Chapter 176 Season Of The Crabs.



"Do you have a picture of the creatures?" She leaned her head over and asked Esong.

"I have a video." He tapped his bracelet terminal and a hologram video depicting the scene of the attack right up to the the moment when Folsom hand was bitten played.

Scarlet had to watch it two times to be sure that her eyes were not deceiving her. Unless she was hallucinating, these were crabs, two times the size of a king crab but still crabs. Or creatures that bore the same resemblance to crabs but were something else because she didn't put them in the water, not even crab eggs and the last time she checked, there was no life in any of the water bodies. She had however dumped two containers full of fertilized fish eggs in the lake but to date, nothing had been hatched. Lately, she had taken to thinking that the eggs probably rotted away or the reaper who sold them to her lied.

"Maybe you were given crab eggs." Severus suggested in her mind. "Do they have meat? Can they be eaten?"

The hound was a foodie, every creature he saw in this world was food in his eyes. She had caught him a few times licking his teeth as he watched the sheep sleep.You can trace the roots of this content at n0v@lbin

But as she pondered Severus's words and considered the possibility of having been given crab eggs accidentally, Scarlet started to worry about what would happen if crabs the size of baby goats started walking on the surface. If one had managed to bite the arm of a mecha warrior and break a vein then that qualified them to be dangerous. How many of them were in the water and how did they reproduce? She remembered that her grandfather once took her fishing for crabs one summer. They liked warm weather, he had said, so they were always easier to catch in the summer. Were they coming to the surface because of winter? Unless they were hibernating and the water crawlers landed upon a few of them, drawing them to the surface.

As many questions raced through her mind, she wondered what facts were true and which ones were fiction. One thing she was sure of, aside from cooking crab meat, she knew next to nothing about their living habits. She should have paid more attention when her grandfather was talking!!

"Did you capture a live one?" She asked Esong curiously.

Her interest in the crabs overrode her desire to eat and Justin helped himself to the remainder of her food. He was struggling to imitate her by using chop sticks instead of a fork and even though he was failing miserably, the little one refused to give up.

Cecily was taking pictures while her husband recorded a video.

"We are planning to send them to the center for marine studies since they came out of the water or the one for mutated beast studies because they appeared at this time. We are going to have to leave sooner than expected because this is not a good sign. I am actually worried more now because this means a few beasts have already made it inside the barrier. I am planning to seal off all water bodies and the forest completely."

Setting aside his comment about leaving sooner that expected, Scarlet was not quite willing to send the crabs to the capital if they were hers. But she could not come out and claim their ownership directly so she found another way to delay things a bit. "Maybe you should hold off on sending them to the capital and let me take a look first after all I do have some knowledge on the identification of mutated beasts."

"That's true, my daughter is the foremost expert on identification of mutated beasts in the empire." Dorian Su claimed proudly.

Everyone was doing their best to dodge the claws because there was no clear plan of attack yet.

Esong used his mental strength to lift the crab in the air and trap it in one place. It was waving it's claws around but grasping at nothing but air. "How do we kill it without killing it?" One way of killing it would leave most of it intact while another way was Esong's way which would end with the crab sliced into ten parts.

All eyes were on Scarlet now, waiting for her to declare what was to be done next.

"Should we put it in boiling water?" Cecily voiced all the way from the living room where she and the women of the Su family and the maids were peeping. Scarlet had said it's meat was edible so logically speaking it would die if it was immersed in hot boiling water.

"No," her method disagreed, "We need a method anyone can use, the mecha warriors can't always go around with hot boiling water."

"Pierce it through the head." Scarlet said. She took a long sharp steel knife out of her storage.

Beord took it from her, Esong brought the crab closer and he pierced it but it barely grazed the surface. The crab was perfectly fine, the knife had not even caused a dent where it pierced.

'What the f.." Scarlet was about to use a dreaded word but she was cut off.

"Language." Mega leaped on a chair and yelled at Scarlet, forgetting that she was holding an infant.

"Now what?" Adler asked.

"A sharper knife maybe." Scarlet shrugged. The one she had given Beord was an ordinary steel knife, she had other knives which Maddox had crafted and that is what she took out of the bracelet storage next.

"Is that a knife made from Avoracian steel?" Markay asked her. His voice was filled with wonder and his eyes contained greed.

"I don't know, it was my teacher's knife." she answered.

Using that knife, the process was repeated again and this time the crab was killed in an instant.