Merchant Crab-Chapter 292: Speaking With the Dead

A heavy thwack echoed through the chamber as the ogre’s club connected with the small kobold who had jumped in its downward path.

Kole dropped to the floor like a bag of orange potatoes, landing motionless with his face down.

But his move had not been just one of defensive self-sacrifice—it had been an attack of opportunity too.

As he jumped in front of the thrall, Kole had used his momentum and the element of surprise to throw his rockwood spear at the creature’s eye, which pierced right through it. The kobold’s stick was practically like a toothpick compared to the ogre’s size, but as it turns out, a toothpick to the eyeball can do a lot of damage.

“Gargh!” the undead ogre gurgled, stumbling back as it clutched its face.

And then it dropped to the floor like a bag of green potatoes.

“Oh no!” Druma exclaimed, hopping off Blue’s back and running toward Kole’s crumpled up form.

The drake whipped around fiercely, and with a roar, showered the collapsed zombie ogre in blue fire, which enveloped its entire body and quickly turned it into a blinding pyre.

Whether due to the critical strike from the kobold, or the magical fire from the drake, the fact was, once the flames subsided, that ogre was without a doubt an absolute goner—a very charred and crispy goner.

“Friend? Friend?!” the goblin called, carefully clutching the fallen kobold’s body and turning him around.

Balthazar skittered toward them, fearing the worst.

“H-hero…” Kole muttered, his eyes slowly opening.

The orange creature managed a slight smile as he saw the goblin holding him in his arms.

“Oh, thank goodness, he’s alive!” the crab said as he peered over Druma’s shoulder, feeling relieved that he wouldn’t have to tell his assistant about the farm up north that all kobolds go to in order to “get better.”

“Boss?!” the goblin said, turning to look at the merchant with pleading eyes. “Can Druma have heal potion, please? Druma promise to pay with double work on bazaar later!”

The crab cocked an eyestalk at his assistant before shoving a pincer into his bag.

“Oh, shush! I was already going to get a healing potion, you don’t have to pay for it!” he said, pulling a bottle of bright red liquid from the magical backpack and then looking at Kole. “But I’ll definitely charge you for it later.”

“G-gold coins, kobolds do not… use,” the injured tunnel dweller said as he struggled to sit up.

“Ah, we will figure some trade out, don’t worry,” said the merchant. “Now drink.”

The crab passed the potion to the goblin, who carefully brought it to the kobold’s mouth.

After swallowing, Kole let out a groan as he tried to straighten himself up in his sitting position.

“Better, I feel,” he said. “But fractured, half my ribs are.”

“Yeah, you’re going to need some long rest before you can go jumping in front of swinging weapons again,” Balthazar said. “We really thought you were a goner there. I forgot that despite your size, you were still technically a higher level than that ogre!”

“What you mean, I am not sure,” the kobold said, placing a hand over his bruised ribs. “But hardy, kobolds are.”

“Uhh, yes, that’s what I meant,” said the crab, before turning his eyestalks to the goblin. “Druma, you and Blue watch over Kole here while I check on the others, alright?”

“Yes, yes, boss!” the green wizard replied as he and the drake carefully pulled the kobold closer to a wall so he could lean against it.

Over by the breach, undead thralls continued to pour through the hole in the wall, but to Balthazar’s surprise, his friends were holding out well. In fact, more than well—they were winning.

“Who could have imagined it, all these guys needed was some coordination!”

Thunk continued her chaotic bashing of heads, moving around the growing piles of dead ogres like a tornado, delivering blow after blow with a wide grin on her face.

“Smash, smash, smash!” the barbarian yelled, with a nearly maniacal glee.

On her head, the horn of her helmet was glowing with a magical shimmer that produced tiny sparkles, their intensity increasing with each successful swing of the adventurer’s weapon.

A few paces behind her, Hannabeth and Khargol were handling all the stragglers that were not directly in the path of the cyclone called Thunk.

The orc, being only level 25, could not afford to be hit by ogres with levels in the forties, but surprisingly, the knight-paladin was doing an excellent job at being his literal shield.

With no weapon to hold, Hannabeth wielded the Believer’s Ward with both hands, and now, perhaps due to being unimpeded by the restrictive perspective of her helmet, she moved around the fight incredibly swiftly.

Each time one of the thralls got close enough to deliver a blow on the chieftain, the adventurer would swoop in and clash her shield against the club or fist, sending the beasts recoiling back as the light of the gems around the ward grew even brighter.

“This is awesome!” Hannabeth shouted to Balthazar with a grin, her usual knightly bravado completely forgotten. “I’m not wearing a helmet, and yet these guys don’t even try to hit my head. It’s like I’m a main character now!”

“Hey, don’t push it!” the crab shouted back.

To his credit, Khargol’s fighting did not look like someone out of his league. He held his own remarkably well, for someone so much lower in level.

Thanks to Hannabeth’s blocking, the orc was mostly free to deliver devastating blows with his battleaxe, having already dispatched a respectful amount of undead thralls, likely due to the combination of the knight’s shield bashing, followed by a strike from his own powerful weapon to finish them off.

Maybe he was right, that weapon doesn’t even need any enchantments to be strong! Pure orcish craftsmanship right there!

Looking toward the blasted wall, Balthazar saw that the supply of zombified ogres was finally starting to run dry, fewer of them coming through each time.

Still standing ominously among them, the lich lord did not look pleased—or perhaps that was just the way his ugly skeletal face always looked, it was hard for the crab to tell.

“Ha-ha! Looks like you’re running out of puppets!” Balthazar shouted from across the chamber.

Once again, the lich raised his skeletal arm, but this time toward his own forehead. As the thin hood covering his bald cranium fluttered, the merchant saw a circlet around his head. It broadened into entwined branches of silver metal over the fiend’s forehead, and at the center of its intricate knot was a large purple amethyst.

The lich’s creepy, bony index finger slowly reached for it and, with the tip of his pointy nail, touched the gem. The amethyst began glowing upon contact, magic radiating from it as the undead master reached forward with his other hand, extending his open hand over the battlefield.

“Uh-oh, I shouldn’t have opened my big mouth, should I?” Balthazar muttered, taking a step back. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

The piles of fallen ogres stirred under the lich’s command, and soon the undead began to rise again, despite their broken limbs and smashed heads, faint tendrils of purple arcana swirling in and out of their bodies as their master propped them back up from afar.

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“Guuuuys?” the crab shouted to the others. “Watch your backs. That guy is cheating!”

Thunk looked back, the shimmering horn on her head casting a colorful halo of light around her scowling expression.

“No fair!” the barbarian said. “Me smash those ogres real good!”

While they had been able to beat them in waves before, now, with nearly all the thralls getting back up at once, the adventurers and Khargol were finding themselves surrounded by overwhelming odds, and with a lot less stamina than they had started with.

“Ah, crabapples! And the bonuses from Leader’s Voice just ran out,” Balthazar said to himself as he checked his system status.

His mind raced. What more tricks could he pull to keep them from being pummeled by a horde of hungry, mindless ogres?

“If only they could be negotiated with, then I’d be in my element! But unfortunately I don’t speak zombie!”

The crab paused, and his eyestalks arched slightly.

“Wait… Maybe I do?”

Quickly pulling up his list of skills, Balthazar looked for one he had rarely used.

[All-Tongue]

[Skill - C tier]

[Requirements: 40 CHA, 20 INT]

[Cost: 5 mana]

[For 15 minutes, your tongue can reach anyone’s ears. No, gross, not like that. Sentient beings will understand your words no matter their language.]

“Is there even any sentience left in them? Bah! What do I have to lose?”

[All-Tongue activated]

“Waaaait!” Balthazar shouted to the horde of zombified ogres.

The thralls, as well as his allies, all froze in their fight and turned to look at the crab.

“Huuuh?” one of the undead brutes groaned, milky white eyes fixed on the crustacean.

“Uhm… Don’t attack my friends… please?” Balthazar said awkwardly, unsure of what he was even trying to do.

“But…” the zombie ogre closest to him said in a guttural voice. “Master… say… kill…”

The creature extended his arm and pointed his club at the lich lord across the cave.

“Why the hell are you groaning and grunting at the zombies?!” exclaimed Joshua, peeking from behind a rock.

“I’m speaking zombie ogrish, shut up!” the crab muttered back before returning to his other conversation. “Why do you obey the stinky skeletal man?”

The undead ogres exchanged a few glances at one another and a few shrugs before another one spoke.

“Dunno.”

“Well, he’s using you all, making you fight for him and not even giving you anything for it. Don’t you all think you should be clubbing his head instead?”

One of the larger ogres scratched the side of his rotting head as he stared emptily at the crab.

“Why? You… give us something to smash him?”

“Uh… Sure…” Balthazar looked around, trying to think fast. “If you stop fighting us and fight the lich instead, we will give you… chocolate? Yeah, that’s a good deal. I know you might not think—”

[The Gift of the Crab: Success]

[Multiple targets persuaded]

[You have reached level 36]

“Alright, we smash skinny man,” the larger brute said, putting his club over his shoulder and turning to shamble toward the lich lord. The rest of the zombie ogres shrugged and followed his lead.

“Wow,” the crab said to himself. “I guess it’s that easy when your persuasion targets have the collective intellect of a soaked cabbage.”

“What in the world did you say to them?!” Hannabeth shouted from the other side of the cave.

“I promised them chocolate,” Balthazar yelled back.

A faint reply came from across the chamber. “Oh, alright…”

As the horde turned against their master, marching toward him with clubs and fists ready, the lich lord remained motionless, showing no fear, but instead a hint of ire in the form of a thin and black curled lip.

“Ah, looks like you’ve lost your army of the dead!” Balthazar shouted from across the cave chamber.

Lowering his finger from the activated gem of his circled and making a sweeping motion with his other arm, the lich lord sent out a purple wave of mist that rushed through the zombie ogres like a grave-breath exhaled from the earth itself, seeping through rot and bone alike.

“Ah, crabs, why do I keep speaking too soon?” the crustacean muttered.

As quickly as it came, the mist faded into the ground, leaving no thrall standing, each one dropping dead like the corpses they should have been all along.

The lich had given them un-life, and the lich had taken it away.

“Booo! More cheating!” Thunk howled, pumping her warhammer up in the air.

The floating figure did not react to the barbarian’s taunting, and instead simply turned around and began to leave through the dark hole it had emerged from.

“Is… is the lich running away?” the farmer boy said, slowly standing up from behind his hiding spot.

“More like… hovering away… slowly?” Balthazar said, gaze still fixed on the levitating man, floating off into the darkness with his feet dangling above the ground.

The two adventurers and the orc chieftain stood amid the sea of fallen ogres, looking at one another for a moment.

“Shall we… follow it?” Hannabeth asked, her shiny shield still held in front of herself.

“We should exercise caution,” said Khargol, scowling. “This could very well be an attempt at leading us into an ambu—”

“Smaaaaaash!”

Thunk broke into a sprint toward the breach on the wall, sledgehammer held high above her glowing head, leaving a faint trail of sparkles behind her.

“Well, I guess that settles it!” the knight said, smiling as she strapped the glowing shield to her back and followed the barbarian.

Khargol closed his eyes for a moment, his nostrils flaring as he exhaled sharply, and then he grasped his battleaxe and took off after the two adventurers.

“Thunk! Wait for me!” Joshua shouted, rushing to the hole in the wall too, his oversized backpack bouncing precariously behind him.

Balthazar looked back and forth, eyestalks swinging from side to side as he did.

“Ah, for the love of pie!”

The crab skittered back to his goblin assistant.

“Druma!” he said. “You and Blue take Kole here back to his tribe so they can take care of him. He’s in no shape to keep going with us. But if you encounter any kind of trouble on the way, you turn around and come right back to us, got it? No playing hero!” He paused. “Well, no playing the self-sacrificing kind of hero, at least.”

“Druma got it, boss!” the goblin said, giving a salute so strong it almost knocked the wizard hat off his head.

The green wizard helped raise the injured kobold onto the drake’s back and they took off at a hurried pace toward the exit opposite of the breach, while Balthazar put all of his eight legs to work catching up with the others.

After climbing the rocks around the blast area and entering the narrow tunnel left by the undead horde, the crab heard a heavy thunk up ahead. As he wrapped around the corner, he saw his three allies—and also the farmer boy—standing in place, with the barbarian sitting with her backside on the floor.

“Owie!” Thunk said, rubbing her nose.

“We tried to warn you,” said Hannabeth as she helped the other adventurer up.

In front of them, blocking the tunnel, was a translucent purple barrier of magical light, similar to the one they had seen the lich use before Druma’s big kaboom.

“Our foe raised this shield behind him as we chased him,” Khargol said to Balthazar as he joined them.

“Damn coward!” the crab said, snapping his pincer. “We almost had him.”

The orc chieftain approached the barrier carefully and inspected it.

“Hmm,” he muttered, rubbing his chiseled jaw. “The lich kept going, which would mean the magic should fade away soon, without him near, unless… There. Do you see it?”

The merchant and the others squinted past the solid purple haze blocking their path, and saw a stone pedestal on the other side, with a purple gem floating above its pointed tip. From it, a thin tendril of purple magic stretched toward the arcane wall.

“The source of the fiend’s foul magic!” the knight-paladin exclaimed dramatically, her immersion seemingly restored.

“But how do we reach it?” Balthazar said thoughtfully.

Putting on his monocle, he tried to examine the barrier.

[Necromantic Barrier]

[An impenetrable bubble of magic powered by a source of mana. This one is enchanted so that only reanimated zombies can pass through unimpeded.]

“Hmm, this complicates matters,” Khargol said after the crab shared the details with the group. “Perhaps our mutual friend, Tom, could be of assistance, if we brought him or one of his friends down here?”

Balthazar shook his shell.

“First thing I thought of, too, but no, they wouldn’t be able to pass through. The description specifically says reanimated zombies. Tom and I once had a conversation about this, and apparently zombies and skeletons are two very different kinds of undead, and to get them mixed up is very rude in bone society. You know, like saying crabs and lobsters are the same thing. Or orcs and ogres.”

“Perhaps your new bag of tricks has something of use, good merchant?” Hannabeth suggested, pointing at the backpack on his shell.

“Hmm, I guess it doesn’t hurt to check,” Balthazar said, taking the pack off and shoving a claw inside.

He rummaged and rummaged, hoping to pinch something useful in the big emptiness inside, until something found its way into his grasp.

“Oh,” he said, as he removed the pincer from the bag.

Wrapped around it was a thin chain from which a solid gold medallion was hanging.

“Holy crab! I had completely forgotten about this thing!”

“That’s a pretty medallion and all,” said Joshua, “but I’m not sure how it’s going to help us get through that magical barrier.”

“As it turns out,” the crab said with a smile, “the bag does exactly as advertised, because this thing might be exactly what we needed right now.”

Balthazar gently squeezed the gold medallion and whispered into it.

“Sir Edmund Auclair Allard, I summon you!”