Chapter 57- Rave Crabs(2)

Chapter 57: 57- Rave Crabs(2)

Three circular, dome-shelled monstrosities, each one two meters wide across the back and weighing well over four hundred kilograms heaved themselves out of the black, stinking brine mud beneath the crust.

They looked like a cross between giant horseshoe crabs and armored spiders.

Beneath their jagged, salt-crusted white domes, each beast walked on eight thick, jointed legs tipped with curved black stone picks, while two massive, asymmetrical crushing claws the size of anvils clacked together in front of a circular, tooth-lined mouth that dripped boiling-cold blue brine foam.

And they didn’t crawl slowly like crabs.

With Level 2 Crowned mana firing through their leg joints, the three four-hundred-kilogram armored domes skittered across the hard salt pan at terrifying speed, one charging straight down the center at Sol, while the other two broke left and right in a coordinated pincer to cut Valera off from the sled.

"Don’t let them get under the sled!" Sol shouted. "If they drag our food into the mud, we starve before Gomorrah!"

The center Stalker covered fifteen meters in less than two seconds.

Right before it reached Sol, the beast didn’t swing its claw, it slammed its smaller left pincer straight down into the salt crust at its own feet and ripped up a one-meter slab of salt-stone, hurling it edge-first at Sol’s chest while simultaneously exhaling a thick, pressurized jet of sub-zero brine sludge from its mouth-parts to blind and freeze him on impact.

Sol didn’t jump backward.

Jumping backward on thin salt crust meant breaking through into the mud pit the crab had just crawled out of.

He dropped to one knee, crossed his forearms in front of his face with the heavy rebar knuckle-guards facing out, and poured a concentrated surge of solar heat into the iron bars.

WHAM!

The flying slab of salt-stone shattered into powder against his crossed iron guards, the force skidding Sol backward thirty centimeters across the pan.

Right behind the rock came the jet of freezing blue brine-sludge.

Before a single drop of that Level 2 brine could touch Sol’s coat, a wall of pure, translucent white frost flashed sideways from Valera’s left hand ten meters away, intercepting the liquid brine in mid-air and freezing it into a harmless, brittle tree of blue icicles that clattered onto the ground between them.

"One’s on me, one’s circling behind you!" Valera yelled.

On the right flank, the second Brine-Stalker had reached her.

The four-hundred-kilogram beast reared up on its back six legs and brought its massive right crushing-claw, a jagged pincer sixty centimeters long down like a pile-driver to snap her in half.

Valera didn’t try to block four hundred kilograms of falling stone-chitin head-on.

She pivoted cleanly off her front foot, letting the massive claw smash thirty centimeters deep into the salt crust beside her hip, and immediately slapped both of her Night-iron gauntlets flat onto the hinged wrist-joint of the beast’s buried claw.

She didn’t try to freeze the thick top shell.

She pushed a needle-sharp jet of her Pure Moon frost straight through the flexible, wet membrane inside the elbow-joint where the brine circulated.

CRACK-FREEZE.

The fluid inside the crab’s hydraulic leg-joint froze solid into a block of diamond-hard blue ice.

When the beast tried to yank its claw out of the salt pan to swing at her again, the frozen joint refused to bend, locking the monster’s heaviest weapon pinned to the ground by its own weight.

Back in the center, Sol was already nose-to-nose with the first Stalker, and the third one was skittering fast around the rear of the pine sled to catch him from behind.

He had five seconds to kill or cripple the one in front of him before he got caught between four anvil-sized claws.

The center Stalker lunged forward, snapping both claws at Sol’s waist like a pair of giant shears meant to snip his spine in two.

Sol didn’t try to punch the top dome.

As the two massive claws swept inward from left and right, Sol threw himself flat onto his stomach on the salt crust and slid headfirst underneath the beast’s closing pincers, right into the dark, reeking gap between its eight thrashing legs beneath its belly..

It was a death-trap.

Above his back, the underside of the four-hundred-kilogram crab dropped down like a hydraulic press to crush him flat against the salt pan, while its circular, tooth-lined mouth opened twenty centimeters in front of his face, dripping freezing blue brine straight onto his forehead.

"Come on, then!" Sol snarled in the dark under the shell.

He braced his left elbow on the hard salt pan, wedging the thirty-centimeter steel rebar knuckle-guard vertically between the ground and the beast’s descending sternum-plate to keep the shell from crushing his ribs flat, just like he had done with the serpent’s jaw and drew his right fist back against his hip.

His furnace roared to ninety-five percent output.

He pumped a blinding, concentrated stream of Peak-Stage solar fire out of his right palm straight into the base of the ten-centimeter Level 2 Silt-Serpent fang wired to his right knuckle-guard.

The hollow ivory tooth turned incandescent white-hot, the residual serpent-ichor inside the canal screaming as it superheated into a pressurized jet of orange fire at the tip.

Sol drove his right fist straight up into the center of the Brine-Stalker’s open, circular mouth.

SHK-BOOM!

The ten-centimeter glowing fang punched straight through the unarmored gullet and directly into the walnut-sized Level 2 crystal sitting right behind the beast’s mouth-parts.

Sol didn’t pull his fist back.

With his arm buried up to the wrist inside the crab’s mouth, he twisted the rebar grip ninety degrees and vented a massive blast of raw solar fire out the hollow tip of the fang directly into the monster’s internal organs.

Underneath a sixty-centimeter-thick dome of impermeable stone-chitin, the heat had zero ways to escape upward.

For half a second, the four-hundred-kilogram monster froze completely still on top of Sol.

Then, with a muffled, sickening THUMP, purple steam and boiling blue ichor blasted violently out of all eight of its leg-joints and around its eye-stalks as its insides cooked inside its own shell like a crab in a pressure-pot.