landed in the ice-blue edged black scale lining of the hood.

We had discussed the manoeuvre in advance and agreed it was the quickest way to get us in close contact.

By the time we’d finished reuniting, I was already in motion, diving to my right as the giant crawdad charged at me. I barely made it out of the way of the rampaging creature as its momentum swept it past me. The mouths of the polyp-like parasites stretched out and gnashed at me, one of them missing by only a handful of centimetres.

My freshly boosted acrobatics skill had already spared me some damage.

Luck was with us as I rolled across the ground. The two Capronids that had been whomping on Anastasia seconds earlier weren’t as spry or aware of the rapidity of what was coming as I had been. The crawdad, acting on instinct and seeing two fresh targets kept scuttling forward unabated on its many legs, and I got a good look at the rest of its body as it did so.

Besides its giant claws and lobster-like head area, the beast had a bulbous main body, its thorax if I recalled my biology lessons accurately, that was several metres long and four pairs of legs that supported the weight. The creature then had several metres of a segmented tail doubling the length of the body. Each segment had its own pair of shorter limbs that weren’t really designed for walking but assisted its mobility, nonetheless. The very rear of the creature had a three-metre-wide flat armoured horizontal flipper with razor edges that swished over the top of my head.

There were six mutated parasites on the thorax of the giant crawdad and the other six were randomly dispersed along the row of segmented tail parts. Up close I could see the parasites were exuding a thick gelatinous substance that had spread across the carapace of the thorax and segments they were welded to.

The only part of the crawdad that didn’t seem coated in the foul muck were its oversized claws.

The beast snapped its large claws and scooped an almost seven-foot goat-man up in each. The Capronids lowed loudly in pain as the pincers snapped shut on them, the razor edges severing the beast’s spines. The crawdad shook them violently as it continued its scuttling advance across the dell.

The two Capronids flailed like rag dolls for a few heartbeats before the power of the mutated crustacean’s pincers finished sawing through bone, flesh, and cartilage. Their severed fur-covered goat legs fell to the barren earth, spurting blood the colour of crimson. A crimson so deep it could almost be mistaken for black. The top halves of the beasts fell away and coated the pincers in blood and viscera as they were discarded.

This was where our early luck deserted us. Anastasia and I were safe for the time being behind the creature as our evasive roll came to a stop. That left Jackson and the hanging frame in full view of the stampeding monster.

“Jackson, get the fuck out of there,” I screamed at the top of my lungs.

Whether it was the volume of my yelling or maybe some effect of the Canon, the youthful sorcerer looked up from where he had been busy trying to slice through the bindings of the fifth slave in time. But he hesitated.

Jackson was a good-hearted kid, and I could intuit his panicked thoughts. He would not want to leave the pair of helpless women still tied to the frame. They started screaming and begging, having seen what was coming for them. The four he had previously freed were already stumbling or hobbling as fast as they could for the woodland and its perceived safety.

His indecision, while morally understandable, was going to get him killed. The two remaining women simply could not be saved, it was too late for them.

“Leave them,” I roared, and infused every iota of my will that I could into the order as the giant crawdad bore down upon them.

Jackson was spurred into action and with a haunted expression of guilt, abandoned the two tied women to their grisly fate and sprinted after the four he had already freed. One of those women, a redhead, had fallen and Jackson leant down as he ran and scooped her up onto his shoulder.

Thankfully, he didn’t look back as the giant crawdad reached the hanging frame, smashed the makeshift, yet sturdy, structure to smithereens as if it were made from balsa wood. The suffering for the unnamed women was blessedly quick as the monster’s snapping mandibles made short work of them.

Although I’d been told to expect the unexpected speed of the gigantic crustacean it was still shocking. The beast had covered the width of the barren land, at least a hundred metres, in the same length of time it would take Usain Bolt. And that would be presuming Usain was running on a flat track. The crawdad had scuttled over shallow ruts in the earth as if they weren’t even there.

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The only silver lining was that by the time the monster had finished devouring the abandoned unfortunates, Jackson and the other four women had managed to get into the woodland and out of its direct line of sight, so it did not try and pursue them.

The crawdad sensing its true prey, me, behind it, twisted around. At least, that action proved to be mildly awkward for the creature, given its enlarged size.

With less than nine seconds before it rampaged all the way back to me, I quickly fired the outline of our plan to Quixbix mentally. He would be able to relay my instructions for Shana to her without me needing to shout them and risk the orders being misheard.

We would have to trust that Jackson would follow my earlier shouted commands and get out of the danger zone.

I felt the cold tickling sensation that accompanied Anastasia’s curative touch. She had emptied her Drain pool into me. My Hit Points were now at 1800/1860. Not quite full but close enough. I hoped.

“Are you ready, Ana?” I asked her.

“Are you?” she squeaked back, her voice a much higher pitch now that she had been miniaturised.

The giant crawdad had completed its awkward turn and was racing towards us on its many legs, having covered three-quarters of the distance already.

Quixbix had one final thing to say before the true battle began. <One last word of warning. Expect the unexpected. This is an A-grade creature, and your analytical ability wouldn’t have told you everything about it.>

The first of Shana’s arrows zipped from the shrubbery where she remained concealed and slammed home into the gnashing mouthparts of a parasite on the thorax which flopped limply having been killed outright by her strike.

We had initially entered the barren dell from the east and had moved to an almost central position when we ran in and battled against the Capronids. After dodging the first charge from the crawdad I had back-pedalled southwards getting closer to the wrecked treeline where the crawdad had originally burst forth.

This didn’t give me a lot more time before it reached us but that wasn’t the point. When in position, I stood my ground and let the monster charge towards me. Once again, at the last possible moment, I jinked to my left which took me further east and closer to the blood shrine.

As planned the crawdad couldn’t slow itself as it barrelled past me but did lash out with one of its claws, using it as a club.

The claw from its tip to the crawdad’s thorax was three metres long and had too much reach for me to avoid entirely. I threw up my forearms and intercepted the knobby edges of the outer shell of the claw and was thrown back ten or more feet, landing in a heap not far from the blood shrine’s altar.

-50 Hit Points. (1,750/1860)

A loss of fifty Hit Points might not have seemed like much, but my arms were numbed for a heartbeat and caused me to drop my blades from the sheer power behind the hammer blow.

Quixbix had something to say as I struggled to stand and retrieve my weapons. <The very high mitigation of your gauntlets prevented your arms from being broken as part of that clubbing. The base damage was three hundred and that was from the part of the claw that isn’t meant as a weapon. If you get caught in those pincers it will be at least twice that if not more. So, don’t do let it do that.>

I got to my feet. “Thanks for the tip, Quix, I must have missed the part where it cut the Capronids in half.” I hoped my sarcasm was clear, as I didn’t have time to reiterate.

Speaking of Capronids. I’d been pushed close enough to the shrine that I could see what was left of them. Shana’s hail of arrows had finished most of them off. There was one snarling goat-faced fucker left and he was crouched down behind the altar.

The beast-man barked aggressively at me but made no move from his hiding place. Apparently, it remained hostile but not stupid, and chose not to expose itself while the giant crawdad was about. That suited me fine, we would deal with him afterwards if he somehow managed to survive the battle.

The crawdad had scuttled back into the woodland which made turning around even more problematic for the beast. This allowed Shana to continue her barrage on the parasites and by the time the giant crawdad had swivelled around, spotted me once more, and churned up the ground under the eighteen legs it possessed, eight of the parasites hung limply against its shell.

I hadn’t forgotten Dean’s advice about not relying on them sapping Hit Points from the main creature. But if I could delay using my Shattering ability for a while longer it would give some of the parasites long enough to proc their full sap and perhaps push the crawdad over the edge.

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