“I left the ship on a crab nest, guys,” Marco said as soon as he read the second notification.

“Yeah, we caught that.” Riv rested his hand on his club as the elves continued to shake themselves out of their apparently magical stupor. “We might have bigger problems than that, though. Somehow.”

“Anything I need to know about elves? It’s my first time with a different species,” Marco asked.

“Not a different species, Marco. Frankly, I’m surprised you know about them at all, but the Elvish are human. They are just from very far away, and have developed on their own for a very long time,” Elisa said.

“What’s that mean for us?”

“They are collectivists. One commander sits over a group of people, there’s a bigger commander managing the smaller commanders, and so on, all the way up to their king. They are very good at coordinating,” Elisa explained.

“Must be hell to deal with in a fight.”

“Yes and no. It’s been a long time since our nation last went to war with them, but they held their own. Just be ready for anything.”

He had to be, since that was about all the time they were going to have to talk. In the center of the group, a particularly large elf rose, somewhat taller than Marco and absolutely huge compared to the rest of the group of waking sleepers.

“What is the meaning of this interruption?” The elf rubbed his eyes and did his best to roar in outrage at the team’s presence. Marco let his hands fall near his rapier and gun without actually touching them yet. “How have you come to be here?”

“By ship?” Marco tried the easy, simple explanation. Something that worked. “By ship, from the hidden sea.”

“Yes, I know that, human.” The commander seemed to calm down as he looked over his people and found none of them were apparently hurt. “But the entrance to the hidden sea is in elf waters. We had no reports of human presence in our waters.”

“Um… I don’t know about any of that,” Marco said. “We were in pretty local waters when we found our way here. Not more than a few days from Gulf Isle.”

“Gulf… Isle?” The commander’s eyes shifted down, as if he was trying to remember long-forgotten geography. “No. That’s months of sailing, at least. Too far to make sense.”

“It could have moved. If it does that. We honestly don’t know much about this place,” Elisa said.

“It’s not a surprise. You have never been good with stuff like this.” The commander made some hand motions and a few of his more nervous-looking troops calmed down a bit. It seemed he had downgraded their threat level.

Marco looked at Elisa in confusion. She whispered to him, “Humans can hardly work around a geas. Elves manage it much more easily. Almost every elf class is made to work with others. It’s a whole thing. The system emphasizes it for them. Nobody knows why.”

The commander noted the whispering but kept going.

“I’ll educate you then. A hidden sea like this is not the exclusive property of one people. Zoned dungeons, as they have long been known, tend to either be paired in a variety of places or else to move slowly from one region to another. It would eventually shift to your lands, but not for quite a long time. Quite a long time…”

Unlawfully taken from NovelBin, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Elisa was the first to go tense after the man stopped speaking, followed by the man himself. Riv tied with several of the elf crew for next, and Marco didn’t get it until the main elf’s eyes slowly traced the broken stone walls in horror.

“What happened?” Elisa was the first to recover. “Why did you cast a stasis spell?”

“The crabs had overwhelmed us. I had to make a decision, and two other groups were meant to enter the dungeon soon. The spell was to be deactivated by allies when appropriate help is available. I never thought —”

He was interrupted by a crashing at the treeline.

“The crabs.” Marco connected all the dots together. He was glad for something to distract them from the fact that these elves may have been waiting for help for years or even decades. “They’re coming.”

“Boy. You and your crew can fight?” the commander asked.

“Well enough.”

“Then I humbly ask for your assistance. Our team was optimized for large-strike tactics.” The commander looked around his own forces until he found a particular combatant, who he waved over. “This one is a defect. I commend her to your care. Do you agree?”

“Marco…”

Elisa was trying to say something, but Marco had decided the moment he heard a person not much older than him get called a defect and saw the predictable crestfallen expression that came out of it.

“I agree.” Marco waved the confused looking woman towards them. “Come on. We’ll stake up by one of the stone walls.”

“Do it to the left.” The woman pointed. Marco tracked from her finger to a distant wall about forty-five degrees offset from the direction the commander was looking. “It will be better there.”

“Fine, but why?” Marco asked.

“It will take too long to explain. Your team can fight at range?”

“A bit.”

“I’ll be able to bolster that. Remember, they may come from all sides.” The woman reached behind her back and brought her bow forward, bending it and setting the string in place before generating an arrow in her off-hand via some magic that had to be part of her class. “We can talk about the larger issue later, commander. The crabs have come.”

Marco had a moment to wonder what could be a larger issue than huge crabs before he saw the first of them. They were each about the size of his ship, and there were more than he could easily count coming through the trees, scuttling nearly sideways as they made their way towards them.

I can’t let them to Elisa. She’ll be crushed.

Wasting as little time as possible, he leveled his gun, took a deep breath, and let his newly evened stats guide his hand as he fired a shot at a crab’s protruding eye. He actually hit his target, which was amazing even to him. Even more amazing was the fact that it seemed to work. He had no doubt the shot would have bounced uselessly off the animal’s shell, but it popped the eye perfectly.

“You’ve been doing a lot of eye damage lately,” Riv babbled. “What should I do?”

“Keep Elisa safe. I’ll try to get the other eye.”

“No need.” The woman elf stepped forward and almost immediately loosed her bow. The arrow flew straight onward, without any arc to speak of. For all he knew, it was weightless. Either way, it sliced through the crab’s second eye like air and left the animal completely blinded.

Around that time, a blast of light as big around as an elephant shot in the direction left of Marco, burning through the air like fire and making Marco’s hair stand on end. The three crabs that stood in its path in some way or another stood no chance against it at all. The parts of them that intersected with the beam just stopped existing, evaporating into a fishy-burned smell Marco picked up from where he was standing.

He tried not to look at the burned gore too much, considering he still had his own target. Lucky for him and even luckier for his melee-range friends was that the blinded crab decided to veer away from the blast and now was tangled up with three or four other crabs, effectively stopping every invader on that side of the forest. They were not social animals, it seemed. They chopped at each other with their enormous claws, doing appropriately enormous damage. The sheer force they were putting out made the whole fallen tree mystery much clearer. It was almost amazing to Marco that they had made it through the forest without doing more damage.

“Turn around!” the woman yelled. “They come from everywhere!”

The next blast went off almost as soon as Marco was able to turn. He fired his gun again, missing as the crabs on that side scrambled to escape the beam. This time only two were caught. It was a tremendous waste of energy, and Marco was beginning to get an idea why.

The commander was firing the beams while every member of his team fed their magic into him, making him the only truly active fighter for the elves. It would have been a great thing if the platoon had been fighting one or two massive, strong enemies. In this situation, they were fighting dozens of quick-moving medium-sized foes, and were unable to split up their beam in any meaningful way to take down more than three of them at once.

Marco and the archer-woman managed to take down another two before the crabs were on them. His rapier flashed as he danced around, trying to blind as many of them as possible. The archer wasn’t nearly as effective at short range, but she proved to be fast enough to evade the crabs endlessly while she fired at near point-blank range, sometimes even managing to hurt one.

Elisa and Riv did well enough. Marco had been afraid for them, but realized that his fear had been misplaced. Elisa’s much improved electrical powers were singeing the eye-stalks and claw-tips of the monsters like they were lightning rods, and they seemed reluctant to get much closer to her than they had to after the first few shocks. That deterrent was doubled by Riv’s new club-based fighting style, which managed to spiderweb cracks through their shells with every impact.

It was a hard fight, but they were hanging on.

When the screams started, Marco could hardly imagine why. It took just a glance to show him. The artillery-optimized group, which was probably several times their level and outnumbered them five times over, was being absolutely crushed by the crabs on their side. He had known they were specialized, but had no idea how very poorly they’d handle something outside their specialty.

He couldn’t help them. Marco’s first priority was to his team, and they were barely keeping up with the crabs in front of them. It would only take a moment of distraction and one clip-clip from a crab and someone would fall to bisected ruin.

They managed to protect themselves for a few seconds longer, which was all it took. The remaining crabs suddenly gave up on fighting and the entire group began to retreat back towards the trees.

“What?” Marco fired at a withdrawing crab. The shot plinked off its shell, doing nothing. “Why are they leaving?”

“They have meat.” The woman’s voice was flat. “Four or five victims. They’ve always acted that way. There were once forty-five of us.”