Merchant Crab

***

Cletus’s hands were shaking.

Which was no surprise, given what he had gotten himself into.

He was right outside a dragon’s lair, after all.

Sitting on a rock under the cover of the mountain’s overhang, the young adventurer did his best to get his nerves under control while organizing his inventory.

His pack was full of blades, blunt objects, crossbows, throwing weapons, explosive bottles, and all other manner of utilities and low-level arms.

“What am I even doing?”

Indeed, the young level 9 adventurer had not exactly thought his decision through before heading to where he was now.

But what else could he have done? The other adventurers in town would have hounded him endlessly if he hadn’t taken the quest.

He was determined to prove them wrong.

If he could walk into that dragon’s lair and somehow complete his quest, he would be a hero, and those bullies would never mock him again.

And of course, he needed to go through with it because it was the right thing to do. No one else was willing to take on the poor wheat farmer’s quest. Certainly none of those idiots pushing Cletus to accept it between snickering and mockery.

“You should take this quest, Cletus,” one of them told him back at the village.

“Yeah, Cletus. Don’t be a coward! You’re the right guy for the job,” said another, stifling his laughter.

“Imagine the loot! I hear the dragon has a whole hoard of shoes and boots in its lair,” their party’s leader said with a dung-eating grin.

The young boy knew exactly what they were doing, but that didn’t stop him from wanting to prove them wrong.

“I’m no coward…”

If none of those guys was willing to step up to the task despite being more than twice his level because they were too scared of the dragon, he’d do it himself.

Cletus gathered up all of his courage and took the quest from the farmer, who said he’d seen the red dragon fly toward the mountain to the west after it terrorized his family over their wheat fields.

The old man didn’t look very confident in the boy’s chances when he sent him off, however. And who could blame him?

The adventurer knew he was little more than a newbie.

A modest nine levels on him, barely any gold to his name, and equipped with mostly second-hand gear he had purchased from a roadside crab months prior. He was hardly fit to fight a goblin, let alone a mighty dragon.

“Come on, Cletus,” the boy muttered to himself, tightening the straps of his traveling pack to his shoulders. “You can do this. Make a name for yourself!”

The boy was going through with it.

He was going to walk up into that lair and do what he was destined for.

For fame and glory.

To teach those other adventurers not to belittle him.

To show that farmer he had what it took to get the quest done.

And maybe just in case the dragon really did have a hoard of boots and shoes to loot.

“Alright, off I go!”

Grabbing the backpack’s straps with his sweaty palms, Cletus started walking down from his shelter.

With each step he took, he felt his knees getting weaker.

The arms in his inventory felt heavy.

“Oh no, I’m gonna vomit!”

The nervous boy hunched forward to keep himself from fainting. He was neither calm nor ready.

“Forget it! I can’t do this.”

The adventurer shook his head in disappointment.

He thought of that farmer’s family. He was going to let them down. He was letting himself down. If he couldn’t go forward with it, who would? Everyone else was too scared to take on the beast.

All those boastful adventurers out there liked to talk a big game. They all ran around chasing leads on the big red dragon since the day it first appeared near Ardville. But once it really came down to going up against it, they all got cold feet, remembering how the beast wiped the floor with a hundred of them the first time.

So many adventurers, but none brave and powerful enough to stand above the rest to save the day.

If only Heartha had a real hero like in all those legends of ages past.

Cletus slumped his shoulders as he looked away from the mountain. He knew that would never be him.

Then, in the distance, from up the main road, he saw something.

A glint. The bright light of the sun reflecting off something.

Reflecting off the flawless surface of a shell.

A crab’s shell.

“I… I can’t believe it,” the boy muttered.

Shielding his eyes against the morning brightness, Cletus watched them emerge from the horizon, mighty and glorious.

The giant crab, his powerful claws swinging as he walked confidently.

A human archer, dressed in brown and green gear, scanning the skies with a huge greatbow on his back.

Behind them followed a goblin wizard, his cape and hat fluttering gently in the breeze, alongside a gracious winged creature with azure scales and intense golden eyes.

Towering above them came a giant golem made of stone and metal, its massive arms thicker than Cletus’s entire body.

The adventurer stared at the group, his jaw hanging loose in amazement.

“That’s… that’s Balthazar!” he said to himself. “That’s really him!”

A wide grin spread across his face at the sight of the merchant crab and his party.

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If he was there, that meant there was hope.

After all, everyone had heard of what happened the first time the red dragon showed up outside Ardville.

The beast beat back the town guards, it decimated the adventurer’s charge, but when all seemed lost and like the town would be attacked next, something happened over at the crab’s pond.

No one could quite agree on what exactly, since nobody had made it close enough to witness it directly. Most of the tales told of an epic clash between the dragon and Balthazar’s companions, ultimately ending with the merchant making a deal with the creature to let it flee.

What kind of legendary negotiation skills the crustacean had to pull off such a trick, nobody really knew, but rumors were abundant.

“He must have come to finish the job,” the young boy said, following the group on the road with his eyes.

A certain sense of pride made Cletus’s heart swell. He knew that crab. He had interacted with him multiple times. Even sold him a solid bar of silver once.

In a way, that made the adventurer feel a tiny bit related to the greatness of it all.

Perhaps one day, when history would be written about that group of heroes, Cletus would be mentioned, at least in passing.

Standing back straight and hooking his thumbs to the backpack’s straps, the boy took a deep and content breath before heading down the side path to the village.

While he felt tempted to approach the group—maybe even ask them to sign the side of his boot as a memento of that soon-to-be fateful day—the adventurer decided it would be best to leave them be and not be a bother during their preparations for the epic battle about to come.

Cletus walked away with a spring in his step. The farmer’s family would be fine, as would the village. Everyone would be safe from the dragon soon.

The heroes had arrived. They would know what to do now.

***

“Alright, any idea what we should do now?” Rye asked.

“Nope!” replied Balthazar, staring up at the mountain in front of them.

The group had spent the past three days discussing how they would approach the situation while traveling to the dragon’s lair, but had achieved little in terms of a plan.

No matter how they looked at it, the odds just felt stacked against them.

The dragon was simply too powerful for a group of much lower levels like them. If all those guards from Ardville and then a force of a hundred adventurers had failed to even hurt the beast, what hope did the five of them have?

Yet, that had not stopped their resolve.

Balthazar was sure he would come up with something, as he always did.

The crab was certain of it.

He had to be.

For her sake.

“Well, that big entrance over there seems to lead all the way up into the center of the mountain, where the lair likely is,” Rye said after coming back from scouting the area.

“Is the way up a staircase?” Balthazar asked.

“Uh, no? Not that I could see. Mostly just a steep path up.”

The crab nodded thoughtfully. “Good. Luck may yet be on our side then.”

Rye looked at the merchant with a confused frown before shrugging and turning away.

“Are you guys ready?” Balthazar asked his party.

The goblin, the drake, and the golem all nodded at the same time.

“Rye?” the merchant called, looking at the young man who was staring down at a small red mushroom growing between some mossy rocks.

“Hmm?” he replied, breaking away from his trance.

“You’re alright?”

The archer nodded. “Yes, sorry. Was just hoping we don’t get in there only to find out our baker is in another castle.”

Balthazar cocked an eyebrow at him.

“Heh, don’t mind me,” Rye said. “Let’s just go in.”

In a line, the group walked through the gaping maw of the mountain, leaving the brightness of the sun outside and entering the darkness of the mountain’s interior.

The air was cold and damp, with shadows creeping from every direction against the towering stone walls that stretched as far up as the eye could see, faintly illuminated by the rays of light that pierced through their jagged gaps.

For nearly an hour, the rescue party walked up the winding path of the mountain’s hollow core in silence, the echoes of each of their footsteps resonating from the bottomless chasm below like haunting howls from the earth itself.

The simple fact that the crab was not talking was the biggest testament to the gravity of the situation. Everyone’s nerves were on edge, and tension only grew the closer they got to the top.

“There,” Rye finally whispered, pointing forward, across a natural stone bridge over the mountain’s pit.

On the other side, barely visible in the darkness, was a giant double gate made of two massive stone slabs.

“That has to be it,” said Balthazar, his voice coming out raspy and quieter from lack of use.

The group walked across to the other side.

Tilting his eyestalks back, the giant crab stared up at the colossal archway in front of him, large enough to make him look like a regular crab.

The door was big enough to make even Bouldy seem as small as a human child.

It was a passage fit for a dragon.

“I can’t see any way to look inside,” Rye said quietly.

“Me neither,” Balthazar whispered, making sure not to make their presence known too soon. “I was hoping for a giant keyhole, but I guess when you’re a dragon, you don’t need to lock your doors.”

“Boss, boss,” the goblin assistant called. “Druma see light!”

They all looked up at where their green friend was pointing. There was a small hole in the wall, a gap that let a faint beam of yellow light through from the other side.

“Druma can peek through if Bouldy lift Druma up!” the goblin said.

Balthazar nodded. “Give him a boost, Bouldy.”

Druma climbed onto the golem’s hand and the stone giant raised it to the fracture on the wall, stretching his arm as far as he could to reach it.

The party waited expectantly as the goblin peered through the gap, a bright golden light shining on his face as he pushed his nose against the stone.

“So? Tell us what you saw,” Balthazar asked anxiously as the golem brought his friend back down. “Did you see the dragon?”

Druma nodded rapidly. “Yes, yes! Druma see big and red scaly body with wings on the other side. Druma is sure it is dragon that attack pond before.”

“What about Madeleine?” Rye asked with wide eyes. “Did you see her anywhere?”

The goblin shook his head. “No. Hole too small to see whole room. Druma can only see big dragon lying on other side.”

The adventurer exhaled long and hard. “This is it. We need to go in there and confront that dragon if we want to find her.”

He turned to the crab. Even in the darkness of the antechamber, the crustacean could see determination burning like a flame in the young man’s eyes.

“It’s your move, Balthazar. I’m no leader or strategist. How should we do this?”

The merchant took a deep breath. It was now or never. They were all relying on him. His party. Rye. Madeleine.

He had never been one for responsibilities, and now there he was, feeling the weight of them on his shell.

Things were certainly a lot simpler when he just lived free of worries in his little pond.

Also a lot lonelier.

With a flick of his eyes, the crab activated his Leader’s Voice skill to boost their team actions. They would need every little advantage they could have.

“Alright, here’s what we will do,” Balthazar started. “First, Bouldy will open these doors for us. Think you can do that?”

The golem placed one of his hands on the stone slab, as if getting a feel for it.

“Friend,” he said with a confident nod.

“Good,” the crab continued. “Once he pushes the gates open, Druma and Blue will fly in and cause as big of a distraction as possible. Blue, you shoot fire everywhere while Druma uses his staff to break off pieces of ceiling like he did back at the forge. Your attacks would be wasted on the dragon’s scales anyway, so we will use them to pull its attention away instead.”

The goblin and the drake nodded in agreement.

Balthazar turned to the archer. “Rye, your arrow is our main hope here, but we can’t afford to miss. While the dragon is distracted, Bouldy will try to do what he already did back at the pond and land a knockout punch on that big lizard’s jaw. Once he does, you land your shot.”

“Got it,” the adventurer said. “I won’t miss.”

“Let’s take her home,” the merchant said. “Bouldy! On my signal…”

The stone golem flexed his arms, making blue veins of cobalt pulse brightly through his surface like lightning bolts, and placed his palms against the gates.

Balthazar brought his pincer up in the air and held for a moment as Druma hopped on Blue’s back and Rye nocked a greatarrow onto his bow.

“And… charge!” he shouted, bringing his claw down with a snap.

Bouldy pushed forward against the stone gates, which dragged forward with a slow rumble.

“Frieeeeends!”

“Go, go, go!” Balthazar said once the gap was big enough for Blue to fly through.

The azure drake swooped in at full speed through the air with the goblin wizard on her back, staff in hand, ready to fling arcane bolts.

As the golem pushed the doors open further, the crab darted into the chamber with both pincers open, followed by the archer, who quickly slid across the floor to take the flank.

“Give us back our baker, you big—”

Balthazar’s warcry died down as he skidded to a stop, his eyestalks curling into a frown.

“What… the hell is this?!”