Crab told me he'd been close to me the whole time—that he never went anywhere. Huh? What's that supposed to mean? There were only two of us on the boat: me and that grumpy old ferryman with the permanently sour face. No one else. And yet, here Crab was… on the other side of the Acheron.
Could it be he really did sneak onto the boat? But then how did that stingy old Charon not notice him?
Ugh… this is so confusing.
"How did you get here?" I asked, still baffled.
"It's nothing much," Crab replied sweetly, smiling. "Just a little talent I happen to have."
"Wait—what did you say? What talent?"
Crab squinted at me. "You seriously don't know?"
"Of course I don't! That's why I'm asking. So what's going on? Stop dodging and spit it out!"
"Fine, fine," he said with that ever-annoying tone of his. "Before I tell you how I snuck onto the boat, there's something I want to show you."
And with that, his body disappeared into thin air.
I stood there, dumbfounded. Again, he just vanished. "What the—he actually can disappear? Seriously? Ow!!"
Suddenly, a sharp pain shot through my left ankle—as if something hard had clamped down on it. I kicked reflexively to shake it off, but whatever it was didn't budge. I looked down and saw a small crab gripping my ankle.
A crab…? Wait. No way—
The little crab unclamped its claw and then began to expand and reshape itself, transforming into a very familiar and very aggravating human form. The one and only companion I had in the Underworld: that infuriatingly… adorable Crab. (Okay, fine, I admit it through gritted teeth.)
"I transformed into a crab to sneak aboard. Then I hid among the barnacles on the boat's hull to camouflage myself. Lucky for me, Charon's half-blind, so he didn't notice," Crab explained, proudly answering my question.
"And the obolus? Where did you get that from?" I asked, still confused.
"Oh, that? You have no idea how hard it was to get. I had to sneak around as a crab without getting caught. Then I waited for the perfect moment—right when everyone was fighting. They were so distracted, they didn't notice me snatching the obolus and burrowing into the ground with it," he said, brimming with pride.
I couldn't help but admire his cunning. For someone with such a pitifully written fate, he sure knew how to turn disaster into opportunity and survive.
But how could he still shapeshift?
"How are you still able to transform into a crab? As far as I know, once a fictional character dies, their fate thread is supposed to return to the Fates."
Crab scratched his head and shook it slowly. "Hmm… I honestly don't know why my fate thread wasn't pulled back like the others."
I'd already started to feel uneasy about my own thread of fate—that uncanny speed of mine hadn't disappeared even after I died. And now, here's Crab, still transforming post-mortem.
Our threads of life hadn't been reclaimed. Something was off.
I glanced at Crab's body, flickering with a pale, fading blue light—just like mine. Bodies that could hardly be called "alive," but weren't exactly dead either. Maybe that's why our fate threads hadn't returned.
Maybe the threads were confused. Unsure whether we were truly dead or not.
As I stood there contemplating the strange circumstances, both our bodies started to sink slowly into the thick mud. I realized that if I kept standing here wondering, we might end up buried forever.
"Hey... maybe we should change locations before we become permanent residents of this mud?" I said.
Crab glanced at me—now sunk almost to my waist—and burst out laughing. "Hahaha! All right then, you got it. I grant you that right!"
This guy… even in a life-or-death moment, he's still goofing around.