As Balthazar regained his breath and posed himself, looking around to ensure no birds or adventurers were around to ugh at his embarrassing moment, he focused ba the floati c the ter of his eyesight. It was simir to the one from the scroll, except that had existed as if projected from the part, floating in the air, while this was clearly inside Balthazar’s eyes, as every time he tried to grab at it his cw did nothing but pinch the empty air in front of him.

  [PvP Kill, experience gained]

  “What in the world is a ‘PvP’ anyway?” the crab asked, puzzled.

  [Level 7 Wizard sin by [cleverly pced trap]]

  “Wizard… that must be this guy,” he said, tapping the tip of the wizard’s shoe, who remained firmly stu his crater. “And what does this mean? What trap?”

  Balthazar raised his eye stalks in realization, looked around, first at the dead wizard, then up at the sky where he had been floating just moments ago, and finally at the book that was now lying ba the ground, not too far off from where he had tossed it before the young man appeared.

  “Is this thing bming me for his death?” Balthazar finally said. “Hey now, wait just a moment, I didn’t… I couldn’t possibly know… it was his own fault. I did nothing!”

  He paced from side to side, the words in front of him unging, ign his pleas of innoce.

  [You have reached Level 2!]

  “And what’s this supposed to mean?” Balthazar said, finally fog o line of text.

  He wasn’t sure what a level was supposed to mean here, only that whatever it was, the wizard had been a seven, which Balthazar knew was more than two. Yes, he may have been just a crab, but he still knew how to t, it’s a vital skill to ah as many legs as he has, never know when you might get into a scuffle and walk away unsure if you still got all your appendages.

  “Well, he doesn’t look that superior to me now,” the crab said with a disdainful look at the young wizard’s twisted expression of horror still stuck to his face.

  “Again, not that it was me who did this to him, of course!” he hurriedly added, to nobody in particur.

  The block of text remained in his sight, and Balthazar began w if it would ever go away, or if he was stuck like that forever. Whatever it was, it was inside his head, inside his mind, so he tried to trate on pushing it away. The task would have been so much easier if he had the ability to blink.

  Just as Balthazar began sidering rubbing his eyes in the sand, his focus o line of text caused a small clid the words disappeared with a smooth slide to the side, as a new block appeared from the opposite dire:

  [Level 2]

  [Attribute Points: 1]

  [Skill Points: 1]

  [Strength: 3] [+]

  [Agility: 2] [+]

  [Intelligence: 11] [+]

  [Skills]

  “Huh, this again,” Balthazar said, staring out into the open, reading the new words only he could see.

  He sed each line carefully, rubbing his with the back of one cw.

  “These attributes I’ve seen before, but skills are something new. And it would seem like I increase one of these three again.”

  He pondered oher he should select Strength this time, but he never felt himself to be weak. He was the stro around, no fish or bird ever dared stand up to him. And clearly, even these pesky adventurers were no match for him. O his own demise after Balthazar did nothing more than give him an attitude-correg pinch, and now this thing in front of him had just cimed he killed that wizard without so much as even toug him. He was clearly a powerhouse. He didn’t o be stronger.

  He could gility, but he also failed to e up with a reason why he would o be mile. He already was agile enough to catch his lunch every day in his favorite feeding puddle. Sure, he never caught any of the annoying little feathery pests that provoked him on the daily, but that wasn’t due to ck of agility, it was just because they could fly, and that was obviously cheating.

  The more he thought about it, the more he cluded that Intelligence was once again the way to go. You could never have too much of the stuff. Just look at that wizard guy. He was clearly very focused on Intelligence, with all that speed reading, magic casting, and whatever, yet, look where that nded him. He wasn’t smart enough to avoid falling to his doom. Clearly, you could always use being a bit more intelligent.

  “That settles it,” Balthazar said, and with redoubled focus, he trated on the plus sigo his Intelligence level, making it tick up from eleven to twelve.

  As he was fog his sight oion, something behind it caught his attention, a refle of light ing from the young wizard’s chest. Tilting himself slightly to look around the text, he spotted something small iween the folds of the wizard’s robes.

  Excited at the possibility of finding more of those beautiful, shiny pieetal he stashed away with the scroll earlier, Balthazar navigated his way around the small crater, trying to see his path while still having the attributes s taking a portion of his view. With great care, he reached a pincer into the dead man’s robe in order to retrieve the source of the refle.

  As he pulled his arm back, he found what it brought between his pincers: a single, small, perfectly circur piece of transparent gss within a delicate silver rim, with a thin hanging from it.

  “What’s this thing supposed to be?” Balthazar asked himself, looking down at the straem between the many words still floating in front of him.

  “e on,” a man’s voice said from down the road, “we’re almost there, we make it.”

  Balthazar broke into a small panic, feeling like someone being caught with their pants down, which was an odd choice of feeling for someone who had never worn pants in their life.

  He turo the dead wizard, then to the other dead advehe tiny lens in his cw, the attributes s still c his eyes, and the crab didn’t know what to do.

  “I wish at least this damhing wasn’t blog my view,” he said, vigorously shaking his shell. As he did it, the block of text flew down his field of view, disappearing into a tiny upward arrow that now sat at the very er of Balthazar’s eye.

  “Well, that wasn’t so difficult,” he said, turning to look down the road, where the top of two adventurer’s heads were ing into view.

  Looking back at his right cw, still holding the strange small object he looted from the wizard, Balthazar darted towards the ter tree, hurriedly crossing the water and reag for his hidden stash. With a quick motion, he lifted the k of wood c it and tossed the piece of gss inside where the small purse and scroll already were. He moved the makeshift cover back down before stopping and staring at the tree’s bark.

  “What am I doing?” he said. “I did nothing wrong. I don’t owe anyone anything. Those two idiots out there got themselves killed, and it’s not like I was looting the dead or anything. Well, maybe just a little, but that’s exactly what those adventurers do all day. Who are they to judge?”

  Balthazar turned back to face the road.

  “Besides, they’re the ones who keep stepping on my residence, causing all sorts of chaos and mess, dying all over the pce, like this is their home. Well, it’s not, and if they’re going to keep trespassing, I say it’s only fair whatever they leave behind bees my property, as a form of pensation, if nothing else.”

  As the now fully determined crab looked back at the road, he saw the duo of adventurers now walking the path in full view. They both carried rge leather packs on their backs, not as rge as the ohe first adventurer from earlier had, but still full and heavy enough to make them show signs of strain while carrying them.

  The o the front was a young man with dark brown hair that looked like he had been wearing a helmet for hours for how messy it was. Sturdy steel armor covered most of his body, and he had a bold smile on his face that matched his fident walk.

  Right behind him was a young woman, wearing a mix of leather and steel, slightly lighter brown hair tied into a ponytail, and a much less enthusiastic expression on her sweating face that matched her slouched posture as she struggled to tinue walking.

  “You promised this was going to be a quick run, Jack,” the young woman said. “It’s been two days now, and we’re only going back because we ’t carry any more loot. I swear, this is the st… hey, are you even listening?”

  The young man was clearly not paying her any attention, as he struggled to step on top of two storying to get closer to one of the swords that had gone flying out of the bursting pack earlier, the ohat was stuck between twe rocks.

  “Leah, look, it’s an ented sword!” he excimed, pointing at the sword, which seemed to have a thin yer of clowing across the surface of its bde, waving and pulsating slowly.

  “Oh, e on, you know we’re overburdened as is,” his partner said, taking a step around the body of the adventurer with the ruptured pack whose face remained firmly pnted into the rocks, “do you want to end up like this guy?”

  “Yes, I know, but I ’t let this opportunity pass, I have a good feeling about this one,” Jack said, without looking back, and while trying to devise a way to better reach the rocks holding the sword in pce.

  “I’m not carrying it, that’s for sure,” Leah decred, with the expression of someone who was already tired of the situation.

  Balthazar was still standing on his small islet at the ter of the pond, watg the pair bickering, annoyance growing in him.

  He was really getting tired of all those adventurers. First oeps on him and spills trash all over his beautiful home, then another es by and decides to make an ugly crater in his front garden, and now those two show up, ignore him pletely, and begin pilging his reside might have been trash, but it was his trash now, and this crab just about had it with their kind. No more standing idly by, expeg things to sort themselves out. He was taking matters into his own hands. Cws. Pincers. Whatever! He was going to show he’s not a crab to be messed with!

  With determination in his eyes and shell held high, Balthazar stepped across the shallow water to the edge of the pond, and straight towards the steel-cd man trying to reach the sword still stu the stones.

  “Hey, you, listen here,” the crab shouted at the young man, “I’ve had a very stressful day, and my patience is running thin, so you and your frieer scram and leave my stuff alone!”

  The two adveurheir heads to face the angry crab.

  “Look what you’ve done,” Leah said, “now you aggroed a crab on us.”

  “Why… why is it squealing and waving its arms like that?” the man asked, fused.

  “How should I know? Do I look like I speak crab?” she responded.

  “Fiends! No manners! No respect!” the crab tinued.

  “Let’s just go, I’m way too exhausted to fight even just a crab,” the tired woman said over the crab’s tinuous squealing.

  “Wait, hold on, I think I have an idea,” said the fident adventurer.

  “So you leave my stuff where it is, take yourselves up that road to wherever you were going, and leave my pond alone!” Balthazar said, agitation spilling from him.

  But it was to no avail. He could tell they weren’t uanding a thing of what he was saying. He knew already that adventurers werely the brightest kind, as demonstrated by the two previous spes already cluttering his residence, but he hadn’t realized their education was so appallingly bad that they didn’t even learn crab nguage. Truly a primitive and simpleton race, they were.

  While Balthazar reflected on the faults of the adventurer education system, the young man in front of him had taken his pack off, pced it on the ground, and was now squatting down, hastily looking for something within it.

  The crab put both of his cws up and tensed up his legs. So there was to be a fight, it seemed. He had already dispatched two adveoday (sort of), what was one more to add to the list (surely the one by the road would run away in fear once she saw him defeat her friend, right?), all he had to do was give him a good ssh and a smash (through his solid steel armor… that sure looked pretty thiow that he looked at it up close).

  Balthazar began w if tossing that book the icked up earlier would work a sed time.

  “Aha! Here it is,” the smiling man said, pulling something out of his bag.

  As he stood up from his pack, he held a small obje his right hand, ed in a simple white cloth, and began uning it with his left hand.

  “Here you go, buddy, don’t be grumpy. I’ll trade you this for that sword. How’s that?” Jack offered, with a wide smile on his face, as he pced the open cloth down on the ground in front of the crab.

  Balthazar stood with cws still ready, cautiously looking at what the man had just id out in front of him, when a smell reached him, a smell he had never felt before, but that filled him with the purest of joys and happiness. He did not know what that triangur piece of soft looking… something was, but he instantly knew he must taste it.

  pletely disregarding the two adventurers, Balthazar lunged forward at the unknown piece of food and tore a small piece of it off with the tip of his pincer, and brought it up to his mouth. The whole world turned brighter around him and he was sure stars could be seen dang in his eyes. It was soft and slightly humid, with the ti crumbly feeling on his tongue. And the taste… he had tasted fruits before, from bushes and small trees around the area, when the season was right, but this was like something else entirely. Sweet, smooth, with a rush at every bite.

  “Seriously, you’re feeding apple pie to the crab?” the female adventurer said to her partner with disdain.

  “It worked, didn’t it?” he responded. “Look hoy he is with it.”

  Without the weight of his pack, the young man climbed up to the stone where the sword was, and with an imposing posture stuck both of his feet firmly to his sides, grasping the hilt with both hands, and with a sharp exhale pulled the bde out of the rocks, lifting it up to the skies with his right hand, its edge shining against the sunlight, a huge victory smile stamped on his face.

  “Yay, hooray, gratutions, chosen one, wahoo,” his panion said in a sarcastie. “ we go now?”

  “Mock all you want, I’m telling you, I have a good feeling about this sword,” Jack said with vi, while jumping down from the rocks. “And yes, let’s go now.”

  As the two adventurers carried on up the road, Balthazar finished eating his slice of pie, no longer g about them or any silly sword. That had been a life-ging experience. He felt a satisfa he had never experienced before. His mouth could still taste the subtle delight that had just gohrough it. All he wao do was lie down, take a nap, and dream about that delicious treat.

  As he smiled and his vision began to blur, a sudden block of glowi assaulted his eyes:

  [High-value item traded. Experience gained.]

  [[Sword of Heavy Might] traded for [Slice of Apple Pie]]

  [You have reached Level 3!]

  “Gah! Son of a...”