"What do you mean we are going to kill the crabs?" Pamela gasped as I told them my intentions.
"I mean exactly what I said. We're going to kill those crabs. I'm not going to let them get back to the village."
"But there are so many of them," Pamela turned to the monsters.
"Yes and they're running away so stop talking and start whacking," I said before moving towards the crabs.
This might not be something that I should be worrying about. After all, I had no horse in this race. If something were to happen to the people who lived here it really wasn't my problem. But at the same time I felt bad. The fact of the matter was the people of this village lost their protection because of me. Even if it wasn't the type of protection they should have to begin with.
But if we were to let those crabs reach the village, especially a village that barely had any actual hunters, they would be in trouble. If we killed them, they would at least get some time to prepare. Maybe that would be enough. Maybe this was the only group of crabs that could be a problem for them. Or maybe it wouldn't matter and there was another swarm of crabs rushing from the lake that would devour everybody.
Either way, the ethics of this was not really the reason why I was so intent on fighting. What I was really looking for was the particles that we would gain from this group of creatures. But specifically the particles that Michael would gain. Astrid and I had agreed to let him join our party and the System was now doing a division where he got 60% of all the particles that we were acquiring and Astrid and I split the remaining 40.
It was better than the 33.3% division that we would need to have. Not to mention even the System sounded annoyed with the idea of having to split 100% into three people. Apparently it would have to keep the three values fluctuating every time someone gained some particles to keep it as even as possible. That way while technically it was an equal split, at any given time one of us would be getting 0.1% more particles than the others.
Michael grabbed his bow and started firing while Astrid was already rushing towards the crabs. I was a bit worried that they would start using skills and that would reveal the System to Pamela but that didn't seem to be the case. Or at least, the skills Michael was using were not visible to the naked eye. His {True Shot} skill only affected him and while I could notice that he was covering his eyes with some particles, I couldn't tell where he was aiming. While Astrid didn't even bother with her skills. She just started swinging at the crabs with her trusted axe cutting them apart like butter. The passive skills in her body doing most of the work to make sure that she would be dealing the right amount of damage to kill them.
Not wanting to be left behind I started whacking them. Each strike from my staff broke their shells and crushed their legs. Pamela on the other hand was just staying back scared of approaching those creatures while screaming as they got closer.
After we killed the first handful, the ones that were heading back to the village, the other crabs turned towards us. Sensing the threat and deciding to work together to fight off the incoming enemy. Their pincers started to snap at our hips and a couple of them even spit out compressed water that was enough to knock me back on the ground. But their aim was absolutely terrible. Not to mention that it took a while for them to prepare the attack allowing us ample time to dodge away from the incoming stream of water.
After killing six crabs I remembered to check their stats.
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Flathead Crustacean - Tier 1
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Flathead Crustacean - Tier 0 - saturated
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The monsters were weak. Plain and simple. There was not a single one of them that was a tier one and saturated but there were a couple tier zero saturated. It was also pretty obvious that those creatures didn't gain as much benefit from the System as the Emperor Flathead. Otherwise they wouldn't be this small. If you could call dog sized crabs small. Then again I wasn't entirely sure how long it took for the emperor to reach its full size. Maybe it got to tier two and spent years growing instead of just growing from the start.
It was just a lot more boring than I was expecting. There was no challenge in this. We were pretty much playing whack-a-mole with a bunch of crabs that were coming out of a lake. Or at least that's how it was at first.
The crustaceans noticed that they were being obliterated and started climbing on top of each other until they formed a roughly humanoid pile. It didn't have two legs but I could see the crabs holding on to each other by the claws to form the arms. They then shifted and their appearance changed in a blink of an eye.
Instead of just a bunch of crabs sitting on top of each other, we were now looking at a horrifying appearance of something that tried and failed to pass as human. It had ashy gray but slimy skin with eyes that were bulging out of its head and even elongated in oval shapes. Right under that was a mouth that opened sideways revealing another mouth inside and only then there were some strange shell-like protrusions inside its maw that could be used as teeth.
The neck was bent in a strange way almost as if the spine had broken and was now sticking out from under the skull, the bones of its body all kept shifting as they were in fact the various legs and claws from the crabs inside. What was both scarier and the funniest part about this creature was that instead of genitals there was one large pincer dangling from between its legs that kept snapping as if trying to reach for anything. The feet connected in a blob of flesh with various crab legs jetting out of the ankles to move around instead of shifting the actual feet.
I have no idea how those creatures were doing that kind of thing. But it was very real, very lifelike, and very disturbing. Almost like if someone were to try to draw a human without ever seeing one. Going off only by the description of a corpse that they found in the middle of the lake. Bloated and misshapen.
I wasn't entirely sure why the creatures decided to create this form. That is until it started to move. The monster was much faster than the crabs by themselves which didn't really make much sense.
Looking at this misshapen human formed by crabs through the System only revealed a group of crustaceans. This was not a different creature, at least not in the eyes of the System but after Astrid tried to cut one down it became clear that things were more complicated than they seemed.
The monster wasn't just scary looking and strange, but it was also much sturdier. Her axe swing wasn't able to pierce the shell or the skin of the first of the creatures. There was some sort of shell making them harder to kill. The only thing that came to mind was that maybe those crabs were somehow sharing the defenses of their carapaces while they were in this form. But even then things still sounded pretty impossible.
"What do we do now?" Michael asked with his voice full of worry. I'm sure he was enjoying level ups but not enough to think it was worth risking his life.
"I think it's better if we kill it," I replied and Astrid gave me a nod, "Don't hold back use everything you have," I said hoping the Frosted Lumberjack would understand what I meant.
Jumping forward I triggered {Formless Ice Devil Lunge} expecting to do some proper damage on the creature. The particles wrapped around my body and my staff, forming the claw just before I slammed them n the monster causing it to tumble backwards. But it wasn't the entirety of its body that fell. Instead, just the upper half hit the ground while the lower half was still there. The crabs that were on top revealed as if they were the insides of this fake person. The other half sprouted crab legs from their waist started rushing towards the legs of this flesh puppet.
Astrid quickly followed up using a {Frost Chop} at the monster. Aimed at the lower half that had one of the crabs exposed. Her attack struck the crustacean that was out in the open instead of the outer layer of skin that formed this fake human and the result was much better than any of us expected.
With one single swing she was able to kill two of those crabs splitting the first clean in half and the second having the blade of her Frosted Axe embedded onto its brain. As a follow-up, I aimed at the exposed crab legs since those were clearly weaker than whatever was being covered by the fake flesh.
This time using a {Formless Emperor Swipe} the particles went towards my staff becoming a large pincer. At the same time I triggered {Compression} making just the tail end of the staff to grow larger turning into a club instead of a stick. But even then, every time I was able to break one of those crabs legs, it took only a few moments for another to pop out. I didn't know if the crabs inside were shifting their bodies or were actually capable of regenerating their limbs so quickly.
It was pretty obvious that we would end up winning this fight. Since we were slowly but surely chipping away at the number of crabs that formed this one human. But the problem was, we were not fighting only one. There were more appearing around us coming from the other crabs that emerged from the lakes. And between the three of us we would start to struggle to fight against all of them really quickly.
I tried using {Compression} to increase the size of my staff and simply slam it on top of the human puppet but it didn't work. My strike wasn't strong enough to kill or seemingly even damage the creatures.
Noticing that we were starting to get into trouble Astrid swung her axe to the side and created a wave of ice that enveloped another of the humanoid creatures that were approaching. The shards of ice were enough to trap the creature into a frozen tomb but it didn't take even a second for the ice to start to break as the crabs struggled inside of it.
From behind, I heard {Predatory Sense} giving me a warning but it was too late as another one of those humanoid creatures wrapped its arms around me. Strangely cold and wet arms before countless pincers started to cut me. If it wasn't for the Ice Devil cloack that was covering my back I would probably have been ripped to shreds but the creatures were too weak to actually pierce the leather of the giant ice bear.
I pushed the second fake human away doing my best to damage it as much as I could before it could leave my range and then turned to face the one that we had yet to kill. The first one that we were fighting. Using {Ice Devil Lunge} again I jumped on the upper half of the body that was now trying to climb up the lower half and caused the crabs to collapse onto the floor. The impact was too strong and it forced them to detach from each other breaking this form, whatever it was. Without missing a beat I eliminated every single one of those crabs before turning to the second humanoid form that was attacking me. But it was no longer there.
Ever since the start of the fight I kept hearing a loud noise in the back of my mind. Pamela was screaming bloody murder non-stop. She didn't even try to help us during the struggles just frozen in fear. But I had tuned that out until now. Her voice was weaker. Not weaker but farther away.
Looking around I saw the woman screaming and clawing at the ground while a pair of those strange humanoid adjacent creatures pulled her away from us into one of the forests around the lake. I cursed under my breath and yelled "They got Pamela."
Astrid and Michael seemed to have heard me and started moving in my direction. We quickly finished the monstrous crab human puppets that they were fighting. The moment the coast was clear, or at least a path was, the three of us dashed into the forest. I knew that bringing Pamela along would cause trouble I just didn't expect for it to happen this quickly.