Merchant Crab-Chapter 286: As Foretold by the Kobold

“What is that thing?!” Joshua exclaimed with a squeal and a finger pointed at the creature with orange scales standing before the group.

“Smash, smash!” Thunk yelled enthusiastically while pumping her warhammer up and down with both hands.

“A foul creature hath leapt forth from concealment, friends! We must strike it down together!” Hannabeth shouted, turning and pointing her mace at a stalagmite near the wall to her left.

Khargol grasped the handle of the battleaxe on his back and let out a snarl while scanning the rest of the tunnel around them with suspicion.

“Will you all calm down?!” Balthazar yelled, skittering in front of them while waving his pincers in the air. “No striking, or smashing! At least not yet. Look at it! Does it look like it’s trying to attack us?”

The group turned their gazes to the kobold with varying degrees of suspicion.

On the other side of the tunnel, the small creature in rags stood with its sharp stick held vertically in one hand, while the other lazily scratched its round, protruding belly, its black eyes staring back at them blankly.

“I don’t know, it looks pretty scary to me,” said the farmer boy, peeking from behind Thunk.

“Smashy-smash?” the barbarian asked, a confused expression on her face as she shrugged with the hammer still in her hands.

“Remain upon thy guard, friends. The creature may seek to lure us into an ambush!” exclaimed the knight-paladin, while still facing the tunnel’s wall.

“That’s a rock you’re looking at, Hannabeth…” the crab said with a sigh.

“This tight tunnel would not make for a good ambush location,” the orc chieftain said, hand still at the ready over his weapon.

“Look, the little guy came to us all alone and asked for help,” Balthazar pleaded. “Let’s at least try the dialogue option before jumping to the bashing and slashing, alright?”

The merchant turned and hesitantly skittered a few steps closer to the kobold. He found it hard to believe such a small and inconspicuous creature could have such a high level, but his monocle had never lied before, and the crab had certainly seen stranger things than that before.

“Uhm… Hello there,” Balthazar greeted with a quick wave of his pincer. “Do you… have a name?”

The creature stared back at the crab without losing the same vacant expression.

“Yes,” it said plainly.

They stayed in silence for a few seconds, the crackling of the group’s torches the only sound echoing from the tunnel walls surrounding them.

“And… Can you tell us your name?” Balthazar said awkwardly.

“Yes,” the kobold repeated.

The crab struggled not to let out an exasperated sigh.

“Alright, and what is your name?” he said, raising his tone slightly in frustration.

“Kole,” the mine dweller replied, with the same monotone, raspy voice of someone who had breathed in too much smoke for too long.

Balthazar exhaled and opened his arms slightly.

“Thank you! I’m Balthazar, and I am a crab. Also a merchant. You are a… kobold, is that right?”

“Yes.”

The crustacean sighed. “And me over here thinking we were making progress.”

While Balthazar had read about kobolds before from some bestiary or another, he did not know much about their species, since they were such a rare sight on the surface. If the human writings were to be believed—and the crab often found they were not—kobolds were a race of small underground reptilians with an affinity for sources of heat who lived in tribal societies. The books always described them as a simplistic species with a habit of pilfering items from unwitting adventurers exploring underground areas.

Balthazar wasn’t sure how much he could trust those claims.

After all, those were the same books that described giant crabs as short-tempered creatures that might snap at an adventurer’s ankle when stepped on.

Typical human prejudice.

“An explanation, you wish?” Kole said to the crab.

“Yes! Please!” the merchant said, lifting his eyestalks to look at the kobold again. “You said you needed help. A little explanation would be great.”

“On the way, I will explain,” said the orange creature. “Follow.”

“Wait, where are you taking us?”

“To tribe, we go,” Kole said. “Waiting, they are.”

Without waiting for a response, the kobold turned and started walking back into the darkness, his feet slapping loudly against the stone floor.

Balthazar turned to his group and shrugged.

“I mean… we were already going that way, right?”

Without any arguments to offer against it, the others simply started following the crab down the tunnel.

“Hey, hold on!” the crab said, watching the kobold hurriedly running out of the reach of their lights. “Can you even see where you’re going?”

“Yes,” the tunnel dweller said without stopping or looking back. “Good dark vision, we have.”

“And I’m really good at eating without chewing, but you don’t see me bragging! Slow down, will ya?”

Kole slowed his pace just enough to be bathed in the yellow light again and glance back.

“Tribe waiting, I explained.”

“Yes, about that,” the crab said, skittering to the kobold’s side as they marched down the tunnel. “What exactly are they waiting for?”

“Who, not what.”

“You know, Kole, I just met you and I can already tell we’re going to get along great,” the merchant said dryly.

“Thank you,” the orange creature said flatly, eyes forward as he kept moving.

“That was sarcasm!” Balthazar exclaimed. “Who is your tribe waiting for?”

“From the prophecy, the hero,” Kole answered. “From extinction, he will save us.”

The crab’s eyestalks sagged.

“Oh, not this ascendant nonsense again,” he muttered with a groan. “Look, pal, I’m flattered and all, but I’m really not—”

“Hero, I did not say you were,” the kobold interrupted.

“Wait, what?” the confused crustacean said. “Then who are you talking about?”

“Him, the hero from the prophecy is,” Kole said, coming to a sudden stop in front of an opening on the cavern wall and pointing a finger at the goblin behind Balthazar.

The merchant looked back and his assistant, who was staring at them with confusion in his eyes.

“You mean Druma?!” Balthazar said.

“Druma…” the creature in rags repeated, as if taking the word in. “The name of the savior from the omens is.”

“What omens? What are you even talking about?!”

“Inside, see the wall. Follow.”

Kole waved for them to enter the tight entrance with him.

After some careful maneuvering and ducking, everyone made it through the small passage.

Inside they found a tiny cave chamber with some old bedding by the corner, made with hay, that gave the immediate impression that place used to be the bedroom of a kobold with poor cleaning habits.

Contrasting against the yellow from their torches and lanterns was a dim blue light that emanated from small clusters of hairy fungi sprouting from the gaps in the rock between the walls and ceiling. The mushrooms gave off a mesmerizing glow, and their fleshy bodies were smooth and shiny.

“You… you guys eat these?” Joshua asked, looking around with an apprehensive expression while remaining within grabbing distance of Thunk’s arm.

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“No,” Kole replied. “Not food, these mushrooms. Light, they are.”

“Oh…” said the farmer boy.

“Surface humans, they eat mushrooms?” asked the reptilian creature.

“Well, yes, but not like the—”

The kobold stuck his pointy tongue out and frowned in a sign of disgust.

“Very strange, humans are.”

“No, I meant—”

“What are these?” Balthazar asked, interrupting the exchange.

With his pincer he pointed at a flat section of the cave wall, which was covered in scribbles and crude drawings.

“The omens,” Kole said reverently.

The crab’s eyestalks frowned at the wall. The drawings were mostly stick figures, done by someone with the artistic prowess of a four-year-old human child. Or an adult crab with pincers for hands.

“These drawings? What are they supposed to be?”

“Long ago, our prophet lived here. Keth, her name. Self-isolate, she chose to. The visions, she drew on these walls.”

“Riiiiight… The visions,” the merchant said, glancing up. “You said you guys definitely don’t eat these weird glowing mushrooms, right?”

“Many generations ago, Keth drew these,” Kole continued, seemingly ignoring or not understanding Balthazar’s question. “The tale of the hero.”

The crab looked closer at the paintings on the wall.

“These don’t look that old.”

“The ancient days of our tribe, Keth lived,” the kobold explained. “Many generations before I was born, that was.”

Balthazar scratched his chin. “So… that means it was…”

“Ten, of surface people years.”

The crab shook his shell in confusion. “Just ten years ago?!”

Kole nodded.

“Very short, kobold life expectancy is. Rock falls, you die. Hole in wall release bad gas, you die. You eat strange thing from mines, you die. Tribe wife wants stronger husband, you die. Harsh life, we have in the underground.”

“Alright, but never mind that,” Balthazar said, throwing his pincers up. “The drawings, these so-called omens. What do they have to do with Druma?”

“Look, and see,” the kobold said, pointing at one of the first figures on the left side of the wall.

A stick figured made with green lines was depicted on the rock, its head disproportionally larger than its twig body, and on top of it was a slightly skewed brown triangle.

“Druma, our hero,” Kole said with veneration.

Balthazar frowned at the painting. “That could be anyone! It’s a stick figure!”

The tunnel dweller shook his head slowly and then pointed at the goblin.

“Green, he is.” He pointed his finger higher, above Druma’s head. “The hat, he has.”

“You’re reading way too much into a few childlike squiggles on a wall, pal. Lots of people are green. Take Khargol here, for example! Who’s to say he’s not your hero, huh?”

The chieftain looked at the merchant with a scowl. “Leave me out of this.”

Kole gazed the orc up and down for a moment.

“The hat, he has not.”

The crab let his eyestalks drop forward in exasperation.

“This guy is giving me a headache,” he whispered to the orc warrior standing next to him, who was admiring the cave paintings with arms crossed and an intrigued expression.

“I like him,” Khargol said without taking his eyes off the drawings.

“Of course you would,” Balthazar said, rolling his eyes. “Must be the way he speaks that really does it for you.”

Khargol glared at the crab from the corner of his eye.

“It is not the only reason, but that too, yes. My tribe has met kobolds briefly in the past. Not these, underground dwelling ones, but a different tribe, long ago, when I was younger and my father was still the chieftain.”

“Oh,” said the crustacean, surprised and suddenly genuinely interested in the orc’s insight.

“They are a hardy species, with very different customs from surface races. What might seem odd to us, are just natural behavior to them. They need something, they take it, without a sense of ownership, it’s just the way things are for them. Humans, of course, took to calling them pilferers and looters because of that. I always liked them because they speak plainly and directly. They lead their sentences with the most important part, followed by the secondary details, so as to not waste any time when communicating and having it be understood as quickly as possible. It’s a necessity when much of your survival underground hinges on the ability to communicate dangers at a moment’s notice. I can admire that.”

“Huh…” the merchant muttered while reflecting on the orc’s words. “Interesting. I’m going to try to ignore the part about taking things that don’t belong to them for now, but I’ll be keeping an eyestalk on my backpack until we leave.”

Kole approached and tapped on the crab’s shell while pointing at another section of the wall. “There, look.”

A different drawing depicted the same green stick figure with a triangle on its head, but this time it was also holding a brown stick in its hand and pushing it forward horizontally. The apparent weapon had several cracks and bolts shooting out of it, into a big mess of paint that took over a big chunk of the stone surface it was drawn on, like a huge explosion.

“Alright, that looks like a big kaboom,” Balthazar said, eyestalks rolling. “Maybe it is Druma after all.”

“The hero, it is,” the kobold said, nodding and then pointing to a corner of the wall, near the floor. “You, that is.”

The eight-legged merchant squinted down at a tiny gray drawing depicting what looked like a circle with eight curved lines sticking downward out of it, two eyes on sticks shooting up from the circle, and another two sticks on the sides ending in inverted triangles.

“The hell…”

Druma came running and leaned over the crab’s carapace with an excited grin.

“That’s boss! That’s boss!” he said, pointing at the drawing.

“No!” said Balthazar. “That could be anyone! Or anything! Like… a guy’s face with really bad facial hair and weird ears.”

Kole stared at the goblin.

“Hero…” he started. “Boss, you call him. That word, what is its meaning? To you, what is he?”

“Uhhm…” the crab’s assistant said, scratching under his hat and looking puzzled. “Druma not very good with words. Boss better with words and talking.”

“Hmm,” the orange creature muttered. “Understand, I think I do. Your speaker, this crab is?”

Balthazar’s eyestalks snapped to the kobold with a frown.

“Now hold on just a sec—”

“Yes, yes!” Druma exclaimed excitedly. “Boss speak good! Boss always does talking, Druma makes big kaboom!”

Kole nodded slowly in understanding.

“Clear now, it became.” He turned to the crab and bowed. “The hero’s speaker, you are. Your word, we will listen to.”

“I…” Balthazar said, but then paused and sighed. “You know what, whatever, I don’t even care right now. Will you just explain to us what do you think Druma is supposed to save your people from already?”

“Extinction, I said already,” the reptilian being said flatly.

“Yes, but from what, for crying out loud?! What could possibly be causing your extinction down here? Mold?! Vitamin deficiency?! We don’t know, because you haven’t explained yet!”

“The ogres,” said Kole, his gaze severe.

The crab stared at him for a moment.

“The… ogres? You mean like… big, green, and brutish?”

The kobold nodded. “Yes.”

Balthazar glanced back awkwardly at Khargol through the corner of his eye.

“Don’t even go there,” the chieftain growled. “Orcs have as much to do with ogres as humans have to do with gorillas.”

“Sooo… distant relatives?”

The orc snarled.

“Alright, alright! I was just checking if you had any insight!” The crab turned back to look at the kobold. “So… Ogres. Got it. What’s up with them?”

“To explain, I will try to,” said Kole, taking a deep breath.

“Here we go,” Balthazar whispered to Khargol with a chuckle. “Watch, he’s about to dump his kind’s entire history on us in a long, meandering tale. Better find yourself a seat, because we’re going to be here a while.”

The orc chieftain gave him the side-eye and remained standing with his arms crossed.

“Living in these undergrounds, our kinds always did,” Kole explained. “Each one in their own territories, kobolds and ogres were. In the small and tight spaces, we lived. In the larger and hard to reach, the ogres stayed. Without bothering each other, for generations. Volcano erupted, one day. Chaos, it all became.”

Balthazar cleared his throat and looked around in discomfort, but decided to say nothing. Purely out of courtesy to the one speaking, obviously.

“Lost much of their territory, the ogres did,” the kobold continued. “Shifted, the caves did. Landslides, collapses. Larger and more open, our territory became. Large enough for ogres to fit. Uneasy, the ogres became. But worse, something came. Famished and sick, the ogres became. Plague, we think. Purple haze, from their caverns came. Away, we stayed. Haunting noises and stench, from their home. But to us, they came. Always savage, ogres were. But much worse, they now became. Attacked, many of our tribes and villages were. Few of us, all that remain now. A single tribe and village, all that is left. And coming to end us, we know the ogres are.”

The small orange creature finished talking, his gaze wandering down to the floor as he supported himself on his spear. For the first time since emerging from that dark tunnel, Balthazar could see an actual expression of emotion on the kobold’s face—sorrow.

“Wow, I…” the crab started, feeling uncomfortable with his own words. “That was… actually a lot shorter than I expected, heh.”

He looked around the cave chamber looking for some support in his attempt at easing the mood, but everyone else had serious expressions on.

Khargol’s scowl was stern, even more so than usual. Hannabeth stood still like an armor stand near the entrance wall, but for once her helmet’s visor was unmistakably pointed in the correct direction to look at the one who had just spoken to them. Over by the other corner, Joshua’s eyes looked watery as he looked at the kobold, and even Thunk, with her ridiculous broken unicorn horn hanging in front of her forehead, stared at the small creature with an ugly frown of pity.

Never a fan of awkward silences, Balthazar opened his mouth.

“I’m sorry to hear that. I’m not sure that we can—”

“Druma and friends help!” the goblin exclaimed suddenly, springing out from behind the crab.

“We do?!” the merchant blurted out, looking at his assistant in shock.

“You can count on my aid, kobold,” chieftain Khargol declared, taking one step forward.

“He can?!” said the crab, turning his surprised gaze to the orc.

“I was hesitant to come with you into this place for my elder trial,” Khargol said. “It was our shaman, Shagazurglamdushell, who convinced me. You remember her, the one who provided the recipe to cure your goblin friend?”

“Ah, yes, madam Shaga… The madam shaman, yes, I remember her.”

“She told me I would find my purpose here, by your side,” the orc continued. “I should have had more faith in her wisdom. I believe that, somehow, she knew my path to become an honorable elder would be down here. I see that clearly now. I must help this tribe in peril. That will be my trial.”

“And you shall have my shield, honorable warrior!” Hannabeth exclaimed, stepping out from the corner.

“Thunk help too!” the barbarian yelled, beating on her chest with a fist.

“I go where she goes!” Joshua hurriedly added.

Even Blue stepped to Druma’s side, a fierce spark in her eyes.

“Well… crabapples!” Balthazar said, throwing his pincers up. “I’m not staying in this stinky cave by myself, and you guys need someone with proper leadership skills! So I guess—”

A thunderous crash came from the tunnel outside, distant but strong enough to cause the ground beneath them to shake and dust to fall from the ceiling.

Kole’s head snapped to look at the exit.

“What the hell just happened?!” the crab yelled, trying to regain his balance.

“For my village,” said the kobold, “the ogres have come.”