Balthazar looked up through his spygss, sing the sky for a target from atop a boulder on the edge of his pond. All was quiet until he saw it: a small brown sparrow fluttering against the white of the clouds behind it. The tihered creature hovered around before nding oip of a thin branch of the islet’s tree, its plumage blending in with the brown and gray tones of the tree itself. But the crab had it locked in his sights now.

  “Right there, Blue!” he yelled out, one pincer firmly stretched out toward the bird.

  With a sudden whoosh, a long blue body flew over the crab, the golden scales on its neck refleg a shiny yellow uhe sunlight hitting them. For such a rge creature, she moved with incredible ease through the air, her wide wings making her soar iree’s dire.

  The tiny sparrow fluttered in a startle, scrambling to flee iher dire, beating its wings as fast as its small body allowed, the drake hot on its trail.

  Had it been a different creature, and perhaps Balthazar would have felt bad for it, but the crab knew better. Birds were nothing but balls of evil, filled with nothing but hatred and pt, devilish creatures with no other purpose but to mock every nd dweller from above.

  Like the time when he was still a small crab, and one of them swooped down and stole a juicy berry he had fouhe water right off his pincer. He never got to taste the sweetness of that fruit, but he got to watch the flying fiend ge itself on it up on a high branch.

  Needless to say, Balthazar was the kind of crab to hold a grudge.

  As the much rger wings of the drake easily allowed it to catch up to the sparrow, the bird found itself with o hide, with nothing but open air around them. Blue opened her mouth as she neared her prey, and with one swift snap of her maw, the bird was none dowhroat in one gulp.

  Balthazar put his spygss down and took a sip from his fresh lemonade, cheering to another job well done.

  The two of them had spent most of the afternoon practig their bird spotting. The crab would have never imagihe easiest path to winning the drake over would be a shared dislike for feathered creatures and corrupt human merts.

  “That was even faster tha one, well done!” he gratuted the drake, as she nded on the boulder o his. “Just remember, imagine eae of those birds is called Antoine. I find it doubles my satisfa watg them flee that way. Also, I alicture a silly little pencil mustache over their stupid beaks.”

  While drakes did not seem capable of ughing, Blue showed a clear air of te. Whether that was because she could somewhat uand Balthazar’s words, or simply because she leased with herself for the chase, the mert did not know nor did he much care to know, for at least now she was no lohrowing her head bad looking disdainfully at him. Small steps were something a crab could appreciate.

  “Boss, boss!” a voice called from below.

  Balthazar looked down from his boulder and saw Druma on the dirt path, returning from the road, waving one hand at him.

  “Back so soon?” the crab asked. “Did something happen?”

  “Yes, yes!” Druma responded, lookied. “Bouldy get big tree for st pilr.”

  The goblin pointed a sy finger back towards the road, where the tip of a tall and thick tree trunk was ing into view around a er, soon followed by the rocky shoulder that supported it.

  “Are you sure it's the right size for it?” Balthazar said, as he made his way down from the boulder and joihe two arrivals.

  “Friend,” said Bouldy with a proud smile, as he pced the trunk upright on the ground, which stood taller thahe golem himself.

  The crab walked around the tree trunk and tapped it with his right cw. “Seems nid sturdy. It should do it.”

  “Boss want Bouldy and Druma to pce it?” the goblin asked, hoppi and right iement.

  “Sure,” the crab answered. “Let’s try to get this roof done before the first leaves start falling.”

  The rocky giant lifted the trunk bato his shoulder, and the three made their way to one of the ers of the trading post’s ptform.

  All the other three sides already had their own crude pilrs pced. Eae’s bark a slightly different shade, oh a few short braill stig out of it, and the one furthest from the entraill had a bird’s attached. Thankfully, its former oct had already vacated it and had not e along as well.

  “Alright, let’s pce it right here,” Balthazar instructed, while drawing an X on the dirt with the tip of his cw. “Bouldy, just like the other times, you know what to do.”

  Nodding his stony head at the crab, the golem gripped the middle of the trunk with his two massive hands and brought it up horizontally above his head. Bug his khe friendly giant drove the intended pilr down with all his might into the mark.

  Balthazar took a few steps back to avoid the cloud of dust lifted from the impact. “Alright, now twist!”

  Bouldy gripped the now upright tree trunk with both arms, like a rock hugging a tree friend, and began twisting. Alternatiween clockwise and terclockwise, he slowly drove the giant stake deeper into the earth.

  “Druma, shovel!” said the crab to the goblin.

  With a quiod, the small assistant grabbed his equally small shovel and ran around the pilr, digging away the dirt that spilled out from the hole created by the golem’s efforts, and making room for more to emerge as the wood went deeper.

  “That seems good enough, you stop, Bouldy,” Balthazar yelled, with one pincer in the air.

  “Friend,” the walking boulder said, letting go of the pilr.

  The golem stepped bad sat down on the ground, out of breath.

  Because as a golem, he did not breathe or even have lungs, so there was no breath within him.

  “This looks about even with the others, right?” said the crab, staring up at the trunk.

  Druma held his thumb up in front of one of his eyes and closed the other. With his toig out of the er of his mouth, he moved the thumb left and right as he eye-measured the pilrs iher ers.

  “Yes, yes! Look good to Druma!” he finally said, opening his other eye and stretg the upright thumb to the crab this time.

  “Great!” Balthazar excimed. “Now that we got four sturdy pilrs, we finally get started on the roof proper.”

  The crab gave the pilr troving pats on the side with his pincer.

  A sound of wood creaking came from underh him and the dirt around the base of the pilr shifted as the pilr began slowly leaning away from the crab.

  Before anyone could react or do anything, the tree trunk toppled over the short wooden fence around the trading post, and crashed loudly into a group of shelves and tables.

  Balthazar spat out and shook off the dirt the uprooted trunk had thrown on his fad stared at the disastrous se with the grumpiest of looks.

  “Noooo,” the goblin howled with a sad frown as he picked up pieces of broken wood from the ground. “Druma’s able.”

  As the crab walked around to the ptform, he surveyed all the damage. Broken bottles of potions, cracked helmets, books with their pages ripped out and spread all over.

  “This is a mess!” he finally yelled, letting out his pent up frustration.

  “Woah, what happened here?” a woman’s voice said from the trading post’s entrance.

  Balthazar turo see a young girl with a bow on her back walking in from the road.

  “Just a small setba our, uh… renovations,” the mert said. “Don’t worry, it’s all still perfectly safe around here. I promise nothing will fall on your head. Just… maybe watch your step for broken gss.”

  “Why are you pg tree trunks around the pce?” the adventurer asked, looking around at the other pilrs. “Is this some kind of silly crab decoration thing I don’t uand?”

  “No,” said the unamused crab. “We are w on a roof for the pce, so silly adventurers like you don’t have to shop uhe rain.”

  “A roof?” the other said, with a mog chuckle. “And those were supposed to be what, your support beams for the structure? Four crudely cut tree trunks, just like that?”

  “Uh… yes? Why, what’s wrong with that?”

  “Mate… you have no idea how to build a proper structure, do you?”

  “I’m a freaking crab. I’ve never even been inside a building. What do you think?!” the exasperated Balthazar excimed, opening both arms in frustration.

  “You haven’t even cut your wood into proper boards and beams,” the girl said, stepping to the edge of the ptform and looking at the gathered wood for the build that illed oher side. “You’re just using it all raw like that!”

  She tinued moving around the trading post, looking at things and shaking her head as she went.

  “All this stuff is all so crudely made, it’s a wonder how nobody has ihemselves leaning on these flimsy guardrails yet.” She grabbed one of the wooden fences and gave it a wobble. “Total w hazard. Who even made this?”

  “D-Druma make that,” the goblin sheepishly said from the other side of the rail, with an embarrassed look and his head down.

  “A goblin building things?” the archer said, as she looked over the rail to the goblin and the golem oher side. “I thought goblins only ever destroyed things. Either way, that does expin a lot. I mean, e on! Your building crew is posed of a small goblin that looks like any small gust of wind could send him flying away, a golem that is probably as smart as the rock he’s made of, and a crab with literal pincers for hands. How do you ever hope to build a proper roof?”

  Balthazar was fuming. In part because of all the unpleasant things he was hearing from the girl, but also because he had numents against it, and there was little that irritated the crab more than admitting an adventurer was right and he was wrong.

  “And what makes you su authority iter?” he blurted out, failing to e up with a better terargument. “You’re an expert carpenter-archer, or something?”

  “No,” she responded. “Nobody takes carpentry as a skill. Are you kidding me? What’s an adventurer going to hat foing to build a ool to sit on while expl a dungeon? My father was an architect, and I grew up around building sites, so I caught a thing or two about structure building. A me tell you, the way yoing, if by some miracle you d a roof over this pce, it will be a matter of time before it es crashing down on you.”

  As much as he hated it, Balthazar khere was a dose of truth to what the girl was saying. He just wished she wasn’t so blunt about it.

  “You need a proper specialist, a human one, preferably,” she tinued. “There are plenty of builders, masons, and carpenters in town. Why don’t you hire oo e down here and do the job?”

  “Paying someohat doesn’t sound like my kind of thing.”

  “Suit yourself, but if you’re not willing to pay for quality, don’t expect to get a proper job done.”

  “Either way,” the crab said, “your fellow townspeople don’t let crabs like me through their gates anyway, talking or not, so even if I wanted any of that, I couldn’t hire anyone.”

  “Oh yes, I guess that’s one problem,” she ceded. “Sounds like you need a town representative. But that would be another hire, and you don’t seem to like that.”

  A town representative. Balthazar had never sidered it, but the way things were going, perhaps there was some merit to the idea.

  The archer girl poked with her fihrough a hole in one of the floorboards of the ptform, shaking her head in disapproval.

  “Anyhow,” the annoyed mert said, “what were you looking to buy or sell, anyway?”

  “Who? Me?” the girl said, standing up and pointing her fi herself. “Nothing. I just heard the crash from the road and came down to check what it was. I ’t resist stopping to watch a wreck.”

  H0st