To hunt a crab is to hunt the sea. Sometimes crabs are small, mere mouthfuls and hunting them is as simple as spearing them with a claw tip. This is akin to robbing the surface of the water of its least treasures, the flotsam and the seaweed. Sometimes the crab is more spine than shell, and to claim its life takes practice and careful dedication, but little in the way of specialized skill. These are the moments where someone (looking to say they had an adventure), dives down to a shallow barrier reef and plucks a single gorgeous pearl to bring home to a sweetheart.

But a true Battle Crab will never succumb to something as paltry as the loss of a single claw. It has another, and ambition to crush what even its full healthy body might not have. To fight this is to know the sting of jellyfish armor, the wrath of the tides. To dive deep, deep, deep into the blackness in the middle of a storm, where once the craft of some inventor had dared to face Poseidon and failed utterly to please him. The bone crunching pressure. The all devouring currents. The equally perilous journey back to the surface, to success but not safety. 

Mosaic's arms are burning and sluggish. She has retreated backward, to the waves of high tide, out of respect. The water soaks her body, and though she stiffens at its lash she is calm. Her shoulders are low and loose and her claws drag through the foam. Her tail curls behind her and strikes the waves as a whip. Her challenge is a song, not the pounding beat of her morning ritual but a high and lilting call to the moon that radiates through the water and sends schools of curious fish darting this way and that to be clear of her path. Their scales shimmer in the light of the night with all the seeming of rent armor as their clusters split further and further apart, and dim as they sink too far below the surface to keep shining.

She does not forget who the predator is. She rises against a high wave, and pulls her hair back down over her back after it slaps against her. One more move. One. Her feet sink into the sand; the squish is pleasant against her toes. She is a silhouette against the backdrop of the stars, seeming large enough for a moment that she might walk out to meet them as friends.

She leaps. Her song is laughter now, her body is an arrow launched from the bow of a goddess. She flies straight with one outstretched arm to test against the thrusting of one good claw. The crab open the pincer, revealing lethally sharp spines growing out of clusters of shell harder than the strongest metals of the Skies. They catch her at the shoulder, they close and paint the ocean with her blood. But her hand has found a sweeter treasure still.

She falls to the beach again. The smell is salt and the sweetness of fresh flesh. The sound is tearing carapace and a shower of wet sand flopping into a retreating wave. Six armored legs tremble under the weight of her blow, stagger, and collapse. Splayed and still. She tears the other arm off as she rises, and wrenches it free from her own.

A deep breath, held. Meditation. Thanks. Her body glistens in the moons' light, no less beautiful for the colors that run down her now. Her eyes close, and she holds her hands aloft.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And only on the third verse does the world return to her.