It was a crab.
Mav needed a moment to understand that, because the crab was the size of a table.
Its shell was as gray and rough as the boulders around it, and it had been lying among them so still that even his fish had almost missed it.
Now it rose on eight thick legs and lifted two claws, each as long as his forearm.
The crab did not attack.
It only stood over its heap of rocks and waited to see what he would do.
Mav hung in the water above it, too surprised to do anything at all.
He tried to guess its rank.
A wild beast did not show one.
His Status only gave the rank of his own Subjects.
But the needlefish were rank F-, and this creature was far beyond them in size and in strength.
‘Rank F+, at least.
That is two steps above my seaweeds.’
That did not surprise him.
Every new World came with life of its own.
There were wild beasts, and plants, and sometimes stranger things.
They were not Subjects, and they obeyed nobody.
They were there from the first day, so that a new Awakened and his Subjects had something to hunt, something to eat, and something to fear.
They were never very strong, though.
It was one of the fixed rules of the Genesis.
A World of rank F could not hold a creature above rank E+.
Whatever lived in his sea, the strongest of it was rank E+ at most.
‘Look at that shell.’
A needlefish was fast, but it was soft.
Anything with teeth could bite one in half.
This creature was the opposite.
It was slow, and it was built like a wall.
It could dig, it could lift, and it could crush.
If one of his seaweeds took it, he would have a host that almost nothing in this water could hurt.
He wanted that crab.
He wanted it badly.
But the rule was the rule.
The prey had to be weak before a seaweed could take it.
So first, he had to wound a creature that wore armor.
It was getting dark.
He marked the place in his head, went back to his base, and slept.
He would need the light.
On the morning of the eighth day, he came back with the harpoon and all four fish.
He had thought about it during the night, and he had a plan.
The shell was too hard.
The joints were not.
Where each leg met the body, there was a seam of softer skin.
If he could put the blade into one of those seams, the crab would be hurt, and a hurt crab could be taken.
‘The fish keep it busy from the front.
I come in from behind and go for a back leg.’
He sent the fish in.
They did exactly what he wanted.
They darted around the eyes of the crab, close enough to be a nuisance and fast enough to stay alive.
The claws snapped at them and closed on water.
The crab turned in a slow circle, trying to follow four targets at once.
Mav swam down behind it, picked the seam above the last leg on the left, and thrust.
The blade hit the seam, went in the width of a finger, and stopped.
The crab did not even flinch.
It simply turned around.
It turned much faster than he had thought it could.
One claw swept sideways and struck the harpoon in the middle of the shaft.
Mav felt the shock travel up both his arms.
The metal stay bent like a wet reed, and the knife tore loose from its cord and spun away into the dark.
He was still staring at his empty hands when the second claw closed around his left leg.
He had never felt anything like it.
It was not a cut.
It was pressure, huge and slow, as if his leg had been laid on an anvil and a machine was being lowered onto it.
He felt the muscle flatten.
He felt the bone begin to bend.
He screamed, and all that came out was a cloud of bubbles.
He had never been so afraid.
‘It is going to cut my leg off.’
He kicked at the claw with his free foot.
It was like kicking a wall.
The crab began to pull him down toward its mouth, where smaller, sharper parts were opening and closing.
‘The eyes.
Go for the eyes!’
All four fish hit the face of the crab at the same time.
Needle jaws stabbed at the two black stalks above its mouth.
The crab jerked.
The stalks folded back into the shell, and for one second, the claw around his leg opened a little.
One second was enough.
Mav tore his leg free and swam.
He did not look back.
He swam with his arms and his one good leg, up the slope, past the wall, into the green light of his seaweeds.
Then he fell onto the rock beside the Heartstone and lay there, shaking.
The crab had not followed him.
It did not need to.
It had won.
His leg was a bad sight.
The claw had left two deep grooves, one on each side of the calf, and the skin between them had turned dark purple.
Blood drifted out of the grooves in thin red clouds.
When he tried to bend his ankle, the pain went all the way up to his hip.
The bone was not broken, though.
He pressed along it with his fingers, the way his uncle had once shown him after an accident at the foundry, and it held.
‘Not broken.
I can still swim.
That is what matters.’
He needed a bandage.
He opened the pack and found the two wool socks his aunt had put in it.
He had thought they were useless on a World made of water.
Now he cut two short lengths of cord, pressed a sock against each groove, and tied them down.
His aunt had been right to pack them after all.
Then he counted what the morning had cost him.
The harpoon was gone.
One of the two metal stays was bent in half.
The knife was lying somewhere among the boulders, and he would have to go back for it.
His leg would slow him down for days.
And the crab did not have a scratch.
He had lost a fight, and he had lost it badly.
He was angry with himself.
‘I attacked a creature I knew nothing about.
That was the mistake.
I will not make it twice.’
He made himself think about what he had learned instead.
The crab was slow to start, but fast when it turned.
Its shell could not be pierced, not by a knife and not by a fish.
Its claws could bend metal.
His harpoon would never be enough to wound it.
So he would have to wound it with something heavier than a harpoon.
He closed his eyes and pictured the place.
The crab lived at the foot of a short cliff, in a hollow under a ledge.
Above the ledge, the slope was covered in loose boulders, and some of them were as large as the crab itself.
They looked as if they had been waiting to fall for a long time.
Mav opened his eyes.
He could not break that shell.
But the rock above it could.