Chapter 147: Sitting On The Crab

"What?" we asked.

All three of us said it at once. Khan from his knee, Eva with her sword still dripping, and me, in a tone I’m not proud of. It came out like a child’s.

Petra didn’t look up from the stone. She kept her morning star pressed against the paste, and the faint red glow lit the underside of her chin.

"Well," she said, "I got an Awakened rank gift after killing it. And considering a summon only requires the characteristics and the gift left behind by the Unorthodox creature, I can now make it my summon."

Nobody said anything for a moment.

I looked at the gift first. It lay half-buried in the muck beside the glowing stone, a small curved thing of pale shell, no longer than my palm. I had seen Gifts drop before, but only from creatures that had been killed cleanly. Petra had turned this one into soup, and it had still left something behind.

"A gift drops very rarely," I said slowly. "That’s a very low chance."

"I know." She grinned. "Lucky me."

She said it lightly, but her hand was shaking a little around the handle of the morning star. I filed that away. Petra didn’t usually shake. Either she was excited, or she was scared of how excited she was.

Khan finally pushed himself up on an axe handle. His color was coming back, though he still looked like a man who had climbed a mountain and been told there was another one behind it. Eva walked over and stood beside him without a word. Their shoulders touched. Neither moved away.

’Good for them.’

"So," Eva said. "What do we do?"

"We wait," said Petra.

We waited.

I would like to say it was peaceful, but nothing in the Realm of Evil lets you wait in peace. Khan stayed on watch with both axes in his hands. Eva walked a slow circle around the dead crabs with her shadows trailing behind her like dogs on a leash. I stood near the boulders with my left ear turned toward the dip, and my left ear kept tingling at nothing, because I was tense and my body was lying to me.

Petra sat cross-legged in front of the paste and did not move.

At first, nothing happened. The stone glowed. The wind pulled at the dust. A drop of something thick slid off a broken pincer and hit the ground, and I jumped.

Then the stone began to change.

It was slow. The dull red deepened into a rich, wet crimson, the color of a heart, and the glow gathered in the air above the paste like steam off hot water. Tiny threads of it rose and curled together and started to take shape. A round form, trembling, as if it wasn’t sure it was allowed to exist.

The characteristics. Every Unorthodox creature leaves a piece of itself behind when it dies, and this one had come out crimson.

"Don’t touch it," Petra murmured. She was talking to herself.

She held out both hands, palms up.

The crimson glow drifted toward her. It touched her fingertips first, then slid up her wrists like warm oil, and for a second I thought it was burning her. Her whole body went rigid. A thin, strained breath came out of her.

She absorbed the characteristics first. Then the gift. The little shell rose out of the muck on its own and floated into the glow, and the two of them circled each other once, twice, and folded together into a single ball of light that sank into her chest.

She shuddered.

I started forward. Khan caught my arm.

"Let her finish," he said quietly. "It’s not hurting her."

I didn’t believe him, but I stayed. My heart was going hard enough that I could hear it in my ears. I had seen Petra walk through a Beast’s claws without blinking. I had never seen her sit this still, and the stillness was worse than any scream.

Two minutes. Maybe three. It felt like an hour.

Then Petra opened her eyes.

She blinked once, slowly. She looked at her hands, then at each of us, and a small, dazed smile spread across her face. A little color came back to her cheeks. She stood, brushed the dust off her knees, and said, as casually as if she were announcing breakfast:

"I have a summon now."

Nobody applauded. Nobody was foolish enough to. But I saw Eva let out a breath she had been holding, and Khan’s shoulders dropped an inch.

Petra raised one hand and snapped her fingers.

The ground in front of her split with a soft crack, and a shape climbed out of the shadow beneath the boulders. Shell first, pincers spread, eight thick legs planting themselves one after another in the dirt. I took an involuntary step back.

The humongous crab.

It was the same one. The same mottled red-brown shell, the same flat face, the same bead eyes. But its head was whole. There was no paste, no ruin. It stood perfectly still beside her like a hound waiting to be told what to do, and when Petra patted its pincer, it lowered itself a little, as if bowing.

"Okay," Khan said faintly. "That’s disturbing."

"It’s adorable," said Petra.

"It tried to kill me with its face a minute ago."

"It’s mine now. It won’t."

I looked at the thing and tried to feel something clean about it, and couldn’t. Ten minutes ago it had been a corpse in the dirt. The Realm of Evil takes whatever it wants from you, and it gives back the same way, twisted.

Petra turned to us, hands on her hips, wearing the look she got when she was about to be annoyingly right.

"And before anybody asks, we can’t just sit on it and forget about walking. It’s large, and stuff, ya know."

She was right. I’d had the exact same thought.

So we climbed on.