Chapter 56- Rave Crabs

Chapter 56: 56- Rave Crabs

"Put your foot on my knee," Sol told her.

Valera sat down on the stacked serpent scales and rested her boot on his left thigh.

Sol wrapped the tough, three-millimeter-thick elk-hide completely around the bottom and toe of her boot like a moccasin shell.

Then, instead of tying it with twine that the salt would rot in twenty kilometers, he pinched the overlapping edges of the raw-hide together over her instep with his bare thumb and forefinger and pulsed a tiny, surgical dot of solar heat from his skin.

Szzzz.

A wisp of foul-smelling smoke rose as the proteins and fat in the heavy elk-hide partially melted and fused together into a single, hard seam of horn-like leather that locked tightly around the boot.

He did the same thing in four spots along the ankle, then tapped her shin.

"Other foot," Sol said.

Valera switched feet, watching his scarred, calloused hands work with the easy, automatic speed of someone who had been patching slaughterhouse aprons since he was twelve.

"Where did you learn how to weld leather with your fingers?" she asked, pulling her mask down to her chin to take a small sip from their canteen.

"Used to do it, my grandma teached me" Sol said, pinching the hide around her right toe and fusing the seam with a quick hiss of heat.

"The lime and blood on the killing floor rots leather stitch-thread in three days. If you walked onto the floor barefoot because your boots fell apart, the bone-splinters in the drain would give you blood-poisoning in a week, and the Overseers wouldn’t pay for a healer, they just dragged you out back and threw you in the hog trough."

He finished the last weld on her right ankle and gave her boot a light tug to make sure it wouldn’t slip.

"There. Ugly, but it’ll hold till we hit the red dirt."

"Everything we wear is ugly, Sol," Valera said, standing up and stamping both feet onto the salt crust to test the fit.

"Look at us. Six months ago I at least looked like an exile from a noble house. Now we look like two mud-trolls dragging a cart of dead fish."

"Smoked snake," Sol corrected, standing up and looping the hemp tow-rope back across his chest. "And nobody out here cares how pretty your coat is."

He took two steps forward, then froze.

The hemp rope went slack between his shoulder and the sled.

"Val," Sol said quietly. He didn’t turn his head. Behind his linen blindfold, his glowing orange eyes dropped to the salt pan fifteen meters in front of his boots. "Don’t move your feet."

Valera’s hand went straight to her hip, her Night-iron gauntlets frosting over with a faint snick of forming ice. "I don’t see anything. The pan’s flat for two kilometers."

"The pan’s not flat," Sol murmured. "The salt here is only ten centimeters thick over wet mud. And there’s two big cold spots shaped like manhole covers sitting half a meter under the crust right in front of us."

He shifted his vision slightly to the right, scanning the hexagonal cracks in the salt crust thirty meters away.

"Make that three," Sol amended, slowly slipping the tow-rope off his shoulder and letting it drop silently into the dust without taking his weight off his heels. "And they aren’t Level 1."

Underneath the white crust, the three thermal signatures were completely stationary.

Like the Silt-Serpent back in the Sunken Flats, their outer shells matched the freezing ambient temperature of the salt mud almost perfectly.

What gave them away to Sol’s 29% Peak-Stage eyes were the cores buried in the center of their flat, circular carapaces, three dense, glowing spheres of compressed dark-blue crystal, each one the size of a man’s fist, pulsing with the slow, cold intelligence of a Level 2: The Crowned (Low-Stage) beast.

And leading across the salt pan between the three buried monsters was a faint, barely visible line of disturbed gray dust, an old wagon track from a winter caravan.

"Brine-Stalkers," Valera whispered, her eyes narrowing as she spotted three tiny, periscope-like stalks that looked just like crystallized salt twigs sticking two centimeters out of the dust ahead. "Caravan-killers. They bury themselves along the salt trails and wait a month for something heavy to walk over their backs. When the crust breaks, they drag you down into the liquid brine mud underneath and drown you before cracking your bones."

"How thick is the shell on top?" Sol asked, sliding both hands down to his belt and pulling the two ten-centimeter Level 2 Silt-Serpent fangs out of their loops.

Without a real weapon, Sol had spent the last two nights inside the cargo trailer modifying the two curved monster teeth.

He had taken two thirty-centimeter lengths of heavy, two-centimeter-thick steel rebar from the overpass, heated the ends until they were soft as clay, and hammered them into D-shaped knuckle-guards around the bases of the two hollow fangs, wrapping the grips in strips of raw-hide.

They weren’t axes. They were a pair of heavy, brutal trench-daggers, iron brass-knuckles over his fists with ten centimeters of curved, hollow Level 2 ivory jutting out from the bottoms of his fists.

"Thicker than the serpent’s scales," Valera said grimly, taking a half-step sideways so their backs weren’t lined up in a straight lane.

"Their backs are mineralized salt-stone and chitin. Even a Level 2 Master with a silver greatsword can’t chop through the top carapace of a Brine-Stalker. You have to flip them or hit the mouth-parts underneath."

"Three of them," Sol said, rolling his shoulders as his furnace began to spin up, the air around his wolf-fur coat shimmering with dry heat. "If we walk around them, do they let us go?"

As if answering his question, the salt crust fifteen meters ahead suddenly bulged upward in three places at once.

The Brine-Stalkers weren’t mindless traps.

The moment Sol’s core began to heat up, their eyes had registered that their prey had spotted the ambush, and out in the food-starved wasteland of the Salt Flats, three Level 2 predators weren’t about to let two hundred kilograms of warm meat walk away.

CRACK-SHATTER!

The white salt pan exploded upward like a minefield going off.